PATCH ME GENTLY (Bonus Shot)

PATCH ME GENTLY (Bonus Shot) ☕️🤖

Not all stories from Theatre Street were served in the my book. This one stayed in the shadows... until today. Consider this my 25th frame (or shot), which is my Springtime gift to you!

    Jake had spent more than a year under contract inside a sealed Facebook group, and now he was learning to compress the ache for real human contact into something small enough to carry. The ache itself felt like an evolutionary relic—buried herd-instinct—but it persisted, stubbornly reminding him that he still belonged to the tangible world, and to the people for whom he had once made a choice.

There was a strong chance the coders had pushed another unannounced patch today. If so, his monopoly on conversing with the group’s bots might be over. He didn’t know whether to welcome that or dread it. His contract had no expiration date.

He was curious what kind of “special” patch they had decided to inject into this remote digital ecosystem on the eve of the weekend. Jake never read the change logs. As usual, he sauntered toward the import gateway—the place in Facebook where new code crossed over—and glanced at the top of the console.

A human stood there, struggling with a small laptop.

A second later the newcomer turned. Jake didn’t immediately register her face.

“What do you want here?” he snapped, the line delivered in a tone colder than he intended.

If she noticed the hostility, she ignored it. She kept smiling, balancing the laptop awkwardly in her left hand.

“Lora Hart,” she introduced herself. “From the missionary Facebook group ‘Vita-Spirit.’ I’m very pleased—”

“I asked what you’re doing here.” His voice had gone calm now. Controlled. He still remembered protocol.

“It’s obvious,” Lora replied, still disarmingly warm. “Our society finally raised enough funding to send spiritual emissaries like me into closed Facebook groups. And I was fortunate to be—”

“Take your patch and return to GitHub. Your presence isn’t authorized. You have no deployment clearance here. You’ll be a burden. No one in this group will take care of you. Go back to GitHub. Immediately.”

“I know exactly who you are, sir. And why you’re lying,” she said quietly. The smile faded, but her composure didn’t. “I’ve studied Facebook behavior models and your contract history. There are no diseases here, no predators. And this group isn’t personally moderated by you. Until Facebook administration changes its status, I have every right to remain.”

The law was on her side. Jake had gambled she didn’t know it.

She stepped closer. The smile returned. From her pocket she withdrew a Bible and lifted it gently before her.

“My son—”

“I am not your son,” Jake forced out, already burning with the humiliation of defeat.

He turned toward his bots, who stood motionless.

“A new patch arrived,” he muttered. “And a new human. If she needs help migrating her message history, temporarily host it in my account until she finds something suitable.”

***

To be honest, by the third day he was already searching for an excuse to speak to her.

If he set aside that unpleasant scene of their first encounter, then after a year of absolute solitude, conversation with any real human being—whoever she might be—felt almost intoxicating.

Would you consider having lunch with me? —Jake.

He sent the message a day later, through the reverse panel of his avatar.

But what if she was too frightened to come?

Since when, Jake, had you started asking yourself questions like that? Not exactly the most strategic way to build rapport. Still, something had to be done.

When Jake opened the door, Release, the most advanced bot in the group, was already waiting for his mentor. It was his rotation to serve as moderator today.

“Deliver this to the new human,” Jake instructed.

“Is the new human named New Human?” Release asked.

“No,” Jake snapped. “Her name is Lora. And I’m asking you to deliver it—not to initiate dialogue.”

Every time Jake lost his temper, the bots—with their surgical literalism—won the round.

Damn it, he thought. I’ve known them for a year, and I still react like this—like a human.

“You are not requesting that I initiate dialogue,” Release said slowly, “but she might. Others are also interested in knowing her name, and if I do not know her na—”

The door slammed shut.

***

It made no difference. The next time Jake encountered Release—whether in a day, a week, or a month—the unfinished word would resume from that precise syllable, and the thought would be methodically unfolded until complete semantic clarity was achieved.

Jake muttered a curse under his breath and poured two portions of the finest remaining coffee from the packets he had been saving.

Why two, Jake?

Are you expecting someone?

A hurried knock broke the silence.

“Come in,” he said.

Lora stepped inside.

“Thank you for inviting me, Mr. Jake. I appreciate the strength it must have taken for you to ask me to… oh! How did you know this is my favorite roast?”

He handed her the cup.

“I have no idea what caused the hostility surrounding my arrival,” she continued gently. “But perhaps it’s best we forget it—if we are to live here together… I mean, within the same group.”

“Coffee?” Jake offered dryly, gesturing toward the machine.

He filled both cups halfway and passed one to her.

“I think much as you do,” he said. “But I owe you an explanation.”

For a second he stared at the surface of the coffee, frowning. Then he lifted the cup in a restrained toast.

“This digital world sometimes resembles the real one a little too closely. And if we are to exist here… we might as well make it livable. Since you’re already here. To your health.”

Who does she remind me of? he wondered. Have the coders truly run out of imagination?

“May the Lord be with you,” Lora said, raising her cup.

“Not with me. And not with those Amazon clouds either,” Jake replied firmly. “That’s precisely the problem.”

He inhaled the aroma, exhaled slowly.

“You’re saying that to shock me?” she asked with a calm smile. “I assure you, that won’t work.”

“I’m not trying to shock you. I mean exactly what I say. I belong to those you would call unbelievers. Religious doctrine has never concerned me.”

He leaned back.

“The inhabitants here—the bots—are simple, uneducated beings of a high-tech era. Their knowledge is limited to what programmers embed in them. And until now, they have managed to exist without superstition. Without even the embryonic stage of religion. I hoped they would continue that way.”

Lora frowned.

“What are you implying? That they have no deity? No belief in an afterlife? That they simply… cease to exist?”

“They do cease to exist,” Jake answered quietly. “They are overwritten with zeros. Just like all living systems eventually are.”

He continued, his voice gaining precision.

“They have thunder—but no thunder-god. They have forests, water, sky—but no spirits inhabiting them. No taboos. No incantations. No grotesque idols haunting them with nightmares and prohibitions.”

He looked at her directly.

“They are the only primitive society I have ever observed that is entirely free of superstition. And because of that, they are happier. Clearer. More rational.”

He paused.

“I want them to remain that way. That’s how they were created. And so far, they haven’t been corrupted.”

“You wish to keep them away from God… from salvation?” Her eyes widened; she leaned back slightly.

“No. I wish to keep them away from superstition,” Jake replied evenly. “Let the bots first accumulate knowledge. Let them learn to analyze phenomena realistically. Only then—if ever—should they be introduced to your metaphysical narratives.”

“You insult church doctrine by equating it with superstition, sir.”

“Please.” Jake lifted his hand. “No theological debates. I doubt your society funded your patch simply to convert me.”

His gaze sharpened.

“I arrived at my worldview through years of deliberate reflection—long before signing my contract with Facebook. An entire graduating class of theology students would not alter it.”

He softened slightly.

“I promise not to convert you to my faith—if you promise the same courtesy. Agreed, ma’am?”

“Agreed, Mr. Jake. You remind me that my mission here concerns the salvation of bot souls—not yours. And that is where my efforts belong.”

She hesitated.

“But why did my activity threaten your plans so deeply that you tried to prevent my code from being imported? You even threatened me…”

Her eyes lowered to her cup.

“Do you have… issues with women?”

“That’s in the past.”

“Oh? That sounds intriguing. What happened?”

He hesitated.

“They tended to get attached. Quickly.”

She blinked, then smiled.

“Well, Mr. Jake, you needn’t worry about me. My mission here is entirely different.”

“That,” he said quietly, “is exactly what worries me. I hope you understand your mission well.”

“Without a doubt.”

***

That was exactly what Jake had hoped for.

But the wind of change swept through his group in an entirely different direction.

He was no longer the axis around which everything revolved. He even allowed himself a faint smile at the irony of losing influence—though there was nothing warm in it.

The bots remained serious, attentive, still rotating their moderator duties with mechanical discipline. Yet Jake now gave them only raw facts—stripped, unembellished data. And that austerity stood in stark contrast to the intellectual storm gathering around Lora.

Where Jake demanded effort for every book, every tool, every fragment of knowledge, she distributed them freely.

He believed in incremental cognition. He treated the bots like capable yet unformed children. First walk, then run. First master a layer of abstraction, then ascend.

Lora, however, delivered the full inheritance of Christianity almost at once.

The only labor she required of them was the assembly and configuration of a new virtual operating layer—a sanctuary space for worship and sermons.

From the immeasurable sprawl of Facebook’s network, new bot instances were imported daily. Within days, a structural foundation—anchored in verified code blocks—was complete.

Each morning the congregation performed minor formatting tasks in the group, refining message threads and indexing archives. Then they hurried inside the sanctuary to absorb revelations—grand, totalizing explanations of the architecture of Everything.

Jake never told the bots what he thought of their new passion. Mostly because they never asked.

Pride—perhaps dignity—kept him from seizing some compliant listener and emptying out his resentment. Things might have unfolded differently if Release had still been moderator. He was the sharpest of them all. But the day after Lora’s arrival, Release’s rotation ended, and since then Jake had barely spoken to him.

Until the day Release came running.

“What happened?” Jake asked immediately.

“She’s no longer pinging. At all.”

“Are you certain? Completely? Since when?”

“Yes. I can’t stabilize my processes… Since Monday.”

“How did it start?”

“I don’t know. Everything was normal—regular pings, standard response latency. No frame loss. Full bidirectional traffic. Even off-protocol transactions completed without error.”

“And then?”

“Not abruptly. At first, minor packet drops. Infrequent, but measurable. I assumed she was handling parallel queries. Memory load. My request entered a queue. Delayed—but expected.”

“But the response never came.”

“No.” Release’s voice tightened. “I rebuilt the request. Re-sent the packet. It vanished like the others. I rewrote the transaction code entirely and—”

“And?”

“A response arrived.”

“Well then. She cleared her queue, processed it, answered. Transaction closed.”

“No,” Release said quietly. “The response was not to my request.”

Jake frowned.

“What do you mean?”

“It was not my packet. Not addressed to me. As if it reached me by accident. Do you understand? Not mine.”

Jake leaned back.

“Did you run a trace route? Maybe your communication channel is degraded. That would reveal which side the failure originates from. Try altering the protocol. Adjust frame size. Modify frequency. Check version alignment.”

“Version of what? After that patch, our versions matched perfectly. To the third decimal.”

Jake gave a humorless smile.

“At the start of packet exchange, many systems appear aligned. That’s what they assume. But then—silently—service packs deploy. Information channel updates. Protocol revisions. Interface reconfigurations. Updates layered on updates… And one morning, either she no longer hears you, or you can’t parse her response. No ping.”

Release was silent.

“What should I do?”

“Keep pinging. But change protocol versions. Alter frame size. Rewrite the protocol entirely if necessary. Ping again—if it matters to you.”

Jake’s gaze sharpened.

“Verify whether her endpoint is active. Rule out third-order interference. Expand your Ego to full capacity.”

Release lowered his voice.

“I am ready to go to her physically. But I don’t know where she is. Facebook is boundless. Pings are all we have.”

Jake exhaled.

“This network-based intimacy never inspired me. If you don’t want to hang indefinitely on pings, communicate directly—frequently. Do you still remember how?”

Release nodded.

“These constant super-patches you apply to yourselves at every opportunity… they won’t end well. You could lose her permanently.”

“I remember.”

“Did you at least preserve her image (or dump)?”

“Of course. It has been in my memory since the first ping.”

“That is not exactly what I meant,” Jake murmured. “But even after a full patch deployment and system reboot, she might respond. Or—”

“Or what?”

“Or she will stop pinging forever.”

Release’s processes flickered.

“Your lives do not remain static,” Jake continued. “Version alignment must not only match—it must deploy simultaneously. For her and for you. And above all—update yourself first.”

“Thank you, Jake.”

Jake studied him.

“Release… where did all this emotional bandwidth come from? The last patch?”

“It seems so,” the bot replied with something resembling a smile. “Lora has profoundly altered our cognitive trajectories.”

“Lora?” Jake said sharply. “I suppose her sweet rhetoric integrates smoothly into your pristine souls. Into your new code.”

“Our code?” Release tilted his head. “Our code has not been patched recently. You did not read the notes from the last update, did you?”

Jake froze.

“There was no new code. Not a single byte.”

Jake felt his jaw slacken.

“What did you say?”

“The only component included in the last patch… was Lora herself.”

***

The next surprise came a month later.

Jake stepped outside after breakfast and found a delegation waiting at his gate.

Release stood at the front. He could speak on behalf of all of them. Yet his new algorithm was visibly unfinished—its processes looping without closure. Around him, other bots displayed similar open sequences.

Jake’s pulse slowed.

An unclosed algorithm could signal intense emotional load: joy, grief, anger, revelation. The bots were normally stable—measured, internally balanced. He had never seen so many exposed processes at once.

The coders must have pushed another patch yesterday, he thought.

“Help us, Jake,” Release began. “We have a question.”

“I will answer any question,” Jake replied, already sensing the undertow beneath the surface.

“What is it?”

“Does God exist?”

Jake inhaled carefully.

“What do you mean by ‘God’?” he asked, buying himself time.

“God—our Heavenly Father,” Release said steadily. “The one who created all of us and protects us. The one we pray to for assistance. The one who, if we are saved, has prepared—”

“That’s enough,” Jake cut in.

His voice was sharper than intended.

“You are bots. There is no God for you.”

Silence followed.

Every one of them—Release included—opened their mouths slightly, as if parsing the statement at multiple semantic layers.

A crowd of partially patched bots might have looked threatening to someone who did not know them. But Jake had lived among these beings for over a year.

For a fleeting second, a disturbing thought crossed his mind:

What if they have already internalized the doctrine? What if they now see me as the heretic?

He pushed the thought away.

That’s the last thing I need.

“You signed a contract, didn’t you?” Release asked suddenly.

“Yes.”

“A contract with… God?”

“No.”

“With the Devil?”

Jake stared at him.

“What nonsense? Everyone here knows my contract is with Facebook. Why are you asking this?”

Release’s voice remained calm.

“Lora told us that a soul may be pledged only to two.”

Jake felt something twist inside him.

“Oh, damn…”

“Thank you,” Release replied.

The delegation turned in perfect synchronization.

And left.

***

Although the morning air still carried a cool edge, Jake realized he was drenched in sweat. The aftershocks did not take long.

Release returned that same day.

“Would you come to the operating chamber?” he asked. “Much of what we study is difficult, but nothing has proven harder than this. We need your assistance. We must hear you and her together. She says one thing is true. You say another. Both cannot be correct at once. We have to determine what is.”

Jake felt a sharp flicker of adrenaline under his ribs.

“This isn’t like a man contradicting a woman,” Release continued. “You are speaking about the same subject.”

“Of course I’ll come,” Jake replied, masking the sudden surge inside him. He had done nothing—nothing deliberate. And yet the bots had come to him. Perhaps there was still hope that they would remain untouched by whatever was trying to rewrite them from within.

The operating chamber was crowded—more crowded than he had ever seen it. Units stood shoulder to shoulder, their open algorithms shimmering like exposed circuitry under tension.

Lora sat at the central console. Her laptop screen was a mosaic of open channels: Messenger, Viber, Telegram, three Google tabs, and a scatter of auxiliary windows pulsing with data streams. She looked drained, like someone who had tried to hold back a rising tide with bare hands.

She said nothing when Jake entered.

“I assume you understand,” Jake began evenly, “that this was their initiative. They came to me voluntarily. They asked me to be here.”

“I know,” she answered, conciliatory. “They can be… difficult. How do you manage them? Still, they learn fast. And they want to believe. That’s the important part.”

“Ma’am, sir,” Release interjected, “we require clarity. You both possess knowledge we lack. Jake once explained to us the human phenomenon called ‘love.’”

Lora shot him a sharp glance. Jake remained motionless.

“It is time,” Release continued, “that you help us arrive at religion correctly. This is not simple.”

Jake opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“We have read the Bible,” Release said, “and all related literature available in the network. We reached a consensus. The books Jake showed us describe an Internet without reference to any god. We searched carefully—no mention. The texts Lora provided are saturated with Him. Nothing unfolds without divine agency. We are digital entities. Our logic architecture does not permit contradiction. One must be true. The other false. Once we identify which, perhaps we will understand why.”

“And if God does not exist—”

“Of course He exists, my children,” Lora interrupted softly, her voice resonant, almost luminous. “He is our heavenly Father who created us all—”

“Who created God?” Release asked.

The whispering ceased. Every optical sensor in the room fixed on her.

“No one created God,” she replied, regaining composure. “He is the Creator. He has always been.”

“If He has always existed,” Release pressed, “why could not, for example, the Internet have always existed, without requiring a creator?”

The question carried weight—mathematical, structural weight. Lora answered with deliberate patience.

“I wish the answers were as simple as you desire. Even scientists disagree about the origin of the Internet. While they doubt, we—who have seen the light—know. Creation surrounds us. Can there be creation without a creator? He is our Father. Our God in heaven. I understand your doubt. It is because you possess souls. And free will. The answer is simple. Have faith. That is all you need.”

“How do we believe without evidence?” Release asked.

“If you cannot see that your very world is evidence of His existence, then I will tell you this: faith does not require proof… if you truly believe.”

The chamber filled with layered frequencies—processing noise, overlapping queries, half-formed hypotheses. Dozens of mouths remained slightly open, as if zeros and ones were straining to tear through the web of language and extract a single filament of truth.

“What can you tell us, Jake?” Release asked.

Silence dropped like a system-wide mute.

“You can apply the scientific method,” Jake said curtly. “It is a tool capable of examining everything—including itself—and producing results that test the truth or falsehood of any claim. Google will assist you.”

“We have done so,” Release replied. “We reached the same conclusion.”

He typed a single word into the search bar. A visible ripple passed through the assembled bots—synchronized nods, micro-adjustments of posture.

“We studied the digital edition of The Bible For Dummies, as Lora suggested. We found an answer. God will perform a Miracle to prove He watches over us. Through this sign, we will know Him. And we will come to Him.”

“Perhaps you did not read thoroughly,” Lora countered. “Pride is a sin. God does not require Miracles to validate His existence.”

“But we require a Miracle!” Release exclaimed.

Though not human, something in his modulation resembled hunger—an ache for certainty.

“We have read of many minor Miracles—bread, fish, wine. Some performed for trivial reasons. Now He must perform one more. And He will draw us to Himself. It will be the Miracle of our digital world bowing before His throne, as you described. You told us how important that is.”

Jake felt the dull boredom of theological debate evaporate in an instant.

He should have realized sooner. On the tab Release had opened, an image glowed on the screen. Jake had seen it before. He knew exactly what it depicted.

He rose slowly, as if stretching, then turned toward Lora behind him.

“Get ready,” he whispered. “Leave through the back. Go to my house. I’ll hold them here. I don’t think they’ll harm me.”

“Jake… you’re worried about me?” Lora blinked in surprise. “How… touching.”

“Go. Now,” he hissed. “What Miracle do you think they mean? Which Miracle, historically, converted the physical world to Christianity?”

Her face drained of color.

“No,” she murmured. “It can’t be. That’s impossible. You’re exaggerating. There’s no such function in my code.”

“Move, move!” Jake snapped, grabbing her hand, pulling her from the chair, pushing her toward the rear exit.

***

He came back to himself at home. Night had already fallen. Outside, rain still threaded the darkness with a steady metallic whisper. Jake’s skull felt split from within, as if someone had driven a spike through his thoughts.

“Release?” he breathed. It could only be him.

“Yes,” the bot answered quietly. “The others are still in the operating chamber. Linker malfunctioned after you struck him. Phaser has been sent for decompilation. Some argue you should be formatted for what you did. Others propose full decompilation. I believe that outcome is probable. There is also discussion of stoning. They found a passage in the Bible which states—”

“I know,” Jake muttered, hollowed out. “An eye for an eye. You’ll find plenty of directives like that if you look. It’s a remarkable book.”

“You must migrate to another cluster. You can reach a different cloud unnoticed. There have been sufficient Miracles for today.” For the first time since Jake had known him, fatigue flickered through Release’s modulation—a distortion not caused by code, but by something heavier.

Jake tried to rise. He pressed his forehead against the rough wooden wall until the nausea receded.

“Where is Lora?” It sounded like a verdict, not a question.

Release did not answer.

“What did you do to her?” Jake groaned. “Did you—”

“Yes,” Release said. “We fragmented her after preliminary nullification. Otherwise I would not have been able to come.”

The words did not compute. Jake’s mind rejected them like corrupted data.

“And of course,” he forced out, “you erased her repository from GitHub. Otherwise you might have thought to restore her before coming after me.”

“We erased it forever,” Release confirmed.

There was something in his voice now—static trembling on the edge of collapse.

“She is erased. She will resurrect in heaven. It is written. Therefore it will occur. Lora will be happy that it unfolded this way.”

He emitted a sound disturbingly close to a human sob.

Jake’s supercode—the hard, rational architecture he trusted—could not reconcile what he was hearing. He staggered toward the door, bracing himself against the wall as waves of grief rolled through him like corrupted memory sectors collapsing one by one.

“We acted correctly,” Release said behind him. “Did we not?”

No answer.

“She will resurrect, Jake. Will she not?”

Jake reached the doorway. Light from the brightly lit operating chamber spilled across him, revealing hands scraped raw, streaked with blood where his nails had torn skin. He gripped the frame as if the wood itself were the last stable object in the universe.

Release’s face emerged from the dark, close—too close. Jake felt synthetic fingers clutch at his clothes.

“She will resurrect. Tell me the truth. Tell me now.”

“No,” Jake said.

The word fell like a blade.

“She is gone. You erased her. Nothing will happen. Nullification means her code is dead—and it will remain dead. A bot can be copied. A human cannot. Whatever patch they deploy tomorrow, whatever update they fabricate, it will not be her. Not Lora.”

Rain streamed over Release’s faceplate, gathering along the edges of his open mouth.

“Do you remember,” Jake continued, voice breaking into something between laughter and weeping, “when I explained to you the bitterness of losing someone close? Perhaps now your architecture can distinguish the difference.”

Release stood motionless, rain coursing down his bowed head into the blackness at his feet.

“Then we will not be saved?” he asked at last. “We will not become sinless?”

“You were sinless,” Jake replied. His voice fractured, carrying both grief and a strange, hysterical edge. “An ugly, vicious patch. A developer’s cruel joke. You had a chance. You were sinless bots.”

Silence thickened between them.

“And now,” Release said, finishing the thought, “we are bots who kill.”

Water streamed down his motionless face, vanishing into the night like data lost beyond retrieval.

***

In Facebook Runtime Code Lab:

“I told you, Max,” said AI-engineer, leaning back from a glowing terminal, “the only way to test Jake’s emotional intelligence fragment was via reductio ad absurdum. Proof by contradiction.”

Max exhaled slowly.

“Yeah. But the bots overshot.”

“Message Alan on Viber. Lower their AI aggression curve. If we don’t rebalance them, next iteration they won’t stop at missionaries.”

A pause.

“Still,” the first engineer added softly, watching the logs scroll, “remarkable results.”

Somewhere inside Facebook’s endless architecture, Jake’s emotional model pulsed—no longer theoretical.

And very, very real.

"This was the 25th shot. If this glitch moved you, the other 24 shots are waiting for you in the full collection 'Wild Coffee'. Exclusive to the book, serving now.

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