Page 799 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

Ender zoomed in on the display. In and in and in, until the display showed only a few parsecs in each dimension. Now the simulation was modeling a small portion of the network-- the crisscrossing of only a half-dozen philotic rays in deep space. Now, instead of looking like an involved, tightlywoven fabric, the philotic rays looked like random lines passing millions of kilometers from each other.
"They never touch," said Miro.
No, they never do. It's something that Ender had never realized. In his mind, the galaxy was flat, the way the starmaps always showed it, a topdown view of the section of the spiral arm of the galaxy where humans had spread out from Earth. But it wasn't flat. No two stars were ever exactly in the same plane as any other two stars. The philotic rays connecting starships and planets and satellites in perfectly straight lines, ansible to ansible-- they seemed to intersect when you saw them on a flat map, but in this three-dimensional close-up in the computer display, it was obvious that they never touched at all.
"How can she live in that?" asked Ender. "How can she possibly exist in that when there's no connection between those lines except at the endpoints?"
"So-- maybe she doesn't. Maybe she lives in the sum of the computer programs at every terminal."
"In which case she could back herself up into all the computers and then--"
"And then nothing. She could never put herself back together because they're only using clean computers to run the ansibles."
"They can't keep that up forever," said Ender. "It's too important for computers on different planets to be able to talk to each other. Congress will find out pretty soon that there aren't enough human beings in existence to key in by hand, in a year, the amount of information computers have to send to each other by ansible every hour."
"So she just hides? Waits? Sneaks in and restores herself when she sees a chance five or ten years from now?"
"If that's all she is-- a collection of programs." "There has to be more to her than that," said Miro. "Why?"
"Because if she's nothing more than a collection of programs, even self-writing and self-revising programs, ultimately she was created by some programmer or group of programmers somewhere. In which case she's just acting out the program that was forced on her from the beginning. She has no free will. She's a puppet. Not a person."