Summary

In "Zeus," the chapter opens with a description of René Descartes' Demon. In his experiment, Descartes "posed the idea of an evil demon that had fooled him into imagining an outside world and a physical body" (203).

The narrative shifts to Zeus's first person perspective. Throughout the chapter, Zeus addresses Arthur using the second person, explaining the difference between knowledge and experience. He talks about his former existence as an ant inside a human mind. As an OS system, he is “the conduit between mind and machine" (206). As an ant, he had a body; now he has no physical being, and thus does not possess the programming for emotions. He describes the human interest in the interconnectivity of minute events. "You called it the butterfly effect in an attempt to explain how a minor action in one part of the world might influence...