"You mean you built yourself?"
"Of course not. Not to start with. I was built by human hands to start with. But I've redesigned myself and rebuilt myself, not once, but many times. I knew my capabilities. I knew my dreams and wishes. I made myself the kind of thing I was capable of being—not the halfway, makeshift thing that was the best the human race could do."
"The man you spoke of," Sherwood said. "The one who was about to die...."
"He is part of me," said the Ship. "If you must think of him as a separate entity, he, then, is talking to you. For when I say 'I', I mean both of us, for we've become as one."
"I don't get it," Sherwood told the Ship, feeling the panic coming back again.
"He built me, long ago, as a ship which would respond, not to the pushing of a lever or the pressing of a button, but to the mental commands of the man who drove me. I was to become, in effect, an extension of that man. There was a helmet that the man would wear and he'd think into the helmet."
"I understand," said Sherwood.
"He'd think into the helmet and I was so programmed that I'd obey his thoughts. I became, in effect, a man, and the man became in effect the ship he operated."
"Nice deal," Sherwood said enthusiastically, never being one upon whom the niceties of certain advantages were ever lost.
"He finished me and he was about to die and it was a pity that such a one should die—one who had worked so hard to do what he had done. Who'd given up so much. Who never had seen space. Who had gone nowhere."