From The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe:
"It would help if we were to talk a bit first. There are a great many things I'd like to learn about Earth."
For an instant I thought I saw a sour smile under the black beard. He said, "Suppose I ask you first --"
He was interrupted -- again -- by Nerissa, I suppose because she wanted to see if we required anything further from the kitchen. I could have strangled her when Dr Marsch halted in midsentence and said instead, "Couldn't this girl ask your aunt if she would see me?"
I had to think quickly. I had been planning to go myself and, after a suitable wait, return and say that my aunt would receive Dr Marsch later, which would have given me an additional opportunity to question him while he waited. But there was at least a possibility (no doubt magnified in my eyes by my eagerness to hear of new discoveries from Earth) that he would not wait -- or that, when and if he did eventually see my aunt, he might mention the incident. If I sent Nerissa I would at least have him to myself while she ran her errand, and there was an excellent chance -- or at least so I imagined -- that my aunt would in fact have some business which she would want to conclude before seeing a stranger. I told Nerissa to go, and Dr Marsch gave her one of his cards after writing a few words on the back.
"Now," I said, "what was it you were about to ask me?"
"Why this house, on a planet that has been inhabited less than two hundred years, seems so absurdly old."
"It was built a hundred and forty years ago, but you must have many on Earth that are far older."
"I suppose so. Hundreds. But for every one of them there are ten thousand that have been up less than a year. Here, almost every building I see seems nearly as old as this one."
"We've never been crowded here, and we haven't had to tear down; that's what Mr Million says. And there are fewer people here now than there were fifty years ago."
"Mr Million?"
I told him about Mr Million, and when I finished he said, "It sounds as if you've got a ten nine unbound simulator here, which should be interesting. Only a few have ever been made."
"A ten nine simulator?"
"A billion, ten to the ninth power. The human brain has several billion synapses, of course; but it's been found that you can simulate its action pretty well --"
It seemed to me that no time at all had passed since Nerissa had left, but she was back. She curtsied to Dr Marsch and said, "Madame will see you." I blurted, "Now?"
"Yes," Nerissa said artlessly, "Madame said right now."
"I'll take him then. You mind the door."
[...]
When I woke, it was an hour past noon, and rain drove in sheets past the window. Mr Million, who was reading a book on the far side of the room, told me that it had been raining like that since six, and for that reason he had not troubled to wake me. I had a splitting headache, as I often did after a long session with my father, and took one of the powders he had prescribed to relieve it. They were gray, and smelled of anise.
"You look unwell," Mr Million said.
"I was hoping to go to the park."
"I know." He rolled across the room toward me, and I recalled that Dr Marsch had called him an "unbound" simulator. For the first time since I had satisfied myself about them when I was quite small, I bent over (at some cost to my head) and read the almost obliterated stampings on his main cabinet. There was only the name of a cybernetics company on Earth and, in French as I had always supposed, his name: M. Million -- "Monsieur" or "Mr" Million. Then, as startling as a blow from behind to a man musing in a comfortable chair, I remembered that a dot was employed in some algebras for multiplication. He saw my change of expression at once. "A thousand million word core capacity," he said. "An English billion or a French milliard, the M being the Roman numeral for one thousand, of course. I thought you understood that some time ago."
"You are an unbound simulator. What is a bound simulator, and whom are you simulating -- my father?"
"No." The face in the screen, Mr Million's face as I had always thought of it, shook its head. "Call me, call the person simulated, at least, your great-grandfather. He -- I -- am dead. In order to achieve simulation, it is necessary to examine the cells of the brain, layer by layer, with a beam of accelerated particles so that the neural patterns can be reproduced, we say 'core imaged,' in the computer. The process is fatal."
I asked after a moment, "And a bound simulator?"
"If the simulation is to have a body that looks human the mechanical body must be linked -- 'bound' -- to a remote core, since the smallest billion word core cannot be made even approximately as small as a human brain." He paused again, and for an instant his face dissolved into myriad sparkling dots, swirling like dust motes in a sunbeam. "I am sorry. For once you wish to listen but I do not wish to lecture. I was told, a very long time ago, just before the operation, that my simulation -- this -- would be capable of emotion in certain circumstances. Until today I had always thought they lied." I would have stopped him if I could, but he rolled out of the room before I could recover from my surprise.
[...]
Although I loved Mr Million as much as I had when I was a boy, I was never able, after that conversation in which I learned the meaning of the familiar lettering on his side, quite to re-establish the old relationship. I was always conscious, as I am conscious now, that the personality I loved had perished years before I was born; and that I addressed an imitation of it, fundamentally mathematical in nature, responding as that personality might to the stimuli of human speech and action. I could never determine whether Mr Million is really aware in that sense which would give him the right to say, as he always has, "I think," and "I feel." When I asked him about it he could only explain that he did not know the answer himself, that having no standard of comparison he could not be positive whether his own mental processes represented true consciousness or not; and I, of course, could not know whether this answer represented the deepest meditation of a soul somehow alive in the dancing abstractions of the simulation, or whether it was merely triggered, a phonographic response, by my question.
Excerpt from The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe, ©1972 Gene Wolfe.
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