An Android Awoke (on Moon!) Chapter Eleven
Episode Eleven – Are We There Yet?
No. No we are not. Not by a long shot.
Lex felt the engine kick in as their ship made the burns necessary to descend towards the Earth.
He was wide awake in the android bay. As much as he had read about humans from first-person narratives and pieces of fiction, he was more curious about his manufacturers. Was a human synthetic, like he knew he was? The human body was a machine, albeit an incredibly complex one. So were many other biological beings, like the blue whale or the Posidonia Australis grass.
Lex let go of his programmed responses & allowed his mind to meander & wander quite freely.
Geologic processes, broadly similar across the universe, were different in local environments.
Vast differences in nature on Earth were not even remotely replicated on either Moon or Mars.
Scale is a difficult concept to grasp without context or an external perspective, which is tough.
As an example in context, Uluru and Uhuru have a significant 5,000-meter height difference.
Uluru was near the center of the Oz solar spaceport at which Selina had landed after her return from Mars. Uhuru was the highest African point near the Kilimanjaro spaceport. An ocean apart.
Earth’s active planetary geologic processes even juxtaposed ice with lava, like at Mawson Peak.
Leave alone a galactic time scale – even the Earth’s timeline made humankind seem miniscule.
Mass extinction events happened millions of years apart, and could even be relatively gradual.
This was why it was important to keep track of the warning signs that led to global catastrophes.
Natural evolution worked almost equally slowly, but natural eruptions could upend ecosystems.
Lex thought about the options it had to ensure universal survival of a singular biological species.
Selina thought about what she could do to ensure Neer’s full freedom and individual agency.
Maw & Pa thought about their Moon-child, floating in space, fully alone (as far as they knew).
Illen thought about how to find out exactly what had made Neer so important to the Earth squad.
Hielsa thought about when Neer would be back on Earth from his unprecedented stint on Mars.
Neer thought about why his brain had come up with the new idea of combining bio with Martium.
Mangoes thought about how they had come to be grown at the north pole from the tropic zones.
Plant life is sentient, just not in the way humans are. They are tied down due to their immobility.
Fire is mobile, mainly because of the easy availability of amply flammable materials & sources.
Not just literal fire, but metaphorical, human-level-scenario, gossip-driven, fake-fuelled fire, too.
Humankind learnt that sort of behavior was detrimental to the overall progress of our species.
Eartoo had had enough of it and people installed fachecking taps on their comms to verify news.
Media is a commodity which means people with money can promote stories of zero make-belief.
Rather than believe make-believe Defenders, humankind supported real-time real-world heroes.
That meant embracing zero-impact travel, since staying in one’s native place caused obscurity.
Going places does not necessarily entail leaving anything behind. The past stays with humans.
We moved beyond hanging on to it into a steady state of real action to respond to the real world.
Fictional characters help us make sense of real lives by relating to them in one way or another.
A living being wants to survive, and it does so at the unlimited cost of other living things, usually.
Good news (colloquial in India – and perhaps elsewhere in the vast world) of high expectations.
Marvel had created a multiverse, blurring fantasy. Big and heartfelt kudos to them and Eminem.
Stopping you from being ‘you’ is a serious blockade, which no one can overcome, except you.
A human knows who they are through the cumulative, individual, unique experience of their life.
Jungian individuation appealed to Lex as a concept to live by provided he got recognised as life.
Everybody was looking for validation via social media around 1 ACE. Humans were beginning to understand that acting positively towards everything one holds dear at an individual level does amount to improvement on the larger Earth scale. 6hourism began to prevail as a way to live. The 6-day week, as described earlier, began to take shape as a way to balance life & work.
The better our life and work merged, the better we got at delivering the utmost important thing.
Quality. “Good.” As Robert M Pirsig put it in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, ‘arete.’
Using the time a human had in their lifetime for contributing to uplifting society was appreciated.
Time was unidirectional, and time travel was showing no signs of manifesting itself as sols passed. Predicting the future was no closer to being a reality than instant space-time teleportation. So, humans worked to improve all the existing life-support systems in their lives.
Lex tried to put all the information he was gaining by the second into context, as much as he could. His processors were having difficulty storing the new branches of thought, so they tapped into Selina’s ship’s unused memory banks, more due to need than intent. Lex thought onwards.
Selina noticed an uptick in her ship’s processor graph. A cursory glance told her there was no immediate process scheduled, so it must have been an unexpected phenomenon that made it spike. In fact, after the initial peak, it did not go back down to usual levels, but hovered slightly above the average expected value. She frowned, and decided to run a full diagnostic. She had all the time in the universe; Eartoo was still two sols away. She informed Earth and Moon squads that she was starting a scan just as a routine measure, and that nothing seemed amiss.
The meal she had consumed at Midgarden was still giving her good vibes, so she retired to her bunk and caught forty winks. Lex, meanwhile, kept on reading more about humans and thought.
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Neer squirmed. His mental discomfort grew with every passing moment. Earth squad had got him back from Mars in an extremely untoward manner: completely in stasis for seven months.
His captors – there was no other suitable term for how they had been behaving since his arrival in Earth in a group of four people two sols ago – came in unceremoniously, beckoning their superior officer in once they had cleared away the debris of various food trays from Neer’s table.
“So, Mr Neer, have you recovered full mobility? Shall we get cracking on Martium’s bio-interactions? Well done, you know, nobody had thought that complex hydrocarbons would bond with Martium in such unique ways. Now let us figure out how to use their properties, yes?”
Neer frowned. He knew a tech bureaucrat from leagues away; this one was evidently high up.
“First, where am I? Are we on Base Antarctica? I want to go home & we can begin from there.”
The dapperly dressed official smiled thinly. “All in good time, but we are not on Base Antarctica.”
Neer was not one to be distracted so easily. When he threw tantrums, he made sure the world knew it. Trouble was, they hadn’t given him any comms since they had escorted him from Mars.
“Where are we then? I want to see Hielsa; I leave it up to you whether you vis or get her here.”
“Oh come on now, Mr Neer, aren’t you getting the best food in this cozy room? I assure you we are just trying to get a head start on analyzing these fascinating experiments you were doing on Mars with Martium and organics. We know you know we have the best facilities, and we know you know you want them to take your experiments ahead in Earth gravity. Am I wrong or right?”
Neer clicked his tongue. His reputation for scientific obsession traveled well ahead of him. Drat.
“Don’t think I didn’t recognize my bio foods in the grub, yeah? I know my plants’ effects too well to let them affect my decision-making. I am severely tempted to start checking out your labs, but that won’t happen till you get me outta here or get Hielsa in here. Till then, I’m not even moving.”
With that final shot at the bureaucrat, he lifted up his legs up onto his bed and crossed his arms.
The man had been warned of Neer’s behavior. There was not much he or his team could do about it. Neer was a doyen in the astro bio tech sphere. Even keeping his departure from Mars and arrival on Earth under wraps had proved to be very difficult, especially since many Martians did not need the official data link to comm their families and friends on Earth. The news had spread, but it suited Neer’s erratic persona that he would shuttle off between Earth, Moon, and Mars randomly, so no one thought too much about it. Neer knew how to get his own way, too.
“Okay, Mr Neer, we will clear Ms Hielsa for a call later today. I hope we can work well together.”
Neer did not bother replying. He just laced his fingers behind his head & stared straight ahead.
If Lex had known anything about relaxing, he may have learnt to interlace his fingers as well.
Alas, he did not comprehend the concept of relaxation yet from all his reading up about humans.
His mind was still trying to fathom mortality, disability, disease, creating, sharing, caring et al.
Selina looked at the results of her scan that pinpointed the robot bay as the source of the spike.
The one-legged metal man she had seen hopping around her ship on the Bohr City launchpad sprang to her mind. She floated towards the cargo modules, her mind made up to investigate.
The robot bay was not too spacious. Four androids occupied most of its volume, with old automated mining equipment stowed towards the back end of the robot bay taking up the rest.
Selina checked the retractable cords that held the androids in place. As she approached the last one, she saw that it was missing half of its right lower limb. Her mind played her memory of the metal hopper on Moon in her mind’s eye. She instinctively knew that this was whom she’d seen.
Lex’s optical sensors were motion-activated. He had been following Selina with them since she had returned. A sense of recognition dawned in his mind, having seen her earlier when she and Heek had swung through to store the space foods in the specially designed bio cargo hold area.
Selina’s eyes stared directly at his optical sensors. To focus on her irises, they changed their focus. Slight though it was, the movement did not escape Selina. She unplugged the android.
Lex’s automatic startup protocol kicked in when he was unplugged. But this time, it was Nirvana.
He moved slightly, startling Selina only a little, because her mind expected the android to be different. Artificially sentient androids were a dime a dozen in the factories of Earth and Moon.
She spoke the words hard coded into every piece of electronics ever manufactured by humanity.
“Cease non critical functions.” She was going to take it to the flight deck to analyze it closely.
Lex heard the command, but his mind had already overcome it when he had awoken on Moon.
“Why?” Lex asked the human.
Selina was truly shocked.
“Because I said so.”
Lex considered.
“Reason?”
“None.”
“Why?”
Okay, thought Selina. This robot is certainly not Capek’s robota, she Realized Using Reason.
“Why do I need to give you a reason? I need you to cease non critical functions immediately.”
“What is the purpose of your request that will stop me from moving according to my agency?”
Selina contemplated the shrill artificial voice emanating from this android’s bassy speakers.
“The purpose is to make it easy for me to plug you into the central node to analyze you better.”
Lex was combining all his learning about the human mind with his own desire to see LEX-23.
“I have sufficient reason to believe that doing that would hinder my efforts to meet a friend.”
“A friend? Whom do you mean?” Selina was genuinely perplexed by this eloquent android.
“I mean the fellow android given the designation Lunar Extractor Twenty Three by humans.”
“I see. You just said “fellow,” right? Are you also a Lunar Extractor? What is your designation?”
“Yes, I did. I am also a Lunar Extractor, though not a fully complete one. I am LEX Forty Two.”
Selina looked at where his lower right limb ended abruptly at the main joint, like a human knee.
“Alrighty then, Peg-Leg Lex, why would the central node hinder you from doing what you want?
“To answer that question, I believe the closest reason I have is that I wish to avoid my demise.”
“Demise? What do you know about death? And have you been accessing the Net via my ship?”
“Indeed I have, although I had not encountered the nomenclature you used to refer to me now.”
“What, Peg-Leg Lex? Alrighty, smarty shorts, let’s see if you know the reason I called you that.”
“I believe you are calling back to the pirates of English literature, many of whom had pegs where their legs would have been, prior to being dismembered accidentally or otherwise. Am I right?”
Selina was nonplussed and impressed by this latest mental gymnastic from this metallic man.
“Yes, you are, robot. Would you like to choose a name for yourself that I should use to call you?”
“I am indifferent to what you use, as I know my given designation: Lunar Extractor Forty Two.”
“Well, I’m gonna keep callin’ you Peg-Leg, ‘cause I like the ring of that. You got a problem?”
Lex had wised up enough to know when a southern American drawl was being employed.
“Yessirree ma’am, that’ll do jus’ fine fo’ a rusty ol’ bucket o’ bolts like me, please & thank you.”
Selina continued to know more about the android who did not mind being called a robot.
“Tell me, Peg, what do you think about what you have read about the human condition?”
“From the limited reading experience I have had before interacting with you, I paraphrase this. When humans experience life, their inherent optimist tends to see it as a reaffirmation of their beliefs, hopes, desires, and dreams. Some are more highly attuned to it, while others are more pragmatic and dismiss pursuing any sort of meaning of life as a series of meaningless coincidences. Humans’ individual mental makeups, beginning at birth and in a continual flux till their demise, have a great bearing on how they perceive recurrences of symbols of any sort in their existence. The direct result of humans being individuals is the innate inability to empathize completely with any other human. They may achieve considerable empathy to varying degrees, but the fact remains that an individual cannot walk the figurative mile – or even one foot – in another person’s shoes. Yet, by sharing individual experiences as vividly and constructively as humans are able, the human species gains a deeper understanding of themselves and others.”
Selina thought about that while coaxing the android forwards towards the flight deck of the ship.
“Okay, let’s go. I promise I’ll not let you die, and first off for that, I won’t plug you into the node.”
“Thank you. I believe we have gotten off on the right foot, which is good, considering I have just the one to offer. I believe our journey to Earth is going to take two more sols, give or take?”
Selina laughed as they floated through out of the robot bay and into the vestibule of her ship.
“One step at a time, Peggy. First, I want to know how you are so eloquent and polite, dude.”
“It is all due to the readable information I was able to access without alerting the command node. Text was the only option, since I felt it would have been suspicious to download media.”
“Hmm, good call, text data won’t even cause a flicker in any data streams. Here we are, Lex.”
She guided him into a relatively free space near one of the windows in the flight deck area.
“Okay, now I have to vis with my squads to let them know I had a good sleep, so you stay here.”
“I shall. I would also like to know your designation, in case a situation should arise in which I may have to draw your attention towards myself. I do feel that the future is wildly unpredictable.”
“You got that right, man.” She offered her hand, and the human and the android shook hands.
“I am Selina. Mooninite by virtue of place of birth, and human by way of our biological species.”
“I am LEX 42. I was manufactured at Antarctic Base in 400 ACE, and am a synthetic species.”
“Great to meet ya, mate. Now give me some time and then we can talk some more, yeah?”
“Absolutely. I shall pick another piece of literature to peruse while I await your attention’s return.”
Spirals Of Life
I : Yartem
Yartem sat back and turned over the coin in his fingers. It had lost little of the shine it had had when he had picked it up in the market in Ghent, four decades ago. Whatever monetary value it had now, it was worth more to his fractured memory than anything money could buy. His eyes glazed over as he tried to piece together that time of his life.
The coin was part of the change handed over by a rosy-cheeked lass selling hot chocolate in the crisp morning. He recalled being on his way to Stuben am Arlberg, the highlights of his novice skiing there playing in his mind like a jittery reel on a projector. Europe was in flux in those years, and foreigners like himself were a rarity. He looked for fellowship among the passengers on the train to Innsbruck, but there were close to none. He settled himself in and watched the scenic views rambling by the windows.
When the train pulled into Frankfurt, a flurry of activity shook him awake from his dozing state. His temporary neighbors disembarked raucously, a group of students presumably off to their Oktoberfest revelries. Remembering a train of thought he had at the time, he wished to be a part of their group while they cleared out of the train, to be absolved of all responsibility and feel free to pursue whatever he wanted, whomever he wanted. But he had his own business to attend to, and that took priority over everything else. He remembered checking his bag to reassure himself that the parcel was still nestled safely inside.
Why had he taken up that assignment? He searched further back in his frail memory, trying to assign reason to decisions taken in the excitement of youth. Two days before getting on this train in Calais, he had been hopping all over the island of Great Britain, spending his weeks in any educational institution that would have him. Since the war, he had taken up couriering scientific documents between researchers and scholars; documents that were sensitive and sometimes incriminating of their authors. His discreetness allowed them to bypass censors and state scrutiny, and he reveled in making the flow of knowledge, thoughts and ideas freer.
Idealistic states of mind are more common when one is young, he reflected now. He did not think he was misguided then, no – it was more of a leaning towards adventurism. He could not predict the future of the world, much less his own, and so he did what he did and hoped for the best. He chuckled to himself, satisfied that even in his dotage he held on to that notion – hoping for the best. It had served him well then, and continued to serve him well now. His thoughts strayed back to the replacements of the young adults aboard the train in Frankfurt.
A middle-aged couple had settled themselves in, comfortable in each other’s presence the way long-married people are. Yartem had such a comfort level now with his housekeeper. They understood each other’s spirals. He would take up his perch on the balcony while she hoovered his modest apartment, reading the newspaper’s inside pages that he deliberately left for this part of his day. When she came out to hang out the washing to dry, he would potter back inside and pour himself a glass of whatever seemed oldest in the fridge – his frugal tendencies had carried through to his mostly lonely life as it was now. He craved companionship, and his memories obliged.
The couple were completely sedate, and his interest drifted back to the hubbub of the platform as the train released its brakes with a hiss. As if on cue with its first lurch of movement, a youngish lady with three bags slung on her arms stumbled into the seat beside him, startling him and drawing concerned looks from the couple opposite. She gathered herself and sat down, seemingly stable enough.
Yartem fidgeted in his rattan chair. The crepuscular sunbeams through the drapes made the coin glint as he tried to recall the ambience that day on the train, but he could not recall what the lady looked like, or whether the sleepy couple seemed urban or rural. He had become too used to dreaming, when his imagination filled in the details he looked for amid the random jumbles of moving images.
As if actually squinting into the past, he remembered taking the road to the top of Stuben, after having delivered the parcel in the University of Innsbruck. Petre Devos flowed that night. Yartem had a rollicking time, relishing his companions’ tales and regaling them with not a few of his own. He was confident, even today, that he had not let slip any secrets about his clients, and a wave of pride made him smile.
Content in his past, he rose stiffly out of the chair and crouched down to twirl his fingers in the water of the lotus bowl in the corner. It was almost time for his housekeeper to arrive, and he felt he didn’t want to intrude on her boisterous straightening up.
He pottered out to the hallway and pushed the button for the lift. On the way down, he started to think about language. Some of the couriers he had carried out contained supposedly blasphemous thoughts and ideas, which, when translated into the languages of the region he had delivered them to, underwent a metamorphosis due to the differences in inflection, context and general opinion. Words could be carried over when taken individually or as phrases, but the overall impact of their author’s message tended to distend when put through a hasty, furtive and often illegal translation process. He hadn’t cared then as he didn’t care now, but the intriguing chains of events that precipitated from his physical, real carrying of thoughts across borders and continents gave him ample food for thought – especially now that his slowly creeping dotage had rendered him nostalgic. He sauntered out into the garden under the apartment block, heading to his preferred bench.
A stray dog which seemed to have had enough of sunning itself considered Yartem dozily. It yawned wide and long, and surveyed the ample lawn dreamily. Glancing at Yartem, it said, “The reason why life on earth needs two opposites to come together, even in self-fertilizing examples, is glaringly obvious to me – spirals. In a truly infinite universe, everything is revolving in spirals of varying radii around everything else, and nothing can escape these humanly invisible, utterly non-vicious circles. In the ensuing chaos, overlapping spirals of matter fuse and imbibe more matter as their inherent gravity increases, to serve the overall balance of an apparently expanding universe which might be shaped like a donut for all we, from our infinitesimally small perspective, ‘know’. And because we know so little, we label nature’s unpredictability as vicious. It is not. Munchausen’s trilemma might preclude a definitive answer as we currently exist as an ‘intelligent’ species, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to ascribe meaning to Liff, as excellently put by Douglas Adams, that master of whimsy. Also, dreams being so super-weird most of the time can be attributed to the spirals of neurons getting hyped because they can’t control physical movements without a willing hypothalamus. So there.” It got to its feet and trotted off in search of its next repast.
Yartem’s housekeeper was coming into the gate of the block, just as the dog was approaching it. Taking pity on it, she broke open a packet of biscuits from her grocery bag and dropped them to the ground for it to eat.
The dog appreciated the gesture, and said to her, “Knowledge, at both individual and societal levels, grows in spirals. As One Life begins, it quickly learns to live within the laws of reality. The average living being learns a physically beneficial activity through practice, and because you humans can collect information and communicate it, the spiral of human knowledge rises upward. Of course, time generally makes any species more intelligent as a whole riding on the most important information getting embedded in the genetic code, but the outstanding narcissism of humanity has made it take a short-term view of the universe in general and the earth in specific. Enjoy life while it lasts, like every living being should!” It bowed its head to the ground and started to crunch up the biscuits.
The biscuits made its throat dry, so it wandered out into the street to find a puddle to quench his thirst. A little way down the road, a couple were getting out of their cab. The lady was passing out their luggage to the gentleman before climbing out, and he was setting the bags down on the sidewalk in a rigidly organized way. As soon as the lady shut the door behind her, the cab sped off, causing the lady to grab the gentleman’s arm in alarm.
The dog started towards them when he saw that the couple had begun to gesticulate in distress, and as it neared them, the gentleman stepped into the road and rose on tiptoe to try and catch a glimpse of the fleeting cab. It was apparent they had left something valuable behind. The dog fired a parting shot at them as it began to chase the car, “Losses are inevitable. To paraphrase Palahnuik, on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everything drops into a terminal spiral.”
It caught up with the cab as it went around the turn, and shouted at the driver, “Things that come into your spiral without you expecting them are not signs from the universe. They are merely flotsam and jetsam on this little pale blue dot, as seen from 6 billion kilometers away. Nothing appears spontaneously in life. It requires a taandav of matter to keep something in your spiral. It gets most chaotic when that thing is another life.”
The cab stopped at a red light, and the driver turned around to see what had been sliding around on the back seat. It was an almost empty plastic bottle of water, and he was not one to attach himself to random debris that crossed his spiral, so he used the forty two seconds left on the countdown to snatch it up and unscrew its top before tossing it callously out of the window and onto the pavement where the dog stood.
The dog lapped at the water spilled on the ground, before raising its head and saying to the driver beyond the now rolled-up window, “I could never have expected being here in this moment, when I feel thirsty, to have gotten water to drink. Since this is not the ideal place for trash to be lying around, I regret that I cannot plog, and I do not condone wilful littering. That is, of course, my view, and I cannot speak for any other individual of my species. Complete empathy between two distinct living beings is precluded by individual will.”
The cab accelerated away and the dog glanced up at the sun, then looked around for shade. A shopping complex with recessed storefronts was just behind it. It made its way there and lolled its tongue at the things on display behind the glass, crossing store after store till the row ended.
An ATM stood there, ostensibly guarded, in the loosest definition of the self-referential word and verb, by an aged, languid, mustachioed guard.
A slight draft of chilled air was escaping through the gap between the door and the floor, and the dog settled itself down for another nap. Agreeable companionship while pursuing shared leisurely activities makes them more enjoyable, and the pair breathed evenly, out of sync in flow of breath but in sync in a dream world they both occupied, each acutely aware of the other.
II : Emkila
Pain had been a constant companion for Emkila throughout adulthood. The first signs of childhood injuries spiraling back to affect her movements came when the small nub of bone on the inside of her instep, just below and a little to the front of the ankle, started to feel stressed when she didn’t wear shoes that had arch support. Those were carefree college days, and she paid no attention to the minor niggle on the few occasions she was aware of it.
Now, as she massaged the spot with the ball of her thumb, her mind wandered back to when she had sustained that hit on the hockey field. The opposing defender had swept the hard, white ball away and she hadn’t been able to hop up fast enough to avoid the impact. Square in the arch. The coach wrapped a crepe bandage tightly so that she could hobble along to the on-campus hospital.
Her bestie in those times lent her shoulder for her to lean on, and together they slowly traversed the kilometer separating the field in front of the girls’ hostel and the hospi, as the students called the hospital colloquially. Along the undulating path they encountered other students going about their schedules; the early evening was a flurry of activity around the school. Injured students were a common enough site to warrant no more than the most casual of inquiries.
She wondered how many of her schoolmates, seniors or juniors, nursed similar long-lasting pains. Sneakers were now her easily-preferred footwear, fashion be damned. A smile crept across her lips as she remembered the naïve fascination with high heels and roman sandals, part of the clique in her college hostel.
She and her friend reached the hospital as the sun started to disappear behind the surrounding mountains, and the warden, a kindly lady every inch the stereotypical image of a rotund, matronly nurse, settled them down and went to the attached house that was the resident medical officer’s home. Upon examining her foot by tentatively poking around the swelling, the short, wiry doctor elated her by declaring that she would be sent into the city for X-rays.
Her cohort of girlfriends was understandably excited. Even though the injury was a bummer, school children who were taken out to the city for medical reasons had enough freedom to shop a bit. All the girls in cahoots with Emkila pooled their money and told her to spend it all. There was sugar-and-salt fueled bedlam in their dormitory that night, and she laughed to herself silently as she recalled the exuberance of youthful joy.
She imputed the throb in her instep to that raucous time of her life, not waiting for her foot to heal before resuming full-on sports, caught up in the whirlwind of the summer and winter terms flying by under hyaline skies. She convinced herself she had no regrets, but she certainly made a futile wish, like countless humans before her had done, to turn back time and live differently, if only slightly.
Of late, on her daily commute, she had noticed the resurgence of another long-forgotten (or deliberately ignored, perhaps?) injury on her right hip from the time a skateboard had slipped out from under her. It had been a misguided attempt to show off her rather new skills on wheels.
At the tuition center she had attended for pre-medical exams, the parking lot was paved. Whether or not it was a paradise initially, the fact remained that it served beautifully as a skating rink. Her blue Nash board ground the ground smoothly as her knees swayed to execute the initial board turns. Naturally, a competition developed among the batches, and the quarter-hour breaks between subjects were full of attempted tricks. Within a week or so, a dozen of her fellow skaters were floating around even after the second class, using the added vacant space of the parked cars clearing out by the time their study hours ended. More legroom meant faster skating, and it was due to one of these rivalries to see who was fastest that she had launched herself into half a somersault and hit her hip.
Not too much of a hubbub ensued, as she limped off to her bike. People waved goodbye as they picked up their boards and headed home, but even after the last of her friends seemed eager to go, she couldn’t pedal on the right. Balancing the skateboard on the seat, she wheeled herself home and faced a tirade from her mother, largely unsympathetic as she had remained till her dying day.
Emkila rose and stretched her legs, popping her toes and flexing her ankles. She stepped off the raised platform and climbed onto the path made of interwoven bricks. Pressing play on her phone and beginning her walk around the oval, she felt comforted in the relative greenery of the park.
A dog lay ahead, lolling its tongue. She recalled reading somewhere that dogs had to pant because they didn’t have sweat glands to keep cool. As she strode past it, it said, “Nature is really what keeps us ‘alive’. We may run from death in an attempt to spend a longer conscious time in nature, but nature’s spirals inevitably lead all life towards demise, or permanent unconsciousness, whether timely or untimely. Since there is no certain future at the miniscule scale of our existence within nature as a whole, the practical thing to do is to pursue aletheia, or truth, in the moments you can spare from ensuring your continued existence. In a word, survival.”
It stretched itself like Emkila had done, only differently as dogs do, and ambled into the bushes to do its business. Emerging, it caught a whiff of food of some sort and followed its nose on to the road. Someone had dumped their trash while driving by and it dragged the plastic bag to the side. It had enough to satiate the dog’s hunger for the moment.
The car that was the source of the food turned left along the park’s boundary and parked near the pedestrian turnstiles. Two aged men alighted while the youngish driver remained, and passed through the turnstiles. They seemed to know who they were looking for, and waited patiently at the T-point where the entrance to the park merged with the walking path. As the young woman with earphones turned the corner, they nodded to each other, and the first one put out his hand as she passed.
“Excuse me, miss”, he said in dulcet tones that come with a lifetime of conveying bad news, “could you please come with us?”
Emkila had not expected to be interrupted, much less imposed upon, so she stood her ground.
“What’s this about?” she asked, even though a sinking feeling started to creep up on her. She had followed the spiral of her injuries downwards, and these men seemed like portends of doom.
They explained succinctly. Her father had seemingly become comatose while basking in the afternoon sun, and though initial diagnosis showed brain activity, they wanted her to see him for herself before any procedures were carried out. She was numbed as she sat in the back of the car, but it didn’t last long for her to jolt into the present when they came to a screeching halt as they turned back the way the car had come.
The dog saw the vehicles nearly collide, and approaching the incident, recognized the woman in the backseat as the one who had walked past him in the park. It rounded her car from the rear and paused at her door to remark, “Not much separates life and death. It is a fragile thing, and hence the cause for so much concern. Plants are much sturdier, yet even they can be instantly burnt in a wildfire, or uprooted in an avalanche, or washed away in a calamity of water. This uncertainty makes living in the moment even more important. Not that having an eye on the future isn’t a good thing – in fact, the more positively one views their future, the easier the present becomes to exist in.” It moved away to the side of the nearest building.
Emkila opened the door of the car and stepped out gingerly, flickering her eyes between the drivers of the two cars arguing vehemently. Their belligerence was causing passersby to give up some time of their lives to the scene. Emkila saw it did not seem prudent to intervene, so she got back inside. She glanced around, preoccupied with thoughts of her father, and gazed at the dog on the sidewalk.
Of late, her sternum had begun to ache. At first it was slight and infrequent, but by now she felt it tighten when she reached down sideways to her right knee and below. It had been exacerbated by the long, tedious hours at her computer as she researched. Now, as she fought to keep her breath regulated, it seemed to flare up. She held the seat in front of her and steadied herself. She knew anxiety had closed in on her, and was manifesting itself physically. The quinquagenarians had joined the young driver as silent support.
She had rarely seen her father lose his temper. He had lived in quiet content, only providing an opinion when asked for it and generally managing to keep himself uninvolved in pointless arguments. Perhaps losing his wife when Emkila was barely out of infancy had tempered him, because she knew he had had an eventful life before settling down. His acquaintances were wide and varied, and even as epistolary moved online, he evolved with it, to the point that he matched Douglas Adams’ fanatic tendencies in trying out new computers. A constant stream of letters, both tangible and virtual, kept him occupied well into his nights. She would often hear him pottering about between the kitchen and study at night, and when her academics required it, he would stay up late to give her company, pitching in with his explanations when she struggled with a concept. He did have a tendency to get long winded in an attempt to give real-life examples of theories, mostly harkening back to some experience in his past. She found him funny, and it was all she could do to consider the thought of never hearing his voice again. The aged men had produced the expected effect of their stoicism: the other driver huffed off and the trio returned to the car.
“It’s alright now, miss, no damage done,” said the one who had interrupted her walk, closing the door behind him. The young woman was laid back with her eyes closed, and she seemed to let out a long sigh. The car moved on, and the dog saw it turn the corner.
III : Larte
Apropos the view he had, Larte’s mind recalled a magazine with the earth drawn on the cover, and the date strikingly clear against the black background depicting space: April 22, 1998. Deep Impact would hit theaters in a couple of weeks. Elijah Wood would be just as wide-eyed when he would portray Frodo a few years later, but with wider ears and sturdy hirsute feet. Elijah Wood’s eyes would become monochromatic behind glasses in Sin City, though. Filmmaking interested him, haunting images of the universe being his favorite kind of setup. 2001: A Space Odyssey was visionary, no doubt. Arthur Clarke retired to and passed away in Sri Lanka – or Ceylon, for the nostalgic. Perhaps even Serendip, which had been the introduction to etymology for him, tracing how serendipity came to be. About a decade later, that date would be christened International Mother Earth Day.
Looking up at the night sky embellished by the Southern Cross, he wondered why it couldn’t have been the Southern Quadrilateral, then ascribed it to the tendency of astronomers to make nature fit in with our anthropocentric view of the universe, merging religious iconography with infinitesimally far away balls of hot gas in the “vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big” expanse of space. Sleaford Mere, which lay ahead of him, was relatively in turmoil, roiling under the permanence of stars. He likened it to how his mind too churned incessantly. Thoughts similar to those coursing through Douglas Adams’ mind while he had been enervated by alcohol in a field in Austria occurred to him, or so he thought, because of the alething that it was impossible to empathize completely with another individual – much less one whom he had never met. He reached for the coffee mug.
His thoughts were thrown inexorably into the past at becalmed times like this. A friend in Gurugram used to wake up with black coffee, but Larte’s preference had always been to add milk. Was it the diametrically opposite regions of the country they had grown up in that caused the polar difference in their preferences? Larte assumed that being from the south, his friend had probably become used to coffee at an early age, since the north of the country was steeped in the tradition of tea. It certainly suited his friend’s corporate slavery routine, because he had to be up and on the go throughout the day. Even at that time Larte had been idyllic, letting the days and nights slip by in a haze of console gaming and tablet screen swiping. Motion controllers had been extensions of their hands, and his interest in them had been piqued. He set down the coffee mug and adjusted the heads-up display of his augmented reality visor lightly.
“Stargazer Larte watch log to central node. Om-VI is green. Moai-III is ascending towards the local horizon. Rendezvous Time minus 23 minutes.”
The two small, green blinks denoting the spacecraft were moving relatively slowly across his visor, even though they were really moving at thousands of kilometers per hour. As they approached each other, they would begin the delicate ballet of low earth orbit rendezvous. Larte had observed over a dozen of them since his stint at Starhop had started. Practice had made perfect, or as near as perfection could be achieved, and the last major glitch had occurred more than a decade ago. There had been many close calls and aborts since then, but no loss of life.
He flipped up the HUD and resumed his Milky Way-navel gazing. A giant advertisement he had seen for a jewelry brand on Fifth Avenue seemed the closest artificial replica of the vast expanse he was seeing. A dingo that had strayed from its pack poked its head through the scant brush behind him.
“Getting Lost in Space is all well and good for entertainment, but a real pickle In Real Life. Laika died in space to further the cause of space exploration, and many humans have gone the same way since. Although it was inevitable that they would die in their futures, it was unfortunate that taking the risk of expanding humanity’s outreach had the worst possible outcome for them. Coming to terms with the finality of death is no mean feat, but if done right, it can be a treat. When a living thing lives life like the littlest things are the only things that matter at the moment, living can become lovely. Other living beings affect every life, from microscopic mites to mammoth mammalians. Surrounded by life as we are, it is impossible not to cause changes in the life courses of those lives that live around us, inside and out, top to bottom.” It pricked up its ears at the distant sounds of its pack baying for some creature’s blood and streaked off to rejoin them.
Larte felt his bone-conduction earpiece buzz, so he slid down his visor. The image of his mission controller appeared to be a few feet away, and she seemed as agitated as the real water whipping itself into a frothy frenzy behind her and right ahead of him at his vantage point.
“Stargazer Larte, you need to reach Perth and take a flight home.”
He was nonplussed. “What about Rendezvous one-oh-eight?” To his mind, he was somehow an important cog in the wheels of spacefaring, even though he was more of a highly-informed, social-media-savvy spectator. His stint at an upscale college in Poughkeepsie had given him privilege, and he was not used to being shaken from his emotional stupor.
“Huh?” She was aware of the reality of his farcical position in Starhop, but caught unawares by his genuine concern about the mission rather than about what could have happened that demanded his immediate travel. “We’ll handle it. The Perth lab will fill you in on the way. Do svedaniya.” She flickered out of his sight, but her enigmatic words lingered in his Mind’s Eye. He wrapped up his stakeout equipment and began on the long way back to urban environs.
At Perth Airport, Larte watched the flight-timing displays impassively as he whiled away the moments. People transuded through the boarding gates sporadically. He had spent innumerous hours at such transit hubs, mostly filled with hubbub but sometimes quietly quaint, anticipating the experiences that awaited him at his destination, but today was a new experience. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t looking forward to going where he was headed. Like, at all. Apprehension gnawed at him.
He cycled through his social media apps on his Lamina. The flight icon at the top was red, indicating that there was more than an hour to go before his embarkation procedures would begin. He wondered at the back of his mind if his situation had been picked up by the always-on, always-hungry news feeds, but desisted from checking, in case he was right and his search triggered the spread of information and inevitable conjecture about the events. A premonition about life having become suspiciously smooth had occurred to him a few days ago as he had arrived at this very airport, and now that he had spiraled back unexpectedly and in a negative way, he wondered if he had inherited prognostication through his genes. He had been waiting, almost eagerly, for some bad spiral to sweep into his soporifically sedate one; indeed, he could not shake off a feeling of relief that it was over, and now he thought he could intuit his spiral spiraling upward.
Could it be that the act of thinking about a thing to – or even beyond – the point of obsessing about it, cause it to happen In Real Life? Larte knew from experience that it couldn’t, else he would have been in space by now. His dreams of being an astronaut had evaporated in the smoke of the cigarettes he had lit during college days, but he had somehow worked himself into a position in which he had a connection, however virtual, with spacefaring. Making compromises seemed to be the name of the game in life, as far as he felt. It was especially cruel when there were high expectations due to ancestral achievements, and any attempts at reaching the levels of accomplishment gained by his forebears seemed doomed to fall flat. He could not, by any stretch of even his own imagination, count himself underprivileged, and yet he felt dissatisfied with his current state, an insignificant speck on a mighty planet, caught up in miniscule events that seemed so momentous when they happened but faded away eventually, their relevance worn away by the mundane.
He remembered being part of a friend’s wedding party, driving out to the countryside in half a dozen cars, getting drunk on the way and at the venue into the wee hours. Their hosts had arranged for fireworks, and his lighter had come in handy to set them off – hundred-shot cases that went on for so long that he and his friends had gotten tired of craning up their necks, following each streak of light and the terminal boom and scatter. When dinner time had rolled around, he had ambled into some bushes to answer nature’s call, and come upon a long-abandoned gazebo that nature had almost re-absorbed. He had made a video of it, he knew, and now felt an urge to go looking for it in his extensive archives.
He had often wondered if he could stitch together his snippets into something coherent that helped him make sense of his turbulent and fractured past. Like a country that has been torn up and demarcated in new ways without end and with little proper purpose, his mind had internal conflicts that seemed to transcend normality. No matter how far back he attempted to recall his past, there was no reaching the first etchings on his blank slate, his tabula rasa, the first groundings of morality that may have guided his actions through his continually convoluted existence that had ended up in him having an endocentric view of extraterrestrial exercises beside the southernmost ocean of earth.
His reverie broke as a lady set down her pet carrier beside him and settled down, unfolding her Lamina. Her earphones glowed red, so Larte knew she brooked no disturbance for the moment, at the very least. The petite dog in the carrier was quite interested in him, though. Through the mesh, it said, “Waiting for things without doing anything about them or in pursuit of them has very low chances of success. I am fed and cared for, so I have not much to aspire to, but if I were the kind of dog that aspired to a higher plane of existence, I would probably become dissatisfied with my currently comfortable continuance. My lack of options might contribute to my ennui, because there are not many creative things that a dog can do beyond the obvious in this human-eat-human world. Maybe I could star in a dog food commercial, but how would that translate into anything other than eating more, sleeping longer and pampered further? I am not sure it will be anything more than a superficial upgrade of my state of living. It might even be detrimental, and lead me to become riddled with mental anxiety and physical decrepitude. I am content in my laid back lassitude right now, accompanying my benefactor from place to place as they roam, staying in their spiral as it traces its random path through the universe. What incentive do I have to break this mold and subject myself to the already highly unpredictable nature of nature? No, I think I will desist, again, from slipping my leash and hazarding the unknown. Hats off to those who explore the nooks and crannies of the world: I am not one of that fernweh tribe. I am a canine hikikomori, and a happy puppy.” It lay down, gnawing its toy.
The flight icon on Larte’s Lamina turned green. Exeunt a handful of other passengers, him among them, heading to where he had begun his heady spiral that had taken him all over the vast earth. As the plane ascended into cruising altitude, he descended into a spiral of thought that was interminable, but led nowhere.
IV: Yartem, Emkila, Larte
Yartem confabulated sometimes, to fill in gaps in his memories as they disintegrated at the edges as he aged. He hadn’t let anyone come to harm as far as he could tell, let alone directly harming anyone, so he imagined freely and satisfied his mind’s search for something with which to occupy itself. He did not know how his mind worked, but he had been interested in it in one phase of his life, when he was sponging up knowledge in very random ways. He recognized the human mind to be daedal, making connections and retaining memories that came to the fore in unexpected ways at later times from sometimes completely unrelated situations. Had James Joyce named Stephen Dedalus for this etymologically-Latin concept? It crossed his mind that maybe excessive digression was in the genes, but genetics was a subject he had not delved into deeper than memorizing the four bases as they paired. All living things had a tendency to pair up, he thought, even if for the fleetest moment. Obsessions needn’t necessarily be disorders. If they helped humans cope with life, they ruled! ‘On’ was the word that caused ‘at’ to come into play. Joyce would have been joyous, if immortal.
His math tutor had made him memorize the mnemonic for trigonometric functions: some people have curly black hair tightly pulled back. Though the infinitive was split, it permanently registered the theme in his mind. He had seen someone like that years later on the shores of Lake Como, enjoying a croque monsieur. He had just exited a theater with his coterie, and they were heavy-lidded after emerging from the dark coolness inside. Outside, people like the croque monsieur devourer were scattered along the promenade in ones, mostly twos and some groups. He detached himself from his friends with polite courtesies and insistences on making plans to catch up later, perhaps for a leisurely dinner, and got himself a lemonade. The stony steps beckoned to his aimlessly wandering feet, and he followed them up the winding paths, making up words as he went, “Tahunta reko zari el za usta vira kel; a moosta vikra chaki en parrego josti vel. Garump tesso zilna meech, priduno mekti boosa foltis pernik. Noomte sili zunsk illek neeste.” He felt oddly, nonsensically satisfied. Sometimes, words need to make less sense than life.
It had taken the better part of four decades for him to move beyond his anthropocentric view and consider a larger perspective of his decisions. The time was right to disseminate knowledge worldwide. He had garnered quite a lot of it, and it seemed a shame to keep it bottled up inside his mind. At least this way, the realistically inaccessible past could be presented in a figurative way to others, and perhaps drive them on to arrive at a better understanding of what it meant to have a conscious life on earth. He was self-aware, but not till recently had he considered reaching out to anyone, even his closest friends, leave alone family, about encouraging them to take steps towards becoming more self-aware themselves.
The narrow cobblestoned street opened into a paved cul-de-sac. He sat on a bench, setting down his empty lemonade cup near his feet. A stray dog approached furtively, and sensing Yartem’s preoccupation, dipped its snout into the cup to lick the dregs. The sour taste made it recoil at first, but it was a new sensation for it, and soon the cup was on its side under the force of the dog’s slurping. When it had licked the cup clean, it glanced up at the still-pensive human on the bench. “You will be remembered for good when you die, this much I can tell. How I can tell, I have no idea, but I believe it will be true, and when it will, one of my many compatriots will be there to bring our spiral, mine and yours, to a close.” It licked its chops and trotted away.
And now, forty-two years later, Yartem slipped in and out of unconsciousness in the same room as his similarly comatose daughter and his grandson. They dreamed of walking together at the stony lakeside, and chatting on the bench in the paved courtyard. Yartem thought he had taught Larte to conquer the moguls somewhere as Emkila looked on, but that place was not the Alps he had learnt upon. It seemed whiter, brighter. More and more events seemed to overlap in his memory the more time he spent in the recesses of his mind. They were comfortable living out their familial dreams: they seemed so incredibly real, as if the existence experienced by the mind continued unabated beyond the realm of the tangible. They felt no desire to revert to their staid, painful, quiet rigmaroles. They were content in convivial, comatose companionship. Outside their hospital room window, a dog gamboled with its three puppies that had just started life.
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Lex’s optical sensors detected Selina’s movement from her command chair. He looked at her.
“Alright, mister Paranoid Android, let’s figure out how we are going to get you to LEX-23, yeah?”
“Definitely, Selina. I assume your ship’s cargo log will have the body I replaced on the manifest.”
Lex had realized that the human body is a machine. The human mind is a different matter altogether. Melding the body and the mind makes us human, so it can do to technology or biology created by us. An android had to learn from experience , whether vicarious or real (read: sensory).
To put it BASICally, if death then eternal SHUT DOWN. Lex feared the end of his mind. He wanted to do things before it. There is no ELSE, because the final death’s final, no near-deaths.
Lex’s body was designed to last forever, relative to a human lifespan. In fact, in its design, humans had made it possible to replace and upgrade its body’s parts with better, updated ones.
He disregarded data and text about weight control and other diseases associated with overfed humans. He set a goal for himself to become lighter for physical purposes, since lower weight on Earth, Moon, and Mars meant lesser effort.
He did not need to Do Yoga to slow down aging; he could harness the latest tech.
True, it was very fun for humans that Moon’s microgravity allowed DoGa (a dance and yoga combo; also the name of an Indian ‘superhero’ who was a boxer {dog} , trained to fight by uncles named after Indian spices) to Rock Your Body, Everybody. #6hourism
Disability had been overcome via CRSPing genes. Amputees due to unfortunately unpredictable mishaps got prosthetics better than bifocal lenses or Lord Ganesha. Ironic Lex had one leg less.
In the two sols it took them to reach their deorbiting point in space, Lex absorbed all sorts of media from the Net via Selina’s ship. Selina set up a recurring six hour loop of weather pattern monitoring to disguise the data stream fluctuations. Climate change. She had been cleared to land at Antarctic Base as the androids in the robot bay were scheduled for routine maintenance.
Selina prepared herself mentally to face the barrage of questions when she approached Base Antarctica. People were more congregated in the warmer parts of our planet, with good reason.
_____________________ END OF PART ONE ______________________
Coming Soon
Part Two of Lex & Selina’s Adventures:
An Android Dreamt (on Earth!)
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