[00:00:00.01] Firefox:	The ship was over 80 kilometres long, and it was called the 'Size Isn't Everything'. The last thing he'd been on for any length of time had actually been bigger, but then that had been a tabular iceberg big enough to hide two armies on, and it didn't beat the General Systems vehicle by much. How do these things hold together? He still on a balcony, looking out over a sort of miniature valley, composed of accommodation units. Each stepped terrace was smothered in foliage. The space was crisscrossed by walkways and slender bridges, and a small stream ran through the bottom of the V. People sat at tables and little courtyards, lounged on the grass by the stream side, or amongst the cushions and couches of cafes and bars on the terraces. places. Hanging above the centre of the valley, beneath a ceiling of glowing blue, a travel tube snaked away into the distance on either side, following the wavy line of the valley. Under the tube, a line of fake sunlight burned, like some enormous strip light. "Hmm?" Desiet-Sma said, arriving at his elbow with two drinks. She handed one to him. "They're big, he said. He turned to face the woman. He'd seen the things they called bays, where they built smaller spaceships. Smaller, in this case, meant over 3km long. Vast, unsupported hangars with thin walls. He'd been near the immense engines, which as far as he could gather were solid and inaccessible. How? And obviously extremely massive. He'd felt oddly threatened on discovering that there was no control room, no bridge, no flight deck anywhere in the vast vessel. Just three minds, fancy computers apparently, controlling everything. "What?" And now he was finding out where the people lived, but it was all too big, too much, too flimsy somehow. the ship was supposed to accelerate as smartly as Smarr claimed. He shook his head. "I don't understand. How does it hold together?" Smarr smiled. "Just think fields, Sheradonin. It's all done with force-fields." She put one hand out to his troubled face, patted one cheek. "Don't look so confused." don't try to understand it all too quickly. Let it soak in. Just wander around. Lose yourself in it for a few days. Come back whenever." Later he had wandered off. The huge ship was an enchanted ocean in which you could never drown, and he threw himself into it to try to understand, if not it. than the people who had built it. He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired. Mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who'd taken a notion to help out for a while. "Of course I don't have to do that!" this," one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. "But look, this table's clean." He agreed that the table was clean. "Usually," the man said, "I work on alien—no offense—alien religions. Directional emphasis in religious observance. That's all." my speciality. Like when temples or graves or prayers have to face in a certain direction. That sort of thing. Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare. I come up with theories and argue with colleagues here and elsewhere. But the job's never finished. Always new examples and even the old ones get re-evaluated and new people come along with new ideas about was settled. "But," he slapped the table, "when you clean a table, you clean a table. You feel you've done something, it's an achievement." "But in the end, it's still just cleaning a table, and therefore it does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?" the man suggested. He smiled in response to the man's grin. "Well, byee." "Yes." "But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important either? I could try composing wonderful musical works or day-long entertainment epics. But what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure, and people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. That anyway," the man laughed. "People die. Stars die. Universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was white tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But, because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure." "And," the man said with a smile. It's a good way of meeting people. So, where are you from anyway?" He talked to people all the time, in bars and cafes mostly. The GSV's accommodation seemed to be divided into various different types of layout. Valleys, or ziggurats if you wanted to look at them like that, seemed to be the most common, though there were different configurations. He ate when he was hungry and drank when he was thirsty, every time trying a different dish or drink from the stunningly complicated menus, and when he wanted to sleep, as the whole vessel gradually cycled into a red-tinged dusk, the ceiling light bars dimming, he just asked the drone and was directed to the nearest unoccupied room. The rooms were all roughly size, and yet all slightly different. Some were very plain, some were highly decorated. The basics were always there. Bed, sometimes a real physical bed, sometimes one of their weird field beds. Somewhere to wash and defecate. Cupboards, places for personal effects. A fake window, a hollow screen of some sort, and a link-up. to the rest of the communications net, both aboard and off ship. The first night away, he linked into one of their direct-link sensory entertainments, lying on the bed with some sort of device activated under the pillow. He did not actually sleep that night; instead, he was a bold pirate prince who'd renounced his nobility to lead a brave crew against the slaverships of a terrible empire amongst treasure isles. Their quick little ships darted amongst the lumbering galleons, picking away the rigging with chainshot. They came ashore on moonless nights, attacking the great prison castles, releasing joyous captives. He personally fought the wicked governor's chief torturer, sword against sword. The man finally fell from a high tower. An alliance with the beautiful Lady Pirate begot a more personal liaison, and a daring rescue from a mountain monastery when she was captured. He pulled away from it after what had been weeks of compressed time. He knew, somewhere at the back of his mind, even as it happened, that none of it was real, but that seemed like the least important property of the adventure. When he came out of it, surprised to discover that it had not actually ejaculated. during some of the profoundly convincing erotic episodes, he discovered that only a night had passed and it was morning and he had, somehow, shared the strange story with others. It had been a game, apparently. People had left messages for him to get in touch. They had enjoyed playing the game with him so much. He felt oddly ashamed and did not reply. The rooms he slept in always contained places to sit, field extensions, mouldable wall units, real couches and, sometimes, ordinary chairs. Whenever the rooms held chairs, he moved them outside into the corridor or onto the terrace. It was all he could do to keep the memories at bay. "Ah," the woman said. in the main bay. It doesn't really work that way. They stood on a half-constructed starship, on what would eventually be the middle of the engines, watching a huge field unit swing through the air out of the engineering space behind the bay proper and up towards the skeletal body of the general contact unit. Little lifter tugs manoeuvred the field unit down towards them. You mean it makes no difference? difference. Not much, the woman said. She pressed on a little studded lanyard she held in one hand, spoke as though to her shoulder. I'll take it. The field unit put them in shadow as it hovered above them. Just another solid slab as far as he could see. It was red, a different colour from the black slickness of the starboard main engine block lower under their feet. She manipulated the lanyard, guiding the huge red block down. Two other people, standing 20 metres away, watched the far end of the unit. "The trouble is," the woman said, watching the vast red building brick come slowly down, "that even when people do get sick and die young, they're always surprised when they get sick. How many healthy people do you think actually sighted themselves?" "Hi. I'm healthy today. Unless they've just had a serious illness." She shrugged, pressed the lanyard again as the field unit lowered to a couple of centimetres off the engine surface. "Stop," she said quietly. "Inertia down five. Check." A line of light flashed on the surface of the engine block. She put one hand on the block and pressed it again. It moved. Down, dead slow, she said. She pressed the block into place. "Sorge, all right?" she asked. He didn't hear the reply, but the woman obviously did. "OK, positioned. All clear." She looked up as the lifter tugs sailed back towards the engineering space, then back at him. All that's happened is that reality has caught up with the way people always did behave. anyway. So, no, you don't feel any wonderful release from debilitating illnesses. She scratched one ear. Except maybe when you think about it. She grinned. I guess in school when you're seeing how people used to live, how aliens still do live, then it hits home and I suppose you never really lose that entirely. But you don't spend much time thinking about They walked across the black expanse of thoroughly featureless material. "Ah," the woman had said when he'd mentioned this. "You take a look at it under a microscope. It's beautiful. "What did you expect, anyway? Cranks? Gears? Tanks full of chemicals?" "Can't machines build these faster?" he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell. "Why, of course!" she loved. Then why do you do it? It's fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space. 300 people on board, everything working, the mind quite happy, and you think, "I'll help build that." The fact that a machine could have done it faster doesn't alter the fact that it was you who actually did it. "Hmm," he said. work, metal work. They will not make you a carpenter or a blacksmith, any more than mastering writing will make you a clerk." "Well, you may say as you wish," the woman said, approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship, where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing inside the model and talking. "But have you ever been gliding or swam underwater?" "Yes," he agreed. The woman shrugged. "Ye birds fly better than we do, and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?" He smiled. "I suppose not." "You suppose correctly," the woman said. "And why?" She looked at him, grinning. "Because it's fun!" She looked at the hollow model of the ship to one side. One of the other workers called to her, pointing at something in the model. She looked at him. "Excuse me, will you?" He nodded as he backed off. "Build well." "Thank you. I trust we shall." "Oh," he asked, "what's this ship to be called?" "Its mind wishes it to be called the Sweet and Full of Grace," the woman laughed. Then she was deep in discussion with the others. He watched their many sports, tried a few. Most of them he just didn't understand. He swam quite a lot, they seemed to like pools and water complexes. Mostly they swam naked, which he found a little embarrassing. Later he discovered there were whole sections. Villages? Areas? Districts? He wasn't sure how to think of them. where people never wore clothes, just body ornaments. He was surprised how quickly he got used to this behaviour, but never fully joined in. It took him a while to realise that all the drones he saw, even more various in their design than humans were in their physiology, didn't all belong to the ship. Hardly any did in fact. They had their own artificial brains. He still tended to think of them as computers. They seemed to have their own personalities too, though he remained sceptical. "Let me put this thought experiment to you," the old drone said, as they played a card game which it had assured him was mostly luck. They sat, well, the drone floated, under an arcade of delicately pink stone by the side of a small pool. The shouts of people playing a complicated ball game on the far side of the pool filtered through bushes and small trees to them. "Forget," said the drone, "about how machine brains are actually put together. Think about making a machine brain, an electronic computer in the image of a human one. One might start with a few cells, as the human embryo does. multiply, gradually establish connections. So one would continually add new components and make the relevant, even if one was to follow the exact development of one single human through the various stages, the identical connections. One would, of course, have to limit the speed of the messages transmitted down those connections to a tiny fraction of their normal electronic speed, but that would not be difficult. Nor would having these neuron-like components act like their biological equivalents internally, firing their own messages according to the types of signal they received. All this could be done comparatively simply. By building up in this gradual way, you could mimic exactly the development of a human brain, and you could mimic its output. Just as an embryo can experience sound and touch and even light inside the womb, so could you send similar signals to your developing electronic equivalent. You could impersonate the experience of birth and use any degree of sensory stimulation to fool this device into thinking it was feeling, touching, tasting, smelling, hearing and seeing everything your real human was. Of course, you might choose not actually to fool it, but always give it just as much genuine sensory input, and of the same quality as the human personality was experiencing at any given point. Now, my question to you is this, where is the difference? The brain of each being works in exactly the same way as the other. They will respond to stimuli with a greater correspondence than one finds even between those zygotic twins. But how can one still choose to call one a conscious entity and the other merely a machine? Your brain is made up of matter, Mr Zerkalwe, organised into information handling, processing and storage units by your genetic inheritance and by the biochemistry of first your mother's body and later your own, not to mention your experiences since some short time before your birth until now. An electronic computer is also made up of matter, but organized differently. What is there so magical about the workings of the huge, slow cells of the animal brain that they can claim themselves to be conscious, but would deny a quicker, more finely grained of equivalent power, or even a machine hobbled so that it worked with precisely the same ponderousness, a similar distinction. "Hm?" the machine said, its aura-field flashing the pink he was beginning to identify as drone amusement. "Unless, of course, you wish to invoke superstition. Do you believe in gods?" He smiled. "I have never had..." that inclination," he said. "Well, then," the drone said, "what would you say? Is the machine in the human image conscious, sentient or not?" He studied his cards. "I'm thinking," he said, and laughed.