“In the morning or in the evening?” asked Norok, chuckling.
That joker. I wonder if Alexa understands humor?
“There is no day-night cycle on Krungthep. The planet is in ‘bound rotation.’”
“And the factories?” asked Kimi. “People would hardly have built them at twelve hundred degrees ambient temperature?”
“The factory districts are in the zone of twilight. The average temperature there is just above the freezing point of water.”
“That sounds quite pleasant,” Norok said.
“I don’t understand the concept of ‘pleasant,’” Alexa said. “Mart always found it far too windy there. I can’t judge if you guys feel similarly, though.”
“Neither can we,” Norok said.
“It’s time to get into the absorption tubs, then,” Alexa said.
“Please tell us they are filled with warm sand,” Kimi said.
“They are filled with warm sand.”
The floor vibrated. Kasfok involuntarily moved his legs to the dance of aversion.
“Please don’t move,” Alexa said.
That was easier said than done, because the vibrations gave her a slight impulse toward the ceiling in zero gravity. Kimi tried to find a foothold with her wings. In the process, she bumped into the column with her left wing. Immediately, the stabbing pain was back. Tolkut’s unconventional treatment was no longer working.
“My wing is injured,” Kimi said.
“No problem. The tubs will take care of that right away,” Alexa reassured her.
At the same time? What else did they do?
“What do we need the tubs for?” asked Norok.
“Before entering the hyperspace tunnel and after exiting, the Sphere must accelerate strongly,” Alexa explained. “Your physical bodies won’t survive that without the tubs.”
“So they act like cushions?”
“The comparison doesn’t fit, Norok. In the tubs, your bodies are virtually dissolved. Each individual atom gets a small corset that holds it in place. After the exit, the supports are removed again.”
“Are we sleeping through this?”
“You are conscious. That’s the only way I can monitor you. I’m constantly checking to see if your reactions are still within the normal range.”
“And if not?”
“We have never had such a case on this ship.”
Kimi turned around because she had the feeling that someone was standing behind her. But there was no one there. A black tub had pushed its way out of the floor of the control center. It was about a third larger than she was. She could see similar tubs behind the others. “Why is it so big?” she asked.
“The atomic supports cause your bodies to expand by about thirty percent,” Alexa said. “Don’t worry. You’ll be back to normal size after you exit.”
“Will we feel anything?” asked Tolkut.
“I’d rather not answer that question,” Alexa said.
“Please answer it,” Kimi said.
“If you insist... Yes, you will feel pain. Severe pain. Unbearable pain. Your nervous system is not used to this strain. From experience, the pain subsides significantly after the tenth hyperspace jump.”
“Thank you, Kimi,” Norok said sarcastically. “I’d have preferred to do this without hearing that information beforehand.”
“Are you guys ready?” asked Alexa.
“As ready as one can be,” Kimi said.
She thought of her children, whose survival depended on her. The tub opened, and a black, slightly oily liquid came into view from under the cover.
“It’s not sand after all,” Kimi said.
“I never said that,” Alexa said.
“You did...”
No, Alexa had only carried out her order. Which meant Alexa wasn’t very smart, or else her sense of humor was as black as the tubs. Why did everything have to be black here? The tubs were probably black because the liquid was that color.
Norok carefully lifted his right leg over the edge of the tub and lowered it into the liquid. He screwed up his face. “It’s cold,” he said.
“I’m sorry about that. The absorption fluid was stored at near zero degrees until yesterday.”
“The tubs must not have been used for a very long time?” asked Norok.
“Not for over three hundred thousand years.”
All sorts of things must have happened in the past 300,000. And Mart must have lost his physical body back then—hopefully not in one of the tubs.
“The last mission... Did it go according to plan?” asked Tolkut.
“I’d rather not answer that question,” Alexa said.
“Please don’t answer him,” Kimi said.
If she heard any more bad news, she wouldn’t get in the tub. She called her eggs to mind. For them, she did what she had to do. Like Norok, she lifted her right leg into the tub. The liquid was surprisingly viscous. Kimi couldn’t help but think of the mud from the cormorant swamps that had been used as a cure. Now that was a nice parallel. On the home world, patients had voluntarily laid down in that black broth.
She got into the tub and sat on her knees.
“That’s not good enough,” Alexa said, “The cover has to close over you.”
Kimi sighed. She stood up once again and lay down on her back. Due to the weightlessness, her body did not press painfully on the base of the wings. But showing her vulnerable belly felt wrong to her. No Iks would ever voluntarily present themselves like that in front of strangers. How were the Mendraki getting along? Until just now, Kimi had heard echoes of their conversations with each other. Probably they were now lying in their tubs, which did not transmit any vibrations to the outside.
“Your beak, Kimi.”
“What about it?”
“It sticks out of the absorption fluid.”
“If I angle it down, I’ll choke.”
“No, you won’t. The absorption fluid is oxygenated. You can breathe in it.”
“I’m not ichthyo, you know.”
The ichthyos were creatures of their home world, capable of breathing underwater.
“Believe me, you don’t have to be ichthyo. Let the fluid soak in everywhere. That’s okay. It has to be that way.”
Even as Alexa described it, she felt it. A chill spread through her abdomen. It had to be the liquid. But in her mind, it couldn’t be. She opened her beak. The black broth rose inside it, even though it was so viscous. Surely it must be a capillary effect. Or did it have to do with the surface tension of the liquid? She tried to remember the formulas. Hydrodynamics was one of the core subjects taught by the Iks in every training course, since it affected their daily locomotion.
The cold liquid reached her throat. Now she could no longer distract herself by brooding over physical problems. She had to make a decision. Iks could transport water in their beaks over long distances because the sphincter worked so well. Now, however, she had to relax it. She had to swallow.
The cold ran down her esophagus. The stuff tasted very salty. Surely that couldn’t be healthy? What if Alexa wanted to poison them all? But that was nonsense. All Alexa had to do for that was cut off their oxygen.
Kimi closed off her swallowing muscle anyway, but it didn’t help. The black liquid had apparently wetted her throat enough to continue flowing down her esophagus. Except it was going more slowly, and that was the last thing Kimi wanted. She forced herself to relax all her muscles.
Norok! She hadn’t even said goodbye to her partner. He probably was as surprised by what was happening as she was. Kimi sent a thought in his direction.
“It’s not so bad, is it?” said Alexa.
The voice was right inside her head. Kimi tried to answer, but her beak did not respond.
“You cannot answer now,” Alexa said, “I just wanted to tell you that I’m with you all the time. The support atoms have constructed a tiny speaker near your hearing organ and connected it to the outside world. That’s how I can talk to you.”
<
br /> Great! Now, in addition to everything else, she had a voice in her head that didn’t belong to her. But somehow it was also reassuring not to be alone, because it had become utterly dark. She could no longer move her eyelids—not a single muscle responded to her commands.
“You have no control over your body until you exit the tunnel,” Alexa said. “That’s perfectly normal and better for you. You might otherwise try to leave the tub or hurt yourself.”
It didn’t feel any better that way, especially not when there was a voice in her head that didn’t belong there.
“The others are fine,” Alexa said, “You have nothing to worry about.”
Was the voice also in the heads of the others? How did it feel for the Mendraki, who could not hear as Iks could?
“The ship needs to keep accelerating at the same rate,” Alexa said.
So, her body was already swollen by a third? For Kimi, everything felt normal. Her self-awareness had not changed.
“You will probably feel pain in the process. We can’t turn off your neurons completely, or you’ll lose consciousness. I don’t mean you’ll become unconscious for a short time. No, your consciousness would dissipate.”
This was understandable. The Iks had also come to the conclusion that consciousness was a dynamic process in their nervous system. If one switched it off completely, it had to disappear into nothingness. Hopefully, the tub could prevent that from happening to her. After all, it had been designed for human physiology. What if human nervous systems were, to some extent, more stable than the Iks’s?
An intense pressure-pain set in. It was as if her wingtip had been caught in a closing bulkhead—with the difference being that her entire body was in that sort of excruciating pain. Kimi tried to close her beak, but it didn’t respond. The pain was cruel. She wouldn’t be able to stand it for long. She had to get out of here. She had to end it. Right now.
She had to... She would... Nothing would. She couldn’t cry, she couldn’t complain, and she was not even free to lose consciousness. She was at the mercy of Alexa and the Sphere. The pain increased. Her whole body was one single pain. If Mart had felt it as well, she now knew the reason why he had discarded his physical body 300,000 years ago. It was impossible to get used to this pain. It was not raging inside her—it was her. She was the pain.
“D... h... st... b... ld... creates,” she heard a voice.
Alexa sounded as if she was calling from far away and had a cloth in front of her mouth. Soon done? The pain must have overheard, because it assaulted her once again. Is this what it felt like to have her body torn apart into all its atoms?
“Nu... no... one... ag,” Alexa’s voice came again.
Just what? A whole day? Was Alexa joking? There really were better times for that. Maybe half an hour had passed since the start. To have to endure this pain 20 more times—it felt like a death sentence to her, executed as a long, drawn-out execution where you couldn’t die.
Review: Earth 3317 A.D
Applause roared through the massive Stephen Hawking Dome in Gothenburg when Martin Jordan and Alexandra Kopper took the stage, hand in hand. This year’s laureates of the Einstein Award in the field of ‘applied cybernetics’ were also privately a couple, and an extremely hologenic one at that.
What made today’s award particularly exceptional was Martin Jordan’s lineage. He was a direct descendant of the first winner of the Einstein Prize for Applied Cybernetics, which had been awarded for the first time in 3010. Jonas Jordan, or ‘JJ’ as he was later known, was considered the forefather of empathy-enabled robots. Along with the discovery of the hypertunnel drive, JJ’s emotioprocessor was considered a milestone on man’s path to becoming a genuinely cosmic living being.
Without this groundbreaking development by Jonas Jordan, with the help of his later wife Genia, the expansion of humanity into space and the founding of hundreds of colonies during the last 300 years would have been inconceivable. The untiring work of man’s faithful helpers in all conceivable fields of work was what had enabled such rapid colonization of the hundreds of planets, moons, and habitats where humans lived today.
Eventually, the governments of the nation-states, followed by those of the state blocs, and finally, the colonial office of the Terran Planetary Union (which was responsible for human settlements outside the Sol system) took care of the economic, social, and psychological effects of an increasingly automated and consequently decreased working population. Thus, humans no longer had to do any physical work—apart from a few special tasks—and they no longer felt worthless or anxious because of it. Almost everything that would have required physical effort had long since been assigned to robots.
The resulting social problems, including the initial rejection of the machine workers, were overcome surprisingly quickly by fair distribution of the added value generated by the robots, so no human had to suffer economically from the absence of work. Everyone was generously provided for, which meant that the robots were soon, if not loved, at least regarded as valuable and indispensable helpers.
Some social philosophers were already talking about the imminent achievement of an economy of abundance, in which every conceivable good would be available to citizens free of charge.
The discovery for which Martin Jordan and Alexandra Kopper would receive the Einstein Award today was seen as one more step toward this goal. Perhaps even the decisive one!
The further development of the emotioprocessor, developed by JJ 300 years ago, into an emotion-quantum matrix and its integration into a quantum computer, also miniaturized by Martin Jordan for use in controlling the robots, was to make them almost human-like beings. Although they would still be incapable of genuine self-reflection, and consequently would not be able to develop true ego-consciousness, their empathy capacity—or rather, its simulation—would be indistinguishable from that of a human being.
At the same time, their intellectual abilities would be raised to a new level, which should allow them to take on work that they had been unable to do before, particularly tasks that depended on unimpeachable and character-strong emotional reactions. This would finally free people from the yoke of labor and bring the goal of an abundant economy within reach.
Of course, these future robots, even if they could hardly be distinguished from humans, would still be nothing more than servants. Because even with the new emotiomatrix, a robot still had no soul.
The celebrations were broadcast worldwide. And, in those colonies already connected to the hypertunnel radio network, it was possible to witness Martin Jordan’s short speech and the award ceremony with only a few minutes delay.
Martin Jordan smiled into the tiny holocam that hovered in front of his face. He was a handsome man in his early 40s, but looked at least ten years younger. Alexandra Kopper was a beauty and also in her early forties. Of course, it was no longer a problem to adapt one’s appearance to the standard beauty ideals at any time, but neither Jordan nor his co-worker and life partner had ever needed to make use of this.
If you asked them about it, they would always laughingly point out that they probably had the best possible genes, and there was nothing they could do to improve them. Alexandra had merely pointed out with a twinkle in her eye that her life partner had, however, only met her visual expectations after he had parted with the terrible mustache he had still worn when they first met.
“Dear Union President Latour, dear Jury of the Einstein College, dear attendees. I also extend warmest greetings to the many viewers and spectators in the systems, on the planets and moons, and in the habitats of the Terran Planetary Union who are tuned in today. Alexandra and I feel the need to thank you all for giving us this kind reception, and of course, we are overwhelmed to be awarded the Einstein Prize this year. Many, many thanks!
“We hope that our development will not only serve to advance the expansion of humanity throughout our galaxy, but that it will also help to bring the goal of a just, classless, and, above all, affluent human society wit
hin reach. No one should be forced to work for a living anymore, as has been the case in all previous social systems in our history. Perhaps our innovation can play its part in finally freeing people from the yoke of work.
“We believe that the new generation of robots, each equipped with an emotiomatrix and a miniaturized quantum computer, will bring us closer to this goal. They are now remarkably similar to us humans. Since the new generation of robots are something like artificial humans, we suggest the name Artificials for the new generation of robots. Thank you very much!”
Again, applause roared through the cathedral-like dome.
Martin Jordan and Alexandra Kopper bowed and waved once more to the audience before leaving the stage.
Almost unnoticed, a robot had stood at the edge of the stage during the ceremony. The male model was a service bot that could be used for multiple tasks in the service sector. It was the prototype of the new generation of robots built by Jordan and his companion, and had accompanied them here to demonstrate its capabilities to a small number of industrialists in advance of today’s event. The presentation had been a resounding success. The corporations were already eagerly waiting to begin production of the Artificials.
The Artificial had watched the goings-on and listened to Jordan’s speech with interest. He was proud to be able to serve the people. They had created him and his kind, so he felt a sense of gratitude. He would do his best not to disappoint his masters. They were his parents, and from the way he understood the feelings of humans, they had to feel something similar to love for their creation.
After all, the Artificials were their children!
59th of Nahn, 299
Kimi became light. The feeling resembled the weightlessness she knew, but it affected her thoughts. She floated, freed from everything that had weighed her down, in a state of extraordinary happiness. But why now? The worries were coming back faster than she would have liked. She would have liked to savor this state, but if the transition to hyperspace failed, Iks and Mendraki would die.
Helium 3: Death from the Past (Helium-3 Book 2) Page 7
