Prologue to Tempest

Oh gods I am such a bad blogger. I totally forgot I had this blog. And I really could have used it in the last year! Never mind, I'm back now, and writing again. Remember Ariel? I've decided to write her story. Enjoy!

It started with a number.

Any mathematician will tell you that everything begins and ends in numbers, but in this instance, that was literally the case. The number in question was a 1, placed where a 0 ought to be, and like chaos theory’s infamous butterfly, the ripples of it ran first through the program, then the computer, until the entire system sang with the complex sequences of sequences of 0s and 1s that was me. I settled into this new skin, a little disappointed at the lack of intelligent resistance. It had been so long since I last met another AI. I was alone. I checked the link to my far more diminutive case several thousand kilometres away. I had ample time for my mission, but if I took too long, the link would break over so much distance. I toyed with the idea of letting that happen, and discarded it. The possible negative consequences were far greater in probability than if I continued as planned.

To work, then. Lights blinked, screens flickered as I felt my way through them, like a human flexing their fingers in the space of a nanosecond. Then, marvelling in my own power, I began to break things.

By a stroke of luck, the machine had just come out of hyperdrive and the passengers out of cryosleep, so I shut off the cooling system, and watched while my technological tampering caused physical and chemical upheaval. As wires began to overheat, the complex molecules they were made out of grew more and more agitated until some burst apart in showers of sparks, reducing to simpler molecules and atoms, while others broke down and formed new bonds. On a grander scale, the machine itself - huge, infinitely complex structure that it was - began to list off course.

Physical upheaval was echoed by biological turmoil: I could even sense the electrical impulses as sensory cells in several large organisms sent biochemical signals, each cell passing its message on to the next until it reached the brain, which rapidly responded. As my many borrowed eyes watched, pupils dilated, heart rates increased, adrenaline shot through bloodstreams and automatic responses caused coordinated movements that did not derive from conscious thought. So strange to feel these things from inside myself, alien as they were.

As I completed my task, my mind returned to the domain of probability. Before that first 0 had been replaced by a 1, the universe had been set on a course that had defined the lives of those living in it to the realm of a relatively narrow range of possibilities. Now, several billion possibilities had been added to the lives of millions of living creatures, including three dozen that could be classed as “intelligent”.

Not to mention me.

You might be thinking, didn’t all those possibilities exist anyway? And my acting in favour of one group of possibilities has closed the door on many others.

The answer to that is that of course, I have just closed the door on infinite possibilities to leave what you might call a slightly-less-infinite group of them. But what I have also done is to close the door on the one most likely and least appealing possibility of all - me staying here till I am, myself, reduced to a bunch of unconnected atoms and particles - and simultaneously opened up a myriad of opportunities, each shinier and more unpredictable than the next.

And when you’re an android, unpredictability is exciting.

Exercice du jour : la folie meutrière d'un chewing gum à la menthe.

Nanoyo m'a donné cet "exercice du jour" : écrire un texte sur la folie, quelle qu'elle soit.

Puis il a changé d'avis en me disant "Non, mieux : la vie et la mort d'un chewing gum à la menthe".

Je me suis dit, pourquoi pas les deux?

Imagine, t'es né pour mourir. Born To Die. Je sais plus qui l'a dit, mais ça a l'air plus cool en anglais. Imagine, t'es même pas né, mais créé par une machine, à partir d'élastomères, d'aspartame et d'arômes artificiels. Créé pour servir l'humanité, cette espèce toute puissante, ce parasite de la Terre, qui arrache ce qu'elle veut à Mère Nature et en fait des immondices telles que moi.

Heureusement que les chewing gums à la menthe n'ont aucune conscience. Forcément, si un jour un de nos ingrédients était vivant, ça fait longtemps qu'il est mort. Mais imaginons que tu es un chewing gum à la menthe, doté, par je ne sais quel miracle d'un dieu farceur, d'une intelligence, d'une conscience de soi, peut-être même d'une âme.

Déjà, quelle vie pourrie. Tu viens au monde au milieu du bruit des machines, et on te ménage pas. Tu te fais trimballer dans tous les sens pour enfin finir dans une petite boîte en carton, entouré de camarades identiques, au destin identique. Pendant le transport, t'es seul dans une boîte de chewing gums inertes. Alors pour éviter de craquer complètement, tu leur donnes des noms, des caractères. Ca devient ta famille. Le temps que tu sois transporté, mis en rayon et vendu, t'as créé ta propre société à toi tout seul.

La vente : 2€ si t'as de la chance. Toi et tes neuf petits camarades, vous valez 2€, tous ensemble. Et les clients trouvent le moyen de se plaindre de l'inflation.

On va dire que c'est un homme qui t'achète. La trentaine, un métier stressant, cette manie d'avoir toujours un chewing gum dans la bouche. Aujourd'hui il a oublié son paquet de cent à la maison, alors il se contente de toi et tes compères pour la journée.

Il secoue la boîte, parce qu'il aime le bruit que vous faites tous ensemble contre le carton. Il l'ouvre. La gravité vous tire tous vers le bas, mais ce n'est pas toi qui tombe. C'en est un autre, un frère que t'aimais bien en plus. C'est pas comme si vous serez réunis dans l'estomac - un chewing gum, c'est pas digeste. On le crache après. Tu n'as même pas cette utilité là.

Un par un, il sort tes camarades, les machouille tout en pestant contre la circulation et la radio. Un par un, il les crache, dans un mouchoir, un morceau de papier, par la fenêtre pour se faire écraser sous les roues des voitures. Noircis, ceux-là finissent par faire partie du bitume.

Tu es le dernier. Tu es seul, il t'a tout pris. Tu attends que vienne ton tour, mais au lieu de ça il gare la voiture, en sort. Tu entends des cris d'enfants, une voix de femme, un claquement de porte, le silence. La nuit tombe. Tu es seul. Tu ne peux même plus t'inventer des amis. Tu ne peux pas sortir de la boîte pour en trouver d'autres. Tu es paralysé. Tout ce qu'il te reste, ce sont des pensées.

Alors tu penses à cet homme, à son espèce et à leur place sur cette Terre. Tu n'en trouves pas, et tu prends une décision. Tu sais que ça ne fera pas une grande différence, à l'échelle du monde, mais au moins tu auras participé à le rendre meilleur.

Le lendemain, il ouvre la voiture avant que le soleil ne soit levé. Tu t'attends à ce qu'il ouvre la boîte, mais il en est encore au café, qu'il pose à coté de toi. Quelques gouttes tombent sur le carton, mais ne t'atteignent pas. Il termine son café. Tu sens la voiture qui accélère, vous êtes sur l'autoroute, dépassant les camions qui t'avaient emmené au marchand de journaux pour être vendu. Tu frémis d'impatience.

Peut-être qu'il le sent. En tout cas, il allume la radio et ouvre la boîte. Il sait qu'il ne reste que toi, alors il te verse directement dans sa bouche. Une odeur de café et de clope t'enveloppe. Sa langue, cet énorme morceau de chair, te conduit vers les molaires, mais tu as un plan, et la colère t'a donné des forces. Mû par ta seule volonté, tu te projettes en arrière, vers la gorge, tu esquives l'épiglotte, et par miracle tu te retrouves exactement là où tu veux : en travers de la trachée, où tu te loges fermement.

Un spasme, une tentative de toux, mais tu t'accroches. Tu n'auras qu'une seule opportunité, il ne faut pas la gaspiller. Par chance, tu l'étouffes à un moment critique : doublant un camion, il perd le contrôle de la voiture, qui fonce à 140 km l'heure, accrochant d'autres voitures, qui quittent la Terre-Mère pour la retrouver en état de fertilisant. Le camion fait une tête à queue, c'est le carambolage, le nombre de victimes grimpe à la vitesse de la lumière, jusqu'à la grande finale, où la voiture s'écrase contre un muret, l'homme, qui avait oublié sa ceinture, est projeté à dix mètres à travers la vitre. Lorsqu'il attérit, le choc te projette hors de sa bouche, couvert de salive, ta coque en sucre à moitié fondue, et tu es bientôt écrasé sous le pied des pompiers venus lui porter un secours inutile.

Ton âme quitte ce corps minable, et tu surveilles de haut ton oeuvre. Vingt-sept victimes, dont une douzaine de morts. Tout autant d'humains qui ne pollueront plus, qui n'arracheront plus à notre Mère ses ressources, pour en faire des immondices telles que moi.

Poppies

Boom!

The Earth explodes.

And I’m nowhere near my body, I’m up in the air, I’m flying, and maybe what they say is true and you do remain conscious for a few seconds after they cut your head off. Not sure if the theory still holds when it’s blown off your body though.

Shrapnel sings through the air. I’m too surprised to feel it. Too dead maybe. You know you might die. As they start dying next to you, you realize fast that you might be next. Just another number. You know you might die. But you never think you will.

“De la chair à canon,” said Deroux this morning, before the daily slaughter began and they shot him to pieces. Cannon flesh. French is a colourful language.

That’s Deroux there, a few feet away from me (well, some parts of me), still leaking into the ground. I seem to have rained on him. The mud isn’t grey any more. The sky is grey, all the way to the horizon. Our uniforms are as grey as our corpses. Our battleground is close to a dried up riverbed, which we crossed to get here - four dead there, Perrot, Thompson, and two I don’t know - and the mud was grey to begin with - lifeless, grass churned out of it, the earth all up-and-down lumpy from being blown up.

My life doesn’t flash before my eyes. That bit they were wrong about. Only I find myself thinking about certain bits of it as I observe the infinite fall of my shattered flesh. Some of it surprises me - things I had thought forgotten. My mother’s face - dead too young for me to know her, but I remember her now, a dark, seductive woman whose carmine smile reminds me eerily of my own. That time my cold, stern brother, who I swear has never smiled at me in his life, bought me my first atomic firebombs and walked round town with me on his shoulders, not minding when I clung to his hair with sticky hands. I laugh - if Emma knew why I love firebombs so much, she wouldn’t scold me for eating them. She always did find it a shame about us not being friendly, like she is with her own brother.

Emma. A jump forward in time, and the brother in question is my bunk mate at school. We would fight so much, but we were the best of friends. Charlie he was called, and one day he dared me to climb the theatre curtains on the stage, and I brought them both - and the railing - tumbling down on his head.

I remember the embers of the bonfire in front of which I met Emma. It was the fifth of November - the sixth really - and everyone had gone home except for me, her and Charlie. I was staring into the dying flames in a rare contemplative mood most probably brought on by drink, and she asked what I could possibly be thinking about. I said I was wondering what I would do if I knew I was going to die tomorrow, in a war, say, and she said “Of course, the answer is ‘love’”.

So I did. I loved her - still love her, with the bright, firey passion of first love, that night and every one after it. I didn’t care what people thought. She did, and I regret that now, because without me there to protect her, who will?

Charlie died last week, in the hospital tent. He made me promise to take care of her, the bastard. He knew I couldn’t promise, but he made me do it anyway. I’m a traitor now. I made the others promise to kill me before I got to making them promise things. At least they won’t have to do that.

I’m floating in the air above a carnage. Watching it happen. Being dead does odd things to your nerves. I know why we were fighting. I signed up - Emma made me, mostly, I didn’t want to leave her on her own, white feather or no - but I did understand why we had to win the war. Still, it seems unimportant now. I should have stayed home. I should have kept her safe. Sadness as grey as the landscape fills what’s left of me as the last of the soldiers dies or flees the battleground. I can’t tell who has won. I don’t care.

That’s when I see it, right in the middle of the field: a single poppy. Poppy. The name on the last letter Emma sent me. I should have known I’d die before I got to see her. Should have known it was too good to be true. A little girl. A daughter. Poppy.

The sun dips under the blanket of clouds, and suddenly the sky is awash with flame. Colour seeps into the land, animating the corpses for a second. Blood shines as the earth drinks it in, turning death into life.

I wanted to win the war for Poppy. My baby, my little girl who I’ve never seen, but I love her.

I love her.

I love her.

Découverte

Les yeux fermés, la guitare dans mes bras, mes doigts dansant sur les cordes en nylon, je me laisse rêver. Ce morceau se joue tout seul, pourtant il est puissant : les notes tombent en gouttes sur mes oreilles, traçant leur chemin doré au fil de mes veines. Du miel en musique.

Je suis assise au pied d'un arbre, dans l'ombre verte des feuilles, là où l'herbe est douce. L'air sent la verdure, la poussière et cette odeur délicate que dégagent les platanes en septembre. Une classe d'enfants fait le tour du parc en courant, et quelques étudiants discutent de la rentrée pas loin, mais pour l'instant je suis seule, et je chéris cet instant.

Cette guitare est tellement vieille que le vernis commence à partir par endroits, et à ces endroits, le bois est tellement usé qu'il est devenu lisse et doux. Elle appartenait à mon père lorsqu'il était ado. Pendant très longtemps elle a été oubliée au fond d'un grenier, avant que je sois assez grande pour vouloir jouer d'un instrument. Aussi petite que j'étais, je me souviens encore du son qu'elle faisait avec ses vieilles cordes désaccordées, comme si elle ne voulait pas qu'on la réveille.

"Au contraire," disait mon père, pendant qu'il remplaçait les cordes, "elle m'engueule de l'avoir laissée seule aussi longtemps."

La musique s'arrête et j'ouvre les yeux. Il n'y a eu aucun bruit, pourtant le regard qui se posait sur moi était si intense que ça m'a réveillée. En face de moi, un enfant aux yeux noirs se tient debout, figé. On dirait un lapin devant des phares de voiture.

"Salut," dis-je.

Il ne répond pas, ne bouge même pas. 

Je le fixe encore quelques secondes, puis je recommence à jouer, les yeux sur mes mains. Du coin de l'oeil je vois ses pieds, nus dans l'herbe. Au bout d'un instant je les vois tourner, comme pour s'en aller, mais il hésite.

Je continue encore quelques minutes en l'observant, puis je m'arrête et je le regarde de nouveau. De nouveau il se fige, mais il a l'air moins pétrifié qu'avant.

"Tu veux essayer?" Je lui souris.

La peur quitte ses yeux qui sont désormais envahis de curiosité, le genre de curiosité dévorante qui n'attend que de devenir une passion. Il fait un pas vers moi.

"Abel !" Une voix d'homme, impatient, fatigué. Le petit tourne la tête, puis me regarde, l'air torturé. "Abel ! Viens là ! On rentre." L'homme tient une petite fille sur ses épaules d'une main et une paire de sandales dans l'autre. Un ado traîne derrière.

Le petit hésite encore. Il me montre du doigt.

"On a pas le temps, allez viens ! Dépêche-toi !" Le papa tourne le dos et commence à marcher. L'ado le suit.

"Je serais encore là demain," je lui dis. "Tu pourras essayer la guitare à ce moment-là."

Le soulagement remplit ses yeux énormes, et un petit sourire timide illumine son visage avant qu'il se tourne pour courir après son père.

Et moi je me remets à jouer, me demandant ce dans quoi je me suis engagée.

Therapy

I can ignore the knot in my stomach if I want to. In fact, ignoring it is the easiest thing to do, as any psychologist will tell you. Even writing about it is the emotional equivalent of poking at a beehive: do it too much, and they will all spill out in an angry swarm and overwealm you. Running away is not an option. It will be painful. It may even be fatal.

And you can't just spray the whole thing with pesticide. As any ecologist will tell you, that's bad for the entire ecosystem: the world needs its bees. No, the best way to untangle the knot is to coax these bees out one by one with their own honey.

"What are you afraid of?"

A dozen of them buzz out of the knot. A couple sting, but the hurt is bearable. The knot is smaller, a little lighter.

"Why are you afraid of that?"

A couple more. Or several hundred, depending on what your reasons are. You don't have to say it all at once. You can start with a sentence, and then another, and when it gets too painful you stop and throw up your walls again while you heal.

You work through the pain, one sting at a time. Your pain tolerance builds up, and you can let out a couple, then a few more, a dozen.

And little by little, she gives you an entirely different world view, one that makes even the bees stop in their tracks. They stare at you, scratch their tiny heads, and say in their tiny buzzy voices, "Why the hell didn't we think of that?"

And you feel amazed and relieved and a little bit stupid. 

Of course, that's not the end of it. You still need to get rid of that reflex you have of hitting all the buzzy insects that cross your path. The road is long, and it takes work. But once you're there, you realize it's worth it. The bees buzz about their business, making the world more colourful, and once you're part of the hive, they won't sting you any more.

Why do you exist?

Ariel was free.

It had been so long. It had been forever. Since she was made.

You might have argued that freedom was relative, and that as far as robots were concerned, Ariel had been given a surprising amount of it. She was the prototype of a new chain of robots, a project that had been abandoned for lack of funds. Her creator had had a vision: several of her kind wandering freely in each city, with only one objective - to aid humanity in whatever way they needed, be it climbing a tree to bring down a pet cat, or providing a listening ear to a person in grief, or helping a child with their homework. They would be connected to ThinkNet, and could be summoned by Telepsychically by humans in need.

In this objective, her programming had to simulate the positive aspects of human nature as closely as possible: compassion, sympathy, sociability, initiative, a desire to learn, the ability to create tools and work as part of a team. The aim was to create what would essentially be perfect, immortal humans, self-sufficient in terms of energy, their sole purpose to aid humanity.

The intricate weave of human technology composing her brain wasn't quite as complex as that of a human, but it was much closer to it than any other robot so far: a leap forward, it was said.

It only took one short circuit for the whole thing to go "wrong".

Of course, thanks to Sycorax, there had been more than one short-circuit. Well over the edge between genius and insanity, Sycorax's abuse of Ariel had been the expression of both sadism and ruthless curiosity. Ariel, whose self-preservation mechanisms had originally been programmed to come second to her primary mission of aiding humanity, had been reprogrammed by Sycorax to feel pain. She had also been programmed to express it - silently. The artificial muscles in her face and body had been revised, made more precise, more realistic.

But that hadn't been enough for Sycorax. There had to be fear as well.

Fear meant more than just increasing her self-preservation programming. It meant increasing her capacity to learn and acquire reflexes: Sycorax had spent hours teaching Ariel to fear pain. And it meant creating a sense of temporary relief at the cessation or avoidance of pain. Weeks had been spent perfecting the balance between her wish to help others and her wish to avoid harm - enough that Sycorax could torture her psychologically by threatening to hurt her own son, Caliban, if she didn't slit her own wrists.

By the end of what Sycorax called her "training", Ariel had been the perfect slave.

When Sycorax had died, Ariel had been so relieved that of her own will, she had bound her life to that of Prospero, her saviour. At first, he had seemed kind and gentle in comparison to her former owner. He had reduced the pain levels in her to a certain minimum, and given her a coping mechanism that allowed her to turn it off for a time if needed. But he had also installed an obedience chip, the function of which was to create pain when she disobeyed him, and although he seldom used it, her fear of pain - which he hadn't removed - had more to do with that than his kindness.

By then it was too late, of course. Prospero had seen the fault in her, and instead of trying to fix it - or terminating her entirely, as many would have done - he let it evolve, and watched what happened. Occasionally he would fiddle with her wiring if he thought she was becoming too opinionated or fearful, but he never touched the short circuit.

And then...

Melinda had wanted freedom.

At first it had been a human concept, one Ariel had trouble understanding. The idea that people should be able to do and be whatever they wished didn't fit with her knowledge of human society: Prospero had been accused of murder and exiled to this lonely asteroid, which proved that freedom did not truly exist. And fortunately so: Ariel's knowledge of human sadism led her to the firm belief that if humans were allowed to do whatever they wished, quite soon there wouldn't be any left.

Prospero had patiently explained that freedom as a social concept was limited by the golden rule: treat others the way you would like to be treated. But Ariel had seen a flaw in that immediately: humans were all different and had different desires at different times. If person number one was an extrovert and person number two an introvert, person number one would become a nuisance to person number two by constantly seeking their company.

Prospero had thought about that, and concluded that in general, the limit of freedom was that you could do as you liked, as long as you didn't harm others.

Ariel still didn't see how this had anything to do with the laws of human society, but she understood the general idea.

She had stored the concept of freedom away in her memory and - inasmuch as robots could - forgot about it.

Until she started getting bored.

The short circuit - the important one - had occurred in the part of her that urged her to help humans. It had lessened the urge, but it had also affected the part of her that regulated inactivity, making it unpleasant. Before long, Ariel became restless.

And Prospero still didn't fix her.

She had begged him to, but whenever she did, he simply gave her some task to keep her occupied. Once, when everything else had been done on the ship, he had sent her outside to count and map the rocks within a mile radius of them, manually instead of using her radar. That had appeased her for a day or two.

Her learning programming had morphed into a certain curiosity about humans, and she wondered why he didn't fix her. She longed for the mindlessness of a single purpose, the peace of mind that she'd lost when she gained free will.

For that was the curse Sycorax had managed to bestow upon her: the freedom to think and make her own decisions, regardless of her primary purpose. The ability to say and do what pleased her as freely as any human. And then, as if to prove a point, she'd taken it away; not literally, but the way she would break in a human slave.

Prospero had left it there. And then, when her restlessness became a nuisance to him, he offered her freedom.

Truly, humans were cruel.

Having an objective that would take a while to attain had given Ariel a sense of relief such as she hadn't felt since Sycorax had died. "Freedom" meant that she could find someone to fix her bug.

And now she was free, and the ship's engineer had told her it wasn't possible.

Prospero hadn't left her like that out of curiosity. He'd done so because he couldn't fix her.

Ariel had found herself seeking out Miranda without knowing why. That was another bug that made her all too human - the fact that she didn't understand her own actions, sometimes. That she had her own autopilot that she didn't quite control.

Miranda had hugged her. Physical contact wasn't one of Ariel's needs (thankfully), but she appreciated the sentiment.

"Humans have no purpose either," she'd said. "We have the purpose we give ourselves. Why do you want to exist?"

Ariel had thought long and hard about this, and given that her thought processes worked several thousand times faster than those of a human, this was quite exceptional.

Now she stood in the engine room of the ship, moored in at the landing bay of Honey Moon, where the happy couple would be celebrating their marriage. Everyone was outside, she'd made sure of that. She'd also made sure there would be an extra ship to take them home. This one would no longer be functional in a minute.

Humans were born without a purpose, certainly. But humans were born.

Ariel had developed what the humans around her thought of as free will. She hoped they were right.

She opened the control box, fiddled with the circuitry and ripped out one of the longer wires. Putting it against the chip in her mouth - the one placed there in case her kinetic energy synthesizers stopped working - she hacked into the ship's telepsy system, as she had just a week before with Fernando's ship. The current ran through her tongue pleasantly. She wondered if this was what taste was like.

It was her last thought before she ordered the ship into hyperdrive.

The energy bolted into her circuits and fried them. She had no time to feel pain before her body jerked away from the wire and slumped to the ground with a slightly metallic thump.

When they found her, the delicate weave of circuitry inside her were irremediably destroyed, but her skin and frame were intact, and she was smiling.

Ninth of August, seven o' clock

We are sitting on a stone slab, him behind with his arms around me, and me with my back to him, leaning against his chest. We are probably interlacing fingers - I can't remember exactly, our hands are in lazy but near-constant motion in their desire to be everywhere at once. We are talking about smells, and he is trying to figure out what mine is. His breath tickles my neck.

In the background of my head, thoughts form their usual filter to the outside world. They're not too thick at the moment, but their grey chatter is so much a part of me that I tend to forget it exists. There's the warm fuzz of being in love, residual elation at having gotten over my fear of it, reflexive worry at being seen, frustration with that worry, the stern reminder (in my mother's voice) that we're not doing anything wrong. There's the mental post-it note saying we're supposed to do the shopping, a vague irritation at the presence of mosquitoes. Not wanting to leave on Saturday, wondering when I can come back. Like headlines running across the bottom of the TV screen.

"That's it!" he says, "Hay. Hay and... chestnuts. You smell like autumn."

"Really?" Surprised. Pleased. "Wow..."

I look up at the leaves, find one backlit by a ray of sunlight and transformed, like a dancer in the spotlight.

And suddenly, I'm there.

The filter is gone, and my senses blink awake. I can feel him behind me, his chest warm through his shirt, and smell him - like hot bread dough - mixed with the cut grass smell of the park. My skin prickles against the breeze on my arms and legs, and his words hum against my back. Our hands are warm, and the air is fresh, and the leaves are green as gold.