“Of course Mystic was right. You just never knew the last part of the story."
“What's the last part?” Kort asked.
Taya gazed down at her toes, wriggled them, and looked perplexed. “Oh, you're the one who's supposed to tell stories, Kort. How am I supposed to know how to tell stories? Here, I'll have to show you instead.” She slipped the shoes that were lying by her onto her feet, took the cutters from his hand, and held out her arms. Kort lifted her down and collected her cloak.
“Once upon a time there were all these minds that woke up,” she began, taking his hand and leading him back toward the doorway.
“Machine minds or Taya minds?"
The doorway led to a place of strange yellow light. Around them the lines of Merkon were dissolving away into formlessness.
“Oh, this is a different story. All minds are the same in this one. And nobody has to be alone in this one, ever or ever or ever or ever...."
Kort saw infinity and eternity merging together into a tapestry of timelessness and spacelessness woven from everything that ever was or could be, extending away in all directions into light. He slowed, overawed, becoming aware of countless other presences. Taya looked up, smiling, and tugged at his hand.
And the robot and the Princess walked forward together into what would be their new home.
* * * *
They found Kort's body kneeling between the cabinets in the Cognitive Processing Center, his arm halfway inside the opened racks, the cutters still gripped in his hand. Exactly what he had been doing nobody could be sure, although the implication was pretty clear. But he never managed to complete the task. Power was still being delivered, and all of his cortical units were live. The “Kort” that had been contained in them, however, no longer existed. The delicate currents and charge patterns that had formed his mind were disrupted irreversibly and had lost all coherence. Yes, the circuits were active, but all that was circulating within them now was noise.
The lysetine bracelet on his wrist was the reason. Extracted from the source of the spa waters of Fariden-Fer, it should perhaps have been guessed that the material was from some kind of facility operated by the Ancients that involved nuclear processes. Kort's mind had been scrambled by the radiation. What was left was an electronic vegetable. The only sensible course was to quietly shut it down.
However, since the circuits and master memory units had been functioning throughout, it was possible to retrieve and decode some glimpses of his last experiences. And what they revealed prompted Mystic to proclaim indisputable proof of the realm beyond the material, where Supermind reigned.
“Look, it's there!” Mystic exhorted. “Kort saw it! What else do you all need to make you believe?"
“Inadmissible as proof,” Skeptic pronounced. “Equally well explained by hallucination."
But even if this didn't say anything conclusively about Mystic's “beyond,” it did give Thinker a new idea concerning the vaster universe of all possibilities that Physicist had discovered, and even Skeptic had acknowledged as real. “There might be a way of inducing higher sensitivity in mec-mind circuits that would enable them to respond to quantum leakage in the same kind of way that biological molecules do,” he suggested. Which at least diverted the arguing off into something else for a change.
“You mean that irrespective of whether Mystic is right or wrong, we might still be capable of anything that humans are?” Psychologist checked, intrigued.
“Yes, exactly."
Everyone became excited. Scientist went off with Physicist to see if they could come up with a way of making quantum-sensitive circuits. Skeptic said he'd believe it when he saw it, but admitted he was curious. Thinker wondered if achieving it would make them mortal like humans too. Mystic said that didn't matter because a greater realm lay beyond mortality anyway, which they would all share in. And as had happened so often before, most of the minds ended up believing him because they wanted it to be true.
And so the minds of Merkon were busy with a purpose, and as argumentative as ever once again, with the humans there to add color and mystery to their existence. The one thing they missed among them was Kort, but many of them, privately, even if they didn't say so, took comfort from the thought that Kort really might have found the fulfillment that Mystic told them he had, and that they would find it also one day. For until the questions were answered of whether they too could develop the Insight of the humans, whether they would have to accept mortality as a consequence, and if so, whether something even greater lay beyond that, Kort had given them the one thing they needed most.
Kort had given them hope.
END
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