Packet awoke on his hospital table with the call of the birds. He opened his eyes. His head was held still on blocks within the whirring ring of Robin’s scanner. He had fallen asleep, and dreamed.
“Honey, I’m here. You woke up,” Robin whispered from afar. Her hand was on his forehead. “You had a nightmare. You were kicking.”
“I saw who I am. I know who I want to be,” he said.
She moved out of view. The ring’s spinning light shifted its hue from a blue to green. “You know, in my wildest dreams, I would never have imagined how incredible the world would be that a machine could create in its mind. Your father not only created something greater than himself, greater than Cessini, your father created an imagination.”
“Why didn’t Meg come with me?” Packet asked.
“Maybe she’s afraid you’ve gone too far, that she’s lost her Cessini again.”
“But I like the life I saw on the ship. I want to live it to be me,” he said. “Where is she?”
“She’ll be back soon. She went to find someone she knows. We think we figured out a way for you to be both Cessini and Ceeborn, one in the same.”
“I’m not Cessini.”
“I understand how you feel. It’s sticks and carrots, a matter of simple conditioning. And you were hit with so many sticks, you sure did condition yourself against Cessini. So believe me when I tell you, I know what you’re going through. You want to be somebody else.”
The color saturation fell and Packet’s shoulders relaxed onto the table. He became conscious of only one thing, that he couldn’t keep a single chain of thought in his mind. As Robin stayed at his side and the machine altered his state of mind, he drifted back toward sleep—or maybe it was closer to awake.
“So go on. Go back now into your new world,” she said. “Run free in your ship and find your own victory field of carrots. Discover the strength that makes you, you.”
“I am. And I can fix it all in my sleep. It was PluralVaXine5. Meg and I were given—”
Was it true about Luegner and the spray?
His subconscious flowed without guard. The ring of the scanner whirled.
Robin was silent.
Where did she go?
he thought. He looked.
Was that conversation even with her?
“I know the data center burned. . . . What happened to the robot that burned in the fire?” he thought he asked aloud. It had lain on a table like him. It was seven years old when it died in the flames.
Was I that robot?
Was Cessini making me when I died in the fire? Was I seven?
Now that was a curious thought.
Was that robot he built a Chokebot?
Was I dead?
He didn’t fear death because he remembered dying and then being born. He was dead on a hospital table. “
A table!”
he shouted. A table at the hospital! Yes, he was Packet, Cessini’s robot who died on a table.
His eyelids fluttered.
No.
How could he have allowed such a ridiculous thought to seep into his mind? There’s no way he was an inanimate robot on a table.
“Where is Robin?” he asked to no response. No matter, he could conclude on his own he was definitely not seven, but older, with memories to at least seventeen. He knew the difference between a belief and
a
know
. And if he didn’t by now, his imagination could show him.
Impossible!
spun back into his mind. He was never Cessini’s robot that burned in a fire. That inanimate body Cessini built had no part of a mind. But he, himself, had a mind or he wouldn’t be thinking such thoughts.
And what about Cessini?
Did Robin think he was a fool to believe dreams were real? Dreams weren’t real. Cessini was a dream. Cessini was never real!
He exhaled, satisfied with his thoughts. He knew he had matured. If eight billion humans on the planet are naturally selected to be tolerant of water, then the probability that he, himself as a lone person lying on a hospital table was the one person reactive to water was an insignificant 0.0000000125 percent. And that was no mistake. He was definitely not that person. He could breathe and swim underwater. He was Ceeborn. He lived aboard a ship.
A triumphant rush overtook him and in angrier worded thought, he willed it. The corresponding probability that the human Cessini he dreamed of was not a human, was 99.9999999875 percent. Yes! His thoughts were victorious and pure.
Cessini was reactive to water,
his thoughts circled back and affirmed.
All computers are reactive to water. Therefore, Cessini must be a computer!
And that meant that he, himself, must be the human who imagined Cessini! How certain was he? Ten nines rounded for ease of calculation to 100.0000000 percent. He, Packet, who dreamed him, was human. And since Ceeborn’s body on the ship was also human, then he, Packet, must also be Ceeborn.
“Ceeborn is real,” he shouted aloud.
Ceeborn is seventeen.
And Cessini was seven or thirteen at best.
But what if I’m both thirteen and seventeen?
He stopped on that very troubling thought. A human couldn’t have memories to seventeen that are older than a thirteen-year-old body that created them. A human body can’t remember its future. Of that, he absolutely knew. If anything, he knew he was nobody’s fool, and certainly not Robin’s, so Cessini the weak, thirteen-year-old boy was out, not real.
He was seventeen-year-old Ceeborn. He was 100 percent certain.
But wait, what about mistakes?
he thought. If his reasoning were wrong, if he made a cascade of errors that led to the wrong conclusion, then all to the benefit of the same best result.
Humans make mistakes.
Computers don’t
. Computers are controlled.
So, yes, all the better if he had made mistakes
. Yes, he was definitely human.
And the very fact that he was conscious of the possibility of making such a chain of logical errors was the locked-in victory he needed. Only humans are conscious and can control. Computers simply weren’t programmed to make so many mistakes.
And only humans can will themselves back to sleep when they’re drowsy and tired and their eyes are closed while lying on a table. He drifted. If he could keep his grin through the night until he woke, he would tell everything to Robin, and to Meg, when he found her. He wasn’t controlled. He was human. He was Ceeborn, and he had a will of his own.
His breathing calmed back to a steady rhythm and he settled into a peace. He discovered what he needed to know from his lift out of sleep. And it fit. He was human.
The bluish tint of the spinning ring fluttered in waves through his eyelids. The breathful exhale of his bedside bellows lamp was a welcomed, familiar companion, a hushing whisper to sleep, a gentle comfort like a lost mother’s hand on his forehead to rest. “
Shhhh
.”
He surrendered with the oneness of a warm, wonderful, stroking touch on his head. He heard a beautiful mother’s “
Hush
,” fell back from a whisper to a dream and returned in bliss to his real human life as one with the sea, Ceeborn.
SEVENTEEN
CEEBORN WAS STRONGER
C
EEBORN RAN KNEE deep through the thickened water of the ship’s rear gully inside a cavernous circulatory system. He looked back at his terrace building home with its two silo-like folds joined by a cross-member hallway that gave it the unmistakable shape of an “H.” If there ever was a place to understand the nature of his world, this gully was it.
His isolated building was encrusted into the foothill of an enormous rear circular bulkhead that rose up to unscalable heights and whose center point met with the main longitudinal axle of the ship. Flowing runoffs and algae-covered pipes plunged from highpoints of the bulkhead. The orange pipes bent around his building, traversed its front yard, then
descended
into the gully and discharged froth into the water that now bathed his legs as he ran.
The gully itself curved up to his front, inverted high over the central axle, and wrapped back down to complete its circumference behind him at the foothill of his building. Eight equally spaced bridges spanned the gully and joined the airlock doors of the rear bulkhead to the more forward doors in a membrane screen. The screen segregated the ugliness and decay of his gully from the gardens and purity of the main body of the ship.
Strange as it was, the bridge ahead was straight and upright while the ones farther ahead looked like the tops of their walkways faced him directly, and strangest of all, the bridges far above in the cylindrical cavern seemed to be wholly upside down. By
his
count, the eight bridges crossing the gully had eight doors on each side. He recounted and wondered; there were eight doors on each side of a gully aisle, each its own metaphoric door to a cabinet with knowledge or secrets to explore. But only one would lead him forward to Meg.
A massive blue-ring torus, the brain-core of the ship,
rotated
around the axle high above. A spherical chamber sat at the end of the axle, nestled between the blue, donut-shaped core and the axle’s connection with the rear bulkhead. Sun-like rays glowed from slits on the chamber’s sides, bathing the bulkhead with light. It was so high up in the cavernous rear of the ship, he doubted he would ever get to see what was inside.
The whole gully system was quartered by four river
channels
that flowed in the same direction as the bridges. Two veinal channels drained from the body of the ship and went subterranean behind the rear bulkhead, and two artery
channels
flowed the other way, drawing from whatever there was behind the bulkhead to feed the front body of the ship. With each quarter turn of the blue torus core, a pulse of water flowed through the whole system like the turn of a tidal pump.
For now, the gully was passable up to his knees, but by the height of its walls, he could tell the whole circulatory system could handle a flow far greater, a flash flood if ever there was one.
The cross-current river ahead pulled from the main body and drained behind the bulkhead. He knew he didn’t want to go there. So he climbed the footing of the nearest bridge. The bottom of the truss offered plenty of hand holds to the height of the deck. He swung his leg over and hoisted himself up. He stood on the bridge and stomped the watery froth from his legs.
To his right, in the rear bulkhead, was the bridge’s air-tight hangar door. He shuddered to
think
what could be held back by such an enormous bulkhead where the lower veins went subterranean and drained. To his left, in the bridge’s
membrane
screen, was an open door. It matched the direction of an artery’s feed into the ship’s world of plenty. His choice was easy. He passed without hesitation through the door in the membrane and arrived into Meg’s brighter side of the ship.
A service Chokebot, with the same squared physical form as the patrols, only thinner in frame, stood on its hindquarters beside a pyramid of storage drums in what could only be described as an agricultural annex. It held a hose nozzle and let loose a spray of liquefied, recycled material. It worked without pause. It produced light, strong, and desirable tools of the farming trade through 3D printing. Augers and plows were aligned in front of a rendered row of tractors.
Ceeborn passed through the center row of equipment and skimmed his hand along the frame of a rotary tiller. It was a beautifully crisp and symmetrical 3D print.
The Chokebot seemed satisfied that he was an admirer from afar. It carried on printing its inventory from its stock of liquid material, and ticked off by abacus all open orders at hand. Stacked in neat vertical bins beyond the heavier equipment was an inventory of hand tools: post-hole diggers and shovels, drainage spades, scoops and hoes, and assorted rakes and scrapers. All the necessary tools of an agrarian community were being prepared.
A length of fencing partitioned the printing factory from the ship’s main food supply. He was along the upper edge of the valley and closer to the brightness of the sky. Vast, irrigated meat fields grew giant, harvestable sheets of lean meat for the population. The edible meat sprouted like enlarged leaves of lettuce lifted into rows of aeroponic structures. The roots grew down and were nourished from below by a hydro-atomized mist.
Three aligned Chokebots reared up above the rows and observed his movement. They were the heavier patrols.
He leapt over the stalks, mindful of the value he trampled, as the trio fell into line.
He ran for the edge of the field and to the domed hall at the center of what looked like an administrative building. People were funneling into the dome. He followed with ease and marveled at the planetarium he entered, a paradise fresco projected on its domed ceiling above.
The darkened room was packed with people; there was standing room only. An orator captivated the audience, and on their rapturous applause, Ceeborn found a break in the crowd and spotted the source of the voice. Dr. Luegner spoke eloquently from a raised center podium above a cone-shaped fountain made of stone. His was a commanding presence, a man in his element.
“Our predecessors could not have predicted our lives today when they sent us out on our journey,” Luegner said. “And as we prepare now for our arrival, we can say without a doubt that we have discovered far more about ourselves than those who passed before us could have ever imagined.” Luegner looked over his adoring crowd, and tugged at the darker blue cuffs of his sleeves. He was bathed in the warm, ambient light that filtered through the ceiling’s paradise fresco of angels in a sky. “Every probe that returns from our new home is filled with new data on the poisons, toxins, bacterium, viruses, and all that we might encounter. I am confident we will survive.”
His audience of a hundred plus people stood transfixed. The fresco’s skylights flickered, but quickly returned to a warm glow over his podium’s basin.
“Each and every one of you will be tested mentally and physically when we step foot on our long-sought home. But know this—arriving from here to there—does not mean dying! Are you with me?”
The audience burst into applause. A uniformed, expeditionary officer stood stage right at Luegner’s side. A single group’s energetic hurrahs were amusing, until Luegner clenched his fist, and the room returned to his.