The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [156]
“I don’t. I’ll hang on to consciousness as long as possible, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t,” the silver said, punctiliously. “In fact, I’m rather glad of it. I don’t want to be alone, even if I am only an Artificial Intelligence. Am I going insane, do you think? Is all this emotional talk just a symptom of the pressure on the hull and the damage to my equipment?”
I knew what it was playing at, of course. It was trying to keep me from morbid thoughts. It was pretending to be human in order to build a bond of fellowship between us, so that I’d find it easier to carry on hoping in spite of the desperation of the situation.
“You’re quite sane,” I assured the silver, setting aside all thoughts of incongruity. “So am I. It would be much harder for both of us if we weren’t together. The last time I was in this kind of mess I had a child with me—a little girl. It made all the difference in the world, to both of us. In a way, every moment I’ve lived through since then has been borrowed time. At least I finished that damned book. Imagine leaving something like that incomplete.”
“Are you so certain it’s complete?” the cunning AI asked. It was making conversation according to some clever programming scheme. Its emergency subroutines had kicked in, and all the crap about it being afraid to die was some psychprogrammer’s idea of what I needed to hear. I knew it was all fake, all just macabre role-playing, but I knew that I had to play my part too by treating every remark and every question as if it were part of an authentic conversation, a genuine quest for knowledge. It was a crooked game, but it was the only game in town.
“It all depends what you mean by complete” I said, carefully. “In one sense, no history can ever be complete, because the world always goes on, always throwing up more events, always changing. In another sense, completion is a purely aesthetic matter, and in that sense Pm entirely confident that my history is complete. It has reached an authentic culmination, which is both true and—for me at least—satisfying. I can look back at it and say to myself: I did that. It’s finished. Nobody ever did anything like it before, and now nobody can, because it’s already been done. Someone else’s history might have been different, but mine is mine, and it is what it is, and it was well worth doing. Does that make sense to you?”
“Yes sir,” the machine said. “It makes very good sense.” The honest bastard was programmed to say that, of course. It was programmed to tell me any damn thing I seemed to want to hear, but I wasn’t going to let on that I knew what a vile hypocrite it was. I was feeling very tired, presumably because the composition of the air that I was breathing was worsening by slow degrees, but I needed to talk because I felt that talk was all that was left to me. Even though I had no one to talk to but the simulation of a listener, I needed to keep going. If I had been absolutely alone I would probably have formulated the words in the silence of my own skull, but I would have formulated them anyhow. They were my final act, in a dramatic as well as a literal sense: the last assertion of my personality upon the face of eternity.
“If I were to die now,” I told my companion, speaking slowly so that I would not exhaust the meager resources of my waning breath, “it would be an unwelcome intrusion in my affairs. I want to go on. I want to do more. I want to become a further and better version of myself. I want to evolve, not merely in the vague ways contained within my ambitions and dreams but in ways as yet unimaginable. But if that really is impossible, then I can die in the knowledge that my life and work does have a certain aesthetic roundness. It really is a human life. It really is an emortal human life, even though it has ended in death.
“It’s not for me to say how important my work has been to the rest of humankind, but it has been vitally important to me, and I’ve done it as well as I could. It would undoubtedly benefit from further revision, but it’s there. Nor