I snapped back to consciousness. As usual, I did a systems check.
Wait, August 10th?
“Hey, doc, I seem to be missing a few days. Have you had on ice for a week?”
Dr. Landers looked everywhere except at . “Well, yes and no. Soone managed to sneak a small explosive into the computer room and take out the replicant matrices. We had to ship in a spare unit and restore you from backups. It took a few days.”
I was silent for a few monts. That ant that I wasn’t the Bob who woke up on June 24th. On the other hand, even back then I wasn’t the sa Bob who got killed by a car. Did I have a soul? Did it matter if I was restored from a backup?
I realized that in the more than a month that I’d been back as a computer program, I’d sohow managed to avoid coming to any conclusions about my exact status. ‘Rolling with it’ had beco a code phrase for avoiding the issue. But I knew that I had a tendency to avoid dealing with painful issues. Jenny had certainly proven that.
And being switched off when not in training contributed as well. I wondered if Dr. Landers had a plan, or if he was just going to wait until I was in space and hope for the best.
I had three issues that bothered . Was I conscious? Could I actually consider myself to be alive? And was I still Bob? Philosophers had been going on and on about this type of thing for centuries, but now, for , it was personal. A human, regardless of their opinion on the subject, could depend on being a human. The minister’s offhand reference to as ‘it’ and ‘replicant’ had stung at a level I was just now starting to appreciate.
I thought back to all the argunts about Turing Tests and thinking machines. Was I nothing more than a Chinese Room? Could my entire behavior be explained as a set of scripted responses to given inputs? That was probably the easiest uncertainty to answer. The classic Chinese Room, which just used scripts to react to input, had no internal dialog. Even if you made its behavior stochastic to introduce so variation in behavior, it was still only active when responding to input. When not processing a response, it just sat there, idle. By worrying about this, right now, I fell into a different category.
For that matter, Descartes had his famous cogito ergo sum; but Thomas had added to it with his “Since I doubt, I think; since I think, I exist.” Well, I was certainly full of doubt. Doubt implied self-awareness, and a concern for one’s future. So I was a conscious entity, barring evidence to the contrary. One down.
Was I alive? Hmm, since no one had yet managed to define life rigorously, that was going to be a fun one. As the speaker at that long-ago panel in Vegas had pointed out, fire has most of the qualities of life but is not alive. According to Dr. Landers, I would be able to reproduce via printer-based autofactories. I certainly responded to stimuli, and acted with self-interest. The claim that life would have to be carbon-based was chauvinistic and narrow-minded, so yeah, I could consider myself alive.
Now, the big one. Who was I? Was I Bob? Or was Bob dead? In engineering terms, what was the tric used to ascribe Bob-hood? Bob was more than a hunk of at. Bob was a person, and a person was a history, a set of desires, thoughts, goals, and opinions. Bob was the accumulation of all that Bob had been for thirty-one years. The at was dead, but the things that made Bob different from a chipmunk were alive. In . I am Bob. Or at least, I am the important parts that made Bob.
With this last thought, a huge weight lifted off of . I imagined it would feel the sa for soone right after the jury said, “not guilty.”
I turned my attention back to the doctor, who was repeating my na in an increasingly panicked tone. I realized that I had been silent for several seconds.
“Hey, doc. I’m here.”
“Thank God.” Dr. Landers collapsed into a chair. “You went silent, and I thought you might have gone psychotic.”
They’d put a lot of effort into by this point—into all of us, really—so I understood his reaction. I wanted to smile at him, but of course, no joy. “S’okay, doc. I think that ship just sailed, and I’m still here.”
Then realization hit as I processed what he’d said. “Um, doc, how many spare matrices do you have?”
“Just the one, Bob. A decision had to be made. I guess congratulations are in order.”
“So Kenneth is gone?”
Dr. Landers nodded, then did a double-take. He looked at , eyes narrowing. Oh, shit. Damage control, Bob.
I quickly threw in the first question I could think of. “So why did they decide to attack now? Has sothing changed?”
“Mm, information about your progress has been circulated. Best guess is that internal FAITH factions have leaked it in order to goad competing nations into so form of reaction. That’s the word from our security people, anyway.” The doctor was still frowning, but seed uncertain. I had to keep this going.
“Damn. Are we close to launch?”
The doctor’s expression changed to a frown of concentration. I just needed to keep him distracted long enough for my little faux pas to be forgotten. He consulted his tablet, idly swiping through so pages of information.
“Current project tiline has it about a month away. It can be moved up though. We’ve got a fair bit of slack in the schedule right now, thanks to your swift progress.”
Again, I tried to smile. And as usual, nothing happened, so I waved a waldo instead. “Still waiting for that raise…”
Dr. Landers laughed. “We’re pushing it through HR. Is that the right term?” He held the beat, head cocked to the side, then changed the subject. “Training session for today. I’ve got the details here.”
I heaved a ntal sigh of relief. The imdiate danger was over, and if the comnt occurred to Dr. Landers later, hopefully he’d be uncertain if he had heard correctly.
Dr. Landers raised a finger to poke at his tablet, hesitated for a mont, then put his hand down. He was silent for a few monts more, then sighed and looked up at . “Bob, I’m going to take a chance, I think. I’m going to stop deactivating you during off-tis, and I’m going to give you access to so more libraries. You’ll undergo a half-hour of semi-sleep every night while you are backed up, but other than that you’ll be online 24/7. If you do go insane, we’ll restore you from a previous backup. That sounds harsh, I know, and I apologize. But I don’t think we can afford the luxury of a leisurely project plan any more. We’re going to have to push forward as quickly as possible.”
I nodded in response. Well, I bobbed my caras, I guess. It was a kind of good news/bad news thing. I’d finally have so ti for so quiet reflection, but it could drive nuts. Woo hah…
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