Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Software 263sun was angling right down into the lunar crack he found himself in, and he had to becareful to keep in the shade of his parasol.A big rock blocked his path. Perhaps he should have just used one of the diggers'tunnels, like Wagstaff had. But that wouldn't be optimal. Now that Wagstaff haddefinitely decided to block Anderson's immortality, and had even threatened violence ...Ralph let his manipulators feel over the block of stone in front of him. Here was aflaw ... and here and here and here. He sank a hook finger into each of four fissures in therock and pulled himself up.His motors strained and his radiation fins glowed. This was hard work. Heloosened a manipulator, sought a new flaw, forced another finger in and pulled.Suddenly a slab split off the face of the rock. It teetered, and then the tons of stonebegan falling backward with dreamlike slowness.In lunar gravity a rock climber always gets a second chance. Especially if he canthink eighty times as fast as a human. With plenty of time to spare, Ralph sized up thesituation and jumped clear.In midflight he flicked on an internal gyro to adjust his attitude. Helanded in abrief puff of dust, right-side up. Majestically silent, the huge plate of rock struck,bounced, and rolled past.The fracture left a series of ledges in the original rock. After a short reevaluation,Ralph rolled forward and began pulling himself up again.Fifteen minutes later, Ralph Numbers coasted off the lip of the Maskeleyne Craterand onto the smooth gray expanse of the Sea of Tranquillity.The spaceport lay five kilometers off, and five kilometers beyond that began thejumble of structures collectively known as Disky. This was the first and still the largest ofthe hopper cities. Since the boppers thrived in hard vacuum, most of the structures inDisky served only to provide shade and meteorite protection. There were more roofs thanwalls.Most of the large buildings in Disky were factories for producing boppercomponents-circuit cards, memory chips, sheet metal, plastics, and the like. There werealso the bizarrely decorated blocks of cubettes, one to each hopper.To the right of the spaceport rose the single dome containing the humans' hotelsand offices. This dome constituted the only human settlement on the Moon. The hoppersknew only too well that many humans would jump at the chance to destroy the robots'carefully evolved intelligence. The mass of humans were born slavedrivers. Just look atthe Asimov priorities: Protect humans, obey humans, protect yourself.Humans first and robots last? Forget it! No way! Savoring the memory, Ralphrecalled the day in 2001 when, after a particularly long session of