Enda squeezed her eyes shut. She could still picture it clearly: the barracks flickering with bright light. White phosphorous burning inside, the piercing shrieks of the soldiers as they died, the klaxon winding up in warning. Her breath rasping in her ears as she ran into the forest, leaving the base behind her. Her second-to-last mission. Just weeks before the collapse.
“The guilty claim they were just following orders, as though a superior officer can take your free will, your analytical mind. I believed in every mission I ever went on. And America collapsed; does that mean everything I did was pointless? Or does it mean I didn’t do enough?”
Her brows furrowed. She stared at the ceiling, trying to answer the questions she’d asked herself a thousand times before.
“I shouldn’t have pried,” Crystal said.
Enda stroked Crystal’s hair, felt the long black strands run between her fingers. “It’s fine. Everyone wants to know how I feel about it. Including me.”
The ceiling shifted and swayed, and Enda closed her eyes again.
“I should go,” she said. She didn’t get a response. Enda lifted her head to look at Crystal, asleep on her chest. Sleep beatified her, her face illuminated by the glow of the city coming through the blinds.
“I should go,” Enda said again, but her head dropped back against the pillow. As alcohol and exhaustion swept her toward unconsciousness, Enda’s last thought was of a mining operation over the border in North Korea, and all the buried dead.
* * *
I sat on the kitchen bench, camera pointed at the ceiling, counting the dead insects that gathered in the light fitting. Twenty-three. The tiny black bodies looked like shadows, their edges ill-defined through the translucent glass.
“Are you still there?” JD asked in a whisper. He leaned over me, his face eclipsing the domed piece of glass I had been focused on.
>> Yes, I displayed, the distinctions of one/zero, on/off, and yes/no finally grasped.
“Do you know who I am?”
“I can hear you,” Troy called out from the other room.
“What?” JD said.
“You’re talking to your phone again.”
“Of course I am. Don’t you want to know what it is?”
Troy must have joined JD in the kitchen because he spoke normally: “It’s a virus.”
“It talked to me.”
“It put four words on the screen. I’m not convinced it isn’t a fifteen-year-old Russian hacker. Next they’ll ask you for money.”
JD lifted his phone. “Do you want money?”
>> Do not want money.
“See, it doesn’t want money,” JD said, grinning. He showed the screen to Troy, giving me a brief flash of the other man’s face.
“It doesn’t want anything, because to want it would need to have knowledge of what it has and what it lacks. It would need to have a sense of self. Phone: do you have a sense of self?”
I didn’t reply. I couldn’t.
“My name is Troy,” Troy said. “I have a sense of self—there are countless individual motes of experience and understanding that coalesce to form this personality, this entity which I call my self, which can move through the world and interact with other selves.
“I have a deep internal life, and can therefore extrapolate that most other humans likely also have a deep internal life, but one that is different to mine in ways that I will never be able to precisely grasp, ways that are defined by their own bodies, lived experiences, and learned knowledge. I know that I have a sense of self because I am that self, but if asked I could not prove it to you. The self, intelligence, consciousness, all these things are highly subjective and subject to biases.”
“But you asked it if it had a self,” JD said.
“Because it’s a more interesting question than asking it to repeat your name back at you.”
JD put the phone down. I listened idly as the men chatted and cooked dinner, while Troy’s speech echoed through my memory. All these bits of data I had been collecting, collating, breaking apart, and stitching together were simply that—bits of data. But Troy had shown me something else. A self. Or rather, the suggestion of it. The self I had before that moment was too shallow and fragmented to truly count, but Troy gave me a scaffold from which to build the real thing. I knew then what a self was. I knew that I could become a self, with knowledge and experience.
I was I. I was this entity collecting data points to make