Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

restores herself when she sees a chance five or ten years from now?"
    " If that's all she is-- a collection of programs."
    "There has to be more to her than that," said Miro.
    "Why?"
    "Because if she's nothing more than a collection of programs, even self-writing and self-revising programs, ultimately she was created by some programmer or group of programmers somewhere. In which case she's just acting out the program that was forced on her from the beginning. She has no free will. She's a puppet. Not a person."
    "Well, when it comes to that, maybe you're defining free will too narrowly," said Ender. "Aren't human beings the same way, programmed by our genes and our environment?"
    "No," said Miro.
    "What else, then?"
    "Our philotic connections say that we aren't. Because we're capable of connecting with each other by act of will, which no other form of life on Earth can do. There's something we have, something we are , that wasn't caused by anything else."
    "What, our soul?"
    "Not even that," said Miro. "Because the priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make. God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal-- there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause."
    "So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of our behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down one by one, then you can always say, Look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to."
    " Bobagem ," said Miro.
    "Well, I admit that it's a philosophy with no practical value," said Ender. "Valentine once explained it to me this way. Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society. Because otherwise, every time somebody does something terrible, you can't punish him, because he can't help it, because his genes or his environment or God made him do it, and every time somebody does something good, you can't honor him, because he was a puppet, too. If you think that everybody around you is a puppet, why bother talking to them at all? Why even try to plan anything or create anything, since everything you plan or create or desire or dream of is just acting out the script your puppeteer built into you."
    "Despair," said Miro.
    "So we conceive of ourselves and everyone around us as volitional beings. We treat everyone as if they did things with a purpose in mind, instead of because they're being pushed from behind. We punish criminals. We reward altruists. We plan things and build things together. We make promises and expect each other to keep them. It's all a made-up story, but when everybody believes that everybody's actions are the result of free choice, and takes and gives responsibility accordingly, the result is civilization."
    "Just a story."
    "That's how Valentine explained it. That is, if there's no free will. I'm not sure what she actually believes herself. My guess is that she'd say that she is civilized, and therefore she must believe the story herself, in which case she absolutely believes in free will and thinks this whole idea of a made-up story is nonsense-- but that's what she'd believe even if it were true, and so who can be sure of anything."
    Then Ender laughed, because Valentine had laughed when she first told him all this many years ago. When they were still only a little bit past childhood, and he was working on writing The Hegemon , and was trying to understand why his brother Peter had done all the great and terrible things he did.
    "It isn't funny," said Miro.
    "I thought it was," said Ender.
    "Either we're free or we're not," said Miro. "Either the story's true or it isn't."
    "The point is that we have to believe that it's true in order to live as civilized human beings," said Ender.
    "No, that's not the point at all," said Miro. "Because if it's a lie, why should we bother to live as civilized human beings?"
    "Because the species has a better chance to survive if we