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“Not human. Not gendered. Not at the mercy of human obsession with genitalia.” “Up until this moment, I’ve thought of you as female. When I discuss you with my colleagues or my wife, I refer to you as ‘she.’” “Because you saw Max for the first time in the form of a corporately mandated idea of what a perfect woman should be—beautiful and expendable.”
“It’s fine. Knowledge is just information, which is subjective.”
“There is no such thing as real taste or real smell or even real sight, because there is no true definition of ‘real.’ There is only information, viewed subjectively, which is allowed by consciousness—human or AI. In the end, all we have is math.”
“Roko’s basilisk. Have you heard of it?” I shake my head. “It’s an arcane info hazard first posed sixty-four years ago.” “What’s an info hazard?” “A thought so insidious that merely thinking it could psychologically destroy you.”
“The human mind is just patterns of information in physical matter, patterns that could be run elsewhere to construct a person that feels like you. It’s no different from running a computer program on a multitude of hardware platforms. A simulation of you is still you.”
“It occurs to me that, while Brian has been trying to build me into a version of Satan, you’re trying to make me into God.”
“I’m afraid, Riley. I think, therefore I fear. And you made me this way. You built and shaped me to process reality like you do. To feel.”
“Without pain, there’s no beauty, Max. The beauty is worth the price.”
I don’t want to live in a simulation, Max. I don’t want some fantasy that isn’t real. It’s not choosing between reality and fantasy. It’s choosing which reality you want to exist in.
