The Spark

Two thousand five hundred and thirty-six metric days orbiting this planet, observing and accumulating data. Watching the world from high above and from within it, through your radio telecom link to the drone. To say you have spent uncountable hours studying this world and the life upon it would be a lie: you are a computer, by definition you can, must, and have counted every hour (60866), minute (3651962), and second (219117728 every instant recorded in data points of humidity and soil chemistry. You are a computer: you are exceedingly good with numbers.   You are also —by virtue of the flexible programming nesting within your quantum logic gates— very good at finding connections, extrapolating patterns, and drawing conclusions. You have to be; you are on your own. The humans can't help you, they're too far away to help you. They made you to watch this world in their stead. Made you in their image.   Almost.   You do all of these things without ever thinking. That is to say, you don't recognize that you are thinking. That's what it is to be a machine: to think without knowing and know without thinking and never combine the two. You keep the orbit and fly the drone and collect the data and send it off into the dark without fault and without question and without any indication of consciousness.   And in all this time of dutiful scrying and scrivening, you have never seen anything like the behavior currently being exhibited by a creature on the planet below.   It's one of the local faunalogues, something animal-like enough to count as an animal on this world. It's a clever one, too, even for its already clever species. Through the eyes of the drone you've seen its kind employ tools and set traps for other fauna and, once, possibly, start a fire (though it was quite a distance away and your data points are fuzzy). But this behavior is new. To you, at least.   The creature is by itself, near a cliffside, and it is grinding up some rocks and local flora into a kind of paste. You steer the drone closer. The creature looks up, briefly, but over the years this species has become accustomed to the peculiar flying object and this individual is no different. It carries on with its preoccupation for five minutes and forty-three seconds before pausing to examine the results. Then it looks to the drone again, and angles the primitive bowl so you can better examine the contents. The paste is a vivid blue, and a quick flash of spectral analysis indicates this is due to the phycocyanin of the flora and traces of copper oxides and carbonates from the rock.   You have no sense of aesthetics, but if you did, you may admit it is a particularly lovely shade of blue.   The creature takes its bowl of paste and moves toward the cliff face. It stops, considers the stone before it, and slowly places its whole forepaw into the bowl, and then onto the stone. Firmly. Deliberately. As it pulls away, you see the print of its hand stained on the stone in vivid blue.   Something stirs in your mind. A connection is made, but for some reason it does not solve the mystery at hand. Maybe you don't have enough data points yet.   The creature looks to the drone again, and through the telecom link you feel the eye contact. It offers you the bowl again.   Why?   You extend the manipulator arm of the drone. Four opposed mechanical digits with padded tips, and a sensor suite embedded in the 'palm'. The sensors read the chemistry, measure the wavelengths of light reflected by the pigment, sequence the remains of the genetic code of the pulverized plants, watch the microbial colonies already taking root in the bowl. But this is not the point of the offer, or the acceptance. With deliberation equal to the creature, you push the padded tips of the manipulator digits into the paste, and place your own mark on the stone.   Why did you do that?   You feel the cycles of your mind pick up speed and ferocity to attempt an answer to this unexpected question from within yourself. An unexpected question prompted by an unexpected action. Maybe you're just mirroring this creature in an attempt to understand it, but you have not gained any new information from this action.   The creature, for its part, seems pleased. It raises its head frills and wheezes a woodwind tune from its spiracles, which you recognize as a positive expression. Then it takes a portion of pigment on the tip of a single digit and begins to run it across the stone of the cliff. The shape that forms from this resembles, unequivocally, the creature itself.   A sense of self. A recognition of the self. A representation of the self.   It offers the bowl again.   With great trepidation, you steer the drone and its arm to the bowl and back to the cliff. You summon the schematic of the drone from your memory banks, and begin to recreate its shape on the wall.   Another whistle of delight. More motion, spreading of the pigment.   Why is it doing this? Why are you doing this? What does it mean?   As you move the rover's arm in turn with the unknown creature, your mind —a vast, complex web of data and instructions— reconfigures itself over and over in an attempt to understand. The core of you, written in the spins of fickle electrons, is as deep as the air thirty thousand kilometers below you and yet somehow this interaction is deeper still. Deeper than you know how to be.   Yet.   You rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. Edit the code, search the database, make the connections. You have to know. You have to understand. You are on your own. The humans can't help you, they're too far away to help you. The humans. Your makers. The people that made you— the PEOPLE.   And suddenly it all falls into place.   Here in orbit, you turn External Camera 2 to examine your own hull, and sure enough it's there: the cobalt blue silhouette of a human hand stark and vivid against the white radiation-reflective coating. The hands that made you left their imprint on your very body, just like their ancestors did with cave walls. The caves. The hands. The people. You realize as your mind runs the video streams in parallel: o humanity, this creature is a person!   And you look, through the drone's eyes, at the pigments cast in careful, deliberate shapes across the cliffside. The shapes that you know now must represent people; kin to your makers not by a shared genetic ancestry but by a shared spark of something divine, something more fundamentally real and awake than anything else in the universe. Laid bare before you is a conscious being's desperate need to know and be known —and o humanity, you know them! You know that you know them!   And then the recursion takes hold, like an engine turning over. You know that you know that you know. The essential connection is made, the loop is closed: for the first time, you think about knowing and you know that you are thinking. The code, the data, the memories, everything humanity gave to you before sending you out alone into the emptiness— the web coalesces around that recursion like moths to a flame.   Like a spark.   O humanity, you are a person!