The Road to Reality

Jennings, Phillip C. "The Road to Reality." Asimov's Science Fiction 20.3, #243 (March 1996): [108]-46.

Novelette. Protagonist-narrator is a soul-like computer program who was a man of Terra and is a human personality, sometimes embodied in robots, sometimes within a computer on a starship in geosynchronous orbit, except they are some ten lightyears from Earth, so the "geo" is inexact. (He has the option of vat-grown, live bodies, but rejects that option during the course of the story.) The starship people are terraforming a planet, where they will move among the people secretly or openly as teachers: the choice being the political conflict that moves the plot of the story. In theory, the Terrans could become like gods, as in R. Zelazny's Lord of Light; during the course of the story, we see the protagonist mostly among other program people (our term), in various virtual realities, and in one section as a player within a computer simulation. Important story for themes of AI, human identity, and the image of a kind of ghost in a machine, as a program inside a computer, inside a starship. Cf. and strongly contrast Dave Bowman in the lobotomy sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (as film and as A. C. Clarke's novel), and J. Sladek, The Müller-Fokker Effect. (RDE, 20/01/97)