Children of Memory (Children of Time, #3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Things fall apart, though, and entropy is the landlord whose rent always gets paid.

A panoply of endless wonder.

But sometimes the human part of her surfaces and she gets frustrated with the intractability of the universe.

“The essential fallacy,” Gothi picks up, “is that humans and other biologically evolved, calculating engines feel themselves to be sentient, when sufficient investigation suggests this is not so. And that sentience, as imagined by the self-proclaimed sentient, is an illusion manufactured by a sufficiently complex series of neural interactions. A simulation, if you will.”

We have witnessed a thing never intended for awareness trying to confront itself. Unhappily.” After a little preening he adds, as a postscript, “We think that it is better not to be sentient. Imagine how hard that would be, to actually have to think about things all the time.”

Feeling rather taken aback by the nihilism of it all, Kern considers. Sufficiently advanced instinct is indistinguishable from intelligence? Is that where we are, then? Or sufficiently advanced programming in my case. But I feel that I am sentient. But then you can tell a computer that anything is true, and it will have no choice but to believe it. Humans and the rest, they feel sentient, surely. But what do they know? And there’s the thought of the simulation itself, haunting its imagined landscape like a lonely beast, existing only as the glint of eyes in the dark at the edge of a firelight. But existing, for as long as the fire was fed.

In exchange for… Knowledge. New, shiny things. Better thinkers than we have observed that, when you reach this level of post-scarcity civilization, it’s either wallow in your own excesses forever or seek out newness. Knowledge and understanding is the crown atop the hierarchy of needs, the thing you can’t have enough of.

It seems a lot of effort to me, just for one small human. That’s because you lack perspective. Think of it as a proof of concept. Because the real problem with a knowledge-based economy is knowing that, no matter how hard you try, most of the information in the universe has already dissolved into entropy before you even evolved. So much is lost that we will never know. Societies rise and fall, and everything ends. Even the protracted sojourn our own long-lived culture enjoys can’t last forever. But right here, we have a time capsule that has preserved information from who knows how many earlier ages. And it runs experiments with them, creating living, four-dimensional worlds based on the cards it was dealt at the start, and the way the deck was stacked. A machine to cheat time and fate. Maybe one day we’ll build our own. Maybe we already did. Enough speculation. Miranda’s waiting.