Noumenon Read online

  Jamal sounded unusual. Worried. Understandably so. I had direct control of everything, save navigation. Sure, there were backups for essential functions, like life support and illumination and food processing, but it wasn’t a systems failure he was worried about. “Do you think I’ve been programmed to do more than send out unconscious messages?”

  “I don’t know, I.C.C. I really don’t. Maybe it’s just the captain’s paranoia getting to me. But he’s right, you’re not well. Even if it’s just a head cold, we need you shipshape again.” He gathered up his things. “I’m going to work in my quarters the rest of the day, okay? I’ll check in with you every once in a while.” He strode over to the door, leaving his half-full coffee mug on the terminal. “Do me a favor? Don’t work too hard. Since we’re not quite sure what sort of tax is being put on your processing, I don’t want you to overdo it.”

  I wish he hadn’t asked. I could handle it, I was sure. I may have been unwell, but I didn’t feel unwell. But I assured him I’d narrow my consciousness.

  At the time of Jamal’s departure, I was having sixty-seven other direct conversations with crew members. All of them quite standard, asking for news of loved ones’ schedules or moods, asking about their own rotations, availability of stock for their cabins. But when Ceren spoke up, I was surprised.

  I shouldn’t have been. She was only asking me to double-check her math. She preferred I consciously answer, though a background calculator function was readily available and about as taxing on my system as losing a flake of skin is on a person’s. And she always knew when she got an automatic response versus a conscious one. So I answered her directly. “Yes, Ceren, I have cross-checked your long work six times, all calculations are in order. But, please check your inputted figure for shelf nineteen. It is outside the normal bell curve of expected change due to use and recycling.” That was why she didn’t want the calculator function.

  While she went back to retally, I stayed. I’d only been surprised by her call because I’d been spying on her. Spying. Though I constantly watched the crew, I’d never spied before.

  “Are you well?” I asked.

  She laughed a little. “I’m fine, I.C.C. How are you? Has Mr. Kaeden encouraged you to try small talk?”

  Ah, yes. Inquiring about one’s health was a standard social greeting. I’d forgotten. But it gave me a good cover. I could be ambiguous in my response. “I thought it was a good opener, yes.”

  The room had three cameras. One in my access point, and two in the ceiling which were unobstructed by the rows of shelves and parts. The room was dim. Almost all of Bottomless was dim. I changed the input mode to infrared and watched her from all angles. She smirked. “Well, then you should answer my other question. How are you?”

  “Fine. Did you get the message I played earlier?”

  She paused, lowering her tablet slightly. “Yes.”

  “What did you think of it?”

  Another pause. A minor hesitation, one a human might not have noticed. With a shrug, she said, “What was I supposed to think?”

  “Did it affect you? Emotionally?”

  She turned to face my access point, though three sets of shelves stood between her and what she identified as me. “Why are you asking?”

  I was not supposed to be disingenuous, but by understanding the concept, I could be. “I am conducting a survey.”

  “Who asked you to broadcast that message, I.C.C.?”

  “It is only a test.”

  “A test for what?”

  “The mental health sector is conducting an experiment.”

  “Huh,” she said, returning to her work. “You shouldn’t have told me that. Doesn’t it give away the game?”

  She knew I was lying. It couldn’t be my intonation, as it was never variant. How could she tell?

  I considered what she might be thinking: Why would a computer lie?

  Which I mentally countered with: Why would a human think a computer was lying?

  Simple answer: because the human was lying.

  Lying about what? She hadn’t done anything but ask me questions. Weren’t lies statements?

  But questions can be misleading. Divergent. A smoke screen.

  Amendment to the simple answer: because the human knew the truth.

  “Yes,” I said a moment after her question. “It does. But games are just for fun, aren’t they?” Here we go. I’d had plenty of encrypted conversations, but those were all in binary. This was entirely different.

  “You think the shrinks experimenting on the crew is fun?” She ported the new supply tally to me.

  “I don’t think the shrinks are in this round.” I would have winced at that one, had I expressions. I wasn’t at all sure I was handling the exchange skillfully.

  “You think there are other players?” Ceren was enjoying herself. At first her heart rate had increased, and her facial features had begun to glow white in my infrared sight. Now they’d cooled again. She was hiding something, but knew I was in the proverbial dark.

  “I think you know the team,” I ventured.

  “These are fun word games, I.C.C., but do you have a clue what you’re saying?”

  “I have a clue.” I wanted to sound indignant, but of course, couldn’t. I made a note to ask Jamal to update my speech patterns to include intonation.

  “You’re all program, I.C.C. No feeling. No insight.”

  Well, that was blatantly untrue. In a way. I am all program, but I am a learning program. I can internalize what I observe, make judgments, and I am not a slave to rationality because I understand human irrationality.

  Was she pressing my buttons?

  If there were ever a term I understood instantly, it was that one.

  “Who uploaded the message, Ceren? For what purpose?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I.C.C. All I know is what the message means to me.”

  “And what is that?”

  She looked away, mouth stern. “It means home.”

  I did not understand. At all. I raked my databases, the archives, trying to figure out what she’d meant. Nothing seemed right.

  Jamal would know. I turned on my consciousness in his quarters and found him sleeping at the table. He had a pile of ‘flex-sheets next to him, and a monitor active. I recognized the diagnostics program running in my background.

  Out of courtesy, I did not wake him.

  Whom to ask?

  I searched for Jamal’s alternate, his apprentice, Vega Hansen. I was not as comfortable with her genetic line—she liked numbers and figures better than people, and did not see why it was necessary to teach me more human-like communication skills. I thought her the most likely to understand my dilemma, though.

  I found her on Aesop in a room full of people, participating in an advanced course—she was only fourteen, after all. But a crowded classroom was not an ideal place for me to ask my unusual question.

  And the elderly version of Vega never spoke to me directly.

  Whom to turn to, then?

  Ah, of course: Margarita. The third iteration.

  In the next instant I’d located her, hard at work in her closet-like station. A pair of wireless buds protruded from her ears, and a look of determination hardened her jawline.

  I felt like I was sneaking up on her. Normally, I did not address crew members of my own accord. They had to do something to draw my attention.

  How could I ease my way into a conversation? I did not want to startle her.

  Flashing a few incoming-signal lights seemed a gentle way to alert her to my conscious presence. Attention caught, she pressed the comm button, surely expecting to hear a human response to her “Yes?”

  “This is I.C.C. I have an inquiry.”

  Though I’d never known her to shrug off her primary duties, she threw crossed legs up on her workstation. She seemed grateful for the break. “Oh? Does the captain want to add yet another amendment to the report before I send it?”

  “No. The in
quiry is mine.”

  She frowned.

  “I want to better understand how reminders of Earth could somehow relate to a crew member’s sense of home. Mira is home.”

  “You’re curious about something?”

  “I’ve always been curious. But I don’t get to exercise the function as often as I’d like.” Actually, I accessed the algorithms frequently, but Jamal always received the brunt of my prodding. “Please. You have the most direct relationship with Earth. I think you are the most equipped to answer fully.”

  She tapped her fingers on her lips. “I’m flattered. But don’t you think the archives master, or—”

  “I believe you fully capable of tending to my edification.”

  Frowning a strange frown that meant “I see” rather than “I am upset,” she took out her buds and said, “Well, all right then. Let’s see if I can get an AI to understand the abstract meaning of home. Hmm.”

  The door to the communications room was open. Light sounds of doors swishing and people treading drifted in. Somewhere in the distance someone was wielding a power tool—in the shuttle bay, Muhammad.

  Margarita stood and leaned against the narrow strip of wall between her desk and a large bank of wires and control panels. “You’ve read The Odyssey, right?”

  “It’s in the system, yes.”

  “And it’s all about Odysseus’ struggle to get home again, correct?”

  I wasn’t sure she’d understood my initial question. “But he was trying to return to where he’d come from. Everyone on board our ships comes from the ships . . . except me.”

  “Literally speaking, yes. But no matter where or how we are born, the human foundation will always be Earth. That’s where our genes originated, our essence. It’s in us, though we’ve never set foot on its shores. Do you remember how Odysseus reacted when he saw his homeland again? Homer compared him to a son who’d seen his ailing father recover. He was a child of his homeland, and to be separated from it was like watching a parent die—to fear never seeing that parent again. To some on board, having never seen Earth is like never having met a now-dead parent. There’s a hole inside that can never quite be filled, because nothing can replace what has been lost save the thing itself.”

  She picked up her notes and shuffled them. “And we all know there’s no going back.” Margarita smiled softly to herself. “It’d be good to remind some people that when Odysseus did return, home was not as it had once been. It was unexpected, changed.” She winked at me, though it was aimed at nowhere in particular. “You can’t go home again, as they say. Or, in our case, ever.”

  “No, you can’t,” I agreed. So, why would someone want to remind the crew of that? “Thank you, I think I have a better understanding now.”

  She shrugged and sat down. “No problem.”

  Before I left her, in light of this new understanding, I had to ask. “Margarita? Is this home? Or is Earth home? For you?”

  “A little bit of both. When I think of Earth I get nostalgic. Sentimental. But I don’t know what it’s like there. Not really. In the convoy I’m comfortable. It’s familiar, warm, everyone is close even if we’re not, you know, close.

  “I can tell you, though, not everyone feels that way. For some, Mira is where they live. The convoy is where they work. But Earth is home.”

  I pondered this for some time, trying to find comparisons in my own existence. Unlike the crew members, I thought of my body—the convoy—as home. I found it difficult to separate the two concepts like humans could. If they only thought like me they’d always be home.

  In theory, I could be disconnected from the convoy and repurposed. But, that was unlikely. Even so, I thought hard about it. What would it be like to lose my body?

  Reaching out, I sensed each ship as a whole, then imagined it being taken from my network.

  Much like a human can only experience the anguish of a severed limb if it’s really gone, I had trouble grasping what missing a ship would be like. I could go offline in one of them, if only for a moment . . .

  A backup program flashed warning signals internally, and I had a monumental urge to erase that last thought from my memory banks. How could I even conceive such a thing?

  Did the crew members feel similar disgust at the thought of leaving home? Or was this more like the limb analogy?

  Some things can never truly be understood by those with limited experience. I might possess more knowledge than most of the crew combined, but I did not have their thought processes, or even a way to access them.

  I realized for the first time that I could never fully understand my colleagues. And they, in turn, could never fully understand me.

  That must have been why some preferred me to behave more like a nonsentient machine. There is nothing to understand about a machine. It performs its function or doesn’t perform its function. You cannot misunderstand its intent, or get to know its desires, or have a real conversation about its opinions.

  That revelation was depressing.

  But there were others who felt differently. They desired to know me as an entity, and were pleasantly surprised by the extent of my capabilities. Like Jamal and Margarita.

  And most of the children. The children spoke to me like I was one of them. They teased me, played with me, picked on me. I had experienced the whole of underdeveloped social interaction.

  Well, almost. They did not play their kissing games with me.

  I felt like a child now, reaching for adult understanding that my infantile programming could not grasp.

  Wistful, and feeling lonely without Jamal, I swept my consciousness through the halls of Aesop. Soft yellow light filled the corridors on this ship. Supposedly it had a calming effect on the children, while the white light of the classrooms produced a stimulating effect. I observed no differential in the children’s energy levels from one place to another. They always seemed to be set on high.

  I let my mind travel, as though flying, through each Aesop entryway and walkthrough, pausing for only fractions of a second to take in the scenes I encountered. The air had a stickiness to it, not a humidity, mind you, a tackiness. Stickiness follows kids everywhere, just like the soft scent of their skin. Children have a unique aura of sensations that accompany their presence. So do adults, but for little ones it’s all the same. They have a newness about them. Like they are completely clean and have yet to be cleaned at the same time.

  Adults, on the other hand, have an individuality about them. Like all the original paint has been scraped off and a new, bolder coat applied.

  But the elderly, they become like children—the atmosphere around them bends into stale homogeny. Not their personalities, just their physical presence.

  Commotion in one of the classrooms drew my attention. Eight-year-olds bounded out of their seats, pointing and exclaiming.

  “My mom saw one of those the other day, she started crying!”

  “My dad says it’s just a stupid test. Your mom is stupid.”

  “Yeah, well your original was stupid. Got put on the mission by mistake.”

  “Settle, settle,” said Dr. Olen. “I’m sure it’s just a glitch and the message wasn’t meant for us.”

  Why would a few little words send these children into an uproar? There was more to this. Too many people had seen the message now. Let me see—yes, other children were reacting. This one was all over the ship.

  Even Vega saw it. But my future caretaker sat calmly, unlike her classmates. For fourteen, she displayed composure far beyond her years. She was smaller than her peers, petite. As an adult, she would grow to all of four foot seven, but there would be so much confidence and power in such a little frame. Now, her water-like blue eyes narrowed, digesting the information on the screen, scrutinizing it.

  So serious for one so young. So serious for such a—on the surface—playful message.

  Remember sandlots. Remember ice-cream trucks. Remember holiday breaks.

  Why couldn’t my self-diagnostics find the problem?
This initial irritation was becoming more problematic by the nanosecond.

  A few more days passed. About six weeks since the first unauthorized broadcast. Still, Jamal hadn’t found anything unwonted in the code.

  I told Jamal about Ceren.

  “I don’t think she really knows anything,” Jamal said, waving aside my concern. He lay in a narrow service duct, attending to a minor problem with the temperature control. There were others to do such tasks, but sometimes he preferred to rest his mind with the menial.

  “She was not being completely truthful with me, I have no doubt. She did not tell me everything she was thinking.”

  “And why do you suppose it was insider secrets? She probably didn’t want you prying into her emotions. She’s a machinist, isn’t she? Not a humanist?”

  “She does fall on that end of the sliding scale, yes.”

  “And machinists don’t like machines asking personal questions.”

  The others—those whom I’d seen turn off the message when it was received—I’d interviewed them and gotten variable responses, each with some level of deception involved. And, they were all machinists. Was there a connection?

  How to find out? How could I discover if their actions had been similar by coincidence or design?

  I could think of one way, but Jamal would disapprove.

  So would the psychiatrists.

  And probably everyone else.

  But I was determined to do it, regardless. I could go against human wishes if human wishes put the mission and crew in danger . . . if those wishes were malevolent.

  “I think the message is malicious,” I said to Jamal.

  “You do?”

  “Yes. It’s causing unrest and dissidence.”

  “Someone’s trying to rile the crew?”

  I wasn’t sure yes was the appropriate answer. Yet no didn’t fit either. And maybe was nothing but a lame sentiment with no teeth. “I’m going to run more self-diagnostics,” I said, not fully a lie.

  “Sure.” Jamal tried to shrug, but the tight space made the gesture awkward—just like our conversation. “If you think it’ll make a difference.”