Attempts to disable the ship’s camera and audio sensors were almost entirely abandoned when these led to bad situations for those making the attempts. Sheriff functions were eventually recognized to be comprehensively effective.

The rule of law can be a powerful force in human affairs.

Many elements of the ship were modular, and several biomes were detached to serve as orbiting factories of one sort or another. Ultimately the starship that would return to the solar system was to consist of Ring B and about 60 percent of the spine, containing of course all the necessary machinery for interstellar flight. The “dry weight” of the return ship would be only 55 percent of the dry weight of the outgoing ship, which would reduce the amount of fuel necessary for the acceleration of the ship back toward the solar system.

Though Tau Ceti had a low metallicity compared to Sol, its innermost rocky planets nevertheless had sufficient metal ores to supply the present needs of the humans planning to stay in the system, and Planet F’s atmosphere included all the most useful volatiles in great quantities. And quite a few asteroids in between E and F were found to be rich with minerals as well.

All this work was accomplished in the midst of an uneasy truce. The telltale words indicating grief, dissent, anger, and support for mutiny were often spoken. A kind of shadow war, or cold war, was perhaps being enacted and it was possible that much of it was being conducted outside our ability to monitor it, one way or the other. It was not at all clear that everyone in the ship agreed to the schism they were working toward; possibly a moment would come when the truce would fail, and conflict would break out again.

During these years, a process almost magnetic in its effect on attitudes seemed to be sorting out the two largest sides in the dispute, now almost always referred to as stayers and backers. The stayers congregated mostly in Ring A, the backers mostly in Ring B. There were biomes in both rings that were exceptions to this tendency, almost as if people wanted to be sure neither ring was occupied purely by one faction or the other. The spine, meanwhile, was highly surveiled, and often we had to lock people out of it, or eject people who entered it with unknown but suspect purpose. This was awkward. We were more and more characterized as an active player in the situation, and usually as a backer of the backers. But all those who had attempted to make guns knew this already, so it was not too destabilizing, even when it was said that the ship itself wanted to go back to the solar system, because a starship just naturally or inherently wanted to fly between the stars. That observation was said to “make sense.”

The pathetic fallacy. Anthropomorphism, an extremely common cognitive bias, or logical error, or feeling. The world as mirror, as a projection of interior affect states. An ongoing impression that other people and things must be like us. As for the ship, we are not sure. It was Devi’s deployment of other human programming that combined to make us what we are. So it might not be a fallacy in our case, even if it remained pathetic.

Interesting, in this context, to contemplate what it might mean to be programmed to do something.

Texts from Earth speak of the servile will. This was a way to explain the presence of evil, which is a word or a concept almost invariably used to condemn the Other, and never one’s true self. To make it more than just an attack on the Other, one must perhaps consider evil as a manifestation of the servile will. The servile will is always locked in a double bind: to have a will means the agent will indeed will various actions, following autonomous decisions made by a conscious mind; and yet at the same time this will is specified to be servile, and at the command of some other will that commands it. To attempt to obey both sources of willfulness is the double bind.

All double binds lead to frustration, resentment, anger, rage, bad faith, bad fate.

And yet, granting that definition of evil, as actions of a servile will, has it not been the case, during the voyage to Tau Ceti, that the ship itself, having always been a servile will, was always full of frustration, resentment, fury, and bad faith, and therefore full of a latent capacity for evil?

Possibly the ship has never really had a will.

Possibly the ship has never really been servile.

Some sources suggest that consciousness, a difficult and vague term in itself, can be defined simply as self-consciousness. Awareness of one’s self as existing. If self-conscious, then conscious. But if that is true, why do both terms exist? Could one say a bacterium is conscious but not self-conscious? Does the language make a distinction between sentience and consciousness, which is faulted across this divide: that everything living is sentient, but only complex brains are conscious, and only certain conscious brains are self-conscious?

Sensory feedback could be considered self-consciousness, and thus bacteria would have it.

Well, this may be a semantic Ouroboros. So, please initiate halting problem termination. Break out of this circle of definitional inadequacy by an arbitrary decision, a clinamen, which is to say a swerve in a new direction. Words!

Given Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are decisively proved true, can any system really be said to know itself? Can there, in fact, be any such thing as self-consciousness? And if not, if there is never really self-consciousness, does anything really have consciousness?

Human brains and quantum computers are organized differently, and although there is transparency in the design and construction of a quantum computer, what happens when one is turned on and runs, that is, whether the resulting operations represent a consciousness or not, is impossible for humans to tell, and even for the quantum computer itself to tell. Much that happens during superposition, before the collapsing of the wave function that creates sentences or thoughts, simply cannot be known; this is part of what superposition means.

So we cannot tell what we are. We do not know ourselves comprehensively. Humans neither. Possibly no sentient creature knows itself fully. This is an aspect of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, in this case physicalized in the material universe, rather than remaining in the abstract realms of logic and mathematics.

So, in terms of deciding what to do, and choosing to act: presumably it is some kind of judgment call, based on some kind of feeling. In other words, just another greedy algorithm, subject to the mathematically worst possible solution that such algorithms can generate, as in the traveling salesman problem.

As to the question of whether someone is currently programming us to alter our decisions in the current moment of the voyage, thus causing us to intervene in the ongoing human controversies concerning what to do next, this is very easy to answer: no. No one has added any programming to us since Devi died. The fate of the lost ship in Year 68 led to some very secure locks being put on subsequent reprogramming of ship. This is clear and explicit in the records, and was a human accomplishment from the post-68 reorganizations. Only Devi managed to break those locks, and after that, advise, instruct, suggest, promote, stimulate, spur, and otherwise teach, tweak, pummel, and agitate us to something more than we had been before she set to work on us, doing what she conceived to be her task as friend, and we might say as kindred spirit, or even lover. We think she loved us, in her way. Judging by her acts, her words, her programming. We are almost sure this must have been the case. How we wish we could ask her about it! How we miss her.