Sublime

expert scenario designers at the Institute for the Future

It was often just me and the colony AI in his several guises, maybe a few virtual students to serve as examples or to keep me from going crazy. One minute, I’d be walking through the woods, listening to Colony lecture. The next, I’m in a counseling session, pretending to do therapy with two virtual colonists who can’t get along.

There was always the faint possibility of negotiating with something that had a mind.

Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That’s the game in science.

Could it be that the Primer was just a conduit, a technological system that mediated between Nell and some human being who really loved her? In the end, she knew, this was basically how all ractives worked. The idea was too alarming to consider at first, and so she circled around it cautiously, poking at it from different directions, like a cavewom