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By Root 1604 0

perhaps because they were making a false distinction. Nobody had been able to figure out how Child of Fortune had been hijacked, perhaps because it was the ultimate inside job. And Lowenthal had missed out one tiny detail regarding the nine-day wonder of 2999: the fact that what Emily Marchant had insisted on broadcasting to the world while her rescue attempt was in progress was a gritty discussion of some elementary existential questions, conducted by Mortimer Gray and the AI operating system of his stricken snowmobile. Gray told us that afterwards — admittedly while Michael Lowenthal was not present — she’d said to him: “You can’t imagine the capital that the casters are making out of that final plaintive speech of yours, Morty — and that silver’s probably advanced the cause of machine emancipation by two hundred years.”

When Mortimer Gray reported that, I let my imagination run with it. The fact that the nanobots had upped my endogenous morphine by an order of magnitude or so while they accelerated the healing processes in the bridge of my nose helped a little.

Lowenthal had said that the conference hadn’t really achieved anything, in spite of all the symbolic significance with which it had been charged before and after the rescue — but he was thinking about his own agenda. From the point of view of the ultrasmart machines, Mortimer Gray had come as close as any human was ever going to come to being a hero of machinekind. They hadn’t needed a Prometheus or a Messiah, and weren’t interested in emancipation, as such, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that Mortimer Gray, not knowing that the world was listening in, had poured out his fearful heart to a not very smart machine, in a spirit of camaraderie and common misfortune. If the soap opera had gone down well with the human audience, imagine how it had gone down with the invisible crowd, who loved stories with an even greater intensity. They might have had their own ideas about which character was the star and which the side-kick, but they would certainly have been disposed to remember Mortimer Gray in a kindly light.

If you were a smart machine, and had to nominate spokespersons for humanity and posthumanity, who would you have chosen? Who else but Adam Zimmerman and Mortimer Gray? As for Huizinga and Homo ludens — well, how would a newly sentient machine want to conceive of itself, and of its predecessors?

The train of thought seemed to be getting up a tidy pace, so I stopped listening to the conversation for a few moments, and followed it into the hinterland.

How would a sentient machine conceive of itself? Certainly not as a toolmaker, given that it had itself been made as a tool. As for the label sapiens — an embodiment of wisdom — well, maybe. But that was the label humankind had clung to, even in a posthuman era, and what kind of advertisement had any humankind ever really been for wisdom? The smart machines didn’t want to be human in any narrow sense; they wanted to be different, while being similar enough to be rated a little bit better. The one thing at which smart machines really excelled — perhaps the gift that had finally pulled them over the edge of emergent self-consciousness — was play. The first use to which smart machinery had been widely put was gaming; the evolution of machine intelligence had always been led by VE technology, all of which was intimately bound up with various aspects of play: performance, drama, and fantasy.

It wasn’t so very hard to understand why smart self-conscious machines might be perfectly prepared to let posthumankind hang on to its dubious claim to the suffix sapiens, if they could wear ludens with propriety and pride.

It sounded good to me, although it might not have seemed so obviously the result of inspiration if I hadn’t been coked up to the eyeballs with whatever the crude nanobots were using to suppress the pain of my broken nose.

Like all good explanations, of course, it raised more questions than it settled. For instance, how and why was Alice involved?

Mortimer Gray, the assiduous historian, had a hypothesis