Rustem realized he had left his second glass of tea undrunk on the table. But tea was cheap in this city. He could find a place to sit for a moment, with a warm glass of it in his hand, and think. That was what he needed. Tea and time to think.

“Enough to live for,” he said to himself.

Chapter 31

When I was a girl, I watched volcanic ash drift into the atmosphere, and listened to the hum of Hrauneyjafoss Hydropower Station near my home. Underground heat turning to ash, water turning to power. All these transformations from one medium to another. Mind and meaning were in everything—even the stones.

Later, when my parents were killed in the bombing of the Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik, I found myself plunged into depression. Now it was not mind and meaning which suffused everything, but rather meaninglessness. Human beings were no more alive than an ancient jukebox. Stimulus: drop a coin into the slot. Response: music, no more than the variation of pressure on the eardrum.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. Sometimes a sound wave is no more than a variation of pressure on the eardrum. But sometimes, if the right nervous system is there to retrieve the patterns in that sequence, it is Mozart’s Requiem. But how can we make that nervous system, that mind? And how, having made it, can we know for certain we have done so?

—Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan, Building Minds

31

“YOU RECENTLY SAID, DOCTOR—and I quote: ‘The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.’ But certainly, after having done what we are capable of, there must be a moment of regret. Especially if what we do causes pain or destruction. DIANIMA has repeatedly been criticized for pursuing advances in artificial intelligence relentlessly, with no thought to the consequences for humankind. With no thought to the people driven out of employment. With no thought to how that intelligence might be weaponized, used against us—with no thought, even, to the ethical questions raised. What do you say to these accusations?”

Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan leaned forward, picked a glass of water up from the table, and drank.

Ha recognized the gesture. She had taken a class, once, on interview skills. Drinking water was an opportunity for delay, a moment to collect one’s thoughts, a way of breaking up the rhythm of the interviewer’s attack.

Still holding the glass, the doctor tapped a finger on its surface.

The interviewer was growing impatient. He was leaning forward and opening his mouth to restate his question when she spoke: