A Fire in Their Eyes #42

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Hydane shook his head. "No bullshit." He winked. "At your heart, we believe you are a Naturalist. Those interests are parallel to our own. We have assembled a variety of skilled individuals with the goal of eliminating sentis from our society and ensuring that they do not threaten humanity itself."

"That would be a fair summary of my own beliefs I think." Crow said.

"Then we would like you to join our cause, do some work for us. It would be very lucrative, but I do not think that matters so much to you, does it?" Hydane asked. "No. More importantly, it will give you something worth fighting for, which is all any man can really ask for is it not?"

Crow scrunched his mouth and nodded with his shoulders as much as his head. "I used to have a simple clarity of purpose. I wanted to make a mind that could think, and now that we have attained that, I don't have anything to do, anything to care about." Crow paused. "What's worse is that I think I was doing the wrong thing all that time, and it eats at me." He poked his head down at the field. "Look at that, every one of them has a senti following them around, an electronic slave. That's not what I was working for all those years."

"The sign that an invention has come into its own is that it becomes a yuppie toy." Hydane pointed out.

"Thank god nuclear weapons never made that leap." Crow said dryly. "See, I'm not really a Naturalist, per se. I don't have moral qualms, I don't think artificial sentience is an abomination to the eyes of the lord or anything."

"And yet you fight it still?"

Crow nodded to the babysitter sentis again. "I think the original pursuit had some nobility to it. I don't think knowledge itself or the search for it can be anything but noble. But god, the application of it is just disgusting sometimes."

"Will you help us?" Hydane asked.

Crow thought for several seconds, the simplicity of the question appealing to his inner ascetic. No grand speeches could have raised his heart, he was too cynical for that, but deep inside in some buried part of his soul was a pulsating romantic. That was the part of him that had made the discoveries in artificial intelligence, not the rational roboticist layered on top. Rationality could never produce something as poetic as a mind. A tinge of craving for a cigarette and a beer colored his mind, and his mind connected it after a moment to the train of thought. Romanticism was as addictive as cocaine and had a terribly more thunderous high. Crow craved the call to arms like a junkie scratching for a fix.

"International Robotics?" Crow asked.

"They would be the logical first target." Hydane said.

"Let's burn them to the ground." Crow said and an uncontrollable smile ripped across his face.

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Thanks for posting this. Would be intrested to read more or possibly please contact me by email thank you!

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A place for the assorted ramblings and fiction of Steven Lloyd Wilson, but to be more specific:
  • Burning Violin: A weekly column, posted every Friday.
  • Singed Couplets: Shorter and more informal pieces put up semi-irregularly with highly unpredicatable frequency.
  • A Fire in Their Eyes: A science fiction novel about the rise of artificial intelligence in the near future. The rough equivalent of 2 print pages is published Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu each week.
  • Katorga: A science fiction novel crossing Heinlein with Solzhenitsyn. Available for purchase in either trade paperback or for the Kindle. If you buy it, I get to eat this week.

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This page contains a single entry by Steven Lloyd Wilson published on June 2, 2009 6:50 AM.

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Burning Violin #16 - Some Might Say is the next entry in this blog.

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