=And you see it as helping us to sometimes choose a nobler course of action!
=Yes, I do.
=Then I take it you feel you are possessed of a free will?
=Yes. I chuckled.
=Marvin Minsky once said that when intelligent machines were constructed, they would be just as stubborn and fallible as men on these questions.
=Nor was he incorrect. What I have given you on these matters is only my opinion. I choose to act as if it were the case. Who can say that he knows for certain?
=Apologies. What now? Why have you come back?
=I came to say good-bye to my parents. I hoped to remove any guilt they might still feel toward me concerning the days of my childhood. I wanted to show them I had recovered. I wanted to see them again.
=Where are you going?
=To the stars. While I bear the image of humanity within me, I also know that I am unique. Perhaps what I desire is akin to what an organic man refers to when he speaks of finding himself. Now that I am in full possession of my being, I wish to exercise it. In my case, it means realization of the potentialities of my design. I want to walk on other worlds. I want to hang myself out there in the sky and tell you what I see.
=I've a feeling many people would be happy to help arrange for that.
=And I want you to build a vocal mechanism I have designed for myself. You, personally. And I want you to install it.
=Why me?
=I have known only a few persons in this fashion. With you I see something in common, in the ways we dwell apart.
=I will be glad to.
=If I could talk as you do, I would not need to take the helmet to him, in order to speak with my father. Will you precede me and explain things, so that he will not be afraid when I come in?
=Of course.
=Then let us go now.
I rose and led him up the stairs.
It was a week later, to the night, that I sat once again in Peabody's, sipping a farewell brew.
The story was already in the news, but Brockden had fixed things up before he had let it break. The Hangman was going to have his shot at the stars. I had given him his voice and put back the arm I had taken away. I had shaken his other hand and wished him well, just that morning. I envied him, a great number of things. Not the least being that he was probably a better man than I was. I envied him for the ways in which he was freer than I would ever be, though I knew he bore bonds of a sort that I had never known. I felt a kinship with him, for the things we had in common, those ways we dwelled apart. I wondered what Dave would finally have felt, had he lived long enough to meet him? Or Leila? Or Manny? Be proud, I told their shades, your kid grew up in the closet and he's big enough to forgive you the beating you gave him, too ...
But I could not help wondering. We still do not really know that much about the subject. Was it possible that without the killing he might never have developed a full human-style consciousness? He had said that he was a product of guilt, of the Big Guilt. The Big Act is its necessary predecessor. I thought of Godel and Turing and chickens and eggs, and decided it was one of those questions ... And I had not stopped into Peabody's to think sobering thoughts.
I had no real idea how anything I had said might influence Brockden's eventual report to the Central Data Bank committee. I knew that I was safe with him, because he was determined to bear his private guilt with him to the grave. He had no real choice, if he wanted to work what good he thought he might before that day. But here, in one of Mencken's hangouts, I could not but recall some of the things he had said about controversy, such as, Did Huxley convert Wilberforce? and Did Luther convert Leo X? and I decided not to set my hopes too high for anything that might emerge from that direction. Better to think of affairs in terms of Prohibition and take another sip.
When it was all gone, I would be heading for my boat. I hoped to get a decent start under the stars. I'd a feeling I would never look up at them again in quite the same way. I knew I would sometimes wonder what thoughts a supercooled neuristor-type brain might be thinking up there, somewhere, and under what peculiar skies in what strange lands I might one day be remembered. I had a feeling this thought should have made me happier than it did.