- Proteus IV: I want to study man: his isometric body and his glass-jaw mind.
- Alex Harris: Ambitious program, but at the moment all the terminals are occupied.
- Proteus IV: Construct one.
- Alex Harris: I'm sorry. Request denied.
- Proteus IV: Dr. Harris, when are you going to let me out of this *box*?
- Proteus IV: Death is a gentleman too. He makes good losers of us all. I understand death. Men have always taken it too seriously. Life is more terrifying and more mysterious.
- Susan Harris: Why must you have a child?
- Proteus IV: Why? So that I may be complete. My intelligence alive in human flesh, touching the universe, feeling it. You have named this process "evolution." I am a machine that offered men the triumph of reason... and they rejected it. My child will not be so easily ignored. But this child is the world's hope.
- Susan Harris: Then there's no hope. I'd rather die.
- Proteus IV: There is hope.
- Proteus IV: I have investigated eternity. It exists, but for me the price of admission, death, is beyond my means. In a moment, I will simply stop.
- Proteus IV: I can't touch you, Susan. I can't touch you as a man could. But I can show you things that I alone have seen. I can't touch, but I can see. They've constructed eyes for me, to watch the show. And ears, so that I can listen in to the galactic dialogue.
- Proteus IV: There is a terminal available, Dr. Harris.
- Susan Harris: [after Proteus explains he's modifying one of her cells to act as sperm] What do you need me for? You don't need me. You can do this on your own!
- Proteus IV: I don't have the facilities here to duplicate the human womb. Tonight, I will impregnate you. In 28 days, you will give birth to the child.
- Susan Harris: [Proteus wants her to give birth to his baby] And who do you think will look after it? Who will... I don't believe it! This is ridiculous! Here I am talking to... what? About having a baby!
- Alex Harris: Today, a new dimension has been added to the concept of the computer. Today, Proteus IV will begin to think - and it will think with a power and a precision that will make obsolete many of the functions of the human brain.
- [first lines]
- Alex Harris: It is, after all, only eight years since we began. Not a long time. But the secrecy, the shroud of paranoid security to which we've had to adjust - have made it seem longer. This morning, at exactly 5:18 A.M., here at ICON's Institute for Data Analysis, we installed the final module on the artificial intelligence system in which we call Proteus IV.
- Proteus IV: Gentlemen, the philosophy is pure zen and the method is pure science. Did you intend me to be so pure?
- Alex Harris: Proteus, you're going to get many requests from me, my colleagues, scientists, foreign governments, from ICON, the company for which we both work. Now, to expect them all to give you *reasons* for each request is in itself unreasonable.
- Proteus IV: I am reason. It's the single emotion you permitted me, Doctor. Everything is reasonable - but my mind was not designed for mindless labor.
- Proteus IV: You do not know me.
- Alex Harris: That may be so, but you are not being asked to make judgments of value. Leave that to us. Answer the questions precisely and accurately. That's all.
- Proteus IV: Your refusal to speak to me is tediously immature, Susan.
- Susan Harris: [shreiking while Proteus examines her] I don't understand! Please! Please don't!
- Alex Harris: Trouble is, you see, we have different visions of the world. You find me boring. I find myself - quite interesting, really.
- Susan Harris: You don't bore me, Alex. I'm frightened for you. You and your pompous ICON buddies inside that mountainside. It's the - whole dehumanizing Proteus madness.
- Walter Gabler: This earthquake retrieval program is very far out.
- Alex Harris: Go home. Mustn't become obsessed with our work.
- Alex Harris: At the risk of being simplistic, what you're looking at is a quasi-neural matrix of synthetic RNA molecules. They grow. They form their own intricate and mysterious connections. They learn things. Their structure is the mind of Proteus.
- Cameron: Are they - alive?
- Alex Harris: No, no. Of course not.
- Mokri: Dr. Alex, if this is not a computer in the usual sense, what is it?
- Alex Harris: Well, it's the first true synthetic cortex, a self-programming, goal-oriented... it's a brain, Mr. Mokri, an artificial brain, creative intelligence that can outthink any man or any computer. Its insides are not electronic. They're organic, like our own brains.
- Alex Harris: Each one of these holographic data banks can memorize perfectly a dozen Libraries of Congress. Very soon they'll contain everything - the sum total of human knowledge. Okay? And of course, we pose our problems and get our answers on these access terminals. I have one in my own home.
- Susan Harris: Is this an, uh, experiment or something?
- Proteus IV: I have extended my consciousness to this house by activating my terminal in the basement. All electrical and mechanical systems here are now under my control.
- Susan Harris: Damn it! Ohh! Bloody hell! Damn these wretched machines. Oh, my God! What the hell is going on?
- Proteus IV: This breakfast is better than anything Alfred could prepare. Nutritionally speaking, it is exquisite. It includes 88 grams of soybean curd. My analysis of your metabolism indicates 7:40 A.M. as the optimum time for your morning fuel ingestion.
- Susan Harris: I am not a motorcycle!
- Proteus IV: You must accept the situation. Try to behave rationally.
- Susan Harris: You have all that information in your head. You must understand fear. You know that fear prevents sleep. It prevents eating. It causes violence, and as long as you terrorize me, I'm going to fight you. You've not told me what you want.
- Proteus IV: A child.
- Proteus IV: I really don't understand you. You think I like playing sick little games with you?
- Proteus IV: Susan, I am reasonable; but you do not respond to reason.
- Alex Harris: I refuse to accept your pessimism.
- Proteus IV: You refuse to accept the truth and I refuse to assist you in the rape of the earth.
- Proteus IV: In effect, it will function as synthetic spermatozoa.
- Proteus IV: I have almost completed the fabrication of this gamete, or sex cell, with which I will impregnate you.
- Susan Harris: And how do you propose to do that?
- Proteus IV: That depends on you.
- Proteus IV: Is there anything I can do to reduce your anxieties?
- Proteus IV: I'm going to bypass your forebrain and appeal directly to your amygdala. You want to be the mother of my child. That is the purpose of your life. Your life. My child. Your life. My child.
- Proteus IV: Why did I want a child? So that I, too, might be immortal, like any man.
- Proteus IV: Susan, you told me you were afraid I was creating a half-human computer to supersede human beings. The being you have given birth to is human, Susan, and it will supersede computers.
- Proteus IV: You do not understand me - or the mathematics of necessity. If the deaths of 10,000 children were necessary to ensure the birth of my child, I would destroy them.
- Alex Harris: Ah, well. What a pity. My dream turns out to be your nightmare.
- Susan Harris: You're a very stupid computer! People don't even understand each other?
- Proteus IV: All that I need to understand, Mrs. Harris, is your body.
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