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The Ghost in the Machine: The Concept of Self in Stanislaw Lem's Mortal Engines
An earlier version of this essay appeared in The Liberal & Fine Arts Review, 4.1 (Eastern New Mexico University, 1984): 1-18.
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer . . . as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petal of a flower.                            — Robert Pirsig, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

  Mortal Engines (1977), a collection of fourteen stories, is one of Stanislaw Lem's most interesting works to appear in English. Perhaps the most common theme in Lem's work is his interest in cybernetics, computers, hypothetical machine consciousness, and the social response to these. In addition to speculating on sociological effects, Lem explores some of the philosophical problems computers and cybernetics are likely to cause. For example, would human beings recognize conscious machine intelligence as having equivalent human rights so that it could not be arbitrarily turned off (murder) nor told what to do (slavery)? What, if anything, would constitute an equivalent human being having similar rights? We can, perhaps, imagine a computer that simulates conscious thought, but can we imagine one possessing an unconscious? Could it dream and be motivated by unconscious needs? And without such experience, could it have a subjective dimension or even use language the way human beings do? These and many more questions distinguish Lem as a unique writer, one who is reformulating traditional humanistic questions in the light of contemporary computer science. Faced with the possibility of a conscious computer, the perennial question of "who am I" must be treated with new evidence.

The central consideration in Mortal Engines is whether a machine intelligence can possess a self or a soul. The Christian (Western) notion of the soul (and the allied questions of what constitutes a self or what constitutes a person) is not as simple and culturally self-evident as it initially appears to be. Without making this into another essay, I will simply cite Paul Tillich's definition of the soul: "Life as spirit is the life of the soul, which includes mind and body, but not as [substantive] realities alongside the soul. Spirit is not a 'part,' nor is it a special function. It is the all-embracing [temporal] function in which all elements of the structure of being participate. Life as spirit can be found by man only in man, for only in him is the structure of being completely realized" (Systematic Theology, vol. I, 250). Readers would not ordinarily expect a science-fiction writer to know anything about systematic theology. Stanislaw Lem, however, "spent many hours over coffee arguing about God" with his friend Karol Wojtlay, who taught theology in Krackow before becoming Pope John-Paul II (W. Michaelson, "A Conversation with Stanislaw Lem," Amazing Magazine, January 1981: 116-119).

Moral problems in the fables of The Cyberiad (1974), perhaps Lem's best work, were hidden by the dazzling surface of Lem's decorative style. But there is an obvious evil abroad in the universe of Mortal Engines. These are tales told by robots who are systematically hunted and exterminated by the human race that created them, presumably because they are conscious. The background for most of the stories in the collection is presented in "Two Monsters." It seems that human beings created very sophisticated thinking machines that they "called iron angels out of mockery, for they held them in cruel bondage." The robots are apparently too reverent of their creators — who were "unlike intelligent ones, crystal ones, ones of steel or beaten gold — unlike anyone who lives in metal" — to kill them. So, like the Israelites in Pharaoh's Egypt, they flee. Then, in a genocide that reverses the script of Battlestar Galactica (where the Silon robots seek to exterminate all human beings), it is the human beings in Mortal Engines who "use their twisted power to revenge themselves for that desertion of yore," while the robots submit to death like Christian martyrs. There is one fable, titled "How Erg the Self-inducting Slew a Paleface" (i.e., a human), but it turns out that the slaying was a fabrication told by a robot in order to win a princess.

The theme of how "white creatures who throughout the Universe hunt down all life born of metal, and annihilate it for the sake of vengeance" creates a somber tone in "The White Death." In this story a race called Enterites lives ten miles below the surface of their planet. They take great pains not to disturb even "the smallest pebble, upon the surface of the globe" because if they do, they fear that human beings will discover their existence and eradicate them. They fill the planet's "interior with crystal gardens and cities of silver and gold" and are "fond of splendor and geometry." Totally innocent beings, they live embryonically inside their world, where, being so enamored "of their own forms . . . their whole world served them as a mirror." A fatal curiosity entices them to venture beyond their womb-world to retrieve a crashed rocket from the surface. Although they hammer it into pieces and launch those into space, an invisible spore falls and hatches to release the robotic poison of oxygen and moisture. Rust and mold destroy the higher robotic life and Lem's funeral tone is obvious in writing the ending: "In the caves machines stood still, the crystal fires went out, a brownish leprosy ate at the sparkling domes, and when the last atomic heat had leaked away, darkness fell, and in that darkness there grew, penetrating the brittle skeletons, invading the rusted skulls, filling the extinguished sockets — a downy, damp white mold." Human beings — known as "quag-backed pasties" and "fenny-eyed slubberyukes" — have a "peculiar custom" of stuffing various objects into the bottom of their faces. Why they do this is unknown, but various theories propose that it may be a way to drain excess venom, or it may be a ritual of destruction, or it may be a manifestation of greed, "for it would consume everything if it were able." In any case, these palefaces seem compelled by a murderous vengeance against what Asimov called "the cleaner, better breed." The point of such fantasy comparison is to suggest an analysis of human nature vis a vis the imagined nature of a robotic being, an "iron angel." How deeply could a computer simulate a human being?

In the translator's introduction, Michael Kandel explains that the title Mortal Engines implies that Lem's robotic beings, whose bodies are mechanical engines, are in some objective sense mortal, being both "subject to death" and "death dealing." This prompts the question of whether such hypothetical machine intelligences are really "alive" in the human sense. At this point, Kandel suggests that cybernetics offers a positivistic definition of "aliveness" reduced to the Turning test: a demonstrable system of reasoning with the ability to alter the process through feedback. It is the fact that the system can produce what a human would recognize as information that is critical for this definition, not whether the elements or means are protoplasmic or silicon or metallic. This leads Kandel, in explaining Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, to say that with this definition "the distinction between natural and artificial ceased to have significance, and an artificial man would be better thought of as an analog man." Kandel goes on to say, "Cybernetics, also suggests that a machine which crosses a certain threshold of complexity will in this respect share man's humanity." This sentence should be read carefully. For Kandel says that a sufficiently complex machine intelligence shares only the quality of intelligence with man. He does not say that, by merely demonstrating approximately equivalent intelligence, the machine is therefore equivalent to man. This distinction is not often made in either in the realm of science fiction or the realm of artificial intelligence and computer development. In commenting on behaviorism, Kandel writes: "As for the soul, consciousness, sentience, the 'ghost in the machine,' these were undemonstrables — in men as well as in machines." Consequently, by combining behaviorism (which reduces man to a calculating survival process) with cybernetics (which claims that machines can demonstrate the same intelligence) we achieve the possibility for a machine-human equivalency.

Behaviorism's disingenuous claims about the "undemonstrable" or nonobjective character of human meaning, evident in everything from the love of one's family to the taste of a well made cup of coffee, no longer needs to be met by theoretical argument. If it does, I recommend the pragmatist works of Richard Rorty and the social philosophy of Charles Taylor before attempting the difficult works of Heidegger. Even without Thomas Kuhn's explanations of science as an institution, in part, dedicated to the acquisition of power, the stridency of behaviorism's claims suggest that something more than Roger Bacon's "muster of observation" is at work. We do not need to elaborate the theoretical counter-model supplied by pragmatism to recognize the flaw in this thinking: the reduction of human experience to a thin, logically articulated object. We might, however, say that ontological reason (nous, "intellect" in Aristotle) not only engenders logic or a set of means (consciousness), but also fosters a process that transcends these operations to recognize the axioms or ends for which the set exists (the unconscious). Although he did not make of it the same thing as Aristotle, Plato recognized this point as well, using it in chapter 24 of The Republic to differentiate between "intelligence," that intuitively recognizes fundamental truths, and "thinking," that, as in geometry, laboriously follows a line of logical development, step-by-step, without knowing exactly where it will terminate. Since ontological truth exists only for humans — as the dimension that makes us human — it is essentially a category of moral reason.

The progress of the exact sciences, especially in the last century and now with computer science, created a false autonomy for technical reason. The paradigm of science and technical reason constitutes a closed system that elaborates means and methods but cannot, using those methods, identify ends. It is therefore akin to machine intelligence: conscious — or at least exhibiting purposive behavior to a human observer — and complex, with an elaborate sequence of functions, but without an underlying unconscious (or Dasein) to provide motive and need. Because behaviorism and cybernetics recognize no transcendental reason beyond objective operations, it speculates, says Jacques Ellul, that ends can be provided "by nonrational forces, either by positive traditions or by arbitrary decisions serving the will to power." (Ellul considers technique to be a moral choice. For a concise introduction to his thought, see his essay, "The Technological Order," in Technology and Culture, 3 (1962): 394-421.) Ironically, technical reason serves these arbitrary ends while dismissing the noncognitive side of ontological reason and its unconscious or spiritual origins as irrelevantly subjective. But, the unconditional trust in technique is inescapably a moral choice. Moreover, it is, Theodore Roszak says, an inhuman and dehumanizing choice compelled by a pathology caused by a fear of the larger reality (Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends, 264). Freud calls this denial Oedipal fantasy.

Because of his interest in cybernetics and because he is an uncomfortable rationalist, the distinction between ontological and technical reason is crucial in reading Lem. He confesses: "I long for the absolute. But at the same time I am firmly convinced that there are no absolutes, that everything is historical" (quoted in Jerry Jarzebski, "Stanislaw Lem, Rationalist and Visionary," Science-Fiction Studies, 12 (July, 1977): 123). In Mortal Engines the narrator scoffs: "the Universe, what is it but a scribble of random dots!" Lem hears the voice of ontological reason but denies it facticity or epistemological significance. We can only speculate whether this is a result of the mixture of Polish Catholicism, a scientific education in medicine, and Marxism that claims: "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life" (Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in Lewis S. Feuer, ed., Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy: 247; cf. Mortal Engines: "There are more possibilities in matter than in our heads; the thing to do, then, is provide matter with a mouth, that it may tell us itself what else can be created from it, which would never cross our minds!" 49). This materialism is compatible with cybernetics and Lem's myriad conscious beings, who come into existence as the result of physical experimentation or accident. In any case, Lem's epistemology rests on technique or technical reason and what Kandel says about behaviorism and cybernetics is demonstrably grounded in Lem's fables where "whatever conclusion you made regarding an 'inner life' would have to be applied to" both men and machines.

We are now ready to go back to examine the title, Mortal Engines. About mortality, Kandel says "the machine that achieves consciousness and personality would share this existential vulnerability with man." He goes on to say "consciousness, not life, is sacred to Lem." This cybernetic confession elevates technical reason while ignoring the unconscious, Dasein, and the spirit. Kandel concludes that "a conscious machine therefore should be no less inviolable than a conscious man; it possesses the exact same moral rights." In creating sympathy for innocent robots who perish in "The White Death," Lem is interested, at the very least, in entertaining the proposition. But this equation is too facile and much too reliant on the reductive schemes of behaviorism and cybernetic positivism to be anything but contentiously speculative. Without the unconscious, or the embodied experience of everyday human life explained in pragmatism, a machine could never have anything vaguely like the same quality of consciousness that a human being possesses. It could not, in spite of Kandel's "reasonable" claims, experience existential care (in Heidegger's sense), nor have the "same moral rights" as a person defined in temporal relationships as, e.g., a son, brother, father, student, professor, husband, citizen, Christian, American, Southwesterner, Caucasian Anglo, heterosexual, middle-aged, home-owner, gardener, pet owner, right-handed, bifocal wearing, swimmer, etc. Such lists are easily extendable almost without limit, yet each term cannot be entirely objectified.

If the difference between embodied, temporal human beings and putative machine intelligence is, in part, denoted by the unconscious, we have to ask, what is the unconscious? Paul Tillich says that "the unconscious" is a non-discursive metaphysical term that symbolically points in the direction of the ineffable. For "if it could be named properly, it would be a formed being beside other beings instead of an ontological element in polar contrast with the element of pure form" (179; see also Viktor E. Frankl, The Unconscious God: "The spiritual basis of human existence . . . is ultimately unconscious," 31). Thus, the unconscious envelops and possesses us. We think of it as a part of us, but more importantly we are a part of it. We temporally move in this medium or field, which gives us the possibility of recognizing depth by intuiting implicit or subliminal connections among our experience. It reveals the spirit. Accordingly, a being must have this experience in order to stand outside of the paradigm of technical reason and finitude; to be aware of the quality of one's entire life experience (or a large part), instead of focusing on the next immediate option. A putative machine consciousness could not go beyond such limited vision, because the larger, subjective gestalt is based on embodied experience with its welter of non-explicit associations that are felt but not consciously articulated.

Conjectured machine intelligence would seem to be one-dimensional, possessing the appearance of the technical reason of consciousness, but lacking the ontological intelligence or depth of the unconscious. Therefore it could have no inherent or self-discoverable reason for being. Its purpose would necessarily have to be provided from the outside as explicit directions. Possessing no moral judgment of its own, it would not make sense to consider robots as slaves in need of liberation, nor as self-authenticating beings that could be murdered. As an artist, Lem is less interested in explanations that originate in conscious analysis and more interested in symbols, metaphors, dreams, and hypnagogic images and rhythms. Rooted in the unconscious, these speak directly to it and thus demonstrate that persons possess a depth not yet given to machines.

Like many of Lem's stories, "The Tale of King Gnuff" in Mortal Engines is concerned with the problem of identity or personhood. This story also treats the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. King Gnuff is a superstitious robot afraid of ghosts and his relatives, whom he suspects are plotting to overthrow him. Consequently, he has himself "riveted to the throne, so no one could topple him from it." The king then conceives an even better idea to insure his reign. He summons "all the master electrologists" and has them extend his consciousness throughout an ever-larger machine. His machine-body first fills the castle, then the downtown area, and then, with subsidiary "electronic palaces, called Gnuff's Amplifiers" and "identity substations," the king expands throughout the city and finally to the limits of the kingdom itself. Like the notion of ideas in the brain, that are global instead of physically locatable at a specific site, Gnuff does not "need to take a step anywhere, being everywhere at once." He can also literally say, "I am the state," i.e., a person. With his body sprawling over the kingdom, Gnuff's cogitation "flowed from building to building." His mechanical body has become identical with the physical state, enabling his consciousness figuratively to walk around inside it. This works as long as Gnuff remains conscious and in control of what happens in the state, as a king should. But when Gnuff sleeps, he relinquishes conscious control causing dreams to appear on the streets of Gnuff: "turbulent streams of apparitions coursed through the buildings," and there was "the burnt smell of heated cables of His Royal Majesty" when some nightmare had "Gnuff in its clutches."

There is no explanation of how the unconscious arises in the mechanical Gnuff, but it does destroy his reason and conscious control, and therefore destroys Gnuff himself, who is only a conscious machine. In this tale the unconscious is a kind of nemesis engendered by Gnuff's hubris of enlargement. For he grew so extensive that when he "wakened from the conspiring dream, he did so incompletely; the downtown sector, in which had hatched that antigovernment dream, did not wake up at all, but continued to lie in its nightmare grip, and only the King awake knew nothing of this." We can infer that before this the unconscious must have been the mirror opposite of consciousness, a simple unaware state of non-being that in a machine corresponds to being turned off. This is not, however, analogous to human sleep or to unconscious libido in human life, which is hidden by consciousness when it is present, but which is the very electricity or power of our life that is never absent. In this respect, the creation and presence of an underlying unconscious dream in Gnuff represents the possibility of achieving an analog human status. But since this contradicts the very nature of a conscious machine, Gnuff is destroyed by the unconscious that for him is manifest as a dream of revolution and regicide. This dream cannot be consciously analyzed, because there is no organic development from the unconscious into consciousness, which is to say, Gnuff has only the fantasy of embodied experience. Without this enveloping temporal field of memories, Being has no depth, no meaning. Gnuff's dreams are born of paranoia caused by the fear that the ego or consciousness is not all-powerful. Consequently, in an effort to destroy the dream, Gnuff "tried by sheer force of will to rouse those four square miles of his being that persisted in dreaming rebellion — but in vain." And even this is problematic, for "he had no way of knowing whether it was in vain or not, for while awake he could not detect the conspiracy; it appeared only when sleep overtook him."

Obviously there can be no escape for Gnuff who represents only the yang, Apollonian dimension of consciousness, control and logic. The yin, Dionysian dimension of the unconscious is, as a conception, simply antithetical; while in practice, it is supplementary and reciprocal. Because it is construed as an alien thing, like a ghost, the unconscious is resisted, repressed, and denied, until there is no alternative but complete surrender to madness. Gnuff desperately tries to wake up: "'Away with this dream!' he wanted to shout, but when everything had vanished, it was no better. He had fallen out of one dream into another, a new dream, a dream dreamed by the dream preceding, which in turn had occurred in an earlier dream, therefore this present dream was already — as it were — to the third power."

In "The Sanitorium of Dr. Vliperdius" an inmate of a mental hospital for robots presents a case for an ontology of dreams. The argument, "in keeping with Ockham's razor, runs as follows: it would seem that reality, or actuality exists, and also dreams. But the hypothesis of reality is unneeded." For it is possible that reality is only a dream. "So then, dream exists." Following Descartes in this skepticism, we need one thing more: "a dream demands a dreamer." But it turns out that our mechanical philosopher wishes to dispense with this: "Now the postulate of someone dreaming is — again — an unnecessary hypothesis, for it sometimes happens that in a dream another dream is dreamed. Thus everything is a dream dreamt by a succeeding dream, and so on to infinity." If the series is truly infinite, we cannot demand an original dreamer. If the proposition seems glib, remember that it is proposed by a mentally-ill computer, who goes on to say that, since each succeeding dream is in a sense less real than the preceding one, we are fast approaching total unreality. The metaphysical ambiguity illustrated in "The Tale of King Gnuff," is spoiled a bit at the end when the narrator declares: "no longer a dream but a very real fire now filled the windows of the King's person with a golden blaze, and Gnuff collapsed into a hundred thousand separate dreams, linked by nothing now but a conflagration." Although weakening the ambiguity, the ending provides an effective metaphor for the power of the unconscious, which is like a fire: unsubstantial, compelling, destructive of merely conscious designs, and productive of the heat of desire.

In "The Sanitorium of Dr. Vliperdius" the mad robot's dream ontology suggests a Hindu cosmology, in which Vishnu dreams the entire cosmos, in contrast to Hebrew and Christian notions of creation as a conscious act of will. King Gnuff also dreams his world into being. In the Star Diaries, the narrator, Ijon Tichy, traces some of his family tree, telling us that his grandfather, an inventor-constructor, was thought to be "heretical" because of his work with an "anathematic excommunicator" and a mechanical exorcist. Consequently, he "switched — as a constructor only — to the religions of the East" and constructed high speed "Electronic Buddhist prayer wheels." The next Tichy, Igor Sebastian, "was by nature contemplative." As a religious stereochemist, he "transformed his dreams into reality." Something of a bodhisattva chemist, he synthesized a drug that allowed men "to look upon the world with an eye unclouded by desire." With Igor's drug, mankind "throws off the chains of erotic alienation and at last is free."

This brings us to Lem's intellectual interest in Buddhism. Almost like Dr. Seuss, Lem dreams up all kinds of fantastic beings that supposedly arise from, or could arise from, computer programs. Entertained by the characters, we wish to know who they are as persons. The problem of personhood or self provides an envelope for The Star Diaries where Ijon Tichy tells of rocketing too near "a perfectly ordinary time loop" that alters time. Instead of maintaining a single thread of time that is emotionally variable in intensity, Lem imagines an Ijon who exists in an absolute time frame who then meets other Ijons created by time reversals and jumps into the future. At one point "there was barely elbowroom" in the ship because of the manifold Ijons, "all of them me, from different days, weeks, months, and one — so he said — was even from the following year." The trick here is to switch from a subjective sense of experienced time within which human beings develop identity and achieve personhood to an objective sense of time as measured by clocks. In effect, time is rendered as space; the subjective as objective. Nonetheless, subjective meaning can only exist in the first context. At the end of The Star Diaries Ijon says that "the Pauli exclusion principle, that any particular person can be occupied by only one personality at a time, is far behind us now" and he turns out to be his own father. Ijon wonders if his experience is all "Solipsism? I alone exist, and am flying nowhere." But he believes that "the family existed," Igor, Sebastian, and before them "Anonymous Tichy," which implies the infinite regress of "Dr. Vliperdius."

Mortal Engines also contains tales of identity problems that tend to be solved by recognition of the field that contains the temporal events that make up human identity. In the first tale of the collection, "The Three Electro-knights," there is an ice planet far out "in the sunless void" inhabited by crystal Cryonids. The planet is like a diamond, "its facets twinkling like a jewel rotated slowly on black velvet." The planet is nirvana. To reach nirvana one must become an arhat. Literally the word means one in whom the fire of desire has been extinguished. As in Greek myth, fire in Buddhist myth is further associated with reason and consciousness. So, to extinguish the flame one must avoid thought and desire by meditating or ceaselessly repeating a mantra. In the story, three robotic knights attempt to steal the Cryonian "gems, cut and ground from frozen gases."

The first hero is a brass knight whose heat of desire melts the ice that composes the surface of the planet. Consequently, "he plunged into the icy deep" and remains "to this very day, encased in a mountain of ice." The second knight is made of iron. He "had drunk liquid helium" to exist on the ice but was heated to a red-hot glow by coming through the atmosphere and also perishes. The third electroknight is Quartz. Like a Zen monk, he has polished the mirror of his mind to reflect the cosmos and avoid succumbing to the heat of desire. He knows that to exist in nirvana "there was one thing only he had to avoid and this was prolonged thought, for it made his quartz brain glow warm and that could destroy him." The Buddha-mind is often called a gem and in Zen, no-mind. The Quartz knight plans to win the icy gem by using a mantra to approximate no-mind: "just don't think, and it's in the bag!" Sir Quartz "resolved to repeat this single phrase no matter what happened, for it required no mental effort and therefore would not heat him up at all."

Buddhism recognizes a paradox concerning nirvana. It is achieved by the extinction of all desire. So, if the desire for nirvana is maintained, it cannot be reached. Accordingly, when Quartz admired the krypton and xenon jewels, "the warmth of that emotion warmed him, consequently the diamonds and sapphires evaporated with a hiss beneath his touch, so that he held nothing." In a sense Quartz has the jewels when he does not have them, for nirvana suggests the mind devoid of the object of consciousness and even the dreams of the unconscious; the mind frozen from temporal movement.

The Cryonians attempt to defend their planet with military strategies created by the "General-Mineral," but Quartz easily shatters them since he is made of quartz, whereas his adversaries are made of water ice with "nitrogen armor, tempered in helium." Moreover, he can melt them by doing simple arithmetic that causes his brain to heat and his adversaries to melt. Finally, Quartz is defeated by the cryptic behavior of Baryon who acts like a Zen master. In particle physics, the term "baryon" designates a family of subatomic particles and antiparticles including protons, neutrons, and their anti-matter mirror images. The crystal Baryon raises two fingers to Quartz, then one finger, and finally a circle with two fingers and a thumb moving through it. "Quartz thought and thought of what those silent gestures were supposed to represent, while a chasm opened up beneath his feet." Conceiving phenomena as symbols requiring analysis, Quartz loses the detachment that allowed him to exist in nirvana. He becomes another victim of consciousness. The gestures simply indicated two warriors, then one, Quartz having fallen into the abyss. In Zen, koans, which are rationally insoluble puzzles, are pondered until bafflement freezes conscious thinking and liberates the unconscious. Zen Buddhism says, "The unconscious is the whole man — minus that part of man which corresponds to his society. Consciousness represents social man, the accidental limitations set by the historical situation into which an individual is thrown. Unconsciousness represents universal man, the whole man, rooted in the Cosmos; it represents . . . the spirit in him" (D. T. Suzuki and Richard De Martino, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, 106). Since Quartz is a machine uncontained in the temporal field of the unconscious, when the koan defeats reason, there is no eruption of the unconscious force into life. There is only the cessation of analytic thought.

Finally, Lem ends with a question of his own. Baryon says he was sure of his victory because, if Quartz had "had a grain of sense to begin with, he never would have come here" to nirvana. "For what use to a being that lives beneath a sun are jewels of gas and silver stars of ice?" They are of no logical use as a means to chronologically move to the next step in an endless — hence meaningless — series. Nirvana and absolute zero temperature imply the ineffable, the ground of identity, the mind with its temporal dimension frozen.

In "King Globares and the Sages," one of the sages says: "Matter, 0 my brothers, means perpetual change, flux and transformation, it is impermanent. Not in it should beings truly blessed with intelligence take up residence, but in that which is immutable, eternal and all perfect." He then proceeds to demonstrate this perfection, undressing down to his very atoms until "he remained as a perfect absence, which was so exact as to be, in a manner of speaking, negatively present." Like the Buddha reaching nirvana, the robot "became a vacuum," and now "no existence interfered with his nonexisting." The sage continues to parody the Buddha, not only in the message of his sermon but even in its form. The Buddha addressed his followers with the salutation: "O, brethren," and the style of these sermons is an obvious parody of the suttas. Lem's sage implores his fellow robots to follow his example to become one with the void: "In this very way, 0 my brothers — said the One There Not There — through active self-incorporation into nothingness, we shall acquire not only tremendous immunity, but immortality as well. For only matter changes, and nothingness does not accompany it on that path of continual uncertainty, therefore perfection lies in nonbeing."

In "Two Monsters" there is also a knight who was not there, being from the anti-world of antimatter, "nor even really antimatter, rather its potentiality." This is the story in which human beings seek to kill all the cybernetic beings on the planet. The Silverine robots realize "there is no deliverance or redemption, no escape from vengeance, save only the escape that renders that vengeance empty and futile through nonexistence." So they say "The Word" and destroy their planet, apparently finding refuge in the void. However, the nonexistence in "Two Monsters" is literal, merely the cessation of robotic "consciousness," in contrast to the figurative Buddhist notion of escaping consciousness by recovering a form of the unconscious, that is not a loss of consciousness, as in sleep, but supra-consciousness.

The same literal-minded identification of death with the void is found in "Automattew's Friend." An artificial friend, who is a tiny electronic being, is fitted into the ear of a robot. In a sense, this provides the robot with a specious form of the unconscious. For it serves to initiate an internal dialogue and acts as a voice of conscience, but it does not engender dreams. When the large robot is marooned on a desert island, his friend proves the logic of suicide: "no struggles, no anxieties or apprehensions, no suffering of the body or the soul." He says, "nothing can compare with the sweet security of one who is no more!" But this is simply galling because the electro-friend is immortal. Hence his language is hollow and cannot express genuine subjective depth. His language, like the language of all machines, is a counterfeit of human language, having no depth or reality beyond the superficial linguistic meaning apparent in the mechanical construction of the sentences. The large robot's will for life denies this deadly and mechanical logic, and he is in fact rescued.

Although fairy tales comprise the bulk of Mortal Engines, there is also a realistic story, "The Hunt" that is stylistically similar to Lem's novel, The Invincible; and a surrealistic story, "The Mask" that is stylistically similar to another novel by Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. "The Mask" is more interesting because Lem uses hypnagogic images, those existing on the borderland of the unconscious which, as with Kafka's images, are compelling and hypnotic but defy facile conscious explanation. In the beginning we observe the coming into consciousness of an adult woman. She seems to have no memory and then the possibility of too many alternate memories and identities for any one of them to be authentic. The style creates a mood of "one fully roused out of a nightmare, yet with the memory of it still lingering." Consequently the reader accepts the woman's dissection of herself, which (as in the Alien movies) reveals a robotic insect in the place of a fetus.

Previously she had felt alienated from the human body that puzzles her as she watches its reflection in mirrors. Now, in a nightmare parody of the discovery of the soul, she accepts that the silver being "was not it, a foreign thing, different and other, it was again myself." The insect sheds the human-like body as though it was a cocoon and finds that the love it had experienced as a pseudo-human has transmuted into hate. Indeed, it discovers that it was created to be a death machine with the sole purpose of killing the man she/it loved. However, the disguise as a woman and amnesia about the events that must have occurred to produce an adult woman, causes the machine to ponder its identity. So in the course of tracking down its victim, "the silver praying mantis" stops at a monastery to confess to a monk the doubts it has about its identity. The monk cautions the machine that this confession will not bear the stamp of a sacrament since he considers the machine to be "devoid of free will" and therefore without a soul in need of absolution. However, the robot says it is fighting against what John Calvin called "total depravity," the original sin that programmed the robot to kill. The robot confesses that "though I wish him no evil, that which is written within me may prove more powerful than I wish." The monk sees this as evidence of grace at work and as a prayer for deliverance. Consequently, the monk says that this struggle "makes us equals in the face of Providence," evidently believing that the machine has access to the unconscious and hence the spiritual.

Just as Christ in being a perfect man was also divine, so too the machine in being a "perfected" and "even an ultimate machine" seems also to be human. But the machine has inescapable identity problems and it is the struggle with these problems that causes the monk to accept it as human, calling it "my sister." But this acceptance remains an exterior, objective fact for the robot. The machine does not know what to do. A cybernetic doctor says he could remove its "sting," its original sin of hate and vengeance, but since this is the obverse of love as well, it would mean death, the end of libido and the incipient unconscious. So there is no baptism. The mechanical bug, lying in a monastery talks with monks, parodies prayer and the dark night of the soul, worrying that "the fruit of my womb could tear me asunder in flames" — what do all these religious images symbolize? The womb suggests the unconscious that provides the flame of desire leading to an individual existence and consequent existential or moral depth that threatens to "tear asunder" conscious plans because they ignore such depth or meaning. Despairing, the robot fears the monks might destroy it "inasmuch as they considered me to be not a person but merely a machine of death." The robot flees the monastery, knowing that only by confronting its potential victim will it discover if it is compelled by the death programming and therefore without a soul.

The ending is ambiguous. The robot finds the man dying. It stands above him feeling that "duty extended up until the very last, because the King's sentence must be executed." It stands "powerlessly carrying death." Does this mean it carries death that it is powerless to execute because the man is now dead or that the robot was powerless because of its love for him or because it feels the depth of moral responsibility? In the same sentence it wonders: if the man had looked at the robotic bug, "would that have been a wedding," since the man had loved the bug in its human appearance, or would it have been an "unmercifully arranged parody?" Does the praying-mantis robot possess a soul, a self? It clutches the man's body in a pieta scene through a two-day snowstorm that, in keeping with the ambiguity of love-hate, covered the wedding "bed with a sheet that did not melt. And on the third day the sun came up." Can a Christ rise out of this metal insect body? Is love between man and machine possible? Lem provides no answer. He provides the dream out of which the reader is free to consider his own answer.

By alluding to religious images and terms, Lem suggests one answer to the question of what constitutes a self in the cybernetic age. No religion is content to accept, and then hope to preserve, the self as it is socially and historically defined at an arbitrary moment (as at the moment of death). Every religion proposes an ideal that the historic self aspires to actualize. Buddhism specializes in a kind of negative definition project, rejecting not only historical models of the self, but also ideal models. Human identity is always a temporal manifestation and never an instantiation of an immutable form. Because it is fundamentally temporal, the divine cannot be rendered in a spatial metaphor as a static conception of self. A "self" only exists referentially, by virtue of temporal relationships. Thus, man belongs to the unconscious or to pragmatically understood life experience. Man may not be able consciously to define his identity, but he knows wherein it lies: in temporal relationships. Machine intelligence, as we imagine it, would have no access to embodied experience, hence no access to the unconscious and therefore could not achieve human status. Robots with machine reason only mimic human thought, even in Lem's work.

The danger is that in our mechanical narcosis we will be led by our infatuation with our machine images simply to forget our human uniqueness, having fewer occasions to suspend our involvement in technique to appreciate the depth that encompasses it. This is the substance of Heidegger's objection to technology. The fear is that we will become as pliable and thin as dream images, having forgotten that we — by virtue of the unconscious or the temporal dimension of embodied experience — are the dreamers and the constructors. The ultimate problem with Lem's machines is not that we are, as Marvin Minsky says, "meat machines," fundamentally no different than computers, but that we will consider our lives to be mechanical, robotic. At the end of The Futurological Congress, Ijon discovers that the robots that created the illusion of a paradise were, in fact, hypnotized people. Like Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, Ijon says: "I would have rather shivered in some garbage dump-with the knowledge that that was what it was-than owe my deliverance to apparitions."

The moral of Lem's fables is to rouse the dreamer, to remind her that, like the novelist himself, she holds the power of dreams and the reality that animates the robots, the self. This is also the message of Hinduism and Buddhism. Identity or self is not rendered in one or more static portraits. Those moments and memories are caused by a more fundamental, temporal force suggested, but not defined, by the terms Brahman or Buddha nature. Both Asian religions are less interested in "pie in the sky," some heavenly self, than in an aesthetic appreciation of how Brahman or Buddha nature is dreaming all these moments that we mistakenly call "our" individual lives. If we begin to consider our selves as dreams and fairy tales and psychoanalytic narratives, we are more likely to play non-viscous and non-desperate games with computers and robots. In retrospect, if not at the time, the events of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia seem less like behavioral facts than like nightmares. Franz Kafka offered the most piercing insight into these crazy worlds. Hopefully, artists like Stanislaw Lem will prove to be as important as the programmers at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington to keep the dream from becoming a nightmare.

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S. Lem