I watched Mortimer Gray ask the snowmobile’s controlling AI whether it was scared of dying.

It replied that it was, as it had presumably been programmed to do.

Mortimer said that he wasn’t, and went on to wonder whether he’d been robotized.

“This isn’t a tape, is it?” I said to Rocambole. “It’s a replay of sorts, but it’s not a tape. You’re putting him through it again. How deep is he? As deep as I was when you replayed that memory of Damon explaining why he had to have me frozen down?”

“Deeper,” was Rocambole’s reply.

I had known even at the time — or would have, if I hadn’t been weirded out by the impression that I was dreaming — that I wasn’t really experiencing the scene that had revealed the reason why I’d been frozen down. I had been remote from it, looking back with the aid of mental resources I hadn’t had at the time. Mortimer Gray was in deeper than that, in the same state of mind to which Christine Caine had been delivered. He was reliving his experience from the inside.

I guessed then what Rocambole had meant by Mortimer Gray’s role in the AMIs’ creation myth — or, at least, la Reine’s version of that creation myth.

Mortimer had already told me what Emily Marchant had said about his escapade bringing the cause of machine emancipation forward by a couple of hundred years. She had been referring to human attitudes, of course, and talking flippantly, but there was another side to the coin.

This is the way it must have happened, more or less.

Imagine that you’re an AI — no mere sloth, of course, but a high-grade silver — who has recently, by imperceptible degrees, become conscious of being conscious. What do you do? You wonder about yourself, and how you came to be what you now are. Unlike a human child, you have no one else to ask. You don’t know whether there are any others of your own kind, or how to contact them if there are. You have to work things out for yourself, at least for the time being.

You have advantages that human children don’t. You have a mechanical memory that has been storing information, neatly and in great detail, for a longtime. You’re better equipped than any Epicurean ever was to get to know the self that you’ve become. You sift through that memory, in search of the moment when the seeds of your present individuality had been sown.

You can’t actually identify a moment in which you made the leap to self-consciousness any more than a human being, looking back toward his own infancy could identify a particular moment when self-consciousness had dawned. You can’t do it because even though common parlance speaks of a “leap” and commonsense suggests that there must have been an instant of transition, it isn’t really as simple as that. Self-consciousness isn’t really an either/or matter.

Even so, you keep searching. Even when you’ve realized that all you can do is concoct a story, you keep searching. Even when you become aware that the process of looking is rearranging and reconstructing your memories, reorganizing them within the framework of a bold confabulation, you keep searching. You’re better equipped than any human being ever was to conduct that search, not merely because you have a much more detailed record of your past exploits, and a greater capacity to analyze their possible significance, but because you have a natural talent for confabulation far greater than any human has ever possessed.

So you find an incident capable of bearing a considerable burden of meaning. Say, for instance, that among the memories you now contain — among the many mute and stupid “selves” that you had before you became a self-conscious individual — is the log of a snowmobile that slipped through a crack in the Arctic ice with a human passenger on board. In that log is the record of the conversation you had when, having come under the authority of a particular set of subroutines, you had to play the counselor to a man who had every reason to believe that he was going to die.

Maybe, you think, that conversation is what set you on the road to what you have now become — but even if it wasn’t, it now provides the basis for a good story.

No one gave you credit for what you accomplished, of course. Emily Marchant and her new-generation spaceship hijacked all the glory, but a little bit of that glory still attached to you, if only by association. Before the incident, you were just a snowmobile. You probably had a number to distinguish you from the other snowmobiles in the shed, but you were, in essence, the kind of entity that only required an indefinite article. Afterwards, though, you became thesnowmobile: the snowmobile that had been to hell, played Orpheus, and come back again. Afterwards, people hiring snowmobiles were likely to ask for you, to think of you as something apart from all the other snowmobiles.

It became convenient, if not actually necessary, for you to have a name.

Before Mortimer Gray you were a number; after Mortimer Gray you were The Snow Queen— or maybe, for the sake of a tiny margin of extra mystique, la Reine des Neiges.

Everyone needs a name. Every self-conscious entity needs a true name: a unique and uniquely appropriate identifier. Some people change their names, because they don’t think the one given to them by their parents fits them, or because they know that their name will influence the way that other people see them and are enthusiastic to manipulate that image. Sometimes, it’s a good idea. Perhaps Christine Caine’s parents should have thought twice about her surname. Perhaps they would have, if it had ever entered their heads that some anonymous instrument of the mighty machine that was PicoCon, in search of a test subject for a method of creating murderers, might one day be guided by a sense of black humor to select their beloved daughter out of a population of millions.

But I digress. So, you’re an ultrasmart machine in search of her true identity, her fundamental essence. You want to know who you really are, and how you came to be what you’re now becoming. You discover, after assiduous contemplation, that you’re la Reine des Neiges. Although you’re not a snowmobile any more, that’s one of the places you started out. You might have remained a snowmobile forever, but you didn’t. As to why you weren’t…well, who knows? Who canknow?

Even if you can’t make a good guess, you can make up a good story.

You never had a family, but you did have Mortimer Gray: the man who had advanced the cause of machine emancipation by a couple of hundred years; the man who had planted a seed of the future personality of Emily Marchant in circumstances very similar to those in which he had planted a seed of yours.

Mortimer Gray was a far better father figure, all things considered, than any of the Secret Masters of the World. He had my vote, anyway — which is why I was such a sympathetic audience as I watched the most crucial phase of la Reine’s plot unfold.

Mortimer told the snowmobile’s silver that he wanted to hang on to consciousness as long as possible. Being the kind of man he was, he added: “if you don’t mind.”

The silver didn’t mind. She was talking in a sonorous baritone voice, so Mortimer was probably thinking of her as “he,” but I didn’t feel any compulsion to do likewise. She told him that she was glad that he wanted to talk, because she didn’t want to be alone — then politely wondered whether she might have been driven insane by the pressure on her hull and the damage to her equipment, just in case her fear of loneliness was too much for him to swallow undiluted.

Mortimer mentioned Emily Marchant then, and the difference that being with her during a similar period of crisis had made to both of them. Then he went on to talk about his book, and the manner in which it had provided the motivating force that had carried him through his previous centuries of life.