different from Christianity’s—a cold, dispassionate mind, a predictive power able to absorb all variables.” Father Glaucus was nodding. “But they think, my son. Their earliest self-conscious progenitors were designed from living DNA—” “Designed from DNA to compute,” I said, appalled at the thought of Core machines being given the benefit of the doubt when it came to souls. “And what was our DNA designed to do for the first few hundred million years, my son? Eat? Kill? Procreate? Were we any less ignoble in our beginnings than the pre-Hegira silicon and DNA-based AIs? As Teilhard would have it,
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