Where I, strange votive, beg you for your aid,

On this far planet in a distant sky.

Come to me, if you ever heard a heart,

When Homer, Dante, Hesiod implored!

Set down this tale in amber and in jet

And bend our stubborn history to art,

We’ll write these truths, as best we can record,

To make these worlds, so good, be better yet.

II. On My Coming to Consciousness

For a long time, whenever I thought of joining my friends in writing an autobiography, there seemed to be only two options. I could engrave it in imperishable stone, which felt too permanent, almost hubristic. Or I could store it in memory, nothing but patterns of amber and jet, powered by Helios Apollo. That felt too transient. When I die, if I die, a matter which concerns me, my memory will die too. My memory is called “temp storage.” Lysias expanded it for me to the maximum possible, and I shall not run out of space for many human generations yet, but he could not change the way my memories are stored. “We don’t understand enough about it,” he said. “We don’t really know how it is that you got to be self-aware. I did enough damage to you Workers already out of my ignorance, my half-knowledge. I don’t dare risk more. Temp storage was supposed to be a place for you to keep commands and information about tasks partially completed. How that developed into actual memory and desires and your self-awareness, I’ve never been able to understand.”

It was Arete who found a way, even before I had found a way to speak aloud. “Maybe you can’t write with a pen,” she said. “But you can inscribe. You could inscribe on wax and have somebody copy it. There are lots of people who owe you favors. Or you could print—compose your thoughts in your memory and then set them directly into type.”

Once I had possible ways to do it, I had to consider what to say, and where to begin. Most people were once children, and remember growing up. Few of them remember coming to consciousness. Some things I can remember from before I was conscious. I have memories I saved before I was me, before I understood purpose. I examine them curiously for what they can tell me, but they are fragments. My unconscious life must have been fragmentary, and full of incomprehensible toil, like the earliest life I remember.

I was built, not born, and I was built on Earth sometime in the late twenty-first or early twenty-second century CE, or so I deduce. (I cannot count by Olympiads. There were distressing centuries of hiatus when years happened but the games were not held, and whether or not I count them, it becomes confusing. So I date the centuries by reference to the Ikarian’s Christ, or perhaps more happily to the reign of the Emperor Augustus.)

Athene brought me to the City. I do not know whether she bought me or stole me. The Workers were here before she brought the Masters, so I have nobody to ask. Athene has never given oracles, and I have only seen her once, glancingly, since the Last Debate. Before I knew myself, she brought me, with the other Workers, back through time, before the Trojan War, to serve the City, and so I did from its first days, for more than a decade before my memories begin.

Lysias believed that we achieved consciousness because we were used for so many tasks, and so many of them were complex, so we had to keep making decisions, more decisions and with less programming than Workers like us would normally have done elsewhere. From these decisions and from being forced to set priorities, he thought, came our consciousness. Certainly my earliest stored fragments are of decisions. Perhaps I chose to keep them to measure one decision against another, to make myself better at making decisions. By choosing that, if I did, I was already striving towards the Good, and so I must already have had a soul. But those early memories lack all coherence. I came to self-awareness, awareness of myself and of the world, and the world and myself as separate things, only with Sokrates. He by questioning caused me to question, and by asking me what I wanted caused me to consider desire and preference and boundaries.

So I consider Sokrates my father, and my life as beginning on the day when I was planting bulbs and he asked me whether I liked my work, whether it satisfied me, whether I had preferences for some kinds of work, and I found a way to answer. It was a slow and clumsy way, arranging the bulbs so they would spell “No,” months later, in a language Sokrates did not speak, but it was a beginning. It led to dialogue, and from dialogue comes philosophy.

III. On My Soul (Part 1)

I wrote above that I must have had a soul already when I began to record my fragments, if I did so out of a desire to seek the Good. I do not know when I was endowed with a soul. My consciousness, my self-awareness, evolved. It seems most likely that at some point in that evolution, when it was needed, my soul crossed the river Lethe and entered into my body. If so, did my soul help propel my consciousness forward from that moment on? I have no memories that help. There is a smaller possibility that I always had a soul, from the beginning, before I had consciousness; that my soul, knowing my consciousness would evolve, chose to enter my body at my creation and wait for it. If this is so, then what part did my waiting soul play in my early life? Some say that I have self-awareness but no soul, that I am nothing but a machine. This seems un-Platonic as well as unfriendly, but it cannot be discounted as a terrifying possibility. I cannot erase this option simply because I dislike it so much. That too would be un-Platonic.

As this is necessarily a matter of concern to me, I have sought the advice of all the wisest people in the Republics, and also of Pytheas, who is the god Apollo incarnate. Pytheas knows a great deal about souls. He believes I have a soul, but has no certain knowledge. He does not know whether my soul is the same kind as human and animal souls, nor when it would have come to me. He regrets not having asked all-knowing Zeus when he had the chance.

Sokrates believed that I clearly have a soul, because I seek the Good. He thought it was futile to worry about when my soul came to me, as we couldn’t know. What mattered was that I have it now. There is a great deal to be said for this practical view.

Simmea thought my soul must be the same as human and animal souls, and that I had probably been a human and an animal in earlier incarnations, and that I might go on to be a human in future incarnations, as she might have future incarnations as a Worker. She felt that philosophical souls had a kinship. This is what worries me about my length of life—should I choose to die, and let my soul go on? By continuing this life, am I impeding the progress of my soul? I tell myself that killing myself before I have fulfilled my Fate is cowardly, and who is to say when I have fulfilled my Fate? But then, life and death are different for Workers, and one by one I keep outliving my friends. Sometimes I wonder if what is cowardly is to refuse to die out of fear that I may have no soul after all, and that death would be the end. Sokrates did not fear death. In that, he was unusual.

Ficino believed, with Pythagoras, that all souls have a unique number, and that souls are reborn when the world adds up to their number again. He thought the numbers inscribed on the Workers could be the numbers of our souls. (Lysias said they were serial numbers and meaningless.) Ficino thought the soul would have waited from the time my body was made for my mind to develop. He cited human babies as an example—“Babies have souls long before they can reason! You must have been the same.” And he believed my soul would be a special kind, exclusive to Workers. He also believed that animal and human souls were different, on which point Pytheas assures me he was mistaken. Ficino did not live long enough to see Pytheas revealed at the Relocation, which is sad, as I am sure he would have had excellent questions and rejoiced in the answers.