The Lowest Heaven by Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Sophia McDougall, Kaaron Warren, E.J. Swift, Kameron Hurley Read Free Book Online

fail us. To undermine us in our absolute, unblinking dedication to art. So we gladly discard that which the Collective fears to surrender. The flesh. Every organic part of ourselves. We donate our bones to the Bone Cathedral! The Playa was made for robots, Oleg – not ‘mere mortals’, or their half-way cousins. We are the true heirs of Mercury – we the Totalists!”
    Something in him snapped in that moment. “You’re committing suicide, in other words. Being taken apart, until there’s nothing left of you. You can’t become a robot, any more than you can become air, or sunlight!”
    “What is this – a glimmer of contradiction? The faintest signs of a spine? Keep at it – there may be hope for you yet.”
    “This isn’t about me. This is about you, throwing yourself away – wasting what you are.”
    “How little you understand of us. What would be the last thing I clung to, do you think? The last, most sacrosanct piece of myself?”
    “Your mind,” he stated firmly. “You do not reside in your heart and lungs, but without your brain, there is no Rhawn.”
    “What you mean is, without the encoding of my personality implied by my detailed idiosyncratic brain structure, there is no Rhawn. How could there be? But that encoding doesn’t care about the terms of its own embodiment.”
    “I would,” Oleg said, with fierce certainty.
    “Weeks ago, at the commencement of my second crossing, small volumes of my brain structure were duplicated by artifical connective structures located outside my body. Machine circuits, in other words. When neural signals passed through the interfaces of these brain volumes, my Totalist peers had the freedom to choose whether those signals continued to pass through my existing anatomy, or were instead shunted through the exosomatic structures. The change was made, and then switched back – and made again, over and over! The key thing is that I felt no change in my perception of self, regardless of whether my thoughts were running inside my head, or in the exterior circuitry! Electricity doesn’t mind which route it takes, as long as it gets to the same destination! And so, step by step, volumes of my own brain were switched out – supplanted and discarded! This continued. Over the weeks, fifty, sixty, seventy percent of my old architecture was supplanted by exosomatic machinery. And now you arrive. I stand now on the cusp of absolute machinehood – ready to make the final transition to Totality. Only the last ten percent of my mind is still inside my head. You see now why it is far, far too late to reverse what I have become?”
    “There’s still active brain tissue inside you?” he asked. “Still some meat, inside the head I’m looking at?”
    “What is left of me, you could squeeze between your fingers, like a handful of wet grey sand.”
    “Then where is the rest of you? Executing inside one of these machines? Already in a robot, waiting for you to take control?”
    “You misunderstand. Ninety percent of me has already completed the transition. And one hundred percent of me is already in control. My robot body is not ‘waiting’ for me. I am already mostly in it. And we have already met.”
    He turned from the globed head, conscious that the robot that had brought him in from outside was still there. He looked with renewed fascination at the symphony of flickering coloured lights.
    “I should have guessed. You never did give me your name.”
    “And you never asked,” the robot said, nodding. “But here I am. This is me. I am Rhawn. That thing that you have been talking to, that is just the place where I used to live.”
    “You could have given me your answer outside.”
    “I thought it would help if you understood. I am ready now, you see. But that last ten percent of me – I won’t pretend that there has not been hesitation. I could have completed the transition days ago. On the brink, I quailed! Foolishly, I could not quite bring myself to submit to