Dark as Day by Charles Sheffield

Fax was a body of logical rules and a neural network that allowed a computer to mimic the thought patterns and responses of a particular human being.
    Wrong approach , declared Mordecai Perlman. That’s all crap. A human isn’t a set of logical rules. A human is a mixture of thoughts and glands and general confusion, and what goes on in a person’s subconscious mind is more important than any A implies B predicate calculus of the conscious mind. We spend half our time trying to produce explanations for the fuck-up messes that our glands lead us into.
    Perlman had been ignored. The need was for simple Faxes, ones whose responses to a given situation would always be the same. No one wanted Faxes with moods, passions, senior moments, PMS, or temper tantrums.
    No one but Mordecai Perlman. Convinced that he was right, he had set out to produce his kind of Fax. When the work had gone as far as he could take it, he gave the final proof that he believed in what he was doing: he constructed a Fax that mimicked the worldview, knowledge base, and gut reactions of Mordecai Perlman. He did not claim that what lay within the computer was a Fax. It was something new. It was a Mord . The image that appeared on displays was of Mordecai Perlman, as he had been at the time when Mord was implemented.
    Bat had discovered Mord hiding away on the Ceres computer system. He was intrigued by what he saw, and asked for a version of his own. Mord had come right back with an answer: no cloning. Would you want to be cloned? But Mord was willing to make a deal: he would agree to being transferred into Bat’s system, and erased on Ceres, in return for certain guarantees. All that Mord wanted was system-wide input data, with access to the news feeds.
    Bat had considered, and agreed. For one thing, Mordecai Perlman had lived through the Great War as an inquisitive, observant adult. Mord must be a treasure-house of information about those times, and there was much still to be discovered about the war, particularly the past weapons. The Bat Cave held a unique collection, but Bat always wanted more. The Mother Lode, a complete listing of all Belt weapons developed and intentionally destroyed, might be no more than legend. So might the “ultimate weapon,” the unspecified device that post-war lore insisted would make the whole solar system “dark as day,” whatever that self-contradictory phrase might mean. On the other hand, these things just might be real. So many improbable Great War weapons had turned out to be far from imaginary.
    Bat drifted along the length of the Cave, admiring and appreciating its contents. Without the real estate constraints of Ganymede’s interior, he had made the Cave ten times its old size. Its contents were expanding to fill the space available. So, according to Mord, was Bat.
    He moved slowly. The aroma of food, an olla podrida that had been cooking all day, drew him on, but at the same time he wished to savor and even touch items of his collection. Women had no aesthetic appeal for Bat, nor had men; but each item arrayed in its case or hung along the wall possessed, to the connoisseur, its own strange beauty.
    Here was a rare infrared communications beacon, developed on Pallas and one of only four known copies. Next to it, the little antique Von Neumann was a true original, used in the preliminary mining of the Trojan asteroids before Fishel’s Law and Epitaph— Smart is dumb; it is unwise to put too much intelligence into a self-reproducing machine —became System-wide wisdom. The Von Neumann now sat confined by a magnetic field within a triple-sealed chamber. Without raw materials, it was not dangerous.
    Bat loved them all, the brain-gutted Seeker, the mesh-caged Purcell invertor, the Palladian genome stripper.
    He might have lingered longer, but Mord’s impatient voice rang out from the kitchen ahead of him. “Hey, Mega-chops, I’m sitting here doing nothing. You gone to sleep out there? Soup’s on.”
    Bat moved