by Hubbert, Jim
But then something made him feel profoundly stupid, something that was not the fruit of his self-awareness. This was when Sayaka’s friends asked him whether or not she let her hair down before bed.
For some reason Sayaka nearly always wore her hair up, whether the occasion was formal or relaxed. In a crowd, her striking combination of slender build and hair piled high, like an ancient warrior’s helmet, made her conspicuous. But Orville knew that was not the gist of the question. People wanted to know what kind of relationship they had. After hearing the question two or three times the subtext was obvious even to him.
Of course, there was no law forbidding love between an AI and a human. The era when that had been considered problematic was more than three centuries past. And Sayaka made no distinction between AIs and humans. As far as she was concerned, it wasn’t an issue.
Oddly enough, around the same time Orville began to ponder this, Sayaka’s attitude changed. Where previously she had always been completely open and frank with him, she now became guarded. On two or three occasions, she had invited Orville to her house for dinner; then the invitations stopped. She avoided discussing humanity or what was worth defending. Instead, she talked only about people they knew, food, the latest trends, and other trivia.
At this point the average male would have begun to worry that the woman’s interest might be waning, but unfortunately Orville was an AI with a heightened self-awareness. Even when he did not wish it, he was aware of Sayaka’s pulse and thermal signature. He understood that far from ignoring him, she was harboring a special interest toward him.
In other words, she was in a quandary, and this posed a major problem. For more than two weeks after he first became aware of Sayaka’s dilemma, Orville deliberated carefully. The problem, ironically, was his own feelings. Orville did not possess that mixture of vulgarity and pretension that drives human males to baldly approach females. On the other hand, he faced a very practical problem. Was it possible for him to love a woman? Were his feelings something he could trust?
Finally, the inevitable happened and Orville was forced to take action. One evening, he was at a bar with a new circle of friends. A young fleet officer—a man liked by all, including Orville—asked him more than half seriously, “Do you know whether Sayaka is seeing anyone?”
Orville was confused by the wave of emotion that rose up inside him. But before pausing to confirm what it was, he answered the question. “She isn’t seeing anyone, as far as I know.”
“Really? Great, thanks.” The officer rose from his chair with a look of determination and headed for the table where Sayaka was chatting lightheartedly with friends. Only then did Orville recognize the source of his agitation.
It was jealousy. He could feel actual jealousy. This astonished him, but it delighted him even more. He hadn’t expected to discover it this way, yet it confirmed his feelings for Sayaka. But this was no time for celebration; the officer had already wormed his way into the conversation and was casting frequent glances at her. The moment of truth would be along soon enough. No, there it was—the officer had requested the pleasure of her company, probably over at the long bar, and was already rising from his chair. Orville stood up.
When he reached the table, everyone turned to look at him. Sayaka, hand in hand with the now standing officer, was rising from her chair. She had just drawn a wry laugh from him, probably thanks to some cutting remark of hers, but she didn’t seem to be refusing him either. When she saw Orville, her face froze along with her body, half out of the chair.
One of the group motioned with his glass for Orville to join them. “Hey, Orville. Good timing. We’ve got a vacancy. Have a seat.”
“Thanks, not right now. Sayaka, I need to talk to you,” said Orville.
“Gosh, I’m sorry. I’m busy just now. Later, possibly—”
“It won’t keep. It’s probably the same thing he wants to tell you.” Orville gulped and prepared to deliver his message, but Sayaka sensed what was coming and held up her hand.
“Wait. All right, Orville. Let’s go over there. Next time, Yansen.”
While the stymied officer struggled for something to say, Sayaka lowered her eyes, slipped past him, and went to the bar, Orville in tow. As soon as they sat down, she emptied her glass and stared straight ahead.
“All right, you first. I might be making the wrong assumption.”
“You probably aren’t. I want a relationship with you. As a man,” said Orville.
“So I thought. Why the timing? Worried he’d beat you to the finish line?” she asked.
“Partly that, but I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. And so have you.” Orville waited for her answer. He was not optimistic. If Sayaka were inclined to accept him, her slender eyebrows would not be almost touching now. Still, he couldn’t help but be struck by her profile in the dim light of the bar. She was beautiful. Tightly pulled back, her hairline curved across her forehead like a glowing copper comb. The gently sloping line of her bare shoulders, the angled wrist holding her glass—she was more than just lovely form. Sayaka was delight. No human artifice could replicate it. This manifestation of decades of movement, animated by the mysteries of thought and experience, was something only humans possessed.
“You’ll go.” Her voice was a hoarse whisper. “You can’t stay with me. You’ll be deployed, that’s for sure. How can you talk like this?”
“Is it wrong?”
“It’s awful. Don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t,” said Orville. “If it were, there’d be no point to love. This isn’t like you. Are you so afraid of the future?”
“Of course I’m afraid!” She was staring at him now. Her amethyst eyes flashed with anger. “I’ve always tried to live with an eye on the future. How wonderful things will be when this war is over. Even with everything coming at us, military service and everything else, I thought things would just get better and better the more time passed. But if I fall in love with a Messenger, it’ll all be for nothing.”
“Is that what’s been worrying you?” said Orville.
“You knew?”
“I know how to look. Maybe women have suffered the same kind of anxiety since the beginning. But if you care about me, try to understand how I feel. We Messengers don’t even have a future to dream about.”
“Orville…” Sayaka’s eyes filled with tears. In a distant corner of his heart, Orville tasted bitterness. The logic of seduction that he was deploying to such effect was not his. It was the logic of the designers who made him. It was agonizing to realize he was simply fulfilling that design. But the desire he felt for Sayaka was real. Of that he was certain.
“If you feel anything at all for me, let me share your suffering. And of course, your joy,” he said.
With a tearful smile, Sayaka dried her eyes and murmured, “‘In sickness and in health.’ How long has it been since anyone said that?”
She filled two glasses with wine and pushed one toward Orville. Her makeup was streaked with tears, but her smile was open and warm. She lifted her glass high. “All right. I’ll be your lover. We’ll share the good and the bad, fifty-fifty. But…let’s make it fun.”
“Cheers,” said Orville.
The clink of their glasses rose above the din of the bar.
For the next four months, Orville loved a human female. Their days together were full of contentment—in the city, together at home, sometimes in a shuttle they’d take into orbit when they both had time. It was also a heady time for humanity, a golden age of the counteroffensive. Each day brought news of another ET nest destroyed, another colony reclaimed. Everyone threw their hearts into the work, every production facility ran flat out. The birthrate skyrocketed. Nurseries and schools rose one after another.
Orville and Sayaka exchanged wry smiles whenever conversation turned to the merits of doing one’s bit for population growth. Messengers lacked the ability to reproduce. Even if Orville were fully functional, as it were, Sayaka’s position (officia
lly, at least) was that she had no time to bear a child, yet. But to close friends she half-joked, “You don’t have to look nine months into the future to have fun in bed.”Though Orville never mentioned it to Sayaka, fertility was a topic of debate even among other Messengers. Opinion ran the gamut. Some wanted the ability to reproduce, some said it was not critical, others thought it should be forbidden. Alexandr believed in platonic relationships and emphasized the tie between soulmates. But when he dragged the concept of Original Sin into the discussion, Orville gave him a friendly warning: “No one doubts the nature of your relationship with Shumina. Just leave it at that.”
On this point, Sandrocottos was unyielding. The ability to reproduce sexually was the critical distinction between humans and AIs. It was a line that must not be crossed.
The importance of leaving descendants often came up when Orville and Sayaka discussed the value of resurgent humanity. For Sayaka, humanity meant not only the several hundred million people alive today. It meant a vast continuity, flowing from the past into the future—an ocean of more than five hundred billion individual lives. Orville liked that majestic image.
Sayaka had been born aboard Pluto Convoy, at the height of humanity’s withdrawal to the far reaches of the solar system. Her mother had died in combat when Sayaka was small, and so she was raised by her historian father. As she moved with him from base to base, she developed an understanding of the flow of people and goods. When she reached adulthood and began searching for work, she realized her place was in the Supply Section.
By nature, Sayaka yearned for a return to something bigger than just community. Orville surmised that this desire had crystallized when she was a young girl. She was inclined to agree. That, she said, was why it was important to hold on to that idea from her childhood and turn it into something nobler, something bigger.
“These are strange days. A person can give their all to society, without a trace of misgiving.” Sayaka sprawled languidly across her bed beneath the skylight. “No worries about being duped into serving tyranny or corruption. The results, the effects of all our actions will be made clear to us. Armies of virtuous AIs, and an almost too perfectly despicable enemy, will rectify all our mistakes with mild punishment or a defeat so clear anyone will be able to recognize it. Even the most cynical person and the biggest anarchist can believe in the rightness of their rulers, the way we can today. My father says there’s been nothing like it in history.”
“So that’s why you think about what will come afterward. Even if circumstances or ideologies change, you want something everyone can value, right?” said Orville.
“Yes, I keep saying I’m hoping that day will come.”
“But actually, that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“Afraid? I don’t think so. No, I’m sure I’m not.”
Orville casually rolled on top of her. His chest pressed into delightful softness. He stroked her hair—now undone, finally. “Humanity has been fighting and winning ever since you were born. Winning the war means any victories after that will pale in comparison. There might be civil strife, there might be secession. Doesn’t that scare you?”
“Sure, I suppose that could happen. If there’s no enemy, creating one is something we humans do. But that doesn’t scare me,” she answered.
“You’re one tough lady.”
“What? No, just the opposite. What I mean is, next to losing you, nothing could scare me.” Sayaka cradled Orville’s face in her hands and looked into his eyes. She chuckled dryly, then expression left her face. “We could always run away.”
“Not a good idea,” Orville said, and he kissed her deeply. Then he whispered in her ear, “I can’t lie to you. I don’t want to run away. The human species needs Messengers to fight for them. I have no doubts about that. I couldn’t throw that away and choose you, even if the people who made me allowed it. I’m at peace with my mission.”
“So much for seduction.”
“Damn it, can’t you understand?”
He embraced her powerfully and she responded. When words failed them, they communed with their bodies. But no matter how much this taught the lovers about each other, it left them both resigned to the impossibility of knowing everything.
Their four months together were over all too soon. As Orville’s deployment crept closer, they quarreled occasionally, but never enough to drive them apart. Once, however, Sayaka suggested they take a shuttle to tour one of the huge, near-lightspeed vessels docked in space. Orville sensed what was on her mind but said nothing till she’d circled the giant ship once, then veered away. After insertion into the return trajectory to Triton, Orville finally spoke.
“Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For turning back. You were thinking about stowing away, weren’t you? Once you’d boarded one of those ships, you would never come back. Not in this lifetime. But I’m glad you didn’t.”
“You really think so?” said Sayaka.
“Yes, because every one of those ships orbiting the Sun is restricted to port until we Messengers are deployed. They don’t want us running away. There’s no way we could have gone.”
“They think of everything.” She exhaled as if surprised and shook her head. “But that’s not what I meant. I was asking whether you really thought I wanted to run.”
“Don’t you?” said Orville.
“No.” She shook her head. Orville knew she wasn’t telling the truth, but he didn’t want to deny her decision to lie. “We’re counting on you, Orville.”
We, as in humanity.
Two-tenths of the Messengers slated for deployment—nearly fifty thousand—were on Triton. There were many couples like Orville and Sayaka, and as the day approached, the change in the city’s mood was apparent. Each couple had felt as if the world were theirs alone. Now they all knew that was impossible.
On the day of deployment, Orville spotted Sayaka from the gangway leading to his ship. She was part of a crowd—an astonishingly large crowd—united in the sorrow of parting. Orville called to Alexandr boarding ahead of him. “Shumina is here.”
“I know.” His massive bulk disappeared into the ship without looking back.
Orville turned. His keen vision picked out Sayaka looking toward him bravely, without tears. Of course, he thought. They had said their farewells quite exhaustively the previous night. Orville would hardly have minded if she hadn’t come today.
But she did come. She had something more to say to him. She opened her mouth wide and slowly formed the words.
“See you. Again. Someday.”
The instant Orville saw that, he felt a stabbing pain in his chest. He fled into the ship.
A Lagrangian point, between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. Hundreds of spacecraft were assembling here, where the gravitational pull from the giant planets was in stable equilibrium. The time fleet was coming together.
“Several years ago, the ETs deployed a portion of their total energy to execute a time jump. Based on measurements of the radiant energy liberated in this maneuver, we estimate they reached a point roughly 480 years in the past. There appears to be no purpose to this move other than to change the course of history. We believe they have realized their disadvantage and are moving to eradicate humanity at a point in the past where we were far weaker than we are today.”Orville was not well versed in the technology of temporal upstreaming or the theory of spacetime on which it was based—the technology had been perfected by human scientists working with specialized AIs—but as a Messenger, he understood and could pilot the hardware that made the theory’s predictions manifest reality. Orville was not particularly interested in the underlying ideas. If the ETs fled backward in time, he knew how to follow them. That was enough.
“You will now upstream into the past and defeat the enemy, supported by all the matériel and AIs that Sol System has been able to assemble. The situation on the ground, and the enemy’s strength, are completely unknown. You may well find your forces inadequate. Therefo
re, your prime objective isn’t to engage the enemy directly, but to alert the local population to the danger and assist them in developing their fighting capabilities to the highest possible level. You will inform and guide, so humanity can fight to defend itself and its future.”
But that future was not this present. Orville’s face twisted with the pain of that knowledge. Spurring humanity to fight the ET in the past would change history, generating new timestreams. Even if Orville survived the fighting, entered cryostasis and waited long enough, he would not be able to return to this present. Regardless of the war’s outcome, a completely transformed Sol System would await the Messengers.
He would never see Sayaka again. But if that were all he had to bear—as if that weren’t enough—he could have borne it.
“Please access AI Prime and authenticate.” At these words from the human officer assigned to see them off, the Messengers closed their eyes and contacted the fleet command AI through their internal comm links. They verified their mission and its implications: they were soldiers who would never return. Using the comm link had been an occasional necessity on Triton, where someone might have been listening, but at this point it was an empty ceremony.
“Authentication is complete. I will now reveal a piece of highly classified information. Our scientists and AIs have just concluded with a high degree of certainty that humanity in this timestream will soon be extinct.” The officer choked with emotion. As the one designated to deliver this message, he would have been chosen for his steady nerves, but his voice was trembling.
“The basis for this conclusion is the fact that no Messengers have arrived from our future. If we had been successful against the ET, mankind should also have sent additional Messengers from our own future to help deal with the conflicts we now face. Techniques to determine the timing of arrival of these new hypothetical Messengers have advanced significantly. But as of today, no new Messengers have upstreamed to our present. This means that the ability to deploy new Messengers into the past is not a part of our future. That means we have no future.
