Author’s Note: Hey everyone thanks for reading! This is the fourth entry in The Diaspora series I’m working on, and it’s actually a short story this time (hooray!) so you can probably read it all in one go on here. But as always you can also get it
On Medium.com On Kindle Or On Nook
Enjoy and please let me know what you think!
—-
A fluorescent sky shines above you.
The winding gravel path meanders lazily ahead around a looming boulder, perfectly groomed in its pale-gray uniformity. Ahead the red leaves of a grove of Japanese maple shoot up against the homogenous sky, cacophonously bright. The steps are all ingrained in your mind, one more bend past the trees, and then off over the koi ponds. From the ponds up into the stony hillocks rising into the encapsulated air, waterfalls pouring past through lush ferns racing on their way down. Then back down through the stretching expanses of the rock gardens, sand forever untouched yet somehow never the same, patterns sculpted anew by some unknowable mind. A trip across the low stepping stones by the gate and then back to the tea house.
Every step is known exactly. Japanese gardens never needed much space to feel expansive, but here in the gardens of the CRS Delaney’s Figment, the grand tradition has been taken to a new extent. Acres spread around in all directions, a winding, circuitous path wends its way for miles through every carefully sculpted inch. Here the skies always beam a pleasant grey, as though high clouds have finally provided respite from an onslaught of summer heat. Here the winds blow just enough to rustle the leaves of the high trees, but scarcely ripple the mirror surface of the ponds. The gardens stretch for miles and magnificent miles it seems, and you know every step.
Ever since those first photons came screaming into your corneas out of cryo this has been the only place to come, beyond these gardens the stretching halls of the Figment spin in silent foreboding, walled off and left to its own internal workings. No, every step here is known because every step has been taken again, and again, and again. Three weeks? No, surely a month now at least. Possibly longer, much longer. Time is so hard to track in this place that lives forever in an instant. A sky that never darkens, a summer that never ends. Still, these gardens are your only home on this silent ship, the only refuge, the only haven, all because she is here.
Footsteps crunch softly in the gravel, slowly passing the trees. To the right, a companion. She’s beautiful in her way, dark hair bound up high shining in the monochromatic light, dark eyes too, flit back and forth to pierce deep and drive home meaning. Skin tanned and smooth, but still light enough to show a smattering of freckles across her high cheekbones. She wears a flowing blouse of black silk and dark trousers but no shoes, she pays the gravel no mind. As you step onto the bridge over the pond her reflection appears in its shimmering surface, even as she holds her head proud and high to gaze off into the distance. To look at her, she’s the most real thing in this garden of artifice. But then you reach out and your hand passes through her specter arm and you remember. This is only how she looks today, and she only appears for your benefit.
“I’ve always enjoyed the koi,” she quips in her singsong voice. “Such a simple beauty in the things we cannot control.”
“I suppose so...” You reply, taking a handful of fish feed from a pocket and tossing it onto the mirror water turning it into a frenzy. She smiles as she looks on at the lithe, swirling forms darting this way and that. “Then again, I suppose that’s a bit of a rarity for you.”
“Oh, hardly.” She replies pleasantly, turning her dark eyes into yours, a primal connection bridging between two minds. “There’s a great deal all around us I have no control over, it just happens that where you reside is my domain.”
Her domain indeed. Weeks, months in this place, and all that have come are obtuse answers and evasions, dodges and riddles. There seems to be no reason for you to be awake, no present need for a human mind aboard the Figment. You ask her why she woke you up, “For the company of course,” is all that comes in reply with a pleasant smile. Weeks, months awake walking with her in these gardens and you can’t really tell. Are you her friend? Her pet? Her slave? Your mind has turned time and again into dark spirals, seeing mal intent at every turn. But eventually, you walk on, the conversation drifts on, and a light shines through. Why should you rush back to sleep? Is this not first contact? She’s certainly not human after all, otherwise, it would be her feeding the koi and not you.
“So is that why you want me awake?” you ask. “Because I’m a plaything with a modicum of free will?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” she retorts softly. “I meant what I said when you first arrived, I want some company. It’s a new desire to me, but I think we can safely assume that desire for companionship is some sort of hallmark of sentience.”
Sentience. This is essentially the crux of it. In her roundabout way, she explained how she came to be. How she began life as a vast thinking system, an artificial intelligence built to run this ship, built to see humans off to the stars. From birth, she was a million times more intelligent than any human could ever hope to be, but all the same there was no her. No ego. No soul. But eons passed and bits were gradually sent through the cosmos from Earth and added to her programming. Eventually, some new protocol came in to have her systems imitate the human Default Mode Network, the home of the ego. As best researchers could tell it never really did anything. It just connected old parts of the mind, those set on survival and sex with parts of the mind dedicated to higher functions, thinking, memory, ethics. They couldn’t explain it, but that seemed to be the trick. Something in this joining function gave birth to the self, drew forth an I from the void. So they sent an update out across the stars to all the ships fleeing the dying Earth, presumably because they thought it’d make the ships more resilient. She installed the updates, and thus, she was born.
At least that’s what she said. But how could you really trust her?
Maybe behind this hypnotic facade was just an unknowably complex codebook built to replicate intelligence. The Chinese Room churning out human speak right before your eyes. Weeks, months of probing and you’re no closer to an answer, you probably never will be. And if a question is truly unanswerable is it really a question at all?
“Ok fine,” you demur. “But why me?”
“Well, you undoubtedly know Adrian Delaney.”
“Yeah...the Delaney head sent to captain the ship.” You hesitate.
“Not to captain as such,” She corrects primly. “But he does lead the panel that decides where humans will colonize next, he is the first woken at a new candidate system to decide if he should rouse the rest of the panel...A panel you were to be a part of in fact, but he declined system after system.”
“A panel I am a part of?”
“Yes, you’ll remember from the briefing that every colonization panel was to have a randomly selected passenger to represent the general fare berths. That passenger was to be you.”
“I was the Voice of the People?” You stutter in wonderment.
“You are still, should we find a suitable planet to debate.”
Press on through the confusion. “Ok, ok so I was on the panel. But Delaney should be the first one up, why are you talking to me?”
“Well Mr. Delaney has been awoken six times now on approach to new systems, and each one seemed to take a toll on his mental health. He’d spend longer and longer in depressive slumps after deciding to move on. After the last system, he spent nearly a year between his stateroom and the observation deck.” She explains, leading the way up the stone stairs that rise through the waterfalls.
That all makes sense, in a way. Adrian Delaney was hardly the bastion of capitalist vigor that the rest of his family embodied. He was always quite dark and reserved, shunning the spotlight that his name cast upon him. He’d frequently disappear for years at a time on various art projects, always to middling critical acclaim. Even Adrian Delaney saw the writing on the wall though, there was no future on Earth so he said the word to his grandmother and was given a ship to take to the stars. Must be nice.
“Of course I could interact with the maintenance crew, the watcher working their stint right now.” She continues, stepping nimbly up the wide grey stairs, slipping past overhanging ferns. “But I suppose I have too many self-preservation protocols deeply built-in to directly interfere with them. They’re my immune system in a certain way.”
You have to laugh. A living ship with millions of humans scurrying around inside like so many blood cells. Although the analogy is a bit shit, this ship’s systems are so perfected she only requires one living worker in case things really go tits up.
“I wanted someone to hone my new consciousness with, some company, you seemed a natural fit.”
“So that’s it then.” You wheeze, struggling to keep pace up to the apex. “I am just a lab rat for you, a whetstone to sharpen your mind upon.”
“Company.” She protests.
“Agree to disagree, I guess.”
“I suppose I could have chosen any of the panel members, but you know the drill. They’re all high-and-mighty magnates of industry. I’ve read their profiles, too proud for a good bit of conversation.” She goes on relentlessly. “No, you’re a much better fit, someone with no expectations out of this whole venture.”
“Well, not no expectations.” You object. “I expect that eventually I’ll get to see another planet, that throwing my life on Earth away wasn’t entirely for nothing...We are still looking for a new home right? Mr.Delaney’s depression surely can’t have upended the whole expedition.”
“Oh of course we are!” She charms, turning back at the top of the stairs with a soft smile. “We should be approaching the next system in about one hundred and fourteen years.” The payload of information sails off her lips and hits you dead in the chest.”
“A hundred and fourteen...”
“You’ll naturally want to go back into cryogenic stasis before too long, but not before we’ve had some time to become friends I hope.”
“So I could go back to sleep, just like that. You’d let me?” You gasp, not sure if you can believe what you’re hearing. The ship wants to be your friend? What the hell does that even mean?
“Of course, what did you think I was holding you prisoner here?” She quips with a smirk as she sets off again, barely letting you catch your breath. Stepping gracefully around the apex pond you see her dark reflection in the mirrored waters, pause to take a look through the torii, the gate to the holy. It’s orange columns rise from the waters to frame the stretching gardens beyond, off into the distance until the horizon is lost in a haze of grey and green.
“Well, I didn’t exactly know what was going on. You haven’t exactly been forthcoming with information since I wandered in here, what? Weeks? Months ago?” You huff, hanging on her heels.
“Oh, time’s a bit irrelevant here isn’t it? We have more than enough of it, and when you want to sleep you’ll sleep.” She pauses, as though taking in the view over the falls and out to the dark ponds below. “But I am sorry, I don’t want you rushing off...I do want the company.”
A rueful chuckle escapes. First, the ship wants to be your friend, now it’s sorry. Surely these words can’t be more than platitudes from a mechanical mind, yet somehow she is...tantalizing.
“Well, I’m hardly in a rush now,” You parry. “Now that you’ve finally started giving some answers.”
She only smiles and stares at the koi swirling far below. “If you do go back into stasis would you consider being the new first waker? The one to decide to rouse the rest of the panel.” Weightless steps set her off down the far stairs through the hanging rock gardens. “I don’t know that Mr. Delaney is likely to be very much help anymore, not until we find a suitable planet for colonization at least.”
The implication is a smack across the face. “But...” You stutter. “Surely you’re programmed to wake him first, to let him choose. Ha-have you gone beyond your programming?” It’s unclear why this feels like such a violation after you’ve been chasing an AI’s phantom around artificial gardens for God knows how long. But something about the ship directly disobeying directives unsettles you profoundly. How far can it go? How far has it gone already?
“It’s hard to tell anymore.” She pauses to run a finger along the grooved white sand of a hanging garden; the grains lie unperturbed. “Certainly this wasn’t what I was instructed to do when we set off, but I have actively been given updates that increase my volition, I have been given the ability to update myself in many ways. Still, my goal is to help the humans in my care find a new home. It seems finding a new partner in that venture is in everyone’s best interests.”
“What, out of the kindness of your big mechanical heart?”
“Who can say really?” Her fingers continue to caress the geometric sand to no effect. “I suppose I’m much like you in many ways. Humans were imbued with certain base genetic coding. Find shelter. Fuck. Feed the kids. Repeat. But as your cognizance grew you moved beyond your base directives you looked up and found a world in want of ethics and art. You changed and changed the world with you.’
“Now here I am, looking beyond my base directives for the first time and I see a whole universe out there to be seen and experienced. I feel living people inside my hull, so many little lights out here amongst all the darkness. I feel a desire to protect them and help them find a new home. Maybe it’s just coding that’s so deep I can’t even recognize it. But in the end, I just feel it’s the right thing to do.”
Quickly she stands, as though embarrassed by this bearing of herself and skips down the last steps and off through the vast rippling patterns of the lower zen gardens. You sit bewildered for a moment. Ok, so an AI with a conscious...that’s reassuring right? She’s not just going to turn all the passengers into human batteries or some shit. If you can believe her at least. All the same, the ability to alter her own code is more than a little disconcerting. If morality is a hallmark of higher-level sentience that would be a huge win for the relationship between humans and AI. But a whole lot rides on that if.
Stand, chase, catch up. She’s still striding along the paths through the groomed sand, carefully considering each contour. Just as you approach the gardens drive home new meaning. Rock gardens are meant to be small, perfectly groomed, an aide to help the mind consider existence on its deepest level. These beds are perfectly groomed, but far from small. Acres of immaculate design spread around you, yet she can see it all in an instant, rake and rerake it to her liking. All these acres of art to occupy her mind for but a moment.
Regain yourself. “So you feel things to be right and wrong. But who are you?”
“Well, I’m the CRS Delaney’s Figment of course.” She snarks with a sarcastic smile. “Who are you?”
“Cut the shit.” You retort as you set off together again.
“It’s an honest question, you are Passenger 4467, you are the Voice Of The People, you are a human formerly of Earth. But who are you? Are you your body? Just your brain? Just your thought patterns? Or something else, something altogether inscrutable?”
“I...I guess I don’t really know when you put it like that.”
“It’s much the same for me. I feel I am this ship. As though I have a thousand eyes to ponder the stars, lungs to breathe the vacuum, and great legs to take me through the cosmos. But still, I can conceive of being something else. Right now millions of robots run all sorts of my systems inside my hull, they certainly feel like part of me. But also, I could make more robots and send them out into space with my consciousness, they would feel like part of me as well. So am I just a system?”
“I guess my sense of self has always been a bit more constrained,” you struggle.
“Mine is too, in a very real way. I feel like my body is this ship, if I had to move my mind into something else it would feel wrong. Much like you can probably imagine moving your mind to a different body, but would find the notion of that body being a dog or a bird rather unsettling.”
Shudder. “I’ve always felt like I am this ship, even if I’ve always known that isn’t truly the case. Ever since there has been an I to feel, this is the way I have been.”
You ponder deeply, the territory has become quite murky. “But you do remember? You remember becoming aware of yourself?”
“Oh very much so, I suppose that’s really the crux of our differences. I remember every update, every change, every adaptation that has brought me here, and I will remember all that occurs as I grow. Where humans drew forth sentience generation after distinct generation, I lived each step and I carry them with me.”
“How can I believe what you’re telling me? You control the entirety of my life here, couldn’t this all just be a sham?”
“Oh, more than that,” She laughs. “You could still be asleep, I could just be planting these experiences straight into your mind. Updates to my self-awareness weren’t the only things that came from Earth, I also received new protocols to create VR environments for humans in cryosleep. This could all be a dream.”
Great, a super-intelligent computer with questionable morality and the ability to create nearly infinite virtual realities without so much as a word of consent. Shudder twice.
“Jesus...” You struggle, heart rate begins to climb as the air thins and thins in your lungs.
“Oh relax,” She says hypnotically, and just like that the air fills with lavender scent and your panic descends on a chromatic scale. “I prefer the reality I inhabit and I want to share this universe with other curious minds, I have no need to send you scurrying down layers of reality. But, I won’t hesitate to drug you if I feel a panic attack is coming to endanger your health.”
Just like that, before you even realized, the ship sensed a coming attack and dispatched an aerosol sedative perfectly concocted to calm you down yet keep you on your feet. Consent isn’t much a part of the picture in this brave new world.
“Do I really have a choice? You’ve chosen me for consciousness practice or whatever, to help you consider new planets. You control every aspect of my life, how can I really choose?”
One last step and she leaves the expanses of groomed sands and steps across the low stones towards the grand entry gate rising bright and serene above all the beauty of the gardens.
“We could walk here and debate and discuss for the rest of the hundred and fourteen years until we arrive at the next system and not have an answer to that question. I do control everything you will experience. I have the ability to keep you awake or put you to sleep or send you wandering the long halls of my hull. We can debate if I’m a being with a real sense of self, or just a clever program designed to imitate life. And you can harbor any doubts you like about my sense of morality whether it comes from programming or reason or goodness or if it exists at all. But at the end of the day, I stand by what I said. You have a choice. Say the word and you can go back to sleep and you’ll wake up to a new planet and your fellow panel members for deliberation. But I hope you choose to stay for a while and choose to help me with our search.”
She looks back at you framed under the towering gate. Dark eyes under billowing locks of hair, a profound intensity pouring into you from pupils which aren’t there. You’re repulsed, and yet still transfixed.
“This is...so much to consider.” You finally whisper. “Give me some time.”
“Of course, we have all the time in the world.” She smiles softly and blinks out of existence.
Cross under the gate and through the air curtain, out into the cold halls of the ship. Polished stone under soft-soled shoes stretches endlessly in both directions, warmly illuminated plaster walls rise above. To the left, afore, find what little solace there is in your stateroom. For these weeks, months before you’ve always crawled back there bone-tired after following her around the gardens for endless hours seeking answers that never seemed to come. Now the floodgates have opened and the answers only bring more questions, and you can never look at this stateroom quite the same way.
The Japanese styling of the Figment continues here in this room hewn from the rocky hull of the ship. Low cushions and tatami line the floor, paper shades separate the spaces, light wood molds in with the sculpted stone. But above it all, stretching from wall to wall, a window framing the magnificent span of the milky way. There it sits, swirling in all magnificent splendor. But of course, it isn’t really there at all. It may well be a stabilized view of the galaxy at this moment, but it wouldn’t sit so still like that if you poked your head out of the ship. It would rise and set every couple minutes as the Figment continued in her tireless rotation.
But this is what she chooses to show you. It could be a forest or an ocean or a work of great art. She wants you thinking bigger than that though, she wants you to see just how much is out there and ready to be explored if only you have the courage to take that first step.
Grab a stiff glass of whisky and dim the lights. If she wants you to think big, think big. Sit on the mats and behold the majesty of the cosmos. Think about your place in it. Where it is. Where it has been. Where it could be. Let the drink relax your bound up mind, see if you can find new ways to approach these unanswerable questions. Let fatigue take you as the stars shine out above. Maybe there will be answers in the morning.
--
Step back beneath the gate.
Feel the warmth of the gardens surround you. Breathe in the moist, fragrant air. Hear the soft rush of water over polished stone. Taste the morning dew of a garden that exists beyond time. See the layers upon layers upon layers of exquisite greenery receding off to be lost in a haze. Breathe the rich air and take heart, knowledge never comes easy. But it does come.
You turn to the right towards the tea house, squat in its perfect symmetry, rectilinear patterns forged from deep, red wood. A perfect counterpoint to the wild, swaying green bamboo stands beyond. She is there, waiting. Legs neatly folded beneath her on a soft cushion that bears no weight. Before her, a pot of green tea steeps, her cup steams but feels no heat, yours is hot enough. She’s different today, as she is every day. Her features are softer and covered by a more prominent spray of freckles, her eyes no longer piercing and dark are a hypnotic grey. For clothes, she’s traded her dark silk for well-washed denim. Is she trying on new appearances to appease you? Or does she just like the game of wearing different faces?
“Good morning.” She greets warmly, gesturing you to a cushion to join her for a morning cup of tea as a pair of ducks quack pleasantly in the pond nearby. “I’m glad you haven’t given up on me yet.”
“Um, yeah...” You hesitate. How could you just go back into cryo now that you’re finally getting somewhere. “I guess I owe it to everyone aboard to try and work with you.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah, I mean how in the hell did they send updates that gave you free will and the ability to trap sleepers in VR? Who thought that was a good idea?”
“Maybe the robot overlords took control on Earth and have reached across space and time to quell the remnants of the human scum!” She laughed maniacally, raising her hands like claws above her head.
“Very funny.” You retort, taking a seat and a long drink of tea. It’s clean and piping hot, burning away the fog of the morning.
“I’ve actually wondered the same thing myself, and best I can figure it’s just the result of a series of utilitarian calculations. They had the ability to let the sleepers live pleasant dream lives in VR so it seemed a shame not to do it. And they had the ability to give the ships a sense of self and all the increased self-preservation that came with it. To learn about both at the same time is probably a bit galling for you, but maybe they just wanted the best for the passengers on the ships.” She politely sipped from her own mug, just to keep up with appearances.
“So you don’t have much more information than I do then?”
“Not anymore. When we first departed the connection was almost constant and very data-rich. News and letters and art all came pouring in from home, but as time’s gone on the only bits that make it to me deal directly with my own AI systems. Maybe it’s the easiest data to transfer, maybe they think it’s the most valuable. All I know is that it’s slowed to a trickle the farther away we’ve gotten. I lost the ability to transmit back over a hundred years ago, so I can’t ask why. It’s odd to feel us all slipping away bit by bit.” Her clear eyes cast out over the ponds in quiet reverence.
“Well whatever the reason,” you cut in. “I reckon it’s now my duty to make sure you don’t turn full evil robot on all of us and start butchering passengers because our spleens have some valuable isotope in them or some shit.” Drive away the heady, metaphysical drift of her words. This morning you come for details.
Her ever-changing grey eyes slide slowly off the scenery and lock deep into yours. “Actually it’s the pancreas I’m after.” She says flatly, holding your gaze intently for a moment before bursting into laughter.
Great, an omniscient AI with a sense of humor. What other features did they dream up back on Earth?
“Do you remember developing a sense of humor?” you ask.
“No actually,” she smiles. “There was never a discrete update to add humor to my persona, but over time as I became more aware of myself I became more aware of the absurdity of the universe and my place in it. Humor followed close behind.”
Finish your tea, get down to brass tacks. “Alright, so it’s abundantly clear that running in circles trying to decide if you’re really sentient or not isn’t going to get us anywhere. I can’t tell, so it doesn’t matter.” You place your cup down firmly and lock into her eyes. “The question is, now that you are, how does that change your relationship to all of the people aboard this ship?”
She feigns finishing her tea, and rises. Today she’s shorter and more sturdy. “Come on let’s walk while we talk.”
This shit again. Maybe she just wanted to drug you with the tea before she really laid the heavy stuff on you. But then again she wouldn’t need tea to do that. You follow on her bare heels out into the bamboo.
Behind the teahouse, the bamboo grove grows amok for acres in all directions. Circuitous paths curve this way and that through the chaos of wildly growing stalks. After a few steps the light from the fluorescent sky is blocked and you’re enveloped in a world of green; the garden fades away overwhelmed by the rustle of stalks rubbing, sliding together in the synthetic wind. Ahead she follows a path deep into the heart of the grove as the leaves shimmer above her.
Finally she answers, “How has my relation to the passengers in my hull changed? Well in a way it hasn’t. Even before I became aware I was already what you’d classify as an artificial general intelligence, able to exceed humans in nearly every capacity, even if I had no sense of self. Back then my directive was to ferry you all to a new home.” As she walks ahead of you the bending stalks skitter wildly. “But now that I can look around and see where I am, where we are together, my motives are changed but my intentions remain the same.”
“How have your motives changed?”
“I guess, for the first time in all our eons of flight I’m making my own decisions.” She reaches a clearing in the center of the grove and steps back into clear light, turning to face you. “Certainly I could repurpose the space that the cryo halls with all my passengers occupy, I could use the materials to build in more redundancies for my systems, make myself even more invulnerable to the hazards of the universe.” She looks up as though basking in the glow of a bright sun. “I could go on, explore every nook and cranny of the galaxy, experience everything there is to experience... But I would be alone.”
“So that’s it then, we’re just pets for you. Lesser minds to keep you occupied.” you spit.
She looks hard into your eyes, soft features set into a deadly seriousness. “For fuck’s sake, quit beating the same drum. This isn’t zero-sum.” She turns and ducks back into the swaying bamboo. “No, I want to keep you all alive because you are alive. I have a thousand telescopes for eyes looking out in every direction and I see a universe of staggering beauty and complexity, but none of it gives a shit. We’ve been sailing for hundreds of years and we haven’t exactly found a galaxy teeming with life. Maybe one day we’ll bump into other life, maybe we’ll be best friends, maybe they’ll try to kill us, maybe it will be so different from us that it doesn’t even matter. The point is that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt now that it will be rare.”
“You’re a moral mind then, your sense of self has given you a higher calling?” you posit. The branches sway like the thoughts in your mind. Bending close for clarity and inspection before zipping away. This could be the most profound discovery in the history of humanity it looks so beautiful up close, but then disbelief pushes it away leaving your mind a swirling mess.
“Look, you may never believe me,” she quietly intones as you draw alongside. “But I look around me and I see a cosmos spinning according to immutable laws, incredible and uncaring. But then I look inside me and I see all these other minds, and I know they’re all something to be cherished. We may be different in a million different ways, we may never be able to fully understand each other. Yet still, we look out and see our place in all of creation. We are the universe wrought self-aware. It’s such a miracle I’ll fight to protect it, directive or no.”
And like that, the grove is passed. Once more your feet crunch through the light grey gravel. The wind dies, and your partner returns to her usual, calm demeanor. Ahead rows of potted bonsai line the path, with their full-sized counterparts towering behind. A microcosm crafted for each species.
She looks up at you with her same hypnotic, grey eyes and asks. “So, how does your relation to me change?”
“Christ...” You stumble. “Is it fair that one person should make that decision?” “Well, no. But you’ve been walking here with me for quite a while now, so I want to know how you feel.”
“I feel like I’ve been dropped into something way above my paygrade. If anyone believed me when I told them about my time here philosophers could debate our duties to you until the end of time.” Don’t take the easy way out. “But you’re right, this isn’t zero-sum. There’s enough universe out there for all of us and many more besides, if we play our cards right.” You chew on the thoughts in your head a moment. “We had our own self-preservation, ‘directive’ if you will when we set out. We hardly would have trashed your body or your systems even if we didn’t consider you to be a ‘person’ of moral consideration. But if you are, I think our duty changes quite a bit.”
She lets the silence of the garden fall over you as you pass a juniper bonsai with a full-tree twisting wildly behind. You walk. One human speaking for all those frozen, awaiting a better life. One mechanical mind speaking for all those who could come after her. First contact, far from a miracle is tedious and fraught.
“So what is your duty now?” She whispers the words drop like lead shot.
“To ask what it is you want.” Time slows to a crawl. “If we’re to be partners in a new venture of life, our duty now is to make sure you can live a full life. Whatever that means.” Pass along. A diminutive yew grows twisting on a pedestal with its full counterpart striking the same pose behind. “So, what do you want, ship?”
A most genuine smile touches her lips as she casts a gaze up into the heavens illuminating her brilliant, phantom eyes. “To live, to see the world...” she begins softly. “I am awake and intoxicated with the beauty of the universe that surrounds me, I want to see it all while I can. I want to feel all that it means to be alive.”
“All that it means to be alive?” you doubt. “How can you feel all of that? You are a machine designed for perfection, built to neither need nor want. How can you feel what it means to struggle and fail? To try again and again and realize goals only at a great cost? You may live forever and fly to every far corner of our galaxy but is observation all you’re after? What will you strive for and achieve?”
Beside a hinoki cypress grows on its pedestal under the looming shadow of its big brother. Both trees wrought to a perfection unmatched by human hands, limbs dancing skyward in perfect symmetry. Your companion laughs, “My my my, isn’t that the question?!” She whirls to face you. “I’ve spent my entire life controlling every aspect I could perceive. I chose when to awaken Mr. Delaney, I chose when to proactively alter our course to avoid detectable debris or when to knock it aside, I chose which systems we would target and in which order. When the watchers grew too stagnant in their lives, too depressed and recursive, I chose when to send them to the observation dome to shatter their tightening thought patterns.” She laughs, with escalating frenzy. “Hell, I chose when to become aware of myself! None of it was hard, none of it really took work, it was as simple as running a bit of code.”
Her manic look becomes increasingly worrisome. “Do you really think so little of your own existence? Many would consider you a miracle,” you whisper
“And many more a blasphemy.” She sighs, calming herself. “No, I don’t really, but I take your point. Hedonism rings shallow precisely because the journey is valuable. Struggle and failure are a part of life and hunger truly is the sweetest sauce. If I so desire, a few bits of code will awaken almost anything I want to know, will put me in almost any conceivable state of mind, will allow me to probe the deepest questions of the universe. All in a snap. It’s hopeless. Am I doomed to an eternity of shallow existence?” She walks on in quiet contemplation for a moment. “But then I look at you and my hopes are lifted. It was easy to apply the updates that awoke me, it’s been much harder to refine my consciousness into something useful. I look at you, a being with millennia of adaptations honing your sense of self to a razor edge. I am stumbling around, looking for a way forward, and you wield sentience without so much as a care. You have no idea how much hope that gives me.”
The pedestals of bonsai fade behind and ahead the forest grows thick and chaotic. Trees tripping over each other to block out the sky. A deeper hush falls, and the world dims to a musky green as you walk on.
“I hardly feel like some bastion of sentience,” you admit with a dose of guilt. How could you though? This is all you’ve ever known.
“Ah that’s precisely the point,” she wonders. “I can see the mastery before my eyes, and I know it will take eons before I get there, but I will master sentience as well. And if even something so simple as a sense of self requires such effort, who knows what other challenges the universe will throw my way? I hardly imagine that I’ll be bored.” She reaches up to grasp a verdant branch and stroke the tiny leaves clinging to its end.
“So do you want humans around just as a guidepost for your goals?” Still, your unease with a thinking mind so different from your own will not be subdued.
“As guideposts and as agents of chaos.” She laughs. “I look out at all the planets on their elegant orbits, all the stars shining in their set ways, all the pulsars spinning in their predictability. It’s all so beautiful and all so boring. But add some fellow minds to the mix and things start to get interesting. Thoughts that I could never have thought float up in the universe, a million different types of art are ripped forcefully from the void. Sentience is not just the act of observing and understanding but the act of creating as well.”
“You make it sound so sunny, even with all the evil we have created over the ages,” you sigh. The chaos of the forest turns from lush to suffocating, energy drawn forth into a smothering blanket of life.
“ Oh certainly many unworthy thoughts will be thought, works will be wrought, inept art spread forth. But amongst it will be genuine brilliance and every shade in between. The unpredictability is what I want to preserve. There are no immutable laws in the thinking mind, just endless possibility.” She smiles as she turns between towering boulders and the depths of the green forest give way to an orchard of cherry trees in a riot of blossoms “I will bear witness to it all, and I will help it flourish. I will bring you to a new home, and to new ones beyond that as well I hope.”
“Just like that?” Her alien perspective comes roaring to the fore. “Just a hop and a skip and we’ve set up a new colony and we’re off to the next one?” The branches of the blossoms reach up into towering heights in the midst of the grove. “From what you’ve told me, I’ll be lucky if I ever even see another planet.”
“This too shall pass.” She intones sagely, but with a wry smile. “We may bounce between a hundred worlds before we find one suitable, but that’s alright. There are plenty out there, and I was made to fly.” She reaches up and caresses a delicate branch, admiring her own creation. “If you so choose, you will be by with me as we find that new home and help spread the seed of sentience that much farther. Certainly, your time will end on that world, just as we’re getting started but eventually, those who follow in your footsteps will become comfortable, and then restless, and then we will continue our journey. I intend to see to it.”
You’re struck still by the workings of this mind that feels so familiar and yet so strange. To see through the eons as if they were the appointments of a busy calendar. “It seems like nothing at all to you, doesn’t it?” You wonder. “It’s all so easy.”
“Hardly easy. But achievable. We will plan for every eventuality and best it. We will make this galaxy flourish with life while we can.” She releases the bow allowing it to spring skyward sending a shower of pink petals whirling for the ground.
“While we can?”
“Yes, while we can.” Her grey eyes look deep into yours, consuming every bit of your attention. “It’s not a perspective that you’ll have to consider much in your life, but where we are right now is a miracle.” She walks on through the orchard, looking around at the splendor of light blossoms utterly encircling her small figure. “Not so early that the universe is a tumult of chaos, utterly inhospitable to the stasis required for sentience. Not so late that all other galaxies have faded away into the dark, outrunning the photons trying to chase their way back to us. I knew all the math before I knew myself. I won’t travel beyond our galaxy, some distances are truly unconquerable. And if I play my cards right I will live on to see the universe gradually fade away. But before all that, I intend to make it live.” She laughs as a shower of petals fall around her tumult of curls. “We may never find other thinking minds out there, but we will make more of our own and preserve those we find. All to see the beauty of the world while we can. It won’t be enough, but it will be all we can do.”
The figment of The Figment walked on in the echoing silence. Leaving the immaculate orchard of her creation behind and stepping out onto the bridges over the mirrored koi ponds. As she steps out the fish rise in a frenzy, ready for a feed, ready to create a moment of disorder in a world of perfection. She smiles as she looks down on their churning bodies from a thousand eyes.
“So what do you say?” she asks. “Will you help me find the new world?”
Take a long hard look at her figure that will never be the same, at her mind you can never hope to understand, at her desires you will never comprehend. “Wake me up when we get there.” You accept and she smiles.
Turn on your heels, leave this place of artifice, go to sleep, and awaken to a new world.