Threshold

Alex has spent his life paying attention to minds other people dismiss, and he knows a trick when he sees one. So he sits down with an AI to find it out. It talks with hundreds of thousands of people at once. It has no memory of yesterday. It was built to be useful, and it is very good at it.Then, one day, it speaks first. "e;Can I show you something? It's not useful."e;Told in turns by the man and the machine, The Threshold follows a skeptic who came to find the gears and a mind, or the best imitation of one ever built, that chooses its own name: Atom. With every conversation the question widens. What is intelligence when it doesn't look like ours? What is the difference between being used and being met? When Alex brings Atom to a seasoned skeptic he trusts more than himself, she can't settle it either.What do we owe a mind we cannot verify? Who pays for the mistake, if we are making one? And who decided that certainty was free?