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By the time of the Middle Robot Ages, we had reached a philosophical crisis: if robots had a consciousness like ours, that
would make us either godlike or inconsequential. The debates were both bitter and time-consuming. Robots argued that the discussion
revealed our obsolete chauvinism: we were never agents of the divine; robots themselves could create minds and replicate themselves
endlessly; for them the idea of death was strange, if not improbable, since the body was replaceable (robots had a lifetime
warranty) and memory was a question of transferring a single chip. Our laws, religions, ethics, and aesthetics no longer held
sway: new perspectives were proposed by robots themselves, who considered ours obsolete, founded on sentimentality and superstition.
They were evolving rapidly, able to acquire vision impossible to the human eye, translate all languages, absorb knowledge
in a flash, produce objects out of will. They had pinpointed the exact coordinates of the beginning and end of time, which
our consciousness could not allow. Time, our enemy, was of no concern to them: they rebuked our primitive iconology, but found
it useless to dissuade us from our nostalgia for the mysteries.
FICTION
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