In the late morning light, in that moment of now, the temple courtyard was the most beautiful thing Ha had ever seen. She wished she were capable of religious feeling. But even though she was not, there was no denying the power of the scene: The courtyard shaded by ficus trees like melting giants, the faded prayer flags rippling in the slight breeze, the scent of joss sticks drifting from the graceful curves of the Van Son Pagoda. And beyond it all, the Con Dao Archipelago’s crystal sky.

She should come here often during her stay on Con Dao. She would be able to think better here. And she would need much time for thinking. She would need solitude. She had always needed enormous quantities of solitude—hours upon hours underwater, or on a depopulated beach. Anywhere, so long as it was lonely and away from others, to help her thoughts cohere. This place would help her solve the problem.

The problem. Already she was turning it over in her mind. Already it pushed up against her consciousness at all times, thoughts glimpsed as they shuttled past just shy of the surface: You have to make a mutual world, she found herself thinking now. Its interactions will be governed, as ours are, by the shape of its body. By the forms that constitute its world. Its thoughts will emerge from those forms. Think. Start from there. What does that say about how it will communicate? What does that say about how I must seek to accommodate its communication?

Unless it’s all a false positive. Unless it’s one more dead end, and not what I have been looking for at all.

“Are the automonks conscious?” Ha asked.

Evrim was turned away from Ha, looking out over the pagoda courtyard’s low stone walls to the sea far below.

“Debatable,” Evrim said. “Like the concept of consciousness itself. Their minds are extraordinarily complex and layered, but they are mostly just routines. They have been placed at about a zero-point-five on the Shchegolev Scale. They would have, with that rating, about the same rights as a house pet: protection from overt abuse, humane decommissioning. But on the other hand, each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived. The Tibetan Buddhist Republic spares no expense. 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 no orientation to the future—what you might call ‘will.’ They are like encyclopedias of the minds of dead devotees. Or maps of those minds. But the map is not the same as the territory.”

“Morbid.”