No more, Crane told himself — no more or less than the aware machines may be planning here on Earth.
First, you’d seek to arouse the humans to the awareness of humanity. You’d teach them that they were human and what it meant to be a human. You’d try to indoctrinate them to your own belief that humans were greater than machines, that no human need work or think for the good of a machine.
And in the end, if you were successful, if the machines didn’t kill or drive you off, there’d be no single human working for machines.
There’d be three things that could happen:
You could transport the humans to some other planet, there to work out their destiny as humans without the domination of machines.
You could turn the machines’ planet over to the humans, with proper safeguards against any recurring domination by the machines. You might, if you were able, set the machines to working for the humans.
Or, simplest of all, you could destroy the machines and in that way make absolutely certain the humans would remain free of any threat of further domination.
Now take all that, Crane told himself, and read it the other way. Read machines for humans and humans for machines.
He walked along the bridle path that flanked the river bank and it was as if he were alone in the entire world, as if no other human moved upon the planet’s face.
That was true, he felt, in one respect at least. For more than likely he was the only human who knew — who knew what the aware machines had wanted him to know.