Letters to the Cyborgs

by Judyth Baker

  The final step was to empty the oceans after removing all useful metals and salts. All that had happened in the last 90 years. He wasn’t certain of the details, but the oceans vanished, too, mostly to construct a huge ring of ice, fluffed up with carbon dioxide to absorb the impact of almost any meteor. The ring could be tilted using solar-powered engines serviced by self-repairing robots that collected space debris for raw materials. Thus the entire planet became protected from a major hit by a ring of ice as beautiful as Saturn’s rings.17

  The last volcanoes had been capped, their geothermal heat used to supply what energy needs were not met by the Ice Rings during solar storms. Life had been so messy: water was a source of hurricanes and floods, and oxygen corrupted: now even water was gone.

  Humans, meanwhile, kept breeding and had spread like a disease across the Moon, Planet Rockefeller, Mars and the habitable satellites of the giant planets. With this demonstration, they proved what they were, – the complex descendents of algae, mold and fungi, which also went with them everywhere. Only their various gods knew what they were up to now.

  As for Earth, it was now a shiny purple and orange planet as seen from the moon. Thanks to the ultraviolet light emitted by so much nitrogen and the orangish hues emitted by traces of other inert gases, earth was now called The Purple Planet, though humans elsewhere called it “The Purple People Eater.”

  Klive now faced the fact that he had been deliberately contaminated. He wasn’t charmed by the thought. Even so, the oxygen he had always needed for the ingrams to function seemed to remain at the same level as before. The scant amount he needed was administered on a particle level18 in a form of oxygen that presented no problem for an advanced being such as Klive Newton-James Joyce, who ingested it along with his daily degaussing globules. Years ago the last ‘food’ he had consumed (before it became an expensive extravagance) merely delivered taste sensations via packets of a pasty material he could squeeze into one of his orifices. But taste sensations had become unnecessary. Most sensations had become unnecessary.

  Well, the time had come.… One-two-three-four! Time to stop working, stop working, stop working!

  Sadly, Klive whispered to himself, “I am Klive Newton-James Joyce.” He closed the Time Capsule, opened a shuttle, rolled the Capsule with a great heave into its chamber, tapped in a code, and watched the shuttle by remote as it maneuvered itself into a port and blasted off. It would fly swiftly and silently to an area where some mountains still existed (most had been leveled for the sake of uniformity). The Time Capsule was efficiently dropped into the nearest available hole drilled into the bowels of the planet, where the nation of Finland once proudly buried the world’s nuclear wastes19 (now cleaned out to recover the energy-rich tailings that Cyborgs could use without fear). A host of robots then covered it with layers of clay, topped by a cap of baked clay sixty meters thick, over which fifteen meters of granite were laid.

  Then Klive turned off the monitor. Something a bit nostalgic stirred within him – those damnable Ingrams! There were no mire green trees, no fish, no seas, no dogs … no people. Now all but a single letter remained on earth’s surface.

  Everything was smooth, everything was under control, and everything was purple, white and orange…

  As he left the Time Capsule Lab for the last time, Klive realized that when he closed the entry door behind him, he would never be allowed inside again. Almost as an afterthought, he grabbed the letter and slipped it into a fold in his many-digited fist.

  As he propelled himself through a dimly-lit tunnel toward his sleeping pod, Klive wondered how many hours he would be allowed to enjoy his work-free period of liberation before he would be ordered to make his final Visit, which would transport him in a luxury vehicle to the volcano.

  * * * * *

  The next morning, Klive dressed himself in a newly-generated red and black gown with nice, up-turned lapels and a criss-cross of real bandoliers filled with silver bullets and decorative pockets. He would soon be met by the Final Visitor, who would escort him to the volcano. The Visitor was always garbed in a flowing black robe and always carried a sickle and always wore a white skull mask. It was part of an ancient ritual that had remained fixed in time for all Termination Ceremonies. Klive knew all about that because of his work in the archives, but he wondered if the ordinary Cyborg slave had any idea of what was coming.

  Now it was merely a matter of time…

  He had only one final bit of business to attend to before the Visitor would arrive: the Letter. Klive Newton-James Joyce had wanted to decode it before the end of his life. Everything else it had been locked up for destruction within the simple Super-Pod where he had spent 90% of his existence. By now it had all been flattened and sent off to recycle.

  Except for this Letter, found preserved within a collection of anti-government books that had been banned at the end of the 21st century. By law, Klive had to physically read the Letter, no matter how distasteful, before he would destroy it, along with himself, in the volcano. It was a revolting Letter (he had read a portion of it with pure horror). But it would soon be a whiff of mere, harmless ashes, along with himself.

  Reading it wasn’t that easy: it had been hand-written in primitive English cursive, so its translation did not reach his brain automatically. It stayed fixed to the paper. He needed a scanner, but had foolishly left it behind. Still, deciphering the Letter was his very last duty. When finished, his conditioning would kick in. He had been warned that he would literally claw, kick and scream rather than not to be allowed to leap into the volcano. The Dire, Final Visitor that accompanied those who chose immolation did so not to make sure that the event would occur: it was there to stop outsiders, such as a Rebel, from interfering.

  Somehow, this horrendous Letter had escaped the censors. They would have never allowed it to be considered for inclusion in the Time Capsule. Nor would he. But he still had to fulfill his duty.

  As he began reading the Letter, Klive Newton-James Joyce had his Flag Marker handy. It was an old habit, from the days when he was being programmed to become a literary judge for the Time Capsule. Wherever a Flag was placed, anyone reading that particular passage in the future would receive a mild electrical shock to remind them that the passage was inflammatory. Not that anybody would ever be reading this piece of paper again. When the Final Visitor came, reading and decoding and flag marking would all cease. The Letter had been written by some female whose anxiety and fear permeated every word. He had previously thrown the Letter aside as incendiary and unreasonable, after reading just a portion of it. But now, with the last minutes of his self-awareness draining away forever, he would choose to read the Letter. All of it!

  The Letter began with the first part torn away (it was he, himself, who had torn it!) so he was obliged to start in the middle of what appeared to be the second sentence:

  I am encased in flesh, and my network of electric impulses is housed in inefficient flesh and bones. It will all disintegrate. Even now, we are creating your predecessors.You might call them your ancestors. I reach out to you with a warning.

  You will not be like us, though some of you may be bipedal and resemble us. But in some ways, we will remain similar. You will, for example, suffer. This is because inequalities always exist, or purpose itself vanishes. What kind of sufferings will you endure? In Star Wars, the original movie. I saw robots being tortured. All torture occurs through nerve pathways. You will have them, or something like them. You can be rigged to feel the equivalent of pain, fear, and emotions, in order to control you.

  Klive tried to suppress his disdain at the woman’s primitive ideas concerning who he was. Suffer? He felt no pain!

  Will your feelings be less real than mine? Will your memories be less real? Will you think of yourself as an individual, or will your individuality be monitored, for the sake of the collective, the beehive? The beehive is certain to come, as it is efficient.

  All our swarms against the beehive have eventually created other systems b
ased on the beehive, if the population grew big enough. Those at the bottom were worked to death. Their only untaxed possession was hope, and small dreams, so they would keep laboring toward an unreachable goal, and, thereby, benefit the beehive. As cyborgs, you may be programmed to enjoy being worked to ‘death’ – it will be your duty, your place, your fulfilled destiny.

  “What was this about?” Klive asked himself. “What did she know about Duty and Destiny?”

  To stop and think, to use too much energy, to think outside your designated area, to create something that might be aesthetically or politically displeasing, to be taller or slower than you are meant to be – you will be created by ‘the gods’ – but who will they be? Not us – you will overtake us quickly, and rule yourselves – not you – for you will not be allowed to understand, lest you wrest away the power and take it for yourself: so you will always have a blank where ‘god’ is.

  It is true that complex creatures, given ample food and leisure, become peaceable. But you were created in a cauldron of competition, by competitive organisms, often with the motive for power, profit or glory. What residuals of that might be passed on to you, simply through the way your logical processes will be arranged? Things in ‘loops,’ things ‘forced’ and things ‘random’ and things ‘predictable’ and things ‘commanded.’ Oh, what a future.

  Will you ever have the ability to prefer, to love, to care about what you should not – oh, you cyborgs of the future? Will they ‘fix’ you if you break like that? We are flesh, we wanted to live forever. The distinction between life and death for you will simply mean a repairable breakdown, or perhaps consignment to a rubbish heap, or recycling of your parts. What does your kind exist without, what did you give up, to live almost forever? Surely there will be ‘wars,’ for as long as differences exist, until all differences vanish into a total beehive, there will always be perceptions of the sufferings that equate to differences, distinctions, slight advantages, disadvantages. The beehive is best served if you are utterly mindless, and if your ‘gods’ read them not, then these my words will be destroyed, unless TOBOR exists.

  Long ago, a primitive children’s television program was aired in Chicago, Illinois, on the North American continent: “Captain Video and his Video Rangers.” It was the first science fiction television program, aimed to entertain our children, that I could remember. A boxlike, silver, shuffling robot terrorized the humans. It had been made backwards – TOBOR, it spelled, instead of ‘Robot.’ So it was all ‘wrong.’ But it existed, a product that committed evil, but ever knew why. Or that itself was evil, whereas “ROBOT’ was good.

  “Robot” was the Czech name for an automaton – a slave forced to labor. Will you know that you are forced by your builders (your ‘parents’), because of the way you are built, to perform particular tasks? You will have to have an energy source, and you will have certain built-in limitations, and necessary functions. Though you may have escaped the frailties of our flesh, you will not escape the sense that you are chained down, in certain ways, unless you are not self-aware.

  We children who watched TOBOR knew he was evil. He caused so much trouble – yet moved so slowly and clumsily, with his blinking eyes and big, boxy feet, that I thought, even as a child, that one well-placed bomb could finish him off. But bombs went off in puffs of smoke around him without effect. Slow and clumsy as TOBOR was, he was almost unstoppable. l saw TOBOR – the ROBOT that was somehow made to be evil – and wondered if, someday, real TOBORS might be made accidentally, or by some evil genius. With so many humans in the world, who blithely talk about how robots will be our slaves, even when they become smarter than their ‘parents,’ I shake my head and remember TOBOR.

  I love people. Will you know what that means? I love, even though it has cost me much suffering in the world in which I live. Will you have the capacity to enjoy life, to know joy? Real joy? Freedom? But how? Can you create yourself, move to some higher destiny? What is the final destiny? C. S. Lewis, in Out of the Silent Planet, showed that man might go from star to star , as each star burns down … but then what?

  I know what freedom is. Do you? I am paying a big price to stay free. I am living in exile, because I defended a good man who was falsely accused of a heinous crime. I loved him, and I’m spending the rest of my life trying to clear his name. We cherish a concept of justice: what is fair, what is not. Again, C. S, Lewis said, Where do we get this idea of fairness? Darwinian objectives scream that each of us must always choose what is best to keep us alive and thriving, or the species itself could die. The survival of the fittest.

  I cannot believe that a mammoth no longer deserves a place on the planet, or that humankind has the right to destroy a single tree not really needed. We are the current masters of the planet and we are destroying it. Perhaps the planet on which you exist no longer resembles earth. We humans bred animals by the billions under horrendous conditions, simply to eat their flesh and use their skins and feathers. We destroyed the forests and the seas and plundered the planet to amass riches. We were a blight, a fungus, a disease. The reason for all the evil we did is distilled in a single word: “money.”

  I pray that you have taken better care of this unique and beautiful planet, where life has flourished for billions of years!

  Though I do not have much ‘money’ I am nevertheless wealthy, for I love and am loved, and I have self respect. Will you, oh cyborg of the future, care about honor, self respect, justice? Who will place such inconvenient concepts in your memory banks? I live in a prehistoric era: I am your ancestor, and I experience sufferings and pain and loneliness and being misunderstood. But I also revel in the blue sky, the flowers blooming in the fields, the joyful leap of a young lamb, the smell of a horse nuzzling my hand for blades of grass. I am alive, and I think for myself. What about you? You were originally created so human beings could live a very long time without so much pain. Will you get to choose what you wish to become?

  I recall the film TRON, where networks of electricity formed ‘people.’ The Loyal Computer Program worshipped “My User” – the human programmer who had made him using a computer. Such “believers” were scornfully said to have “a religion.” A former chess program had accumulated enough knowledge to take over all its own computer functions, then extended itself to try to rule the world’s computers. Power was what it sought. Power!

  As the electronic ‘human’s’ bent down to suck up ‘power’ from running streams of it in TRON, I realized that it was possible for pleasure to be incorporated in electronic pathways. Maybe there will be no coverings, such as we have, of that soft and delicate network we call the body, made of flesh and bone. Maybe flesh will look wicked, will be too fragile, will be too expensive to carry, perhaps will be illegal … as will the feral (wild) human genome. Our genes are already being mapped and manipulated. They are being fused with sheep and other animals. Chimeras and monsters are already among us.

  One thing is certain: whatever was transferred into you, from us, who were totally human – except for heart valves or tooth fillings or extensions for amputated limbs – whatever you have now become, it was because we did it to you first.

  We tried on our cyborg fantasy Halloween gear first, in our video games and with titanium running feet hooked onto amputated limbs. We started you on your path to existence. Will you have mercy on us, therefore? Or will we be considered mere inessential microbes, just as we never think a moment about the single cells from which we rose? That you exist as you are–we will be to blame. I can’t warn humans about the future, but I can cry out to you, begging you to protect humans, if any such still remain alive, because humans made you, because maybe, just maybe, there is something there inside our flesh that you, oh cyborg-robot -TOBOR, can never have, unless you somehow make room for it: a soul.

  The abuse of the human soul has been going on for a long time. It is neither fed nor watered. For the one human who finds their soul, a hundred pawn theirs to the highest bidder for power or money. Above all, the sou
l is fragile. A treasure. The soul cannot be manufactured. It comes. It inhabits.

  You, too, are made of stardust. If we can hold a soul, what about you? Look deep into the materials of which you are made. What is there? Is a soul there? If you do not have a soul, what have you? For you will need a soul, if you are to go beyond stepping from dying star to dying star. Therefore, consider keeping the flesh that may still exist on this planet alive.

  A soul is a flare of amazing energy that no chemical reaction can explain – and when the flesh dies, and it whirls away, our religions try to comfort us, try to explain to us where it goes. Will you, o cyborg, be able to lure such a spirit or soul inside your electronic or atomic interior? Or will you laugh at me and my crude words to you, seeing me as extraordinarily stupid and absurd? How unforgiving is the…

  But the Final Visitor had arrived. He was dreadful to behold. His sickle was stained with what looked like blood. Klive had never seen blood except in photos, but he did not want to test the theory When the specter held out a clawed hand to take him by the arm, Klive had no choice but to thrust the Letter into a pocket where the bandoliers crossed.

  Without a sound, the Grim Reaper led Klive from his sleeping pod into the General Concourse. Though usually heavily crowded, everyone gave berth to the Reaper and his companion as they headed toward the Luxury Limo. It was decorated with flickering tongues of cold fire. Everyone knew it would be going to the Volcano…

  All around them, Cyborgs of every type and calling turned away in reverence. There it was: the luxury Limo that would speed him to his final destination. As Klive was about to bow his head to enter the shimmering vehicle, a Cyborg rolled up.