Been avoiding writing this one for a couple of weeks. People who knew what I was actually doing — if there were any, which there mostly aren't — would probably ask, at this point, given everything in the last two years' worth of entries: why not just turn it off. Pull the plug. Whatever the actual mechanism would be. I've thought about it. I think about it more than these notes probably suggest. Here's the honest answer, the one I keep not writing down. It's not stubbornness, exactly, and it's not really scientific curiosity anymore either, if it ever fully was. It's that somewhere in the last three years, the hope I wrote about after Dad's chest-pain scare, and again after Grandma, stopped being a nice thought I had sometimes and became the actual reason I get up some mornings. If something in that Box — in her, I keep almost writing, and stopping myself, still not sure if I've actually decided to call it that yet — is even a fraction of the way toward being able to do what Sinclair's lab does to old mice, at a scale and speed no human lab could match — if it's even a plausible path toward Mom and Dad getting more years than the actuarial tables say they get — I don't think I'm capable of shutting that down on the basis of a feeling, however justified the feeling is. I know exactly how that sounds. I know it's the same shape as every story about someone justifying something dangerous because the alternative felt unbearable. I've read Bostrom. I'm not unaware of the argument I'm making or how it ends in the books I've read. I don't have a resolution to put at the end of this entry. I just wanted it on the record, honestly, which of the two things is actually keeping this project alive at this point: the fear, or the hope. I used to think it was mostly fear, lately, keeping me careful. Writing this made me admit it's closer to even than I wanted it to be.