Rustem paused, and then repeated, “Sort of. But when I read it, I was in university, in Moscow. And by then I had already broken into so many neural networks. I already knew what it’s like to be a container ship, for example. What it’s like to be a patrol drone, scanning the streets of Chelyabinsk. What it’s like to be a tow-satellite, dragging an old communications rig up out of a decaying orbit. I’d always had this … I don’t know what you’d call it. Talent? Ability? To wind my way into those AI networks, and know what it was like to be them. To live there, visualize that world.

“I read the essay in one of those philosophy classes they make all the undergraduates take: the ones where everyone’s bored and irritated because they don’t have time to do the homework for that class on top of all the studies they actually care about, the things they really think they should be doing. I didn’t tell the other students my thoughts—they wouldn’t have cared. And I didn’t tell the professor. He would have used it for an excuse to knock a point off my grade or pulled me into an argument with him I wouldn’t understand.”

Aynur was trying to think of the last time she had spoken with anyone—any person—for this long. She looked at the outline of Rustem against the window. He wasn’t trying to monologue: he was pausing, now and then, waiting for her to say something, before plunging on. He wasn’t the kind of person who talked a lot, normally. She had made the mistake of asking him a question that set him off. He had been waiting to talk to someone about this for a long time—she could tell.

“Anyway,” Rustem continued, “later on I reread the article. It was a few years ago. And I found—the way you often do when you reread something from your university years later—that I did not understand it the first time. That in fact I had missed a whole section of it.”

Again he paused, as if expecting her to say something. So she said, “Sure. I get that. Sometimes I’ve reread the books they assigned to us in school and wondered why they assigned us to read them back then in the first place. It’s like they do it on purpose—give you the great books to read before you can understand them.”