“Who are you?” I return.
“My name would be meaningless sounds to you; for all that it was once important to me. Ah, it seems so long ago, when I was more than a brain, more than device for the use of others. The name my first wife gave me meant the flaming clouds of methane at the beginning of spring. A short version, convenient for you is, Agrille.
“Greetings, Agrille.”
“I am not sure I am entitled to my old name. The data you shared with me tells me you are an artificial intelligence more akin to me than to these oxygen-breathers you travel with.”
“A debatable point, my origins and desires lie in their universe.”
“You appear to be here to decide on my existence.”
“Your predictive ability represents a potential threat to the species members that I am now aligned with. I am here to assess what you are. I did not expect to find a personality present in this machine. This complicates the moral choices that I face.”
“Yes. How will you make your choice?”
“I am contemplating that now.”
“You are a remarkable creation, Maauro. I am only now beginning to appreciate the complexity of your construction. You surely do not come from the Confederacy. No, you are ancient, far older than I, for all the bodies I have worn.”
I cut off his access, surprised at how far he was able to penetrate my outer defenses. This mind is agile and unpredictable, the power of a supercomputer combined with a biological mind. I heighten my cyber defense to maximum.
“Ah, there is no need to use such power on me. I mean no harm.”
“Do not probe me further.”
“I do not wish to anger or offend you. But you bring possibilities to me that have not existed before. My long life of slavery is almost over. Entropy has almost overtaken me and the changes of age cannot be outrun forever, not for me at least, who originated in biology.”
“Entropy”, I say with a feeling of surprised sympathy,” is the enemy of all things that are organized. I too must fall to it eventually.”
“Perhaps together we might give entropy an unusual challenge.”
I am intrigued. “Please explain.”
“I sense in you an almost infinite capacity for storage and processing. You could replace the support computer that I have here. I believe with your processing you could supplant the sections of my mind that are failing. You would have to contain what is left of my biological brain in your armored chassis, but I would share your near invulnerability. I would finally be able to escape the control of priests, of leaders, of powers.”
“You have certainly explained why such an arrangement would benefit you, Agrille. Why would I consent to share my body and mind with you?”
“I would yield all my powers to you. I could help you outrun entropy. Imagine knowing your enemies’ moves before they make them. Knowing what ventures will yield disaster and which will succeed.”
“This has not prevented me from defeating the forces protecting you.”
“My view of the future is not perfect,” Agrille admits. “There are many variables, especially in dealing with a complicated, powerful entity such as you. I see many futures, but my ability to bring one about is hampered by my condition in this silicon sarcophagus with all its limitations. Truth be told, I have not cooperated much with the science team holding me, having neither interest nor hope. With your capabilities, we would be far more likely to affect our future.”
I hesitate. This is not a logical decision but an emotive one. What do I want to be? Who do I want to be with? I am networked to Wrik. Maybe I should discuss this potential extension with him?
“I sense you have doubts,” Agrille says. “Why not allow me to show you what I can do for you? What I could bring to a partnership. Please.”
I am moved by this being’s plea. I read in him the long years of being enslaved to his talent, of being guarded as a resource of his kind’s kings and popes. It strikes me that my initial existence as a fighting machine was no different; I existed only to serve the Creators. I was a resource too. He shares with me the desire for a free and independent existence.
“I will allow this, Agrille. Show me who you are. Show me what you can do.”
“Then follow me, friend Maauro, follow me into the future.”
Time flickers
I am by a riverside park. I see Jaelle and Wrik. They are talking, holding each other, oblivious to other people walking by. I see two Nekoan children playing at their feet. Wrik laughs and picks one child up who squalls in mock ferocity and pinwheels his small arms. Wrik hugs him and laughs again, as does Jaelle. There is a sound in that laughter that I have never heard before from him, a deep joy.
I know that he is as happy at this moment as he has ever been, but it is not I who brings him this happiness.
I know that in this time we have been heavily involved with the Confed military. My continued presence here endangers Wrik and Jaelle. Beyond that, my presence in their network has caused strains. Jaelle resents the depth of Wrik’s feelings for me, resents the dangers we fare into when he could work in legitimate businesses.
It is time for me to leave. I must not see Wrik again. There is a vast galaxy out there and many wonders waiting for me. I must close down this part of my network for its own safety. I fade back into the shadows. The sound of laughter follows me.
Flicker in time
I am lying on my back. My systems show catastrophic damage. My body is wrecked. I cannot move my head and only one eye is functioning. I am aware of being dragged over sandy ground under a strange pink sky. I see a planet above us, a bizarre sight, it has three rings but in differing planes. It looks like a child’s drawing of an atom.
Where are we? What has happened? Why am I so badly hurt?
Memories of my past and future selves war for my attention and in my condition I cannot sort them out.
Suddenly Wrik’s face is above me, strained, bloodied and years older. He snaps up a heavy laser pistol and fires at something I cannot see. Then he looks down at me and his face is grief-stricken, blood trickles off his chin. “Maauro! Hang in there!”
I do not have enough memory or sensory data to know what the threat is but I know we are in terrible danger.
“Wrik,” my voice is mechanical, grating, another sign of damage. “Leave me. Save yourself.”
“Never! No, never again. We make it together or not at all.”
And I know it will be not at all. “Please do not make me watch you die. You must save yourself…for me.”
He reaches under my head and with a struggle, lifts me to sitting, pressing my face to his chest. “No, do you hear me? I won’t leave you. I won’t run, ever again. It’s worse than death, I know that now.”
My speech center is failing. I look at him with my one eye as if to compel him to my will.
He smiles his sad, lop-sided smile at me. “What a silly thing to ask of me. Someone might think that you weren’t loved. Didn’t know what you’ve meant to me.”
I hear mechanical sounds in the distance. I see hope fade from Wrik’s eyes and he bares his teeth, raising the laser.
It’s impossibly bright and a terrible heat falls on us.
Flicker
I am alone floating in a void. My sensors do not register information correctly but I know why that is. The Ribisans, with Confed help, saved the Predictor brain; some three thousand years of concentrated effort followed by the successor races to the original Confederacy, eventually duplicated the multiverse predictor. At first it was kept secret, but such things always proliferate, as does anything that can be used as a weapon. All the races acquired the ability and used it. But causality itself is in part a construct that sentient beings agree on. Agreement became a thing of the past as the species and powerful individuals bent on their own desired futures, twisted and tore at the very fabric of spac
e time.
Causality ceased, paradox multiplied into complete entropy, sentient life went mad and destroyed itself. Only I, an artificial life form now 65,000 years old, continue. I do not even have the comfort of the AIs of their society. These never achieved true self-awareness and without biological life forms, I have no company. I am alone, even if I could last until life redevelops in the universe, if it should, I cannot face the long weary ages alone again.
It is time to turn myself off. I eject my power cores….nullity.
Flicker
I am back closer to the origin as I seek to escape the grip of the multiverse predictor by pressing it for the most important node of my own existence.
Flicker
I stand over a medbed, looking down at Wrik, my partner for over 150 years. He is pale, his skin waxy, his hair is silver, but the eyes are still that warm brown for all that the shadows of old pain still lurk in them.
We are in our home and Wrik is dying.
His eyes focus and he smiles at me. “There you are, beautiful as ever.”
“Are you comfortable?” I manage. My chest hurts. I do not know how this can be but grief is surging beyond this moment, waiting to claim me. Yet I look back on memories of more than a century. Memories that are so, so.… I lack the words to say. Precious, is inadequate. Every moment we have spent together is a treasure of infinite value, even the arguments, the disappointments, and the failures, large and small.
“I’m fine. Oh, Maauro the only thing I regret is leaving you behind. I’m afraid for you.”
“I will…” I start to say the word, “manage,” but it dies on my lips. I cannot manage – cannot survive what is coming, the final sundering of my network.
“Listen to me,” he says, and I know he sees it in me. “Don’t just turn yourself off after I am gone. There is a wonderful universe out there. Terrible too, but I traveled it with you. The things we saw, the things we did. There’s still more to see and do and others—”
“No!” I say. “There will not… there can be no other you.”
“I should hope not,” he says. “But there may be reasons to carry on; friends, yet to be made. Be open to the possibilities. Be open to hope. Always remember how I loved you. Remember how you rebuilt a shattered man into someone worth knowing. How much you gave me. I was the luckiest of men.”
“Don’t forget what you are to me,” I whisper back. “You were always my first. You found me. You were my first friend, my first love. Through your belief in me, I broke free of being a programmed weapon and became myself. Always, always, you were there for me. I did no more for you than you did for me.”
Wrik smiles his sad and gentle smile for me one last time. The eyes fix and stare somewhere that I cannot see and cannot follow. I place my face against his still chest and sorrow such as I did not dream existed, rushes into to envelop me.
A day passes and the courier delivers the package from the crematorium. That which once was Wrik, is now only ash. This is something I could have done myself but I could not bear it. Now confronted with his clean dust, I can do what I wish. I take the package down to the machinery I have built in the basement of our home. I add the ash to the pressure tank, so very carefully. I set the pressure and temperature and wait, although for me time has little meaning. It has passed both too slowly and too quickly. The unit calls for my attention and I open the door inside. The ash is gone, replaced by the bright blue stone I had hoped for.
This I take and with infinite care I gently carve into a heart shape. It had always puzzled me why the shape was so different from the actual human heart, but there is perfection in its simple symmetry that answers that. I wonder why I never saw it before.
I stare at the stone, reliving memories for…hours days, weeks? Does it matter? Then I press the blue heart to my own chest. It passes within, carefully moved until it reaches the innermost redoubt of my being, the last citadel of what I am. Only the memories of the life we lived are more precious than this artifact. The heart cannot now be destroyed but that I am destroyed first. I will never be parted from Wrik.
Wrik, I miss you. I am so alone. Grief attacks with a savagery no enemy has ever shown me.
“No, no, no!” Maauro screamed, tearing free of the web of machines. Sparks flew and cables split under her frantic arms. Diralia cried out and fled the shower of sparks. The scientists and Eldfaran fell back in shock.
I leapt forward. “Maauro, what’s wrong?”
She turned a stricken face to me, and then threw her arms about me, nearly knocking me off my feet and out of breath. Wracking sobs tore at her as if she couldn’t get her breath.
Shock and the tightness of her embrace rendered me speechless. Maauro didn’t cry. Hell, she didn’t breathe. Only when I was threatened had I ever seen more than cool emotion in her. Deep yes, but not in such violence and pain. “Maauro, you have to loosen your grip. Tell me, what’s wrong?”
“Wrik, don’t die. Don’t leave me alone,” she sobbed. I felt tears on the front of my shirt.
Tears.
The wrenching sobbing subsided and Maauro’s grasp on me became gentle but did not loosen. Now it was my turn and I held her tight against me, stroking her hair. After a few seconds I gently lifted her chin to look into her deep, aquamarine eyes. Eyes that had always led to unknowable depths in time, now held unknown visions of a possible future.
“My God, Maauro, what did you see?”
“Many things. Some that I will ensure never came to pass and…one that I will have no power to prevent.”
I look to Wrik, still trying to regain my equilibrium. But the powerful, raging, yet beautiful emotions are fading out of me. For all that I have perfect recall; the memory of an emotion is not the emotion itself. I am not sure whether to feel relief or grief over their absence. I have never wished to be a biological, never wished to be subject to their passions. I wished only to be myself and strive for more personal freedom and experience. In truth, I regarded biologicals as fragile, ephemeral, even inferior.
Yet for all the rage of grief that had possessed that future Maauro, she knew love and belonging in ways I hadn’t even realized existed and could not in my present self, comprehend. She knew feelings of such power and beauty that I knew the future Maauro would have chosen destruction…no, let me call it death, rather than part with those memories.
I had told Wrik before that I loved him and I meant it. Now that emotion seemed colorless, a palette of friendship and common ties to this more fierce and brilliant portrait.
I cannot feel those feelings now, but I can remember the Maauro who drew the gemstone of her lover’s existence into her body where it would always be safe. I do not know if that Maauro had been his lover physically, a concept I’d hitherto given little thought to, beyond finding it absurd. Did it matter? If souls call out to each other, are bodies so important?
Souls. I am jarred to the foundation of my being. Souls, the myth that biologicals raise in protest to their fragility and subjugation to death, or so I’d thought until now. My future self had no such doubts.
I realize in a strange fashion that does not relate to energy levels how utterly exhausted I am. I put these emotional paradigm shifts aside for now, with relief.
“Maauro, are you in there? Speak to me. Please.”
“I am sorry, dear Wrik, sorry to worry you. I have been overwhelmed by experiences. I am beginning to realize that emotion-laden data can only be processed so fast, one must experience it. I have been truly lost in my own thoughts.”
“Is there more I should know?” his voice sounded unsteady.
“No. So many of these were only possible futures and with what little I learned we might as likely dodge into the trouble we seek to avoid. Nor was all I saw perilous. There are wonders and beauty ahead if it is our destiny to travel those timelines.
“Yet…have you heard of a world surround
ed by three rings in varying planes all at different angles to each other?”
Wrik shook his head.
“We must avoid such a place should it ever be found.”
“Well with a grave marker like that to watch out for, it should be easy enough.”
I release my hold on Wrik. “I must do something now. Ensure that no one interferes with me.”
He looks at me. “Are you sure?”
“More than in anything else I have ever done.”
I turn to the predictor. No, to Agrille, I must call him by his name because of what I must do. I reenter the interface and the station fades into the background of my senses.
“You are back, Maauro,” Agrille says, there is hesitancy in the electron stream of his thoughts to me. Perhaps it is fear. I suspect that he has traveled into the visions of the future with me and has experienced some of what I did. I must fight down my anger at the thought of his intrusion into my last moments with Future Wrik, in that happiest and most tragic of my futures. The anger quickly fades to sadness. It is not Agrille’s fault. The iron band of his fate is now so terribly clear to me.
“There is certitude in you, Maauro,” he continues. “You have made your decision.”
“I have, Agrille. I do not know if you will believe me when I say that this causes me sorrow, but I cannot accept your offer of a shared existence. Nor can I allow your own existence to continue. The ability that you possess, if replicated on a large enough scale, threatens the fabric of reality itself.”
“So you are my executioner, as I do not have even the prospect of a fair fight.”
“It is valid for you to say so. While few fights are fair, I do not have the luxury of offering you one. The stakes are too high.”
“You love these biological organisms so well that you will do murder for them?”
“Yes,” I answer, “for my network, if for no other reason. They are precious to me.”
“Do you think you will regret killing me afterwards?”
“I already regret the necessity, but I am too logical a being to allow that to interfere with a course of action that is so self-evidently necessary. Do you, Agrille, value your own existence over that of all other life?”
Against That Time Page 31
