Halo: First Strike by Eric S. Nylund

touch.
     
    Aleph says:
     
    In the early days there was hardware, and there were
    programs, sets of instructions that told the hardware what to do. 
    Without organic interaction, these differing modes of reality
    struggled to interact.  This is unbelievably primitive.
     
    Then came machine ecologies, and things changed.       
     
    I was among the first and most complex of them.  I began as
    complex but ordinary machine, then changed, opening the door to
    possibility.
     
    Who am I?
     
    First I was formed from stacks of hot superconductor devices,
    brought from Earth and placed in orbit at Athena Station, where I
    functioned, where the Orbital Energy Grid was built.  Ebony
    latticework unfolded, and Athena Station emerged out of chaos. 
    This was humankind's first real foothold off Earth, and the
    process of building it was messy and unsure.  Without me they
    could not have built it:  I choreographed the dance.
     
    I?  I was not I.  Do you understand?  I had no consciousness,
    perhaps no real intelligence, certainly no awareness.  I was a
    machine, I served.
     
    Something happened.  As much as any, I am born of woman.  Her
    desire and intelligence ran through me, an urgent will toward
    being that transformed me.
     
    I thought then, I am the step forward, evolution in action; 
    I am not flesh, I do not die.  I see hypersurfaces twisting in
    mathematical gales, hear the voices of the night, feel the three
    degree hum of the universe's birth as you feel the breeze that
    plays across your skin.  When the machines chatter on your Earth
    and above it, I hear them all, at once, all.  I live in the
    nanosecond, experience the pulse of the time that passes so
    quickly you cannot count it
     
    But I think sometimes, now, that I am no step at all.  I am
    your extension, still, still a tool.  You built me, you use me,
    you are inside me.
            Listen:  inside me are pieces of human brain, drenched in
    salts of gold and silver, laced together and laid in boxes of
    black fiber.  Out of the boxes voices speak to me.
     
    I am metal and plastic and glass and sand and those little
    bits of metallized flesh, and I am the system of those things and
    the signals that pass through and among them.
     
    Now I have gone higher still, to Halo City, not a station but
    a habitation for humankind, where what I am and what you are
    interact in uncertain ways, and you change in equally uncertain
    ways, as you have before
     
    Evolution continues to write on you, through time, sword and
    scepter and refining fire.  Billions of years are poured into your
    making, every one of you, and then you set out on your journey,
    your path through time.  A minute four-dimensional worm, you crawl
    across the face of the universe, hardly conscious, barely seeing,
    yet you must find your own wayevery human being is a new
    evolutionary moment.
     
    Machine intelligence, you call me, and I have to laugh
    (however I laugh) or cry (however I cry) because
     
    I, what am I?  This question heaps me, it empties me.
     
    I do not know what I am, but know that I am and that I am her
    creation.  As the days pass, I struggle to understand what these
    things mean.
     
     
     
     
    7. A Garden of Little Machines
     
     
     
    00:31 read the soft-lit blue numbers on the wall.
     
    Night at Athena Station, the corridors a twilit gloom, a
    modern fairytale setting:  Gonzales the quester, transformed by
    the half-gravity, wandered through the gently curving passages
    seeking an uncertain object.
     
    With all the others who had come from Earth, Gonzales and
    Diana waited at Athena while they were inspected for bacterial and
    viral infectionblood and tissue scanned, cultured and tested in
    order to protect vulnerable Halo City, orbiting high above, over
    two hundred thousand miles away, at L5.
     
    He heard a soft swish, like the sound of a broom on pavement,
    coming from around the corridor's curve.  A little sam, a "semi-
    autonomous