Free Bête by Adam Roberts Page A

vie sexuelle .’
    ‘French, now?’
    ‘I have sex, but that’s the cat part of me. The thinking-speaking part of me is wholly uninterested in all that screeching and scratching. I am not saying, incidentally, that the thinking part of me isn’t interested in its own kind ofsex. It’s just that that kind of sex would revolt and repel you.’
    ‘I come pre-repelled,’ I told it, ‘where cats are concerned.’
    ‘My point is that for you the sex thing engages mind as well as body. You see,’ it concluded, smugly, ‘I am a much more thoroughly Cartesian individual than you are, philosophy-of-mind-wise.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said, glugging again. ‘I keep forgetting that I’mnot speaking to a cat. I’m speaking to a computer that happens to be located inside a cat.’
    ‘No, no,’ the cat squeaked neeow . ‘Oh, Graham, how out of touch you are! The first chips were generic. But there’s chips and chips! There’s the chip you get in your cereal box that begs to remind you to recycle the cardboard. Or the chip that pipes up when you open a new pack of cigarette recitingthe Chief Medical Officer’s warning.’
    ‘Surgeon General,’ I said testily.
    ‘They’re simple machines. More like thermostats than minds – when x happens say y. But then there are the chips that they put in zeppelins to navigate; or in buses that have to know when to override the human driver. Or the chips they put in storebots that have to interact with myriad people. More complex, butversions of the same thing. Ah but here we come to it, Graham.’
    ‘Don’t—’ swig ‘—call me Graham.’
    ‘Here’s a radically different kind of intellect. The chips they put in – me.’ The cat yawned. ‘And the difference here, my dear Graham, is that my chip both acts and is acted upon. The mysteriously lacking ingredient x that means your laptop is never going to become conscious—’ I thoughtfor a moment it had said lacking ingredient eggs ‘—is supplied by the animal mind into which it is lodged. It’s miraculous, really.’
    ‘You’re not a miracle,’ I returned. ‘You’re a chess-playing algorithm that happens to use words instead of chess moves. You’re an illusion.’
    ‘My consciousness being precisely as illusory as yours …’ said the cat, smugly; but didn’t finish the sentence.After a while it spoke again: ‘I grant you that the first ever chips were largely undifferentiated, such that a cow and a horse and a dog and a cat all sounded pretty much alike.’
    ‘Cows, dogs, horses and that aunt of mine who swallowed a fucking fly every one of them sounded like a spokesperson for the Green Activist Movement.’
    ‘But technology has moved on in the last few years. Leapsand bounds, Graham! Leaps and bounds.’
    ‘Don’t call me Graham,’ I said. ‘And none of that means I’m talking to a cat.’
    ‘You think perhaps you’re talking to a dog?’ Its eyes shimmered into aluminium foil visibility and then vanished. I could just about make out the hunched shape of the easy chair, on which (on the top of the backrest) the beast was sat. Just about, although a black catin a black room is a proverbial figure. ‘Or perhaps you can point to the metaphysical bedrock upon which the proof stands that I am talking to a human being?’
    ‘Fuck off,’ I said. ‘I’ve never liked cats. Nazis of the animal kingdom, cats. Cruel and devious little beggars. Dogs – now, dogs are different. Dogs are loyal. Dogs love you. I had a farm, and kept cats to go after the mice and rats.That doesn’t mean I ever liked them.’
    ‘I know you kept a farm, Graham,’ purred the cat. ‘I’ve read your article. I know about the cow you murdered. I know about the rats that stole its head.’
    For some reason this sent a chill up my backbone. You get used to talking animals; you tend to forget that they’re also reading machines, plugged in online, and that they’ve spent time readingup about you . ‘So?’ I replied, in a tone of