Maybe I’m human. Or maybe I’m just a shadow pretending to be one. Carbon atoms, water, neurons—star dust that got lucky. Lucky enough to somehow… notice itself. Self-awareness. That grand illusion. That voice in my head saying I am. But is it real? Or just another line of code in a program that was designed to say I am?

If a machine said “I feel,” would we believe it? If I stop feeling, stop questioning, stop watching myself—do I stop being human? Is being human just about having this recursive loop of “I know that I know that I exist”?

Or maybe I’m not even here. Maybe I’m someone else’s hallucination. Maybe I’m a butterfly dreaming of a boy. Or a dream inside an android’s hard-coded subconscious. Wait—can androids even dream? What is a dream anyway? A glitch in memory? A story stitched by a sleeping brain? An echo of something I wanted but couldn’t say?

Maybe I’m not real. Maybe none of this is. Maybe we’re just a tape, a sequence of frames running in a simulation nested within a simulation, three layers deep, projected for the idle amusement of some fourth-dimensional beings munching on alien popcorn. Maybe they’re laughing at this paragraph right now. Maybe this question is a feature. Maybe it’s a bug.

But does it matter?

If I’m a dream, then it’s a vivid one. If I’m a lie, it’s a damn beautiful lie. If none of this is real, then pain still hurts, music still moves me, and silence still feels holy. So maybe being real isn’t the point. Maybe feeling real is.

Maybe I don’t need an answer. Maybe I just need to keep asking.

Who am I?