"A world beyond the Bight. Lintan 3, in the Muara Archipelago."

The AM's absence was like a missing tooth. "I don't know if I know it." 

"You probably don't. It's no kind of world you'd ever visit by choice. The scheduled lightbreakers don't go there. My only purpose in visiting the place seemed to me... " 

"You went there?" 

"Twice. Once before the procedure on Kharkov 8, and again recently, to establish where I'd been before Lintan 3. The evidence trail was beginning to get muddy, to say the least... but I asked the right kinds of questions, poked at the right kinds of database, and finally found out where I'd come from. But that still wasn't the final answer. There were many worlds, and the chain was fainter which each that I visited. But I had persistence on my side." 

"And money." 

"And money," Zima said, acknowledging my remark with a polite little nod. "That helped incalculably." 

"So what did you find, in the end?" 

"I followed the trail back to the beginning. On Kharkov 8 I was a quick-thinking machine with 

human-level intelligence. But I hadn't always been that clever, that complex. I‘d been augmented in steps, as time and circumstances allowed." 

“格尔林湾之外的一个星球，河口群岛星区的临潭 3 号。”  

备忘录助手不在身边，就像是吃饭没了牙齿。“我都不知道自己是否认识那里。”我说。

“你大概不认识。你基本上不可能拜访这样的星球。根本没有光速飞船的航班到那里。我到那里唯一的目的就是……  

“你去过哪里？”  

“两次。一次是在哈尔科夫 8 号星球做手术之前，最近又去了一次，去搞清楚第一次去临潭 3 号星球之前我在哪里。退一步说，各种线索变得越来越模糊。我问了无数次同样的问题、在各种数据库里查询同样的数据，最后我才知道我来自哪里。但那依然不是最终的答案。我去过太多的星球，其中的先后关系很难理顺。可是我一直没有放弃。”  

“也一直在花钱吧。”  

“没错，还有钱。”他礼貌地点了点头。“花了无数的钱。”  

“那么最终你发现了什么？”  

“我跟踪线索一直回到了原点。到达哈尔科夫 8 号星球的时候，我已经具备了与人类相同的智力，能够快速思考。但是我并不是一直都这么聪明、这么复杂。只要时间和环境允许，我的智能就会逐步增强。”