The Mountain in the Sea

The porthole’s thick strata of glass and polycarbonate distorted the scene outside. Through it, Ha watched the undulating barrier of jungle encroaching the narrow road. Ruined walls of rubble studded abbreviated clearings, structures that could have been fortresses once. Or mills, or factories. Anything. The full moon cast waveforms on the sea’s su

Stenciled over the armored steel door of the wheelhouse, in English, was: WOLF LARSEN, CAPTAIN. When Eiko had asked about the name, one of the other crew members—one of the other slaves—had laughed bitterly. “It’s a joke. A reference to some old book or movie. But there’s nothing behind that door but the AI core.

Science often dismisses our individual experiences—what it feels like to smell an orange, or to be in love—as qualia. We are left with theories and metaphors for consciousness: A stream of experience. A self-referential loop. Something out of nothing. None of these are satisfactory. Definition eludes us.

Ha heard the insect cacophony of the jungle, the hooting call-and-response of macaques. Rain blew sideways into the pod.

“Sort of. Like a map of a place you’ve never seen before. Except you also don’t know what the symbols or shapes of the map represent. You have to figure out what they mean according to their relationships with one another.” “And most people do this with VR tech.” “Yes. And AI: they have programs that basically model the network for them—like assist

His memory palace was a Japanese inn. Not just any inn: it was the Minaguchi-ya, on the Tokaido Road, between Tokyo and Kyoto. Eiko had never visited the Minaguchi-ya, but he had read an ancient book, by a gaijin from the old American States named Oliver Statler. The book had detailed the Minaguchi-ya: every room of the place, over all the generati

But what could be more illusory than the world we see? After all, in the darkness inside our skulls, nothing reaches us. There is no light, no sound—nothing. The brain dwells there alone, in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it through its sensory apparatus. —Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan, Buildi

“What exactly is the point,” a stream interviewer once asked Mínervudóttir-Chan, “of an android? Why go to such trouble to make them so human, when making humans is almost free?” Mínervudóttir-Chan had answered, “The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”

You can ask the automonks questions on philosophy, religion, their views on life. They’ll answer like the dead men they are modeled on. They are walking repositories of memory. Yet they have no apparent will of their own—their present state is automated. If you asked me personally, I would say they are not conscious. They do not progress. They have