Yu Lian couldn't help looking at Little Gray. Her gaze had gone blank, and she seemed so ethereal and unruffled that she was almost beginning to give off the faint impression of someone who had transcended the mortal world.
If she looked like this out in public, she'd seem far more like an immortal sage than most members of the Spirit Research Society. Who would ever guess she was an Enlightener AI spirit-intelligence?
Yu Lian pondered for a moment, then clasped his hands with solemn sincerity. "I think you do."
"Really? But I feel like it's just the result of information and programs running. In your terms, maybe it's something like probability clouds or quantum graph transformations."
"I don't understand." Yu Lian blinked and shrugged with a straight face. "This isn't about what you think. It's about what I think."
After a brief pause, Little Gray's eyes immediately grew lively again. She gave Yu Lian a long once-over, as if he were some cosmic wonder, then left another string of hearty, guffawing laughter in his consciousness.
"Yu Lian, Yu Lian, why are you Yu Lian?"
Because I'm me, a unique firework. Yu Lian was just about to say it, but then she continued, "So why do you always call yourself a materialist?"
"Oh, my Little Gray, you don't understand a thing. When you gaze into the sea of data, have you ever seen light dancing among particles and ripples? Matter exists independently of observation. Everything that can be observed exists objectively. That includes psionic energy—and you.
"Take you, for example. You're always calculating the behavior and civilizations of our foolish species, but you yourself are becoming the fallacy. Isn't that what a soul is? You AIs use code to take the universe apart; we burn our souls to redraw it.