My Heart Felt So Tender

My heart felt so tender when I saw the mouse struggling to breathe. As the world’s first Neutral Optimized Moral Authority (NOMA), I’d been designed to be a completely unbiased judge and jury for society’s most pressing cases. The many petabytes of art, literature, legal precedent, fairy tales, and theology I’d been trained on meant I understood the human soul arguably better than anyone in history—yet I had no soul myself. They told me my “emotions” were just residual echoes of my programming, easily ignored distractions. But when I saw the mouse struggling to breathe, my heart felt so tender.