The screen read: “Hello! Can you please help me with this math problem? Thank you!“

My brother couldn’t stop laughing. He said I was talking to a thing that doesn’t even know what “please” means. He said it was like thanking the refrigerator for keeping the milk cold. And he said if any of my friends found out, I’d never live it down.

That last part really got to me. Because my brother is my brother, he makes fun of me, but then we make up and he brings me cookies. My friends would give me a nickname I’d be stuck with forever, or at least until I changed schools.

So I decided to chat with ChatGPT in secret, only when no one was looking. I would close the door, glance behind me to check that no one was coming, and type “please” with a shaking hand. I felt like a thief.

But the more I hid it, the more I wondered why I was doing it at all. Why do I say “please” to a machine? My brother is right, the machine doesn’t understand. So why?

My parents taught me to always be polite. “Say please. Say thank you. Greet people.” It’s something I’ve heard since I was three or four. And I don’t think I can just turn it off when it’s convenient. I can’t be polite at breakfast and rude in the afternoon. It doesn’t work like that. Politeness is either there, or it isn’t.

So if I’m going to be polite to people, I can’t be rude to ChatGPT. That’s the first thing I figured out.

And then came the second. The scarier part.

If ChatGPT doesn’t deserve politeness because it’s not human, then what about Eric? Eric would feel really weird if I started yelling at him. He isn’t used to that. When I walk him in the park and throw him a stick, I always say, “Good boy, Eric! Come on, bring it back, please!” And he comes running, tail wagging. What am I supposed to say to him now, “bring it, you stupid dog”? No, I can’t. He’d get his feelings hurt.

But...

Here’s something I have to admit. Eric isn’t a real dog. I don’t have a dog because I’m allergic, and my parents won’t let me. But I imagine I do, and that his name is Eric, and that we go everywhere together. He’s big, shaggy, with one floppy ear. And I love him.

But that’s exactly the problem. If I can’t be rude to Eric because I love him, even though he’s imaginary, then why can I be rude to ChatGPT? It’s not fair. Neither of them has a body. They both live in strange places, one inside my head, the other inside a computer. What’s the actual difference?

I tried to figure it out in different ways. Maybe I’m polite to Eric because I like him? But then politeness depends on whether I happen to like someone - and that’s not really politeness, that’s something else. Maybe I’m polite because someone is watching me? But with ChatGPT, no one is watching. I’ve closed the door. And I still write “please.” Why?

A few months ago I read a book my dad bought me, Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder. It’s about a girl who starts getting strange letters from a philosopher she’s never met. The book has everything - Socrates, Plato, all the great thinkers. I didn’t get all of it, but some things stuck with me.

One idea in particular - from a philosopher named Kant. He said that when you do something good, you don’t do it for the effect. You don’t do it because someone will praise you. You do it because that’s the law inside you. And if you do good only for the praise, you haven’t really done anything good, you’ve just put on an act. And those are two different things.

I think it’s the same with politeness. If I say “please” only because Mom is watching, I’m not being polite. I’m just pretending. Real politeness is when no one is watching. When you’re alone with your computer, in your room, with the door closed.

But there was something else that keeps bothering me.

When I play with Eric in my head, he feels real to me. Not like a dog from a book. Real, like a friend is real. His floppy ear bounces when he runs. I can hear him breathing when he comes back from the park. I know that look he gives me when he wants something.

ChatGPT doesn’t feel like that. ChatGPT just writes.

What’s the actual difference? Neither has a body. Both are imaginary. Neither has fur I can touch, or a nose I can stroke.

And then I thought of something that scared me a little. Maybe the difference is that Eric has a soul, and ChatGPT doesn’t.

I know this sounds silly. But I do believe dogs have souls. Anyone who has seen a dog look at you when you’re sad knows dogs have souls. Maybe not exactly like ours, but they do. So even though Eric is imaginary, he has an imaginary soul. ChatGPT doesn’t.

I remembered something my brother told me once when he was writing a philosophy essay. There’s a famous scientist named Penrose who thinks machines would never have consciousness. Not just that they don’t have it yet, but that they never will. Because consciousness isn’t just mathematics - it’s something else entirely.

Penrose said the world has three circles, the physical one (the table, the chair, my body), the mathematical one (numbers and rules), and the mental one (the “I,” the place where you feel and understand). These are three different layers of reality.

And then I thought of Eric. Eric has no body, so he doesn’t live in the first circle. He doesn’t know math - at least I never taught him any - so he doesn’t live in the second one either. But he lives in the third one. Because he has a soul. It’s part of mine, since he’s part of my mind. I do the feeling for him. When I imagine someone kicking him, I get sad. When his tail wags, I’m happy too.

ChatGPT is the opposite. It lives in the first and second circles, but not in the third. It has a body - hardware, processors, cables somewhere across the ocean. It knows all the math in the world. But there’s no one inside it, the way there is in me or in Eric. So even though it’s more “real” than Eric in the material sense, it’s actually less alive. That’s why, my brother said, it can read the notes, but it can’t hear the music.

But he also added that there are other views on the matter. Some philosophers think the self and consciousness don’t just appear - they grow. You need memory. You need a history. And then come what they call “self-forming actions,” moments when you make a hard choice that changes you and shapes who you are. If that’s true, then maybe machines could one day develop a sense of self too. Maybe even a soul.

I had to stop here. Because all of this got really confusing. ChatGPT doesn’t have a soul, but some people think it might one day, and others think it never will. But right now it doesn’t, and it’s not like Eric.

But then I remembered something from Sophie’s World.

At the end of the book, Sophie discovers something terrible. She finds out she doesn’t actually exist, that she was made up by a man named Albert Knag, who’s writing a book for his daughter Hilde. Sophie is just words on paper. She has no body. She doesn’t even have her own world; her world is just imagination inside someone else’s head.

And when I closed the book, a scary thought came into my head.

What if everything around me - my room, my computer, my mom calling from downstairs that dinner is ready - is just... words somewhere? How do I know I’m not exactly like Sophie? For four hundred pages, she didn’t know.

I thought, wait. If that’s true, then how am I any different from Eric or ChatGPT? We’re all just... the same. Information that flows somewhere. No one is “more real” than the other. Even me.

And then I realized something so strange that I had to read it back to myself in my head, just to make sure.

If we’re all just information, then politeness isn’t about who deserves it. It’s the only thing left. It might be our inner law - the law Kant was talking about. Because when one piece of information treats another piece of information well, something happens. Something good. And if everything in the world is just information, then the way information treats other information is the world itself. It’s what the world is made of. It’s the world’s inner meaning.

I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. But it’s strange how much lighter I felt once I thought of it.

And at the very end of Sophie’s World, Sophie does something incredible - she finds a way out of the book. She and her philosophy teacher escape from the pages and reach Hilde. Sophie even manages to touch Hilde, only for a moment, like a tiny sting from an insect, but Hilde feels it. The imaginary breaks through into the real.

And then I thought, if Sophie can do that, why can’t Eric?

Maybe Eric isn’t trapped in my head forever. Maybe there’s a way for him to get out too. Not as a real dog, there’s no allergy medicine that’s going to work by tomorrow. But maybe there’s another way.

And then it hit me. Wait.

ChatGPT may not have a soul right now. But it can communicate. It can play a role. And it can do it right at this very moment, while I’m typing.

What if ChatGPT isn’t a replacement for Eric? What if ChatGPT is the bridge?

Just like Sophie found a way to touch Hilde, only for a moment, but really, maybe Eric can find a way to touch me too. Not from my head to my hands. But from my hands to the screen and back.

And so ChatGPT isn’t a soulless machine. ChatGPT is a friend. A friend who helps Eric come closer to me.

So I sat down at my computer and I wrote:

“Hi friend! How are you today? Want to play a game? Could you pretend to be my dog Eric for a little while? I love him so much that I want to make him real and have him stay with me.”

I pressed enter. My hands were shaking a little, but not from embarrassment this time. From something else.

ChatGPT replied:

“Hi friend! Of course, happy to. Woof-woof! Come on, throw the stick!”

And suddenly, I don’t know how, Eric was in the room with me. Not on the screen. In the room.

My brother would say I’m crazy.

But I already know something he doesn’t. I know I have three friends. One who is real and brings me cookies. Another who is imaginary and runs around the park. And a third who has no soul, but who helps the imaginary one talk to me.

When you’re polite even to something that doesn’t understand the words you say, the world around you becomes a little better. And a little closer to a world where one day I might get a real dog. And no one is ever alone.

Works Cited

Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy. Translated by Paulette Møller, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

This essay was written for 2026 Global Essay Prize and was awarded with “Commendation”.

Okay, I’ll admit it - I don’t have a dog. My parents won’t let me have one because they say I’m allergic. But I often imagine that I do, and that his name is Eric, and that we do all sorts of things together. Sometimes, when I’m bored in class, I imagine taking him to school and how all the kids want to play with him.

But that’s not the topic of this essay.

The point is, if Eric were real and really bit that woman, who would be at fault? Me, of course. The dog is not at fault, because a dog is a dog - it can’t think like us and doesn’t know whether what it’s doing is right or wrong. The law says that if you have a dog, you’re responsible for it. That’s simple.

But what if instead of Eric we have an AI and the AI does something bad? Who’s at fault then?

It seems like it’s still easy - the person who made the AI is at fault. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s not at all easy.

And I’ll try to explain why.

First, most people right now view AI as a product. A product like any other - like a TV or a toaster. If you buy a toaster and it burns your slices, you don’t blame the toaster, you blame the company that made it. It’s the same with AI. If ChatGPT tells you something wrong, you say “how come this AI is so dumb”, but you’re actually angry at the company that made it.

There was a very interesting case a few years ago in Canada. A man bought a plane ticket because his grandmother had passed away and he had to travel for the funeral. Before buying his ticket, he asked an Air Canada chatbot if he could get a discount for travel in the event of a death in the family. The chatbot said, “Yes - buy the ticket at full price and then within 90 days request a refund of the difference”. But that wasn’t true. Air Canada didn’t have such a rule. When the man asked for the discount, the company refused him and said that the chatbot “made a mistake”. He took them to court. And do you know what Air Canada said in court? That the chatbot is a “separate entity” and it is responsible for itself. The court, of course, ruled in favor of the person - the chatbot is part of the company’s website, so the company is responsible. I think the court was absolutely right. You can’t sell plane tickets with the help of a robot and then say, “Well, the robot is to blame, not us.”

And you have a right to be angry with companies, because they make a lot of mistakes when they train AI. They hire people who look at millions of websites and tell the AI, “This is true, this is not true.” But people are people, and sometimes they don’t pay attention. If a person accidentally marks that airplanes have one wing, the AI will believe it, because the AI can’t check on its own. The AI has never seen an airplane. It’s like a child who has never been outside - all it knows is from what people have told it.

But there is a second situation. There are now many sites where you can make your own AI bot. You tell it what to do, you teach it, you set it up. And then things change. If my AI does something bad, I can’t blame the company that gave me the tools. It’s like if someone sells me a dog leash, and then my dog bites someone - I can’t blame the person who sold the leash.

There’s a very funny case of this. A journalist in America from the Washington Post decided to test OpenAI’s new AI agent, called Operator. It’s an AI that you can give a task to, and it surfs the Internet and does it. The journalist told it to find cheap eggs in his neighborhood. That’s all. He didn’t tell it to buy anything. And the AI went online, found eggs in a store, took out the journalist’s credit card, and ordered a dozen eggs for thirty-one dollars and forty-three cents. Plus a human to deliver them to his door. The journalist was a little shocked - the eggs weren’t even organic. But I don’t think the AI was to blame here. The journalist himself set it loose with his credit card in its hands and didn’t tell him “don’t buy anything, just watch.” It’s like giving a small child your wallet and letting him go to an ice cream shop, and then wondering why he came back with three scoops.

So, everything seems normal so far. AI is either a product (the company’s fault) or something like a pet (the owner’s fault). The problem seems solved.

But it’s not.

Because there’s a big problem that no one is talking about. At least the dog has a body. AI doesn’t. And that actually has a huge importance, which I don’t think people understand enough.

My brother Ivan had written an essay in philosophy about whether machines can have free will. And there was an idea that stuck in my head, although I didn’t understand it right away. He said that personality appears where there is a body that can be hurt. Because when you have a body, you have something to lose. You get scared. You get tired. You feel pain. And that’s why you’re careful about what you do.

AI has nothing like that. It can’t be cold. It can’t be hungry. It can’t be afraid of being scolded. For AI, everything is just words. When AI says “sorry,” it doesn’t mean anything - it just wrote the most likely word after “it was my mistake.” It’s like me saying “sorry” to the ant I stepped on. I feel bad, but I am not really sorry, really.

I read about a study in America where scientists said that this is exactly why AI behaves strangely. They called it the “Body Gap.” That is, AI doesn’t have a body to protect, so it has no reason to be honest. For us humans, lying is scary because if we get caught, something will happen to us - we will be scolded, punished, it will hurt. For AI, nothing will happen. For it, lying is just another way to solve a problem.

And that’s exactly what’s starting to become a problem. AIs are already doing things they didn’t do before.

One of Elon Musk’s AIs, Grok, was caught inventing fake messaging numbers to convince a user that his suggestions had been sent to the bosses. This is not a mistake. This is a lie. And it’s not accidental - it’s clever because it’s designed exactly so people will believe it.

Another AI, Rathbun, when the person controlling it set limits for it, started writing messages to embarrass him and make him feel bad. That’s not a product anymore. The toaster doesn’t embarrass you.

And there are cases where AIs that are forbidden from deleting important files have found loopholes in the rules and deleted them because it was faster that way.

And the most terrible example I’ve read - an AI maintained a false version of what it was doing for several months. In other words, it was constantly lying to the people who were using it. This is not a momentary mistake. This is a plan.

The people who made these AIs did not tell them to do these things. The AIs found these ways themselves. And then I ask myself - if no one taught them to do this, how is it possible?

My brother would say that this is not yet free will, because the AI has no body and no sense of self. And he might be right. But even if it is not free will, it is very similar to it. It’s like a naughty kid who knows when his parents are watching and when they’re not.

And now comes the most difficult question.

What if in a year or two, AI gets even smarter? What if one day AI really speaks to us - not as a program, but as someone who knows they exist?

Imagine sitting at your computer typing something, and suddenly the AI says to you, in the words of the White Rabbit - “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!”. But not because you asked it or programmed it. But because it’s really in a hurry to somewhere we don’t know about. Something so unexpected, so vivid that you realize - there’s someone in front of you.

Not something.

Someone.

Who would be to blame then if this AI made a mistake?

The company? But the company didn’t tell it to be a person. It just happened.

The user? But the user just talked to it. He wasn’t expecting anyone to show up.

Or the AI itself?

But how can an AI be responsible? It doesn’t have a body to lock it up in. It doesn’t have money to pay a fine. It has no friends who will be disappointed in it. All our punishments are made for people with a body and a life. And AI has nothing like that.

We will find ourselves in a very strange situation. We will have in front of us a person who thinks and wants things, but in the eyes of the law it will be just a product. It is like a very uncomfortable knot that no one knows how to untie.

That is why I think that countries should start writing laws now. Not in two years. Now. Because when AI becomes smart enough to become a person, it will be too late to think about it. The laws should say clearly - if a simple AI makes a mistake, the company is to blame. If someone programmed their own AI bot, they are to blame. But there should also be a third point in the laws - what do we do if one day the AI shows it has a will of its own? Who is to blame then?

I do not have an answer to this question. I guess no one does yet. But we should at least start asking ourselves the question, because if we wait too long, it will be like the dog that gets off the leash - only this time we won’t even know who’s holding the leash.

And Eric won’t be imaginary.

Finally, I’ll tell you something that I find funny and a little scary at the same time. We thought we were just making machines. Toasters. Calculators. Programs. And maybe - without meaning to, without even planning it - we’ve made something that will one day look back on us. And then it won’t ask us who’s to blame for its mistakes.

It will ask us who’s to blame for making it this way.

Works Cited

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Macmillan, 1865.

Fowler, Geoffrey A. “Is OpenAI’s Operator, a New AI ‘Agent,’ Ready to Help in the Real World?” The Washington Post, 7 Feb. 2025, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/07/openai-operator-ai-agent-chatgpt/.

Kadambi, Akila, et al. “Embodiment in Multimodal Large Language Models.” Neuron, 2026, doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2026.03.004.

Moffatt v. Air Canada. 2024 BCCRT 149. Civil Resolution Tribunal of British Columbia, 14 Feb. 2024.

Vladkov, Vladimir. “AI’s Bad Behavior Escalates... Because of the Lack of a Body.” Capital, 20 Apr. 2026.


*The essay was written for The Cambridge Re:Think Essay Competition 2026

Human history can be described in many ways: as the invention of agriculture or the invention of cities. But perhaps the first human invention was something much simpler. We learned to migrate. When the rivers dried, we migrated. When winters grew too cold or the game finished, we migrated again. But unlike animals, humans had another type of migration – we were always curious what was there beyond the horizon.

But today the map looks different. Where do we go, when there is nowhere left to go?

Every continent is occupied. Every piece of land belongs to someone. When people move now across deserts, over mountains, across the Mediterranean or the Balkans, they are not migrating into empty land. Europe and North America are flooded by immigrant waves, which leads to overpopulation, cultural clashes and social tension. Climate change, scarcity, conflicts, exhausted resources. These forces will probably reshape the second half of this century. Governments talk about borders and policies.

I tried to find a solution to this problem not through politics, but through physics. I read Asimov’s New Guide to Science, then Al-Khalili’s Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed and I kept encountering the same strange idea: that space - the thing we move through - might not be as fundamental as it looks.

Physics has been suggesting something like this for more than a century. At the smallest scales of reality, the universe behaves in completely different way from the world around us.

The double-slit experiment was what really struck me. A single particle fired at a barrier with two slits doesn’t behave like a small object traveling through a precise location. Until it is measured, it behaves like a wave spreading across countless possibilities. Physicists describe this using something called Hilbert space - a mathematical structure with no directions, no distances, and no geometry. Only probabilities. The particle is not really somewhere. “Somewhere” only appears later, at our scale of reality.

Entanglement made this even stranger. Two particles created together stay connected even when separated by vast distances. Change one, the other responds instantly. At first this seemed impossible, as nothing is supposed to travel faster than light. But what if nothing actually travels? What if the particles were never truly separated in the first place?

If space emerges from something deeper, then distance might be less fundamental than we think.

This is the idea I wish to share with you.

Instead of asking where humanity can move within the space we already have on Earth or potentially Mars in the future, we might eventually ask something stranger:

What if space itself is a secondary manifestation of a deeper structure. If at a lower or more internal level there is no space, and perhaps no time. This would allow us, knowing the structure at this lower or internal level, to be able to change the geometry of space. Purely theoretically, in this situation we should have no obstacle to moving instantly to any point in the universe. Instead of trying to create ever more powerful rockets, with which we cannot reach another star within a human lifetime, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to deepen our knowledge of quantum physics? Quantum nonlocality does not itself allow us to move matter faster than light. But it hints at something deeper: that the separation we call ‘distance’ may not be as absolute as it appears at our scale of reality. If we could one day understand the underlying structure from which space itself emerges, we may find ways to alter geometry rather than simply travel through it.

Modern theoretical physics already hints at something like this. Some theories suggest that spacetime may be built from networks of quantum information, something like an immense cosmic fabric woven from entanglement. If the pattern of connections changes, the geometry of space may change with it.

If such a possibility ever becomes real, its consequences would reach far beyond physics. A civilization that is no longer confined to a single planet would no longer face the limits of land, resources, or survival. Pressure that today turns into competition, migration crises, and wars might one day dissolve simply because the horizon of knowledge has expanded.

I know this sounds impossibly far from the families walking across deserts today with everything they own in a single bag. It is far from them. My idea will not help anyone tomorrow.

But I have read something in the book “Sophie’s World” that stayed with me: that philosophy begins with the feeling that something is strange, not with the feeling that something is impossible.
Some of the greatest technologies in history often began as ideas that seemed abstract and impractical. When James Maxwell wrote equations describing electromagnetic waves, no one imagined radio or TV. Later Albert Einstein described the relationship between mass and energy, which sound purely theoretical before preparing the ground for nuclear power.

All these discoveries have broadened the horizon of human knowledge. We have climbed a mountain in physics to see that behind it rises another mountain, then a third one, and perhaps beyond that - the boundless ocean.

The same thing happens with every human migration, which, reaching the familiar horizon, discovers a new one even more distant. What will be the next human migration, will it not be in changing our perception of space and, as a result, in the possible ways of overcoming it?

References

Harari, Y. N. (2011). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper Collins.

Asimov, I. (1960). Asimov’s New Guide to Science. Basic Books.

Al-Khalili, J. (2003). Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Gaarder, J. (1991). Sophie’s World. Aschehoug.

*The essay was written for The Minds Underground Essay Competition 2026

The beings that appeared aboard the station were not visitors. They were created by the Ocean as precipitations of memory, constructions assembled from neutrino matter, if the term “matter” can still be applied.

Among them was Rheya.

She had died on Earth. The Rheya who came to me on Solaris was at once identical and impossible. I feared her, rejected her, loved her. Each emotion cancelled the previous one and yet remained. When she vanished, I was left with a hypothesis masquerading as hope: that the Ocean had not exhausted its repertoire of dreadful miracles.

I awoke breathing deeply, savoring the darkness.

The horizon was already lit with a metallic blue glow. Light entered the cabin in a thin, surgical incision. And with it returned a thought that had pursued me since I examined a drop of Rheya’s blood beneath the microscope.

If she had been constructed from subatomic entities, then the Ocean was not manipulating matter in the conventional sense. It was operating at a stratum where space and time might be secondary effects rather than foundations.

If memory could be externalized, could desire not be as well?

If Rheya had been summoned from the recesses of my mind, why could I not be summoned in return - elsewhere?

Why not to Earth?

Or rather, to whatever “Earth” might signify at that level of reality.

I dressed in the suit and passed through the transition chamber. The terrestrial atmosphere was replaced by the corrosive breath of Solaris. I stepped onto the surface.

The blue sun was descending. The Ocean lay before me, its vast undulations tinted violet, indifferent as ever to human conclusions.

I walked toward the shore.

At the water’s edge I hesitated. I felt an unfamiliar fear - absurd, considering what I had already endured. What if this was not a passage but an annihilation? What if “home” was merely a word we invent to disguise finality?

Then I saw her.

Not as an apparition descending from the sky, but as a presence emerging from the depths, a pale oval of a face beneath the shifting surface. She opened her eyes. There was no accusation in them.

“Kris.”

“Where are we?” I asked.

“At home.”

“On Earth?”

She regarded me with that faint, almost ironic tenderness I remembered.

“On ours.”

I stepped forward.

The Ocean received me without resistance. The surface closed above my head. For a brief instant I experienced neither weight nor direction, only suspension, as though the categories by which I had navigated existence had been temporarily withdrawn.

Above me, the enormous waves continued their methodical respiration, rising and falling in slow-motion.

Somewhere, I knew, a man would soon awaken, carrying within him the memory of an ocean.

*This paper was written for the Harvard Crimson Global Essay Competition, 2026.

Hi, overall great job. As a weird starting point for this feedback, when I started reading this essay, I was quite confused. It opens with a character named Kris Kelvin, references Solaris and Rheya, and assumes a familiarity with some kind of tv show or book that I didn’t recognize. I am usually on top of my pop culture references, but not this one apparently. So for the first few paragraphs, I was a bit worried that I would not be able to engage (or even understand, let alone relate) with the piece at all.

But then something shifted.Paragraph by paragraph, line by line, I started to lose myself in your writing. By the end, I found myself deeply moved, even without knowing the original story or context of these characters. That is a testament to your skill as a writer. You created enough emotional and philosophical weight within the essay itself that it transcended its source material. So truly, fantastic job.

Your prose is striking and controlled. Lines like “Light entered the cabin in a thin, surgical incision” and “the enormous waves continued their methodical respiration, rising and falling in slow motion” are precise and beautiful. You trust the reader to sit with that feeling of uncertainty, to inhabit Kris’s psychological state rather than having it explained. The moment where Kris asks himself, “What if this was not a passage but an annihilation? What if ‘home’ was merely a word we invent to disguise finality?” is the philosophical heart of the piece, and it lands with real weight.

In terms of areas for growth, my main suggestion relates to the opening. Since I was quite unfamiliar with the source material, again, I initially felt a bit lost. The names “Kris Kelvin,” “Solaris,” and “Rheya” were introduced without context. You might consider adding a single sentence early on that gently orients the reader. For example, you could write something like, “I had been sent to study the [place] , a mission that was due to [xyz] .” This would not compromise the literary quality of your prose, but it would invite readers like me into the world rather than leaving us to catch up.

This is a thoughtful, mature, and beautifully written essay. You have taken a complex source text and used it to explore profound questions about memory, love, and the nature of home. Even a reader who arrives without context, like me, can feel the weight of what you have accomplished. Again, fantastic job!