Determinism in Lifecycle of Software Objects

        Having been assigned The Lifecycle of Software Objects in class last week, it was interesting to think about the story in regards to determinism since Chiang is so adamant about including that factor in almost all of his stories. The way I saw determinism fitting into this story was with the digients. It almost seemed like the digients represented humans and the humans represented free will, or the absence of it. The digients were created to perform various but specific tasks, and if they started to act in ways that the humans did not like, they could erase whatever led up to that behavior and re-train them. This was an interesting idea to me, because the digients were given no choice in the matter, almost like in Chiang's The Story of Us, where even though the woman knew her child would die at an early age, she could not change her actions to change the future. It seems as if, in Chiang's stories, that there is a force that makes decisions for humans, or in this case, digients. It gives off the impression that there is no free will and that a higher power has already made every decision for you. This is also interesting because Chiang is an atheist, but there seems to almost be a God-like figure in every story that dictates the actions of those less powerful, like humans or digients.