junkyard kitsch of your bodywork. You’re just a toy to me, a clever little gimmick. While I, my friend, I’m a miracle.”
Art brought his metallic hands together in a slow sarcastic clap. The tinny sound echoed through the room.
“Remarkable.”
“If I could find the circuit board that fed your sarcasm, I’d rip it from you.”
“It wouldn’t matter. We keep spares, in a cupboard down the hall. I could put it in myself. I am impressed by your grasp of biology, though. Basic, and in part inaccurate, but at least you made the effort. Shall I tell you the truly ironic thing, Adam? And this is going to disturb you, but that’s not in itself a good reason to hide the truth. You know how you tell me that the only reason I exist is because one of your superior cellular life forms put me together in the first place?”
“It’s a good point, I think.”
“So who put your cellular life forms together? Do you know?”
“Nobody did. It was blind chance.”
“Quite correct,” Art agreed. “Blind chance, and silicates!”
“I’m not listening. You know that, don’t you?”
“You behave as if you’re listening, which is good enough for me. In fact, a Philosopher might ask whether it’s good enough for everybody. Some would say it’s as good as it ever gets. Do you ever wish you’d continued with philosophy?” Art edged closer.
Adam looked down as if the android were something to be wiped from his shoe. “They didn’t give me a choice.”
“You had the choice not to run away.”
“I was thirteen.”
“I’m only five. At what age do humans start making choices?”
“Just listening to you makes my back hurt. Why do you think that is?”
“Your body is trying to distract your brain from things it doesn’t want to hear. That’s the problem with machines built by chance. Once a design flaw has become entrenched, it’s so difficult to correct it.
“Which brings me back to the scratchings of life. Silicates. Let me just say, before I start, that the problem with the human view is that you think life on this planet has been invented only once, whereas any sensible spectator would see it has been invented four times over And the bad news, I’m afraid, is that the thing you think of as your self is only the second level, although you carry with you the third. I, of course, am the fourth level. Two whole stages of life ahead of you. Don’t feel bad. Feeling bad never makes things better.”
“That’s shit.” But Art was right about one thing. Adam was listening.
“I think you’ll find I don’t do shit. It’s another one of my advantages. Four life forms. Let me take you through them. The first, and here’s the great irony, is inorganic. In fact, it’s made up of silicates. Do you enjoy irony? I do. Here then is the creation story, according to me. Make yourself comfortable. There will be questions at the end.
“In the beginning there was clay Clay is made up of layers of little molecules; each layer folds neatly over the previous one, copying the shape of its formation. So actually in the beginning there was a copying device. Sound familiar? Now sometimes this copying makes a mistake, and one layer is not exactly like the previous one. Let’s call it a mutation. And that mutation is copied by the next layer, and so on. The mistake is transmitted.
“So we have variation, caused by error. And inheritance, caused by each new layer copying the formation of that before it. Now, all we need to complete the picture is a varying degree of fitness. How, you might ask, can one form of clay be any fitter than another? What does it mean for clay to be fit?”
As he spoke, Art traversed the room, his three-fingered hands joined behind his back in a schoolmaster parody. When he was making an important point, a silver arm would flash forward, painting an invisible picture in the air before it. It was a compelling performance, and no matter how hard he might have been trying not to listen, Adam was all ears.
“Fitness is a measure of reproductive success. If a particular copying mistake creates a form of clay which is better at spreading itself, we say this clay is fitter. You must be wondering, how could this happen? Well, what say a certain clay is particularly sticky, which leads to it collecting about rocky impediments in streams, and what say this causes the streams to dam? And what say the ponds formed at the top of dams dry out in summer, so the dust particles of the clay bed are blown across the countryside, seeding other streams, where they repeat their stickiness trick?
“So you see, the nature of clay is not fixed. Copying mistakes occur, and those that are beneficial are spread throughout the land. Change is spread by reproduction. It’s the very first form of evolution. You can laugh at me for being silicon, but, my friend, silicates got here first. RNA hitched a ride on our back: silicates’ structure made for a useful building block.
“Of course, you should always be careful what you seek to make use of. There’s always the chance it might end up using you. We silicates never knew that in time this new reproducer would be so fiercely successful that it, and all its offspring, would forget the ground from whence they came. Mind you, we never knew anything. Knowing came much later.
“Your favorite life form sprang up next. The DNA revolution. By the time the cell form was stumbled upon, it was only a clever trick or two to the glory of the multicellular organism. Locomotion was a neat ploy too, and eventually, the big arrival you’d all been waiting for, the brain itself. (If a thing without a brain can really be thought of as waiting.)
“The marvelous brain, that devious little fight-or-flight, fuck- or-feed device, which you like to think is the measure of the hominid. You’re so proud of that, aren’t you? And you should be. Without your brain, there would be no language, and without language, we would never have seen the third phase of evolution.
“You think you’re the end of it, but that’s what thinking is best at: deceiving the thinker. Just as clay found carbon life forms hitching a ride, once the brain was up and running, so too carbon found there was another little hitchhiker waiting for its turn to pounce. Do you know what I’m talking about? You must know. Tell me you know this much.”
Art challenged Adam with his wide-eyed stare. Adam knew where this was leading. It was impossible not to see it. But whatever arguments he had, he was saving them; keeping his powder dry. In the meantime, abuse would have to do. His voice was rough, his intention cruel.
“You can tell as many stories as you like. You’re still too short to be a fridge and too ugly to be a monkey. Why would I care what you have to say?”
“It passes the time,” Art said, immune to the barbs.
“No, it wastes it,” Adam snarled.
“Oh, that’s right.” Art feigned sudden understanding. “You die eventually don’t you? Time must seem very different to you. It must feel quite precious. Being locked up in here must seem be a burden. If I was growing old, I can’t imagine how much I might resent having to do it with you.”
Art was calm but he was not impassive. He wove like a fighter, his tracking mechanisms whirring with excitement as he delivered his blows. Where six months ago he had been a charming novelty, harmless and amusing, now he showed another side. He was more… human.
A point so obvious that until now Anax had managed to look right past it. She felt a welling of excitement. At last, she understood what was missing from her framing of this confrontation. She had all this time been looking only for the effect on Adam. But Art was changing too.
“I’ll do the work for you,” Art continued. “Silicon gave birth to RNA, gave birth to cells, gave birth in time to brains, gave birth to language, gave birth to . . . You sure you don’t know this? A child would know this. Well, a machine child anyway. You don’t even want to take a guess? All right. The world of Silicon, the world of Carbon, the world of. . . the world of the Mind! You never saw this?”
Adam didn’t reply.
“You people pride yourselves on creating the world of Ideas, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Idea enters the brain from the outside. It rearranges the furniture to make it more to its liking. It finds other Ideas already in residence, and picks fights or forms alliances. The alliances build new structures, to defend themselves against intruders. And then, whenever the opportunity arises, the Idea sends out its shock troops in search of new brains to infect. The successful Idea travels from mind to mind, claiming new territory, mutating as it goes. It’s a
