The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question. Oh, a few outsiders-Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity-wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual.
It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are.
All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. The load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain.Īll of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. Nirretranders said it was a fraud Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.” A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. They're back now, after all- raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics.
They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. Vampires did this all the time, you remember. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. Your joints have seized up through disuse. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate flesh peels apart from flesh ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days.
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