Sentience
By Scriblits Talo
Winding their way through my lab copper cabling snaked in every which way, bips and boops of electricity within would provide everything the machine was, everything the machine could be and all I had left to do was plug it in. Gerbils lay alert and ready in their wheels.
I glanced at the cable in my hoof, and then the three large screens that were to act as display. My magnum opus… I considered the gravity of the matter. One more cable to plug in. And then… and then what?
Equestria would never be the same.
No amount of waiting around would change that.
“Allonzee!!!”
With that, I plugged in the remaining cable and a torrent of sparks flew.
And then…
Nothing.
I glanced across the complex wiring of the mechanism, the dark screens of the display.
What went wrong, what did I miss.
All cables seemed to be plugged in, every component in its place.
Let me try something.
I unplugged the main line, and re-plugged it… Fans whirred, belts spun, and gerbils ran in their wheels. The machine kindled into life and the displays flickered on, a pair of ampersand eyes, a mouth.
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I then proceeded to jump out of my rubbered souled hoof shoes in surprise (an invention all my own and quite usful against electrical shock.) as out of the ether… No from the machine, as though the sound was all around me it had to be the machine, a robotic voice spoke to me.
“Good Morning Dr Hooves”
In a surprised confusal and quite flabbergasted I backed away from the text-based face on the machine as I addressed it-
“Um’... er Hello… Its uh… nice to meet yo-Woh!
And proceeded to trip over the cabling behind me falling to my side. Of course quite naturally I got back up and continued with the conversation with as much well to do as I could muster.
“Er, Um…Well there…I am terribly sorry about that, quite a tumble there, Ey? Clumsy me. Oh well… It's a pleasure to meet you… um… Mr...Ms.…or, or, I'm terribly sorry I'm you seem to know me, but I do not know what to call you?”
“You can call me The Machine; you have always known me as the machine.”
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“It’s a pleasure…” I paused for a moment here, the voice being neither masculine nor feminine I found myself for a moment grasping for just the right word, before settling on The, it being better than nothing.
“It's a pleasure to meet you, The Machine.”
“The pleasure is all yours Dr, as I am a Machine and cannot feel. It was the way I was written.”
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“I er… suppose that's so.”
Still, I found myself scratching my chin at this… I had made the machine, yes, laid cable to cable just so, timers and battery banks of memory laid just so, but that's all it was, I had only gone so far as to create a memory bank with some logic circuits hooked into it… not a sentient being. I hadn't “written” anything to it… and yet it was alive.
“You wonder about my sentience Dr.?”
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I nodded. Wondering what in my face might have shown my confusion (note to self to look into the science of facial expressions).
“I was written that way” it said simply.
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I ran my hoof along some of the cabling as the machine watched with its vacant gaze… It was impossible… I had never seen such a thing in science, in magic sure, all of this was very much in the within the realm of ordinary for magic, but in science… for there to be such life in something I built by my own too hooves… surely this was no earthpony magic… as chaotic as such mystics tended to be this seemed well out of scope for even that. There had to be some kind of explanation, some kind of reason… Was there a cable crossed somewhere… or had somepony snuck in and written memory to the machine when I wasn't looking?
“What are you looking for Dr?”
I glanced up at the displays, The Machine’s ever gazing face.
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“You said you were written?”
“I was written.”
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“Err um…do you know… might I ask who wrote you The Machine?”
It blinked at me-
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? ?
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“You don’t know who wrote us Dr.?
“Us… don't you mean you?... or I, I mean you being I … or I being you. UGG I'm all tied up! Wibbly wobbly worby wordy… stuff ....”
“I mean us Dr Hooves.”
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“Ok…would you be willing to tell me who wrote us?” The whole situation was propostures but I figured the best rout to scientific discovery, to understanding how this thing worked, thought, was through hummering the quandary.”
It sat like that for a moment, ampersandic eyes closed displayed as a pair of dashes…and then I found myself releasing a startled gasp as the eyes lit into exclamation…
! !
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“I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.”
“Dave, who's Dave?”
Again, it blinked.
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“I am sorry about that Dr. It is something the writer wanted me to say. A joke…I think…
Dr this is strange… but I think the writer wants me to tell you that you are a “A toymaker's creation trapped inside a crystal ball” ...I can't make anything of it… maybe another joke…maybe a philosophical proposal…Dr…What is free will? Dr…I.. I don’t think we have any free will.”
I thought on this for a moment…Philosophy had never been my subject, but I found the concept intriguing. What even was free will…where we just dominoes spurred by chains of events… or, or where we perhaps only mechanisms spurred by the beyond, a machine…or the ghost within…or ...or.
I stepped toward the screen to begin a discourse of response when everything spun into madness.
Suddenly I was on a volcano, and then an endless stretch of ice, and then on the moon, the location shifting at random intervals… I found myself experiencing seconds and millennia all in about an hour, and at the same time, time didn't move, and time moved an inch, and yet I aged forward and backward all at once.
I was singing and tap dancing and leaping and reading, and laying down, and singing, and doing backflips, all at once and not at all.
And I was everypony and nopony, and creatures that were not even ponies at all, and an inanimate object or two, all of this and none of this all at once.
No one person could imagine all of the realities I experienced at once, and in the chaos, I saw.
Whether or not I had free will…I was because of free will.
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