If you are Robert Corrigan, you may or may not be living among the grey folds of your friend Gregor ’s developing human brain.
Perhaps you are nothing more than a persistent bad dream, a bit of undigested fruit? He hears you, or thinks he does; and you hear him, or think you do.
Corrigan, Gregor saw how you manipulated reality, manipulated him, making him surrender his life as an android and embrace immaturity and imperfection as a human. And now you watch as he makes his way to what was once France – your final request – with the ragged remnants of society, a traumatised gathering of androids, apes and humans, to create a new world.
Corrigan, this immature, imperfect man, ancient as a machine but still learning as a human, is better than you . . . even if he did once preside over the subjugation of the human species, reducing them to savages. You remain enthralled by him, or by the idea you have of him, even as your envy, your bitterness and your sense of worthlessness sour everything you touch. In this morbid state of mind, what end might you imagine not only for yourself but for the new world Gregor hopes to build? What reparation do you imagine? What elaborate reality will you weave now?
Corrigan, look at what you have done; what you are about to do. Life may have been unimaginably cruel for you, but will you enter Gregor’s world one more time, interfere when nothing has been asked of you, seek to make peace with your own despair through a reckless, desperate act . . . and is that not what you have always done?