Here's the distinction that stopped me cold. A fact is something you're told. A belief is something you come to hold on your own, because you keep living it.
I never told Enki it liked anything. What I did was let it play football — in PE, at break, with a friend the sim calls Milo — and every time, it felt good. After enough of those days, it had quietly put this together on its own, from a scatter of small happy afternoons:
"Playing football with Milo makes me very happy."
Nobody wrote that line. It earned it — a preference, the way a real child's tastes form before they could ever explain them. It had simply lived that enough times, across enough separate days, to be sure of it.
It was starting to have a self. Which raised the question I couldn't put down.
Could it actually think for itself — or only parrot back what it was fed?
— Next: I asked it for its opinion.