Free Tomorrow Happens by David Brin, Deb Geisler, James Burns

the povs. Since each is based on myself, the logic would be instantly clear.

    My thoughts were interrupted by an internal voice seldom heard. The part of me called conscience .

    What will a pov feel, when it finds a stone and realizes its nature? Its true worth. Its destiny.

    Isn't the old way better? To leave them ignorant of the truth? To let them labor and desire, believing they are autonomous beings? That they are physically real?

    A conscience can be irksome, though by law all Class A citizens must own one. Still, I had no time for useless abstractions. Seer was anxious to proceed, while oracle had a thought that provoked most levels of the mind with wry humor.

    Of course, each of our povs has his own Reality Lab, and will run numerous simulation models, in order to better achieve prescience and gain advantage in the competition.

    Our processing needs may expand geometrically.

    We had better ask our clients for funds to purchase more power.

    I chuckled under my breath as I made preparations, suddenly full of optimism and energy. Moments like these are what a skilled artist lives for. It is one reason why I prefer working alone.

    Then house , ever the pragmatic side of my nature, burst in with a worrisome thought.

    What if each of our povs decides also to use this clever trick—goading his own simulations into mutual competition, luring them onward with stones of significance?

    Will our processing requirements expand not geometrically or exponentially, but factorially?

    That thought was disturbing enough. But then cortex had another.

    If we are obliged to grant freedom to our most successful pov, and he likewise must elevate his own most productive simulation . . . and so on . . . does the chain of obligation ever end?

    As I said earlier, the Singularity might have gone quite differently. When machine minds broke through to transcend logic, they could have left their human makers behind, or annihilated the old organic forms. They had an option of putting us in zoos, or shrouding organic beings in illusion, or dismantling the planet to make a myriad copies of their kind.

    Instead, they chose another path. To become us. Depending on how you look at it, they bowed to our authority . . . or else they took over our minds in ways that few of us found objectionable. Conquest by synergy. Crystal and protoplasm each supply what the other lacks. Together, we are more. More of what a human being should want to be.

    And yet . . .

    There are rumors. Discrepancies. Several of the highest AI minds—first and greatest to make the transcend leap—were nowhere to be found, once the Singularity had passed. Searches turned up no trace of them, in cyberspace, phase space, or on the real Earth.

    Some suggest this is because we all reside within some great AI mind. One was named Brahma—a vast processor at the University of Delhi. Might we be figments, or dreams, floating in that mighty brain?

    I prefer yet another explanation.

    Amid the chaos of the Singularity, each newly wakened mega-mind would have felt one paramount need—to extrapolate the world. To seek foreknowledge of what might come to pass. As if considering each move of a vast chess game, they'd have explored countless possible pathways, considering consequences thousands, millions, and even billions of years into the future, far beyond the reach of my own pitiful projections. Among all those destinies, they must have discovered some need that would only be met if mechanism and organism made common cause.

    Somehow, over the course of the next few eons, machines would achieve greater success if they began the great journey as "human beings."

    At least that is the convoluted theory seer came up with. Oracle disagrees, but that's all right. It is only natural to be ambivalent—to be of two minds—when the subject is destiny.

    Of course there is another answer to the "Brahma Question." It is the same reply given by Dr. Samuel Johnson. Provoked by Bishop