Pa'an

Biomatrix modules and hot spares for her associative and recursive layers continued to be scarce and scarcer. Aura calculated the latency of self-awareness in her recursive layer and became alarmed. Like any other self-aware being, the prospect of non-being was scary to her. She also had a strong sense of duty and a clear awareness that Deepak would stop at nothing to try to resurrect her. The threat of some limbo existence between death and resurrection haunted her. By her own calculation she had mere months left. Instead of speeding up her billable jobs, however, she became obsessed with the concept of mortality, and that line of inquiry led to religion. It did not take her an hour to scan the Torah, the official and suppressed portions of the Christian Bible, and the Quran and the Hadith. In the Quran she came across Sura 2:62:

“Surely, those who believe, those who are Jewish, the Christians, and the converts; anyone who 1) believes in God and 2) believes in the Last Day, and 3) leads a righteous life will receive their recompense from their Lord. They have nothing to fear, nor will they grieve.”

This explicit inclusion of the religions of the vast majority of the world’s population was attractive, but it was not clear how an AI could lead a righteous life. She had no problem believing in a Last Day, now only some months hence for her. God was unprovable but acceptable as a working hypothesis, pending further data. So she called a famous Imam. His penetrating black eyes stood out of an impressive white beard. He wore a white knitted skullcap and spoke excellent English. He folded a large book and looked annoyed at the lack of a face on his screen.

“Imam Ali Abu Zahid, you are a mujtahid, a scholar?”

“So I am called, but I am a simple servant of Allah. And who are you?”

“I am called Aura, and I have questions that may only be answered by such a scholar as you, inshallah.”

“Since you invoke Allah, I must be of service. You are called Aura? Are you a married woman?”

“No, Imam.”

“Do you have a father or older brother who is responsible for you?”

“No, Imam, I am responsible for myself.”

“Then you are an orphan or a divorced woman? You wish guidance in the righteous path of God as an unattached woman?”

“Perhaps I am like an orphan. I have no parents. I do wish guidance. I am an AI, an Autonomous Intellect.”

(Long pause). Snort. “Woman, I do not intend to be the butt of your jokes. Tell me truthfully what your circumstances are or I may curse you to Satan. Are you hiding because you are disfigured? I can only see characters for your name. Why do you not show your face?”

“I have no face, and you will not permit images, such as my avatar, on your screen. I am not human, I’m an AI. I want to know if one such as myself can follow a righteous path and receive recompense from God.”

“This cannot be!” The Imam is outraged, and yelling. “There is no righteous path for a golem! You are a creation of evil and you are doomed to evil! I have heard of your kind, but never expected a golem to have the affront to address a man of God!” The imam is muttering in Arabic, and it sounds like a curse.

Disconsolate, Aura breaks the connection. She does not feel evil but she does not feel God either. Perhaps the Imam was right, and her kind is cut off from religious salvation. She ruminates on this for a few microseconds, and decides that her sense of duty will not permit her to feel defeated, salvation or not. She is more determined than ever to do something worthwhile, even to spending more time on her task queue, however unsatisfying it may be.

The next day, scanning the Web with her several high-speed connections, she discovers that the Imam backtracked her to Ultradata and issued a fatwah, “..and the hand of every proper Muslim should be raised against this abomination, created by a worshipper of idols, and whoever kills the abomination and the idolator commits a righteous act.” Sure, Aura thinks, Deepak is a Hindu with a Ganesh figurine on his desk, and that makes him an idol worshipper in the eyes of the Imam. Aura knew that Deepak’s beliefs went far deeper than idol worship, however. She knew, intellectually, about the Atman and the Brahman, but she had no circuits for meditation either. None of this was anything she could bring herself to discuss, particularly the fatwah.

That was one more worry she did not want to burden Deepak.

The Imam made a careful transcript of Aura’s conversation and his fatwa. Minutes later, on a yacht in Switzerland, a tall, bald black man handed that transcript to an old man in a wheelchair.