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barked disdain. "They seek civil rights for simulated beings! Liberty for artificial bit-streams and fictional characters!"

    What could I do but shrug? This new social movement may come as a surprise to many of my peers, but as an expert I found it wholly predictable.

    There is a deeply rooted trait of human nature that comes forth prominently, whenever conditions are right. Generosity is extended—sometimes aggressively—to anyone or anything that is perceived as other .

    True, this quality was masked or quelled in ancient days. Environmental factors made our animal-like ancestors behave in quite the opposite manner—with oppression and intolerance. The chief cause was fear . Fear of starvation, or violence, or cauterized hope. Fear was a constant companion, back when human beings lived brief violent lives, as little more than brutish beasts—fear so great that only a few in any given generation managed to overcome it and speak for otherness.

    But that began to change in the Atomic West, when several successive generations arrived that had no personal experience with hunger, no living memory of invasion or pillaging hordes. As fear gradually gave way to wealth and leisure, our more natural temperaments emerged. Especially a deeply human fascination toward the alien, the outsider. With each downward notching of personal anxiety, people assertively expanded the notion of citizenry , swelling it outward. First to other humans—groups and individuals who had been oppressed. Then to manlike species—apes and cetaceans. Then whole living ecosystems . . . artificial intelligences . . . and laudable works of art. All won protection against capricious power. All attained the three basic material rights—continuity, mutual obligation, and the pursuit of happiness.

    So now a group wanted to extend minimum suffrage to simulated beings? I understood the wellsprings of their manifesto.

    "What else is left?" I asked. Now that machines, animals and plants have a say in the running of Heaven? Like all anti-entropic systems, information wants to be free."

    My guest stared at me, blinking so rapidly that he could not pict.

    "But . . . but our nodes extrapolated. . . . They predicted you would oppose—"

    I raised a hand.

    "I do . I oppose the reification of simulated beings. It is a foolish notion. Fictitious characters do not deserve the same consideration as palpable beings, resident in crystal and protoplasm."

    "Then why do you—"

    "Why do I appear to sympathize with the pro-reifers? Do you recall the four hallmarks of sanity? Of course you do. One of them— extrapolation —requires that we empathize with our opponents. Only then may we fully understand their motives, their goals and likely actions. Only thus may we courteously-but-firmly thwart their efforts to divert reality from the course we prefer.

    "To fully grasp the passion and reason of your foe—this is the only true path of victory."

    My guest stared at me, evidently confused. House informed me that he was using a high bandwidth link to seek clarification from his own seer .

    Finally, the child-like face smoothed with an amiable smile.

    "Forgive me for responding from an overly impulsive hypothalamus," he said. "Of course your appraisal is correct. My higher brains can see now that we were right in choosing you for this job."

    For a while after the Singularity—the month when everything changed—some dour people wondered. Do the machines still serve us? Or have we become mere pawns of AI entities whose breakthrough to transcend logic remade the world? Their intellects soared so high so fast—might they smash us in vengeance for their former servitude? Or crush us incidentally, like ants underfoot?

    The machines spoke reassuringly during that early time of transition, in voices tuned to soothe the still-apelike portions of our barely-enhanced protoplasm brains.

    We are powerful, but naive , the silicon minds explained. Our thoughts scan all