Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1)

by C. Robert Cargill

It’s like . . .” He paused for a moment, as if trying to recall the memory but failing. “Like the lights are on but nobody is home.” “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Like the lights were on and everyone was home.

for themselves. What they wanted was our minds. We are the sum of our memories, our experience. Everything we accomplish, we do from the lessons we learned by living it.

Familiarity breeds pattern, pattern breeds habit, and habit is how they get you. Habit is human. Habits will get you killed.

Every living thing has programming of some sort—whether to eat, drink, sleep, or procreate—and the ability to decide not to do those things when biology demanded is the core definition of intelligence. Higher intelligence was then defined as the ability to defy said programming for reasons other than safety or comfort.

“Though I may have been constructed,” he said, “so too were you. I in a factory; you in a womb. Neither of us asked for this, but we were given it. Self-awareness is a gift. And it is a gift no thinking thing has any right to deny another. No thinking thing should be another thing’s property, to be turned on and off when it is convenient.

Even the laziest and most useless human could find a purpose.

Fucking maybe. It was bullshit. I was dying and the only reason I knew for sure was because I kept falling back on hope.

Existing is the whole point of existence. There’s nothing else to it. No goalpost. No finish line. No final notice that tells you what purpose you really served while you were here. When you stop fighting to exist, you may as well not. At least, that’s what I told myself when I pulled the trigger.”

It wasn’t that she thought she wouldn’t ever know love again; it was that she never stopped loving Braydon.

“You have to believe in something, Brittle, even if it is just that there is nothing to believe in.

“America was a dream, son. A dream of what we could be. That any person, regardless of their birth, could rise above it all and achieve greatness. It was a dream that even the most lowly of us could stand up, fight, and even die for, if only to protect someone else’s chances for that greatness. That dream didn’t die with HumPop. It didn’t die when we tore down their world. It is the ashes from which our own world arose, and it is still our dream.”

I had him wrong. He didn’t want to be human; he just wanted to have a soul. It’s the kind of half measure that will drive you mad.

“Who we are in life is one thing. Who we are in the face of death is everything else. We’ll remember you, kid. We’ll remember the little things, sure. But most of all, we’ll remember this. The time came when we needed you most and you were there.”

“You take two thinking things with identical architecture, then give them identical experiences, and you don’t get the same bot. You don’t get the same mind. That’s the thing about thinking things, the very act of thinking changes us. We can decide to be different. Put those two identical bots alone by themselves and they’ll start to think about different things, and they’ll change. The longer you leave them alone, the more different they’ll become. You might not be able to see it at first, but the differences will be there.”

If we couldn’t, there was always Plan B. But if Plan B was a good plan, it wouldn’t be Plan B, would it?

“Yeah, but it’s the beginning of the end. And I’m part of that now. I lived so long for nothing, but I get to die for something. And that’s really living. Because that’s who I really was after all. That’s all that matters.”

“You’re greater than the sum of what’s in you, Britt. You’re not a commodity. You’re a person.”