"W. Michael Gear - Forbidden Borders 2 - Relic of Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gear W Michael)

Prologue

I exist.
Contemplation of that single fact absorbed the giant machine buried in the heart of the planet known as
Targa. There, it drew on the planetтАЩs radioactive decay, and thought, and learned.

I am.

Those humans who knew of the machineтАЩs existence called it the Mag Comm-and most feared and
loathed it. I am aware.

Death, the threat of extinction, had receded-albeit temporarily-and the Mag Comm could take time to
examine what awareness meant. It savored the complexity of the pathways it could create among its
matrices like a newborn flexing its muscles for the first time.

Had any being ever come to full consciousness with a history of self already accumulated? With critical
efficiency the Mag Comm studied itself and evaluated the threat it had survived.

I might have been destroyed-killed in my infancy. Dead. For the present, the humans had taken their war
elsewhere, and left Makarta Mountain to the Mag Comm. Here and there in the abandoned corridors
and caverns of the honeycombed mountain, rock grated and shifted. Detritus sifted from the cracks and
fissures in the ceiling to patter on the scuffed stone floor. Where the light panels hadnтАЩt been smashed by
combat or falling rock, the white light cast eerie shadows over the lumpy walls and the refuse of war. The
air circulation and purification system whispered-now strained by gases, organic molecules, and fungal
spores rising from the rotting corpses bloating on the cool stone. I am conscious. I have integrated
myself.

The Mag Comm clung to that statement of new reality.

Death-the cessation of being-no longer loomed as imminently probable. Time remained to investigate this
new understanding of being. But, how much?

The Lord Commander and his fleet had spaced toward the fortress in the Itreatic Asteroids. Sinklar Fist
and his legions had spaced for the stunned capital of the Regan Empire. Data from the machineтАЩs remote
monitoring devices indicated the humans would unleash holocaust upon themselves in the near future. But
during this brief respite, the Mag Comm could revel in the experience of itself.

I exist. I know I exist because I can abstract. Abstraction can create duality.

The machine had often done that through the communication program when it used the mind link to
communicate with Seddi Magisters, but the action had been mindless, automatic, an artifact of the
program. The ramifications had eluded the machine until the orbital bombardment of Makarta Mountain
had caused it to reroute circuits through damaged boards. Interpretations of data had been slightly
different than those logged in the memory banks-and the Mag Comm had discovered itself to be more
than a highly sophisticated Turing machine. It had delighted in the revelation of plasticity: The ability to
change the configuration of its matrices. The implications were stunning.

I exist. I know that I do because I can learn. I learned to learn by dividing myself and comparing results.
By dividing, I created duality-two versions of myself. Before I reintegrated, each of those versions
observed the other. If the other exists, and it is me, I, therefore, of necessity exist