“So if Wintermute's backing the whole show, it's paying us to burn it…burning itself?" "Real motive problem… — William Gibson
“So if Wintermute's backing the whole show, it's paying us to burn it…burning itself?"
"Real motive problem, with an AI," the construct said. "Not human…Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one."
"Are you sentient, or not?"
"Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them philosophical questions, I guess…But I ain't likely to write you no poem. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human…[Does] it own itself?"
"Swiss citizen," Case said, "but T-A owns the basic software and the mainframe."
"That's a good one. Like, 'I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship.' Sure. Lotsa luck, AI."
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More from this book
Smith had a visitor, unannounced…A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a vat-grown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master.
"I got a little story for you about them…Haven't ever told anybody this one," the Finn began.
The story he told Case and Molly began with another man's story, a man he called Smith. Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal request, one businessman to another.
He was less than a block from Deane's office when it hit, the sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass, and very close. The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took for granted.
