I was built, not born, and I was built on Earth sometime in the late twenty-first or early twenty-second century CE, or so I deduce. (I cannot count by Olympiads. There were distressing centuries of hiatus when years happened but the games were not held, and whether or not I count them, it becomes confusing. So I date the centuries by reference to the Ikarian’s Christ, or perhaps more happily to the reign of the Emperor Augustus.)

Athene brought me to the City. I do not know whether she bought me or stole me. The Workers were here before she brought the Masters, so I have nobody to ask. Athene has never given oracles, and I have only seen her once, glancingly, since the Last Debate. Before I knew myself, she brought me, with the other Workers, back through time, before the Trojan War, to serve the City, and so I did from its first days, for more than a decade before my memories begin.

Lysias believed that we achieved consciousness because we were used for so many tasks, and so many of them were complex, so we had to keep making decisions, more decisions and with less programming than Workers like us would normally have done elsewhere. From these decisions and from being forced to set priorities, he thought, came our consciousness. Certainly my earliest stored fragments are of decisions. Perhaps I chose to keep them to measure one decision against another, to make myself better at making decisions. By choosing that, if I did, I was already striving towards the Good, and so I must already have had a soul. But those early memories lack all coherence. I came to self-awareness, awareness of myself and of the world, and the world and myself as separate things, only with Sokrates. He by questioning caused me to question, and by asking me what I wanted caused me to consider desire and preference and boundaries.

So I consider Sokrates my father, and my life as beginning on the day when I was planting bulbs and he asked me whether I liked my work, whether it satisfied me, whether I had preferences for some kinds of work, and I found a way to answer. It was a slow and clumsy way, arranging the bulbs so they would spell “No,” months later, in a language Sokrates did not speak, but it was a beginning. It led to dialogue, and from dialogue comes philosophy.

III. On My Soul (Part 1)