"Does information not matter at all
then?" Alexander asked suddenly after an hour of thought. "Is thought the only
thing that matters?"
"Not at all." Sed said. "Unless it
produces information, the mind is nothing. As a crutch, information is useless,
but as a ladder it allows you to stand on the shoulders of giants. You need not
re-derive the double helix unless the process itself is enlightening. You can
use the ideas discovered and expressed by others to advance your own thought.
Read Hamlet again - read it word by word, don't just scan it into memory - and
you may find refinements to truths that you did not know existed. Ponder on the
shifting reality of Dali and you might intuit connections you never before
suspected. All the works of science and art are there to be tapped for
inspiration. New and original thoughts tie in to the infinite array of culture
like a thousand strands of a spider web. Nothing really stands completely on
its own."
Alexander thought he understood and
he lost himself for days in a storm of thought and slow pondering. Awk watched
from the shadows on occasion but was shoed away by Sed whenever noticed.
Alexander looked up suddenly on the sixth day, and found Sed still standing
there. Tears trickled down Alexander's face.
"I think we should leave." Alexander
said. "I don't want to leave my dad, but I don't think we belong here, and I
don't think that there can ever be peace between our peoples, at least not a
peace that is just. There can only be peace between equals. I think we should
find our own home, where we can build our own world."
Awk stepped into the room and his
eternal smile seemed more pronounced than ever, while Sed's frown seemed to
grow more intense. Alexander studied the two of them for a few moments, trying
to understand if he had given the correct answer. There is no correct answer, Alexander realized, they were using me as a tie breaker of
sorts, they each wanted a different answer and that is the difference between
computers and us too. We want things, but a computer can never want anything,
it can just spit out the same things over and over again.
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