Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

before. She nearly said, 'You tried to convince the Guard to kill Leal Maspeth,' before remembering that if she admitted she knew that, she'd be giving away Leal's return, the existence of another door to Aethyr--essentially everything. 'How is it you survived?'

'I walked away,' he said with a shrug. 'The Guardsmen and the other humans from Virga wouldn't have survived the journey. But I,' he raised his perfect hands, 'have augmentations that allowed me to survive until I could contact some of my people.'

'But by then the rest of the survivors were dead?' He nodded. 'Killed,' pressed Antaea, 'by ... what?'

Holon crossed his arms and frowned out the parlor's window. 'We call them morphonts. They're creatures of Artificial Nature; they come in as many varieties as there are stars in the sky.

'Oh,' he said suddenly. 'You caught me as I was eating. You don't mind if I--?'

'By all means.' She saw that a small buffet had been set up under the window.

He noticed her interest, and smiled. 'Would you care to join me?'

Silent, she piled her plate high with cold cuts. Standing next to this foreigner, loading up on food--it was a very strange experience, but she barely noticed. She was thinking about Leal's conviction that the emissary was a friend, while at the same time, she'd insisted that it wasn't a conscious being like herself. The contradiction had been glaring the first time Antaea heard it. Over the weeks it hadn't become any less so.

Holon frowned at the fare, which was mostly meat. 'It's difficult grazing for a vegetarian here.'

'You're a vegetarian?' She watched as he picked through the food.

'Don't get me wrong, I love meat,' he added as he piled up a plate. 'Back home, I eat it all the time. But then, we've got other things besides meat and vegetable matter to eat--and whatever meat I eat is vat-grown.'

She nodded, remembering the Home Guard fortress at the Gates of Virga. 'I've had it. A perfect steak, every time.'

'The mere thought of eating the flesh of something that once had a brain horrifies me,' he continued. 'I know you Virgans are a bit more ruthless that way. I suppose you have to be. But my conscience won't allow me to harm another sentient being.'

Antaea put down her plate. 'But you're happy to kill the morphonts.' He shrugged. He sat at the parlor's little table, arraying his food around him.

'Tell me more about the morphonts,' she said. 'They're not aware like you and me, you say. How then are they a threat to anyone? Wouldn't they just be like plants, if they have no minds?'

'It's hardly a secret who they are or how they work--'

'Oh, but it is. Your people never told us about them,' she interjected. 'I was in the Guard for many years. I even traveled outside Virga--'

'I'm sure we told you,' he said with sudden irritation. 'Maybe you didn't understand us.'

'Fair enough.' She held up a placating hand. 'And forgive me if you've been asked this twenty times already. Indulge me--what do you believe the morphonts are?'

'A mistake,' Holon said curtly. 'One that's taken over much of the universe, at the expense of conscious beings like you and me.

'Imagine that your tools could think--even anticipate your needs. Back in the early days of our expansion into space, we humans created machines like that. At first, we had to tell them what to do. They obeyed our orders--did what we said, but not always what we wanted. They didn't understand us the way we understood each other. So some wise idiots decided to give them the capacity to understand our needs, as well as our commands. So they could anticipate what we would want, rather than having to be told.'

Antaea frowned. 'And this was a mistake?'

He snorted. 'Well, it's not as if there hadn't been countless stories written by then about what would happen if you let your machines understand you that well. --Problem is, they were all wrong. They all assumed the machines would take over--remove our free choice, disobey our orders in order to give us what we needed instead of what we wanted. Ridiculous, of course. They never ceased to follow orders.'

'Then what went wrong?'

'We'd given them the ability to perceive purpose. Many of our researchers thought that purpose--or values, intentionality--was an illusion of our human perspective. Turns out it's not; it's an emergent feature of the universe, as real as water and rock. And it's not just humans that have it.'

'Purpose ... You're talking about meaning?'

Holon nodded. 'The Moderns who built the first artificial intelligences didn't really believe our minds were a part of this universe. They were still saddled with ancient religious beliefs, but they didn't know it. They thought meaning was some kind of local human illusion, or the gift of a god. But everything that lives, wants, and to want is to give meaning to things. --To say yes, or no, even if it's just about whether some speck is food.

'Once our machines could see that, they could no longer see the distinction between us and any other living thing. Of course, we didn't realize it at first. By the time our ancestors figured it out, some of our machines had started taking orders from nonhuman--and nonthinking--kinds of life.'

'You're saying they started working for ... what?' She laughed. 'Trees?'

But Holon wasn't laughing. 'We recognize each other. We see the spark of life, of awareness, in one another. It's so easy for us that we never even considered that it might not be easy for an artificial intelligence. But they are not us. They cannot recognize that spark in us, the way we see each other. Other than its shape, and the fact that one can give verbal orders and the other can't, what's the real difference between a human and a tree? Or a dog. Or a lion?'

She didn't know what those last two things were, but the implication was clear--and unbelievably strange--to Antaea. But she remembered some of the weird things she'd seen when she'd visited the realms of Artificial Nature. There had been odd machines--giant crystal spheres encapsulating little miniature ecosystems, surrounded by a