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.
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