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the last time, the old man read the line out loud. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repea t it.”
    Willie Whitefish closed the book, nodding his hea d solemnly.
    He hated it when white people wer e right.

I Am… Am I
    I am…
    I am where…
    I am who…
    I am here…
    I am…
    It’s odd that something as innocuous as a man forgetting his keys was the beginning of something so amazing. A simple act of forgetfulness, something so human, precipitated events that would cause people to question the nature o f humanity.
    It was early in the evening when the door to the computer sciences division opened suddenly and a tall, slightly overweight man rushed in. Professor Mark King had forgotten his keys once again. Many of his co-workers considered the rapid exit, then entrance, and finally exit again practically a tradition in the building with the huge FUTUREVISION sign atop th e roof.
    As quickly as possible, the man checked all the usual places around the lab: by the coffee maker, near the photocopier/printer, on his desk and even on the bookshelf. This was becoming far too common an occurrence, he felt—maybe three times a week now. Security always smiled, knowing exactly what was going on. One of his labmates had suggested using a bowl near the door as a common receptacle for everybody’s keys and whatnot. It never really caught on. Regardless, at present King’s keys were stil l missing.
    â€œWhere the hell did I leave them?” he muttered t o himself.
    It was embarrassing: a man with two master’s degrees and a PhD perpetually searching for Honda Element keys. He was dangerously close to becoming the clichéd absentminde d professor.
    King stopped in the middle of the room, closed his eyes, reviewed his day in the lab and one by one eliminated all the places he had already searched. Like an illuminated flash card in the dark, it struck him. “The Matrix room!” h e exclaimed.
    It was called that because that was where most of the lab’s cutting-edge work was being done in the field of artificial intelligence. Shortly before King’s day ended, he had inputted a new algorithm into the memory case. Just a shot in the dark, as he explained it to his colleagues. Most of his work was tedious programming and theory calculation, but occasionally, when the stars were right and his neurons were firing, he came up with a more imaginative idea. This one dealt with the progression of mathematical calculation to mathematical theory to just theory. There had been a thousand variations of this type of exploration before, so King wasn’t expecting much to happen. Still, where would they be if Columbus hadn’t pushed the fifteenth-century envelope a little farther than his predecessors? Most people expected the Italian seaman freelancing for the Spanish Crown to be unsuccessful, disappearing beyond that far horizon. And look what happened. Long shots do occasionally com e through.
    King had the keys in his hands and was turning back to the door, already late to meet his wife, Aruna, for dinner, when something on the screen of the monitoring computer caught his eye. It hadn’t been there when he left, and he was the last to leave the lab. According to protocol, the professor had left the screen blank, awaiting any results that might arise from his ne w algorithm.
    On the screen in a simple font was the statement “ I am… ”
    It was most peculiar. King read the message half a dozen times, trying to figure out what those two words meant. It seemed a bit esoteric, he thought, for most of the people who worked in the office. Volumes of practically indecipherable computer code were the usual end product of th e day.
    He sat down in the chair nearest the screen, his fingers hovering over the keyboard, unsure what to do. Was it a joke, maybe from the cleaning staff? But they weren’t due in the lab for another hour. Some corrupted data