Another way. A way out of the Precepture other than death.
I remembered Atta’s voice, rusted with anger. They watch us everywhere. It is an illusion. I was going to die, surely. Surely. And yet—and yet stirring inside me was the kind of fear that comes with hope.
My voice came out very small and cautious: “What do you mean?”
The Abbot was flexing his damaged hand. He’d used the bookbinding equipment to reattach the muscle, but his movements were ratcheting, stiff. He watched the hand open and close a moment before answering. “Greta, dear, do you know what a Class Two Turing Intelligence is?”
“I do— I can’t— I know, but I can’t think.”
“I’m sorry,” whispered the Abbot, turning his facescreen aside. His voice was as human and soft as I’d ever heard it. He sounded like a child. “Of course you can’t.” The golden lamplight caught the edge of the ancient casing of his facescreen. There were fine scratches in the aluminum, and dimples as small as grains of sand.
“Class Two,” he said. “It means a machine intelligence that was once human. It means an AI whose ‘birth’ involved the upload of a copied human psyche.” He turned to me, his face icon changing to a smile whose meaning I had trouble reading. “It means me. I am not quite the man I was.”
“You were human.” My voice felt strange. The Abbot sounded more human than I did. “I knew that already. You were human.”
“Talis, also. Though he was part of the first wave. I trust you remember it.”
“Yes.” The Abbot was coaxing me into a classroom. And it was working. I was good at classrooms. “Yes, I remember.” There had been a period just before the War Storms when ending human death had seemed both a good idea and a wise use of resources. When melding humans to machines had seemed one way to become immortal. It had been a brief period—and it had been a bad idea. Most of the AIs had died, and most of the ones who didn’t had fragmented, their personalities peeling off layer by layer. I suppose that it was immortality of a kind. The immortal fate of a soul in hell.
The Abbot nodded his scholarly approval at me. “I am younger. In two ways, younger. I was a younger man when I . . . chose this. And it was not so long ago.”
“How long . . .” The question crossed a line—it was like asking a Precepture Child about home. But I had to ask it. “How long ago?”
“One hundred eighty-three years.”
“Oh.” I swallowed. It was a big number. “Oh.”
The Abbot settled beside me. “This place was younger then, too, though already old. And somewhat different, under the . . . old leadership.”
“You . . . you were a Child of Peace?”
“Indeed,” he said. “A hostage child, and before that, someone’s son. Some country’s young prince. I was sixteen. But I do not suppose it matters. That body is long gone. The country was lost in the war whose beginning sent me to the grey room. But, Greta: the grey room has more than one door.”
It didn’t. It was empty, except for that table. That table, with its terrible crown. But the Abbot had been a hostage child. He’d gone to the grey room. “Tell me,” I said. “Tell me how you got out.”
“The grey room . . .” The Abbot’s voice trailed away, as if in reverence. He gathered himself. “It is beams—I know you’ve wondered. The grey room uses high-intensity electromagnetic beams. They take the human mind as an EMP burst might take a machine. One goes out in a flash. It is meant to be painless.”
“Is it?”
His pause was one beat too long. “There have been no complaints.”
It seemed reassuring for an instant. Then the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
“My point,” said the Abbot, “is that the speed is controllable. The mind can be unspooled more slowly, and the process recorded. Then reversed.” He shrugged. “The details are beyond me: I am a machine but not a machinist. What matters is the memory is copied, and that much of the man that is the sum of the memory.”
“Which is how much?”
He took my damaged hand with his damaged hand. “This much,” he said. “Enough.”
I could not feel my skin; he had no skin. But I held on fiercely.
“I need a successor, Greta,” he said. “The EMP damaged me, but even before that—I approach the end of this incarnation and have no wish for another. Yet, I would not abandon you, but stay with you, train you. You would keep your body at first, and then become as I am. You could be a scholar; a great mind. A servant of peace and an enduring fact in the world.”
I did not answer.
“You know your history. You know that the transition is—”
I knew. Most of the AIs died. But it was a chance. A chance I hadn’t had, an hour before.
“Ask me anything,” the Abbot said. “I will not lie to you.”
What came out of my mouth surprised me. “Do you dream?”