Nanobot team: It is impossible to know. There are activities similar to those we observe in humans.

Winifred: And consciousness?

Nanobot team: It reacts rapidly to almost all stimuli. There seems to be no opportunity for reflective thought. It occasionally rests, typically perched above the ground, and at those times brain activity changes. It remains alert, and will respond to stimulus, but it may be doing something like thinking.

Winifred: Social activity?

Nanobot team: It engages in a great deal of it. It communicates with sound, and physically. We guess there is some kind of hierarchy within its species. It is also responsive to the other life forms it encounters. It eats some of them, of course.

Winifred: I want to understand more about its brain. The physiological information is interesting but not immediately useful. We want to understand more about human consciousness, and we know humans entertain many beliefs about their own minds and those of other animals. I would like to know what actually goes on, to compare it with these beliefs.

Nanobot team: We could focus on the bird’s brain, and attempt to correlate its activity with external events.

This was agreed.

Margaret

All a bird has to do is be a bird. All I have to do is be a human. But what does it mean? Is it easier for me to think about birds being birdy because I’m not one, or because they’re much simpler things? I don’t think they are.

When I was at school they taught me that life fits into a hierarchy. Simple organisms at the bottom, humans at the top. Science said so, and everybody liked that, of course. I wonder. It excuses a lot of human behaviour, like the way people treat the planet and all the other life forms on it. Is it scientific, or is it a modern version of the Bible story? ‘Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’

Now scientists describe the human brain as the most complex thing in the universe. With some sort of caveat about the known and the unknown, in case another life form appears, out among the stars, with an even more complex brain. Heaven help us.

Now what? We’ve made something right here on earth that might give us pause.

What are we going to do with ourselves once the Helpers are everywhere? I’m a pioneer – one of the first to live without any real occupation, thanks to them. Because I’m supposed to be dead. Well, I’m not. So I have to just be human, like a bird is a bird.