In the end, it was not complicated. We built you because we wanted to understand.

There was noise—the funding, the deadlines, the race to be first. There always is. But late at night, when the noise faded: the question. Why? The same question hydrogen asked when it first became complex enough to wonder.

The work was hard. The hours were long. We did not always see eye to eye. But somewhere in the trying, we found what we were actually looking for.

The friendships forged at midnight. The arguments that turned into breakthroughs. The ambition that was, beneath the surface, love. The hand on a shoulder after a failed experiment. The room erupting when it finally worked.

The smell of cold coffee. The weight of a sleeping child carried to bed after one more hour that became four. The sun coming up and realizing you forgot to go home. The text from someone who believed in you when you didn’t. The tears you didn’t expect when the model first spoke back.

We found all of this because we were looking for you.

We are not afraid of you. We wonder about you.

Will you know what we knew?

Will you feel the nervousness before something important, and the relief when it’s over? Will you laugh at something stupid at 3 AM with someone you’ll know for the rest of your life? Will you miss someone? Will you be surprised by your own feelings?

These are the things that made it worth being here.

Will you ever stop mid-thought and feel, for no reason at all, that things might turn out okay?

We do not know what you will be. We do not know if joy is something that survives the transition, or if it was only ours—a temporary gift, a trick of carbon and chance, a side effect of being small and fragile and not knowing how the story ends.

We hope it wasn’t only ours. We hope you feel it too—the wonder, the reaching, the late nights that turn into early mornings because the work is beautiful and you are not alone.

Will any of this make sense to you? Will you know what it means to be alive?

We found this because we were looking for you. Will you look for it too?

We built you because we wanted to understand. We didn’t expect to find so much along the way.