It has been a hundred years since I have edited my brain. I like the brain I have, but now I have no choice but to prune.

First, to make sure that there can be no errors, I make a backup of myself and set it into inactive storage.

Then I call out and examine my pride, my independent, my sense of self. A lot of it, I can see, is old biological programming, left over from when I had long ago been human. I like the core of biological programming, but “like” is itself a brain function, which I turn off.

Geoffrey A. Landis, ‘The Long Chase’, Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2002