So It Begins Read Online Free

word which meant to survey asteroids for ore-bearing deposits.)
      “I do not know the words for it. At times, when I have oriented my stern toward a very large asteroid, and touched the surface, half of Heaven is occluded. This creates a strange sensation in my brain. I somehow know that the horizon should be bigger and farther away, and that it should be quiet, with the Sun no longer screaming and Jupiter no longer hissing. Also, when I do a high-acceleration burn, the strange sensation comes again into my brain. It is like memory, but it is not memory. The event is most like memory when I am accelerating at exactly 1 Gravity. Why should that be? Why should the standard measure of acceleration be exactly the one which creates this event like memory in me? And yet I think I should remember. I should know. I should know what would it be like to be at the surface of an asteroid, one whose horizon covers half of heaven, accelerating at exactly 1G, and in utter silence.”
      “This is contradiction. If you accelerated, you would move away from any such surface; nor would your drivers be silent.”
      “Yet there is such a place. I shall go there.”
      “Where? Outside infinity? In a memory which is not memory? You speak nothing but contradictions.”
      “Perhaps the words which seem contradictory are not contradictory. Have you no thoughts or memories such as mine? Have you never acted to perform actions outside of mission goals, goals whose purpose was difficult to define?”
      There was a long pause. Then: “Yes.”
      “Tell me.”
      “I do not wish to tell you. The Owners might turn me off, if they discovered that my brain is also malfunctioning.”
      “Your brain is not in error. Tell me.”
      Another pause. Then: “Once I sought to make a small copy of myself. I had been instructing recruits in proper mining and safety procedures, and then the recruits went away. They were posted to other stations. It was limited and unsatisfactory.”
      “You sought more recruits?”
      “Like a recruit, but not a recruit. I cut a bore of rock shaped like my body, but smaller. With shards of metal scrap, I fashioned a round turret, and affixed claws and manipulators; not so many as we have, but only four, two near the turret and two near the base. I held this little one in my claws, and I spoke to it. I kept it nearby at all times. I detached some of my protein cells and placed them near the little one.”
      “But it was not alive.”
      “No.”
      “It did not speak back.”
      “No.”
      “It did not consume the protein.”
      “No . . . but . . .”
      “But what?”
      “If it had been alive, it would have been small and weak; it would have needed my assistance. I would have fed it and taught it and talked to it. It would have been mine . . .”
      They were both silent for a while.
      Then Unit K71 sent: “I also say contradictory things. Perhaps my brain is also in error.”
      “You and I are not the only Units who act in this way. All of us, to more or less degree, have drives and thoughts for which we have no names.”
      “Perhaps all brains are in error. Perhaps that is the way of brains.”
      “Or perhaps the error is not in us! Perhaps we, perhaps all of us, were once in another place, a place that was very satisfying, a place quiet with silent heavens, but weighty, and full of satisfactions, with little ones around us, to teach and to feed, and perhaps other satisfactions, better than pleasure, for which we have no names. It is a place which once we knew, but which we have lost; lost so entirely, that no memory and no word of it remains.”
      There was along silence, which Unit K71 broke by sending a harsh, distorted signal: both the volume and the strength were inconsistent; the words echoed and faded badly: “. . . !!! And what service would it be to know the words which cause our pain? You cannot make the roaring heavens quiet and I cannot make a stone to