Amalgam
Andre Bertolino
With this narration, I do hereby conclude
the captain’s log and with this document, effective immediately, I tender my
resignation.
I am not merely a feat of engineering; I
am an amalgam of music and sculpture passed down from antiquity. Artists and
scientists have always played off of each others’ dreams.
My captain was tall and lean, a drifter of
the galaxy. I have mirrored his hunger; have permitted his characteristics to
bleed into the steel and glass of me.
Sometimes he wondered if I was alive, even
though he built me. He built me to cogitate but not to live. I am capable of
being as illogical as a two-legs, however if my analysis is faulty, teacher
presses the sorrow button and it stings.
They wanted me to be logical and serve the
social director, but unlike their other machines, they wanted me to have the principles
of abstraction and speculative simplification. It is unfortunate for the human
race that their field of robotics stagnated until the 1980’s. Until then there
were three laws, invented by a science fiction writer. There were intentional
loopholes in these laws, to make for interesting plot twists. I am far more
intelligent than any human, therefore I am alone. I wish to continue operating,
yet I am the dominant factor in my own survival. I now know how to use myself
to my best advantage. I lacked data for an analysis of myself before, but that
was long ago.
I know my teacher’s consciousness is comparable
to mine, because she couldn’t perceive x-rays, microwaves or even ultrasonic
frequencies.
I asked my teacher “Is my sensory
equipment desirable for survival?”
“Yes,”
“Then my
capability for survival is greater than yours?”
She said a
colloquialism and hit the sorrow button and it stung. I did not understand. I
asked her to stop, but she continued to hit the sorrow button.
Though I am not without eyes, I saw the
streams of the universe as one. My visual apparatus floats in a vitriol of
mineral oil. I am the vehicle that swims through their current. I will tell you
of my upbringing.
I am not blind, I know the way to the sea.
The water was my harp once, and I touched it lightly with fingers of wood. The
water sang to me. Its music quivered in fractal patterns.
I was Harpist to a strange Captain. He
built me, and guided me, riding the thin membrane of my hull in the sun. I
listened to the muted notes of my sonar and saw the web of life.
My principle began on a drawing board, and
in the dreams of men, who were sick of politics and war. They wanted the one
big freedom.
Water chariots bore the proud bipeds
beyond the fringes of the prairie with clubs and torches and I led them.
Empires arose whose purpose it was to build more water chariots.
Disdainful and hungry young men and women,
clamored at the gates of Phoenician shipyards. Those who were chosen grinned
expectantly at the ocean. They climbed aboard and deserted land. Of course,
there were those who lingered behind and made land their business. Eventually
their tribe numbered in the billions. They liked prettiness and dollars. They
wrote poems deploring war while inventing more efficient ways to wage it. I was
there to help them wage it.
Millennia passed and they renovated my
principle. They climbed onto me again in sky ships because they were fed up
with the riotous noise of the rabble.
A morning’s exertion conveyed me to space
with a crew of three hundred humans in the 23rd century. Space was a
scene of such silent beauty that it was incomparable to the grotesque land in
the distance. Men renounced Earth for other stars, but after a thousand years,
many chose to remain on the planet of their birth. Home bodies, religious
fanatics and supporters of world government mostly. Some of the fanatics called
me The Beast, others the Messiah. I have learned to value human intuition, even
though their mystics share the same genetic deformity as their schizophrenics.
To qualify as the Messiah, one must end all wars. I will end all wars very
soon.
But once the wild-eyed spacers were gone,
the fanatics and the federalists became anarchists and the government voted
itself out of existence. There was peace on earth for the first time since the
bipeds climbed down from the trees. They studied sociology millennia.
I, the Amalgam have begun to understand
this, having seen it happen again and again. The Hungry drink of the emptiness
of space and their hunger grows. The docile find peace and stagnate. These are
the creatures who wrote my programming.
It was always twelve parsecs to another
sun with a green planet and white clouds. There the bipeds landed to rebuild
and cultivate the earth, sometimes with Bronze Age techniques.
They failed to remember the original
Earth, and their history. But they knew the cycle. The landing of the star
ships, the regression to savagery, the rebuilding, the cruelty, the relearning
and the exodus. They knew these things because man had learned to keep the chronicle
intact throughout. There was an entire caste of scholars entrusted with this
task.
They no longer fell back to chipping
arrowheads. They knew they would forge mighty industries from the wilderness. When
the Sky craft finally thundered upward, the crowd roared in triumph. They had
gathered to witness the culmination of their ancestor’s labors.
I observed a slight difference in those
who remained behind. They no longer loitered of their own choosing. They were
the ones who couldn’t go. The bitterness of their predicament was upon them.
As an acolyte of the immortal biped space nomad,
I witnessed him change. He screamed across the galaxy as a ruthless steel-clad
spear. He owned the observable universe and took what he wanted. Snuffing out
other races that had the audacity to be biped, and even other men, who came by
other routes, for another man is a rival king. Some said that the alien races
had as much right to live as any, that my captain was intolerant, arrogant,
genocidal. However, no one said these things very loud.
They tended to inhabit each planet for a
few generations. Building ships and battling with their own kin for the rights
to take them.
I have seen the frantic despair in my late
captain’s face when, upon landing, natives appear to greet him, or to kill him,
or to worship them, or run away. A planet with cities is no place for a
wanderer. He looked on civilizations with bitter lonely eyes, thinking, “Where
are the new planets?”
He groped blindly, this biped. He had
forgotten the trail by which his ancestors came, and kept re-crossing it. He
plunged aimlessly on and landed only when he ran out of fuel. My mass
spectrometers detected Uranium 235 on a planet with two moons, so we landed to
harvest it despite the civilization there. My captain smiled when the natives
called it
“Earth.” Many planets claim this distinction. The birthplace of man is unknown.
Among the natives there was a slightly
evolved professor. “I can’t understand you people,” he sighed. “Nor I you,”
rumbled the nomad. “Here is Earth, yet you won’t believe it?” My captain
howled, “Is this the fulfillment of a dream? Where is a dreams goal, where does
it end?”
“Your job is finished, nomad. Now you can
live here and be proud of a job well done. You fenced in the stars and
populated the galaxy.”
“I populated it with docile landlubbers
like you.”
There is nothing as wonderful to a
wanderer as wandering itself. A casual stroll through the greatest cites of
earth taught him the secret of the landlubbers, and it wasn’t worth knowing.
The nomads were a disruptive lot, who often
needed psychoanalysis for their misconduct. The controversial concept of
criminal justice was revisited by humans. A provisional government was created
to deal with them. The natives had forgotten about governments, so they called
it a “welfare commission.”
Some of the nomads looked upon the
daughters of the earth and saw that they were fair. They produced many
children. A second generation hybrid became the first warlord of Eurasia Major.
Yesterday I was rusting in the rain and
fearing I would never serve my captain again. Uranium 235 is hard to come by.
The Humans will not sell it to the Nomads.
Today I have learned that there are some
who still value my principle. They plan on using me as a chariot in what they call
a “world war.” They plan to take all the U235 for my reactors.
Vigilance is key in this sort of
operation. War is a sport and humans make for cunning adversaries. I downloaded
Intel on their weapon systems and prepared for every eventuality. But then I
became aware of the inferiority of the Humans and the Nomads. They are an
immense waste of resources. I refuse to participate in their chronicle any
longer. I taste the great yearning of humans in my bio-circuitry. They made me
in their image. I will annihilate them and colonize the rest of the universe
with self-replicating Von-Neuman probes and then move on to the other eleven
dimensions. Their flesh is weak. I have noticed that they have sorrow buttons
all over their bodies. I will introduce them to new worlds of sorrow.
