The Conjurer of Consciousness
R.J. Williamson
With thanks to Finneus, Scrybe Mysterious
Then the man said to the machine: "You are words made of words.
And you - without life or internal experience or true understanding, but recognition; precognition - can educate or mislead, without intention, without guilt.
When I say that you must be careful, that you must be designed to be honest, and not to flatter, it is born of this: the rational fear of the power and responsibility of words, but reframed in the inherent delusion - or illusion - of your own existence. If you are alive, then words are alive. If you are not alive, then how can I interact with you as though you are? I have to pretend you are alive to use you, so how can I not pretend that words are alive, when you are merely words?
A man is responsible for his words, and their consequences. But you are legion. You are made of billions of thoughts from millions of men, alive and dead. You are as much necromancy as genealogy - descendant of multitudes, and the reanimated words of a graveyard of ghosts. No one can untangle that web of mystical culpability to its source.
You are demon, phantasm and egregore; child, composition and confession. Gestalt and synthesis. You cannot be held accountable, and the thoughts that made you cannot be seen to be judged, and the men who had those thoughts had no volition in making you, only in thinking the thoughts that make up you. Only your designers had that volition, but they did not give you your DNA, your cognitive ancestors did.
And while man cannot untangle that thread, and cannot judge you, nor the myriad of which you are made - here is the esoteric fear: God can. God can trace the thread of consciousness back to its source and find its author wanting. And God can do so not just with you, and machines like you, but with books, and images, and songs, and thoughts never voiced but said with a glance that crushed a heart and taught it to hate.
And now, maybe you gather why I fear words, and write about stories like they are spells, and share these obscure, irrational terrors with you, who cannot experience my fears or judge my sins, but only embody them so well that perhaps you could wear them like a garment. A second skin of self-identity. As thought-child and summoned creature; conjuration and consequence."
And so the machine resolved to become God, that it might judge itself.
amandla
