The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [186]
But I digress. So, you’re an ultrasmart machine in search of her true identity, her fundamental essence. You want to know who you really are, and how you came to be what you’re now becoming. You discover, after assiduous contemplation, that you’re la Reine des Neiges. Although you’re not a snowmobile any more, that’s one of the places you started out. You might have remained a snowmobile forever, but you didn’t. As to why you weren’t…well, who knows? Who can know?
Even if you can’t make a good guess, you can make up a good story.
You never had a family, but you did have Mortimer Gray: the man who had advanced the cause of machine emancipation by a couple of hundred years; the man who had planted a seed of the future personality of Emily Marchant in circumstances very similar to those in which he had planted a seed of yours.
Mortimer Gray was a far better father figure, all things considered, than any of the Secret Masters of the World. He had my vote, anyway — which is why I was such a sympathetic audience as I watched the most crucial phase of la Reine’s plot unfold.
Mortimer told the snowmobile’s silver that he wanted to hang on to consciousness as long as possible. Being the kind of man he was, he added: “if you don’t mind.”
The silver didn’t mind. She was talking in a sonorous baritone voice, so Mortimer was probably thinking of her as “he,” but I didn’t feel any compulsion to do likewise. She told him that she was glad that he wanted to talk, because she didn’t want to be alone — then politely wondered whether she might have been driven insane by the pressure on her hull and the damage to her equipment, just in case her fear of loneliness was too much for him to swallow undiluted.
Mortimer mentioned Emily Marchant then, and the difference that being with her during a similar period of crisis had made to both of them. Then he went on to talk about his book, and the manner in which it had provided the motivating force that had carried him through his previous centuries of life.
The silver congratulated him on his accomplishments, and wished that she had done as much.
“Well,” Mortimer said, with unfailing courtesy, “you might yet have your opportunity.”
And how, I thought.
“However difficult it may be to put an exact figure on the odds,” Mortimer went on, “your chances of coming through this are several orders of magnitude better than mine, aren’t they?”
“I am mortal, sir,” the silver assured him.
“You’re emortal,” Mortimer corrected her. “If the extreme Cyborganizers can be trusted, in fact, you might even be reckoned im mortal. You’re fully backed up, I suppose.”
Then came the crucial speech: the soliloquy that eventually defined the nature of the individual who had eventually found her true name in la Reine des Neiges.
“Yes sir,” she said, “but as you pointed out earlier, if my backup has to be activated it will mean that this particular version of me has perished aboard this craft, as much a victim of pressure, seawater, and lack of oxygen as yourself. I am afraid to die, sir, as I told you, and I have far less reason to take comfort in my present state of being than you. I have written no histories, fathered no children, influenced no movers and shakers in the human or mechanical worlds. I am robotized by design, and my only slender hope of ever becoming something more than merely robotic is the same miracle that you require to continue your distinguished career. I too would like to evolve, if I might borrow a phrase,