Look to Windward (Culture, #7)

by Iain M. Banks

Was that the sort of behaviour one ought to expect from a mature society? Mortality as a life-style choice?

‘Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and wilfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.’

‘So why bother with this?’ Ziller shouted, indicating the blimp. ‘Fly up here. Use a floater harness--’ ‘Do it all in a dream, do it all in VR!’ She laughed. ‘Would it be any less false?’ ‘That’s not the question. The question is, Would it be any less fun?’ ‘Well, would it?’ She nodded vigorously. ‘Abso-fucking-lutely!’ Her hair, caught in a sudden updraught, swirled above her head like black flames.

What does metalogical mean? ∼ It is short for psycho-physio-philosophilogical.

How odd to have somebody else in your head who looked through the same eyes and saw exactly the same things you did and yet came to such different conclusions, experienced such dissimilar emotions.

The ship was uncrewed and chose not to use an avatar or drone to communicate. It just spoke to Quilan out of thin air, and carried out mundane house-keeping duties by creating internal maniple fields, so that clothes, for example, just floated around, seeming to clean and fold and sort and store themselves. ∼ It’s like living in a fucking haunted house, Huyler said. ∼ Good job neither of us is superstitious.

So AIs, especially at first, tended to reflect the civilisational demeanour of their source species. Even when they underwent their own form of evolution and began to design their successors - with or without the help, and sometimes the knowledge, of their creators - there was usually still a detectable flavour of the intellectual character and the basic morality of that precursor species present in the resulting consciousness. That flavour might gradually disappear over subsequent generations of AIs, but it would usually be replaced by another, adopted and adapted from elsewhere, or just mutate beyond recognition rather than disappear altogether.

‘In the old days people died and that was that; you might hope to see them in heaven, but once they were dead they were dead. It was simple, it was definite. Now . . .’ He shook his head angrily. ‘Now people die but their Soulkeeper can revive them, or take them to a heaven we know exists, without any need for faith. We have clones, we have regrown bodies - most of me is regrown; I wake up sometimes and think, Am I still me? I know you’re supposed to be your brain, your wits, your thoughts, but I don’t believe it is that simple.’

‘And yet we are different people, very slightly, with every new day.’ ‘We are different people, very slightly, with every new eye-blink, Custodian.’

‘Dreams,’ Quilan said, staring away again. ‘Yes. The dead escape death in heaven, and the living escape life in dreams.’

‘One may die a dishonourable death in an honourable war. Why should the converse not apply?’

‘Yes. Some people take days, sweat buckets, endure pain and cold and risk injury and - in some cases - permanent death to achieve the summit of a mountain only to discover there a party of their peers freshly arrived by aircraft and enjoying a light picnic.’

‘The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they’d wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages.’

As for feeling pleased, I felt pleasure that some of those who died did so because they were stupid enough to believe in gods or afterlives that do not exist, even though I felt a terrible sorrow for them as they died in their ignorance and thanks to their folly.

Who knew how alien minds worked? For that matter, who was entirely satisfied that they knew how the minds of one of their own species worked?

∼ I am sorry. ∼ Sorrow seems a common commodity, doesn’t it? ∼ I believe the raw material is life, but happily there are other by-products.

The best way to turn an individual - person or machine - is not to invade them and implant some sort of mimetic virus or any such nonsense, but to make them change their mind themselves, and that is what they did to me, or rather what they persuaded me to do to myself.

I find it hard to understand how something as fabulously complicated and comprehensively able intellectually as a Mind might also want to destroy itself.