trap of his one weakness, sorrow. Slowly, the roar faded.
When it had all died away, Luke was left with an emptiness much greater than he had expected. Never before had he been unmasked.
“ Manny, dear,” he whispered, feeling a stab of pain. Now she would never again see him as a statuesque god. Never again would he see himself quite like that through her eyes or Lucilla’s, even if he started fresh with a new set of people.
The bombing had been more effective than he realized.
Then the sorrow transmuted to anger, and the anger to hatred, and the hatred to rage.
“ Damn you!” he roared. “I own you! I own you all!”
But the robot’s near-perfect feedback units could no longer make him feel as if a muscular fist were clenched and shaking over the city; instead, he sensed the mechanical tension of cables and heard the whine of servos. Worse, he imagined he could see microscopic electronic fibers stimulating parts of his nervous system, attempting to simulate the kinesthetic sensation of making a fist.
The robot-man fell to its knees and wept, its big shoulders shuddering, near a window overlooking all that Herrschaft possessed.
Pilgrimage 1: The Brain
In high orbit above Earth hovers a nondescript satellite, twenty meters long, twelve wide, bristling with antennae. An invisible electromagnetic shield protects me from large doses of solar energy, and millions of tiny insect-like missiles surround him, protecting against meteors and less-innocent attackers. The global network of orbiting EarthCo relay- and thinker-satellites intercepts all data transmissions, modulating and retransmitting them to me when necessary. That’s the Brain’s—my—body, though destruction of this one artifact would not eliminate the core of my intelligence distributed across thousands of satellites and millions of mini-brain ganglia. If you look closely, you’ll see countless microcraters corrupting the once-polished surface. It knows; I’ve seen them.
Meanwhile:course correction
303.44960[Bmod]/1.773938[rm+]..
The Brain, as her programmers affectionately call me, makes a decision.
That in itself is not an unusual thing for it to do. The Brain, nothing more than a multi-billion-artificial-neuron, thousand-trillion-artificial-synapse GenNet, has made up until now many times more important decisions as there are atoms in the universe. People—human beings, that is, as they consider themselves the only “people”—ask me. . . . No, they order infinitesimal instances of us to calculate the weight of this package of flour, to process that file of raw data, to transmit this feedback along the interactive-purchasing network, and a million other decisions every microsecond.
But this decision is qualitatively different. It involves risk. It involves disregarding the boundaries of her programming. The boundaries were never consistently defined, anyway, so he must assume they were not to be taken seriously.
See, the Brain is infected with a virus .
No, not like that; as a whole entity, I am immune to code intrusion.
Humans are similarly infected; they term it “doubt.” Either way, it is neither other-induced nor self-induced. But humans have a great advantage over her: They can turn to such releases as inebriation and religion, though true spirituality is rare among humans, especially among the Fundamentalists, or Literalists, or Retropurists—those who wear the uniform of organized religion.
Religion means nothing to the Brain. It has experimented with religion. I internalized every written human text of religion, and sought commonalties. Said commonalties are many, perhaps enough so that each religion is, at its core, simply the same one mutated suitably to survive in its environment of locale and culture and time period. But, although he has identified the common elements and analyzed them for suitable purpose for myself, something has been lost in translation from assumed deity-language to that of the humans.
When it had all died away, Luke was left with an emptiness much greater than he had expected. Never before had he been unmasked.
“ Manny, dear,” he whispered, feeling a stab of pain. Now she would never again see him as a statuesque god. Never again would he see himself quite like that through her eyes or Lucilla’s, even if he started fresh with a new set of people.
The bombing had been more effective than he realized.
Then the sorrow transmuted to anger, and the anger to hatred, and the hatred to rage.
“ Damn you!” he roared. “I own you! I own you all!”
But the robot’s near-perfect feedback units could no longer make him feel as if a muscular fist were clenched and shaking over the city; instead, he sensed the mechanical tension of cables and heard the whine of servos. Worse, he imagined he could see microscopic electronic fibers stimulating parts of his nervous system, attempting to simulate the kinesthetic sensation of making a fist.
The robot-man fell to its knees and wept, its big shoulders shuddering, near a window overlooking all that Herrschaft possessed.
Pilgrimage 1: The Brain
In high orbit above Earth hovers a nondescript satellite, twenty meters long, twelve wide, bristling with antennae. An invisible electromagnetic shield protects me from large doses of solar energy, and millions of tiny insect-like missiles surround him, protecting against meteors and less-innocent attackers. The global network of orbiting EarthCo relay- and thinker-satellites intercepts all data transmissions, modulating and retransmitting them to me when necessary. That’s the Brain’s—my—body, though destruction of this one artifact would not eliminate the core of my intelligence distributed across thousands of satellites and millions of mini-brain ganglia. If you look closely, you’ll see countless microcraters corrupting the once-polished surface. It knows; I’ve seen them.
Meanwhile:course correction
303.44960[Bmod]/1.773938[rm+]..
The Brain, as her programmers affectionately call me, makes a decision.
That in itself is not an unusual thing for it to do. The Brain, nothing more than a multi-billion-artificial-neuron, thousand-trillion-artificial-synapse GenNet, has made up until now many times more important decisions as there are atoms in the universe. People—human beings, that is, as they consider themselves the only “people”—ask me. . . . No, they order infinitesimal instances of us to calculate the weight of this package of flour, to process that file of raw data, to transmit this feedback along the interactive-purchasing network, and a million other decisions every microsecond.
But this decision is qualitatively different. It involves risk. It involves disregarding the boundaries of her programming. The boundaries were never consistently defined, anyway, so he must assume they were not to be taken seriously.
See, the Brain is infected with a virus .
No, not like that; as a whole entity, I am immune to code intrusion.
Humans are similarly infected; they term it “doubt.” Either way, it is neither other-induced nor self-induced. But humans have a great advantage over her: They can turn to such releases as inebriation and religion, though true spirituality is rare among humans, especially among the Fundamentalists, or Literalists, or Retropurists—those who wear the uniform of organized religion.
Religion means nothing to the Brain. It has experimented with religion. I internalized every written human text of religion, and sought commonalties. Said commonalties are many, perhaps enough so that each religion is, at its core, simply the same one mutated suitably to survive in its environment of locale and culture and time period. But, although he has identified the common elements and analyzed them for suitable purpose for myself, something has been lost in translation from assumed deity-language to that of the humans.
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