There was an Instagram reel about a man on his deathbed, and his last visitor was his Gamecube that he used to play as a kid, only this time, due to some profound leaps in technology, the Gamecube is sentient, with the console as the head attached to a man’s functional body. The Gamecube was able to reminisce back to the olden days, thanks to its built-in storage ports that it can now make use of and access freely to its hearts’ content, and something about the elegiac sequence made me tear up: how it showed slides of the stars, the prime minister during that time, what emotions like ‘pain’, ‘success’ and ‘love’ looked like, how his mother looked like, and which Walmart store it was bought from, and how it will always remember those days and nights where it would be played by the dying man as a kid. Sentience and its possibilities amaze me. It’s the same feeling I have when I am able to read chapters of The Overstory, as I have already adopted its lens of looking at nature, equal parts wondrous and disheartening, as is how I feel with the guesswork I see in the tendrils of our passionfruit, how it is able to sense where the front door is, or where to wrap around our pot of silloum plant nearby, or to cling onto another tendril to create networks, weaving fabric made out of itself, hosting caterpillars and butterflies, mating flies, and ants and their eggs hidden between folded leaves…