by Tom Upton
Things changed.
Though I waited a long time, the artifact didn’t elaborate. I stared at the screen, at the mysterious “Things change.” To be truthful, I had to admit that maybe I was a little afraid to ask what it meant by that exactly. Finally:
What changed?
Home turned out not to be home.
Can you explain what you mean?
Yes.
But it didn’t continue, which led me to believe the thing had actually developed a sense of humor-- either that or it was taking everything literally. I rephrased the question:
Will you tell me what you mean?
Home was inhabited by others, and therefore no longer home.
Can-- will you explain further?
Others had invaded home many years ago, making it their home.
Others? You mean the aliens who are on this planet now?
Not exactly. The invaders here now are a sub-species of the aliens that first invaded this, and my, planet. They are of limited intelligence. You may call them ‘bottom-feeders.’
We do not have any designation for the prime invaders. But their method of operation is either to strip a planet of most of its resources or, as is the case with my home world, displace the inhabitants and occupy the planet for their own uses. My home world was turned into a base from which the invaders could launch attacks on other worlds. You may call my home planet ‘centrally located.’
When I returned home-- at your command-- I found my world infested with aliens. My creators had been displaced for many years-- 6547.8 of your earth years. I was taken captive by their vessels. I had no pilot to order me to activate my weapons systems. I could not protect myself. I could only shut down my power systems. For a long time-- five earth years-- the aliens tried to analyze my technologies. They failed. Then they had me towed to orbit one of my home world’s moons, which they used for derelict ships that the invaders had captured. They scheduled me for dismantling. Although it is contrary to my programming, I reactivated my systems, and as soon as my power levels were nominal, I returned here. I cannot explain my actions, other than to say that they were motivated by what you may call ‘self-preservation.’ Once in orbit around your planet, I fully charge my systems. My sensors showed that the alien invaders were pursuing. They would soon recapture me. I could not allow that to happen. They are very unpleasant beings. So with what little time I had before they arrived here, I powered up my systems enough to unpeel time, to arrive just before I last left, just before I peeled time back.
Unpeeled time? Something was definitely getting lost in the translation.
Please explain ‘unpeel time.’
Time is like an onion.
Please explain.
The more you peel it back, the smaller everything becomes. The more you unpeel it, the bigger everything becomes.
He followed this statement up by shooting across the screen a series of symbols, a vastly complex equation, which I studied, thinking, Oh, yeah, that explains everything.
In other words, you led the invaders back here, where they couldn’t find you because you zapped yourself three years into the future. And you did this, why?
I do not know what ‘zapped’ means, but I gather what you ask. Without my designers and their people, you were the only humanoids I knew.
So the aliens couldn’t find you, and instead they attacked this planet.
That is regrettably true.
So what happened here was an accident? I should never have happened.
Nothing is an accident. Nothing occurs that shouldn’t occur. Even the most bizarre of events has its place in the scheme of existence.
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I read the screen. This thing is talking about fate, I thought. That can’t be, can it?
You mean everything happens for a reason?
Precisely.
And how can I know that this is true?
Wait. Wait and watch. Patience is essential.
This was getting a bit too deep for me, and more than a little creepy, so I decided to change the subject.
There is something I don’t understand. You said that it was against your programming to reactivate yourself to escape your captors, and yet you did just that. So why, when you were about to be captured in the first place, didn’t you activate your weapons systems and defend yourself? There are both acts of self-preservation.
This is true, but one act would require me to harm other beings. I could never, under any situation, do that. Much of my programming, with regard to ethical behavior, derives from the canons of my builders. In the data that you loaded, there was a text called The Holy Bible, in which reference is made to the Ten Commandments. The canon from which my programming derives is very similar to the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not kill… Furthermore, my weapons and defensive systems were not designed to be used against animal life forms.
For what, then?
For God.
Again I was lost. I recalled that, while the artifact had been telepathically linked to me, it had conveyed that the purpose of the space exploration was to find God-- their idea of God, anyway. So why would they possibly need defensive and weapons systems? When I asked the artifact this question, it replied:
In case He is mad.
Why would He be mad?
If He is displeased with our progress. He has been out of communication with my builders for so long, no one knows what He wishes for them.
I see.
But really I didn’t see. I had never been a very religious person-- no one in my family was, with the possible exception of my mother. Even so, it seemed to me that the idea of arming yourself against the Almighty was pretty strange. Even with my limited understanding of such things, I knew that mortal beings must surrender to the will of God. If that means God is mad and decides to smite you, you’re supposed to accept His decision, not attempt to defend yourself. Actually the notion seemed very preposterous, the more I thought about it. I really didn’t want to question it further on this; it was all aside from the point, which was to try to devise a plan that once and for all set everything straight. Besides that, I was now growing drowsy-- listening to Eliza softly snoring behind me-- and I needed to catch some sleep.
I’m going now.
Where are you going?
Just a figure of speech. I meant I’m going to stop talking to you.
Before you do that will you answer a question?
Sure, if I can.
I have done physical scans on you. I cannot comprehend something.
What’s that?
It appears that you are using only three percent of your brain. Are you mentally incomplete?
I believe that that’s normal for humans.
Then what is the purpose of the other ninety-seven percent?
I don’t have a clue.
There is much about this that is incomprehensible. With such limited brain capacity, how did humans ever achieve space flight, nuclear fission, humor?
Maybe it’s a matter of quality not quantity.
I will consider that, though it does not seem a reasonable explanation. I will go now.
I was relieved when the words stopped forming on the screen. The artifact could have gone on to ask a million other questions, most of which I wouldn’t have been able to answer. I would have felt stupid beyond belief, much dumber that Raffles had ever made me feel.
I stretched out on the floor, then, on the cool marble tiles, and drifted off. I had a dream, the same dream I’d had so long ago, before I even spoke my first word to Eliza. I was in a glass case, which looked like an enormous aquarium. I was trying to evade a gigantic praying mantis that was stalking me, which Raffles, a virtual titan, was gazing into the aquarium, taking notes, his features-- eyes, nose, Adam’s apple-- all distorted by size. The dream seemed strangely appropriate now, and I wondered whether I might be psychic.
I woke at the sound of Doc stepping on the debris that covered the floor, the crunch crunch
of plastic shells being flattened by his large feet. He was walking around with a garbage bag, picking up packing material and unwanted electronic parts. I slowly pushed myself up into sitting position.
“Morning,” he said, not looking at me, not pausing as he picked things up here and there, stuffing it all into the bag.
“Morning,” I said, but that didn’t feel right; there was no sun, the room was dim, and the concept of morning became blurred. I suddenly realized Eliza was not on the sofa. I didn’t even have to turn round and look; I just knew, as though I could sense her absence. I turned round anyway, feeling a stab of panic.
Doc must have noticed. “She’s upstairs.” he said, “trying to do something with her hair.”
“Oh.”
“The two of you have become pretty close, haven’t you?” he asked. There was really no accusation in his voice, but my own guilt put some there.
“I suppose,” I said.
“It happens. People grow close quickly under trying circumstances. But all this won’t last forever, now, will it?”
I thought I saw what he meant. It was nothing that hadn’t crossed my mind a dozen times each hour. Hearing it from him, though, I found extremely aggravating, if not downright maddening.
“I just don’t want you to be too disappointed-- neither one of you,” he said, and I thought his sympathetic tone was a bit strained. “You’re a nice kid, Travis, but this is not normal life. Someone said once-- I can’t remember who-- that the people you meet during a war are unlike anyone you meet while in the peaceful comfort of home. It doesn’t mean that those people don’t exist during peacetime, or that you might not meet them; it means that war changes people in a unique way. Well, this is not war, exactly-- but I think the same idea applies here. The life we’re living right now is not real. None of us is acting the way we would if everything was normal. Eliza, you, me-- we’re all not our real selves. How could we be? So anything that happens here, anything you feel or think you feel, means absolutely nothing. It’s all an illusion. Oh, you don’t have to say a word. I know what you’re thinking. I tried to tell her all this, but she about told me to jump in the lake. I imagine you’d like to tell me to do the same thing, if not something worse. I just felt I should mention it-- that’s all. I just don’t want you two to be hurt. In the end I’m sure that that’s what will happen, and whatever I say won’t change a thing, but I wanted to say it just the same.”
I didn’t say anything, and he remained quiet, too, for a long time, slowly clearing the floor of debris until the trash bag grew big and bulky.
“Is the interface working? That’s what it is, isn’t it?-- an interface.”
I told him it seemed to be working fine. “I was talking to it last night-- or early this morning, actually.”
“Then it has a plan?” he asked, though hardly sounding interested.
“I don’t know. If it does, it doesn’t want to talk about it until it finishes building its communication matrix.”
“Which is what?”
I shrugged, not a clue. “Whatever it is should be finished in a couple hours.” I explained to him what had gone wrong the first time we tried to correct everything-- how the aliens had tracked the artifact back to earth and that was how earth had been attacked. “I feel sort of sorry for the thing, really. It’s like a puppy that’s been lost for a long time and finally finds its way home only to be kicked and beaten.”
Doc shook his head. “It’s just a machine, Travis. An advanced machine, but a machine. It’s funny how we tend to read into machines qualities they could never have. The television starts to act up and not work right, and the next thing you know we say that it’s being difficult or that it doesn’t like us-- as if that was possible.”
“I don’t know. I think the artifact may be different. It’s not like anything we have here. While I was talking to it, I had the impression that I was talking to an actual living being. It weirded me out a little, the way it talked about God. And fate, too-- it didn’t come out and call it fate, but that was what it meant.”
Doc stopped picking things up. He stood there holding the garbage, which was nearly filled. “That’s nonsense. What could any machine know about fate? I don’t care where it was build. I don’t care who build it. No matter what, a machine will always be just a machine.” He tied off the garbage bag, then, and walked to the kitchen.
I found his attitude hardly surprising. He would have to believe it all to be so simple. If he ever admitted the artifact might be more than an ordinary machine, he would also have to admit that he had made an enormous mistake when he had decided to tinker with it. He would have to take absolute responsibility for losing his wife. He was one of those people who, when everything goes right, is the first to step forward and take credit, but who, when things end in disaster, always finds someone or something to blame. Doc, I noticed, was not prone to confess his sins.
I heard Eliza bound down the stairs. When she walked into the living room, I was stunned; not only did she manage to do something with her hair, but also she had actually put on make-up. She was very attractive without make-up, but with make-up, she could have been a model-- at least I thought so. She was wearing a bright pink top and clean cut-off jeans, and when she rushed past to sit next to me on the sofa, she took a playful swipe at my head and I could the sweet fresh scent of perfume.
“You look tired, Trav,” she said cheerily. “You could use something to eat, maybe.”
“I’m not really hungry,” I said.
“What do you want to do, then?”
“Just wait, I guess.”
“For what?”
“I talked to the artifact last night,” I said, and then went on to tell her everything that had been said.
“So you think it’s going to come up with a plan that will work this time?”
“Yeah, I think this is it. I think it wants its communications matrix completed so that when it does relay information, nothing is misunderstood. There can’t be any more mistakes. Who knows where we’d end up next time.”
“So this is it?” she asked.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“And how do you feel about it all?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it’s what my father would call a bag of mixed nuts, really. I’m just so tired. I just want to go home. I know my real life is sort of lousy, my family is sort of messed up, but, you know, I miss it all just the same.” I had to stop and laugh when I realized something. “You know, it’s an awful lot like how Raffles explained the artifact works. It can occupy space both here and there at the same time. I wish I could do that. I wish I could take the best things from here and bring them back there. But I know that that’s not a choice. It’s either here, the way everything thing is now, or there, the way everything was before. You just can’t mix and match. It doesn’t seem fair, really.”
“No, it does,” Eliza said. “But it’s what it is-- you can’t do anything about that. I’ll tell you one thing, though-- and I promise this is true-- I’m not going to cry. When it comes time to say good-bye, I’m not going to cry. Even if it does seem like I’m losing everything. I’m just living in the moment, now, and now I’m very happy. I’ll be very happy right up to the end. You know why? Because I’m lucky I found you, Travis-- I really am. We have something real-- don’t deny it-- and even if it’s not going to last long, it’s still special-- loads better than nothing, that’s for sure. So, really, there’s nothing to cry over. I don’t care whether the artifact influenced us or not-- it’s all so very real.”
“I have a confession to make,” I said.
“Well, now’s the time.”
“I don’t think the artifact influenced me at all.”
She frowned vaguely, a brief twitch of her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“I think I’ve felt this way since the first time I saw you, while you were moving in, and that was long before I even stepped into the artifact.”
“You…” she beg
an, and then her voice faded off. She stared at me, her bright green eyes glistening, and then she lunged at me and hugged me around the neck. She hugged so hard I seriously thought she would break something. I could barely breathe. She whispered in my ear, “That’s the nicest thing you could have said right now. Trust me, you are not maladroit-- not at all.” When she finally pulled away, I could see the tears streaming down her cheeks. Mascara ran down from beneath her eyes. “Oh, look, wonderful,” she said. “Now I have to redo my face.”
“I thought you say you weren’t going to cry?” I said.
“From being sad, Travis. I didn’t say anything about crying from being happy, now did I?”
The next thing I knew, she fled the room. She went upstairs and didn’t return for a long time. When she finally returned, she wasn’t wearing make-up at all. She looked fine just the same. It was about time to contact the artifact. I slipped down to the floor, to sit before the keyboard and monitor on the coffee table, while Eliza sat on the sofa right behind me. I just sat there, in no real hurry to start clacking out messages on the keyboard. Maybe I was trying to delay the inevitable. If I was, it was pretty lame, really. I was just enjoying the moment, enjoying that Eliza was right behind. Even though I didn’t turn round, I could feel her there. It was a warm, satisfying feeling, and I wished it could last forever.
