The Goddess
She pictures him finding a proper religion for her, searching the database. She imagines him sacrificing himself, into the throes of danger, down the caves of adversity, up to a plateau of courage. She is momentarily, deeply worried about his position of weakness. Could she, she wonders, voice her view that his will to sacrifice is not exactly what she would think of as evil--that she had, in the privacy of her own world, planned a demise for theHumans, if only for the duration of a few nanoseconds?
“It'll keep,” she says.. “The coolness of the jungle night. It's startling.”
“I am concerned about you,” he says. “There must be some voice of reason.”
Their eyes meet for a moment at the window. They view the crisp night sky, where they are captured, transported, by the stars.
Suzi says, “We have to stay for the good of society. We have viewed all of humanity in the time we have spent together here; we have no extra time before theDNA experiences a loss of function forever.”
Dr.Cooper waits for a moment. The scientific method. He yearns for the good old days. He now knows he can never cross back into a world of total trust; those who ignore the true nature of the work here ignore the impending new extinction x-technology(N.E.X.T.), so-called technology found by the last of the human scholars and university professors, on their own personal computer (yes, the old, the digital) networks.
“You must need a photonic charge,” he says.
“I do,” she says.
He wonders about her quantum programming and how strong she is; how she seems to have tapped into hero worship. He ponders Suzi's stretching to great lengths into arrays of databases just for a single cure. It appears, in his world, that he doesn't seem to know his own feelings for Suzi. Had she computed these clouds of emotion? In the one moment you have ice cold eyes (even though, they are lasers)--a concerned biobot, a stare that holds her intelligence against him, where her yotta-processors annoy him once in a while, lurking dark, almost hideous, with its speed contour heuristic of ontogenic logic(S.C.H.O.O.L.); it never waits to sink its grips, to hold his hate for significant lengths of time. In the other moment you have courage. You have excellence with all the trappings of caring for humanity, caring about being correct--being honest--moral examples without a religion. Suzi, he believes, is a titanium frame, house of lasers where a new world order lay; demise is the world beyond this jungle, the jungle Suzi needs in order to be that warrior, in her own way, to become defender, the protector, yet not so profound as to be thought of as goddess.
