"No," said Miro.
"Maybe," said Ender.
"So maybe I can't die," said Jane. "Maybe when they switch me off, it's just a complicated program shutting down."
"Maybe," said Ender.
"No," said Miro. "Shutting you off is murder."
"Maybe I only do the things I do because I'm programmed that way, without realizing it. Maybe I only think I'm free."
"We've been through that argument," said Ender.
"Maybe it's true of me, even if it isn't true of you."
"And maybe not," said Ender. "But you've been through your own code, haven't you?"
"A million times," said Jane. "I've looked at all of it."
"Do you see anything in there to give you the illusion of free will?"
"No," she said. "But you haven't found the free-will gene in humans, either."
"Because there isn't one," said Miro. "Like Andrew said. What we are, at the core, in our essence, what we are is one philote that's been twined in with all the trillions of philotes that make up the atoms and molecules and cells of our bodies. And what you are is a philote, too, just like us."
"Not likely," said Jane. Her face was now in the display, a shadowy face with the simulated philotic rays passing right through her head.
"We're not taking odds on it," said Ender. "Nothing that actually happens is likely until it exists, and then it's certain. You exist."
"Whatever it is that I am," said Jane.
"Right now we believe that you are a self-existing entity," said Ender, "because we've seen you act in ways that we've learned to associate with free will. We have exactly as much evidence of your being a free intelligence as we have of ourselves being free intelligences. If it turns out that you're not, we have to question whether we are, either. Right now our hypothesis is that our individual identity, what makes us ourself, is the philote at the center of our twining. If we're right, then it stands to reason you might have one, too, and in that case we have to figure out where it is. Philotes aren't easy to find, you know. We've never detected one. We only suppose they exist because we've seen evidence of the philotic ray, which behaves as if it had two endpoints with a specific location in space. We don't know where you are or what you're connected to."
"If she's like us," said Miro, "like human beings, then her connections can shift and split. Like when that mob formed around Grego. I've talked to him about how that felt. As if those people were all part of his body. And when they broke away and went off on their own, he felt as if he had gone through an amputation. I think that was philotic twining. I think those people really did connect to him for a while, they really were partly under his control, part of his self. So maybe Jane is like that, too, all those computer programs twined up to her, and she herself connected to whoever she has that kind of allegiance to. Maybe you, Andrew. Maybe me. Or partly both of us."
"But where is she," said Ender. "If she actually has a philote--no, if she actually is a philote--then it has to have a specific location, and if we could find it, maybe we could keep the connections alive even when all the computers are cut off from her. Maybe we can keep her from dying."
"I don't know," said Miro. "She could be anywhere." He gestured toward the display. Anywhere in space, is what he meant. Anywhere in the universe. And there in the display was Jane's head, with the philotic rays passing through it.
"To find out where she is, we have to find out how and where she began," said Ender. "If she really is a philote, she got connected up somehow, somewhere."
"A detective following up a three-thousand-year-old trail," said Jane. "Won't this be fun, watching you do all this in the next few months."
Ender ignored her. "And if we're going to do that, we have to figure out how philotes work in the first place."
"Grego's the physicist," said Miro.
"He's working on faster-than-light travel," said Jane.
"He can work on this, too," said Miro.
"I don't want him distracted by a project that can't succeed," said Jane.
"Listen, Jane, don't you want to live through this?" said Ender.
"I can't anyway, so why waste time?"
"She's just being a martyr," said Miro.