The Philosopher's Apprentice Read Online Free PDF

white lace gown and reading an issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, a woman of perhaps forty sat in a wicker chair, its fan-shaped back spreading behind her like Botticelli’s scallop shell giving birth to Venus.
    â€œEvery Saturday morning,” Javier told me, “you’ll find two elegant and fascinating creatures in our conservatory—my friend Dr. Sabacthani, and this queen of the trees, Proserpine.”
    â€œThe mangrove has a name?” I asked.
    â€œA Christian name only,” the woman replied in a sandpaper voice. Her face was a disconcerting conjunction of high-cheeked beauty and humorless ambition, as if Katharine Hepburn had been cast in her prime as Catherine de Medici. “The experiment was not sufficiently successful for me to admit Proserpine to the Sabacthani family.” She flipped a pair of gold-framed polarized lenses into place over her eyeglasses, then set her book atop a wheeled cart holding a coffee urn,its shiny convex surface elongating Proserpine’s reflection into an El Greco figure. “Forgive me for not rising to greet you, Mason, but I’ve not been well lately, and etiquette would only aggravate my condition. Call me Edwina. May I offer you some coffee?”
    â€œThe food of philosophers,” I said, though a better case could be made for beer.
    Javier gestured me into a second fan-back chair and, approaching the urn, released an ebony stream into a mug bearing the Odradek Pharmaceuticals logo. He passed me my coffee, filled a second Odradek mug for Edwina, and exited the dome, walking backward with the dexterity of a Hawthorne tour guide showing prospective students around the campus.
    â€œTell me, Mason, is sin something that Anglo-American philosophers worry about these days”—Edwina rested a bony hand on the mangrove’s nearest root—“or do you leave all that to your Continental colleagues?”
    â€œSin?”
    â€œNo sooner had Dr. Charnock and I given Proserpine a rudimentary brain than it became clear that we had sinned.”
    â€œA brain?”
    â€œIt’s gone now, most of it. Her first words—”
    â€œWords?”
    â€œWe also gave her a tongue, a larynx, primitive lungs, and a crude circulatory system. Her first words were, ‘Put me out of my misery.’ Not what we expected to hear. What do you suppose she meant?”
    â€œAre you testing me?”
    Edwina smiled.
    â€œPerhaps you’d created a kind of basket case.” I sipped my beverage. It had a heady chocolate flavor, as if Charnock had induced a coffee bush to have sex with a cacao plant. “A being with an inherent desire to move its body through space but lacking any means to do so.”
    â€œGood,” Edwina said, acclaiming my answer with a clap of her hands. “Dawson did not overestimate you. I told Dr. Charnock we had no choice but to amputate Proserpine’s consciousness. Mercy demanded it. He said such an operation would amount to physician-assisted suicide, a practice he has always found repellent. So I took up a scalpel and performed the procedure myself. There’s a lesson in all this, a parable for the neural-network community as they go about imposing self-awareness on their computers. Beware, ladies and gentlemen. To pour a free-floating intellect into a machine is to risk making an infinitely frustrated soul.”
    â€œA tormented Dr. Johnson,” I mused, “eternally eager to kick a stone and thus give Berkeley’s idealism the boot. But he can find no stone in his universe, nor a leg with which to kick it.”
    â€œWell said.”
    Just then a mild tremor passed through the mangrove’s limbs and roots. Edwina and I exchanged freighted glances.
    â€œYou didn’t imagine that,” she said. “I couldn’t excise the entire nervous system without causing death. Every so often, Proserpine shudders.”
    Curious, I rose and picked my way across