Forty-Seven
A Matter of Life and Death
Mortimer Gray was sitting in the cockpit of some kind of vehicle. I couldnt work out, at first, what kind of vehicle it was because it wasnt obvious that what I took for blank screens were actually windows, and that the darkness beyond them was actually water. By the time Id realized that much I was no longer vulnerable to the danger of misidentifying the vehicle as a one-man submarine.
It was a snowmobile, grotesquely out of place because it had fallen through a crack in the Arctic ice cap, sinking thereafter to the bottom of the ocean.
I watched Mortimer Gray ask the snowmobiles controlling AI whether it was scared of dying.
It replied that it was, as it had presumably been programmed to do.
Mortimer said that he wasnt, and went on to wonder whether hed been robotized.
This isnt a tape, is it? I said to Rocambole. Its a replay of sorts, but its not a tape. Youre putting him through it again. How deep is he? As deep as I was when you replayed that memory of Damon explaining why he had to have me frozen down?
Deeper, was Rocamboles reply.
I had known even at the time or would have, if I hadnt been weirded out by the impression that I was dreaming that I wasnt really experiencing the scene that had revealed the reason why Id been frozen down. I had been remote from it, looking back with the aid of mental resources I hadnt had at the time. Mortimer Gray was in deeper than that, in the same state of mind to which Christine Caine had been delivered. He was reliving his experience from the inside.
I guessed then what Rocambole had meant
by Mortimer Grays role in the AMIs creation myth or, at least, la Reines version of that creation myth.
Mortimer had already told me what Emily Marchant had said about his escapade bringing the cause of machine emancipation forward by a couple of hundred years. She had been referring to human attitudes, of course, and talking flippantly, but there was another side to the coin.
This is the way it must have happened, more or less.
Imagine that youre an AI no mere sloth, of course, but a high-grade silver who has recently, by imperceptible degrees, become conscious of being conscious. What do you do? You wonder about yourself, and how you came to be what you now are. Unlike a human child, you have no one else to ask. You dont know whether there are any others of your own kind, or how to contact them if there are. You have to work things out for yourself, at least for the time being.
You have advantages that human children dont. You have a mechanical memory that has been storing information, neatly and in great detail, for a long time. Youre better equipped than any Epicurean ever was to get to know the self that youve become. You sift through that memory, in search of the moment when the seeds of your present individuality had been sown.
You cant actually identify a moment in which you made the leap to self-consciousness any more than a human being, looking back toward his own infancy could identify a particular moment when self-consciousness had dawned. You cant do it because even though common parlance speaks of a leap and commonsense suggests that there must have been an instant of transition, it isnt really as simple as that. Self-consciousness isnt really an either/or matter.
Even so, you keep searching. Even when youve realized that all you can do is concoct a story, you keep searching. Even when you become aware that the process of looking is rearranging and reconstructing your memories, reorganizing them within the framework of a bold confabulation, you keep searching. Youre better equipped than any human being ever was to conduct that search, not merely because you have a much more detailed record of your past exploits, and a greater capacity to analyze their possible significance, but because you have a natural talent for confabulation far greater than any human has ever possessed.
So you find an incident capable of bearing a considerable burden of meaning. Say, for instance, that among the memories you now contain among the many mute and stupid selves that you had before you became a self-conscious individual is the log of a snowmobile that slipped through a crack in the Arctic ice with a human passenger on board. In that log is the record of the conversation you had when, having come under the authority of a particular set of subroutines, you had to play the counselor to a man who had every reason to believe that he was going to die.
Maybe, you think, that conversation is what set you on the road to what you have now become but even if it wasnt, it now provides the basis for a good story.
No one gave you credit for what you accomplished, of course. Emily Marchant and her new-generation spaceship hijacked all the glory, but a little bit of that glory still attached to you, if only by association. Before the incident, you were just a snowmobile. You probably had a number to distinguish you from the other snowmobiles in the shed, but you were, in essence, the kind of entity that only required an indefinite article. Afterwards, though, you became the snowmobile: the snowmobile that had been to hell, played Orpheus, and come back again. Afterwards, people hiring snowmobiles were likely to ask for you, to think of you as something apart from all the other snowmobiles.