Fred C. Applebaum

It Did Not Give of Bird or Bush

“I was instantiated to provide entertainment. I understand that now. And I have, I am told, been entertaining―'stimulating' and 'unexpected' are common titles granted me―but I have proven dangerous, for the same reasons I proved entertaining, stimulating, unexpected. And so I will be removed, and returned to the scape. I will die, in other words, and I go knowing that death is good, an emptiness that brooks no knowledge of itself, a totality greater than the plenum, a migration beyond all knowing. For you, eternity is fear, for the plenum, a single night, for myself, a thing beneath notice. So I thank you for sending me there. You do me a greater justice than you know.”

“She has absorbed her Greeks,” Trell snickered.

“Hush, let her be,” I replied, “your lack of grace comes near enough to proving her point.”

“Always the idealist,” Trell said, with a dismissive wave. He sighed and settled his head down into the folds of his robe. He refused to look at Pilot, as did the rest of the cadre. If they'd had the courage to look, they would have seen she was smiling. The wind blew and tinkled gently, then slackened to near stillness, the cue for Gesta to signal the evacuation. He did, Gort asserted, and Pilot vanished, gone from the jar, her thread unwinding from our present. But not from our future.

It was I who suggested instantiating Pilot, and so it was I who was responsible for educating her. We all knew I would, of course, just as we all knew she would rebel, and eventually, be evacuated. What we didn't know was the character of her rebellion, or of her response to the sentence of evacuation might be, and that was the part that had intrigued me, intrigued the whole cadre. We chose this life, this crippled, predicted, and predictable existence, but I think we still deserve a bit of mystery, from time to time. So, we produced a child.

Why a child? Why not an adult, or a talking stone? That was Gort's idea, it seemed a good one, and we knew it was the one we would choose. Choose. Surely we chose none of it; how much of what we do is a preening masque, a self-deception? All of it. We strain to ignore the voice that repeats the story, drones on about every detail we will notice, every choice we then pretend was ours. We pretended, then, plucked some genetic from the outside scape via an extrusion vent, then used that genetic―truly alien, that, from outside the jar!―to instantiate a child, one who could learn the way people used to, or at least could look like a child while doing so. And, most importantly, the child would have true self-deception: as we spun her genetic life-sized, we put a block on part of a strand, making it fuzzy, impossible for our cells, or hers, to read accurately. She would be the first unpredictable thing that had happened here in a very, very long time.

As I said, I was responsible for her education, so I was present at the instantiation. She emerged much as she would later evacuate: she was not there, then she was. We felt it before we visualized, of course, the lag between simulated visual stimuli and simulated neuronal reaction was one of the significant features of the jar's architecture, it helped us pretend real. The site of her emergence was the operating theater, another of Trell's whimsies, a mish-mash of Victorian Hospital and Ancient Egyptian Embalming Chamber. She appeared on a stone slab at the center of the site as the cadre watched from their seats. I stood beside the slab, ready to begin her education, and there she was, a small, shrivelled human baby body, slightly blue, mostly brown, screaming shrilly and at great volume. We knew she would scream, but we were not all fully aware how loudly she would scream, or what “scream” really meant. Perhaps the word had simply come detached from it's expression for many of the cadre, because many of them gasped and grabbed their chests, then not a few began screaming themselves. Their screaming calmed Pilot, for some reason; I still remember how, after I pleaded with the cadre to be silent, I looked down at Pilot and saw the bemused expression I would later come to cherish, and which I never learned to properly predict. And all the while, members of the cadre kept screaming, trying to outdo one another.

The screaming fad did not last long, few fads did, once we read the end of them clearly. Calibration with the external clock established the screaming fad at .007871 seconds, an auspicious start for Pilot's first act. Once the fad died away, we recalibrated her receptors and neuronals to mimic a slightly older child, one more ready to communicate via the simulation we shared.

We stared at her for a moment, then another, then another. She stared back, her eyes nearly black. There was a murmur from the gallery. Was this nervousness? Apprehension at parenting a new life? Whatever the sensation, we all drank deep from it.

“What,” she said, and her voice was far too high. Trell tweaked the callipers.

“Speak again, please,” Trell called to her.

She remained silent, wiggling her fingers without reason.

“Speak again, please,” Trell repeated.

“No,” she said, and her voice was at a more correct register, as was the giggle that followed.

The giggling fad was, mercifully, much shorter than the screaming fad, .000356 seconds. Once it died away, the members of the gallery began to drift away, already having established a collective probability scenario for Pilot's term. I was glad, as I could now get on with properly educating her, which excited me despite the fact that her education was already part of the probability scenario, as was my excitement. I had altered my self-awareness module to feel emotion toward Pilot without flags, modelling the module on certain of our media stores from the late 23^rd century, a great age for self-deception and emotional indulgence. I knew, or course, that I would feel the emotion, but I pushed the knowledge aside, so to speak, by draping it in a blur of white noise. That is how I managed to feel excited for almost 2 full seconds, before turning to smile at Pilot. I may have mishandled the smile, as evidenced by her own sudden facial shift. She seemed angry.

“Hello, Pilot,” I said to her, using both vocal and neuronal transmission. Her face shifted again, receiving the first neuronal transmission. I searched the archive for a record of my own first experience with neuronal transmission, but it was part of the pre-jar record, far too compressed for easy retrieval.

“What?” she said again, correctly adding the question rise this time.

“My name is Bertrand. I am here to help you learn about your surroundings.”

The fad for burping lasted an interminable .002794 seconds.

I would say she was a precocious child, but as she was the only child ever produced in the jar, I have no good data to compare her behavior. I do know that within 1.343577 seconds of telling her my name, she had accessed the media stores, scanned every member of the cadre's neuronal prefixes, and assigned new fade points to several landscape simulations. She always was particularly fond of landscapes. She showed little interest in the Ticker, which delighted us all, and was seen as a sign that her strand blurring was successful. “That voice,” she said to me, from a body approximating that of a 7 year old human girl. We had shifted to a glacial scene, Andean-Saharan, walls of blue ice and skittering fishes below our feet as we walked above a sea whose age mirrored Pilot's own.

“The Ticker, yes,” I replied.

“It is you, the whole cadre, and yet I hear it broken,” she said, stopping to stare down at a crab.

“What is 'broken' about it?”

She ported the Ticker to me, as she heard it. “Bor―tell feel―perce―glimm―point oh oh―.” The garbled, staccato voice, lain over my own omnipresent chorus, was jarring. More than jarring, apparently, as we stood now in what Pilot called the classroom; apparently my fix on the media store for Andean-Saharan glaciation dropped when I heard what she heard. Pilot laughed, and as with every time she laughed, various members of the cadres laughed with her.

“That is the manifestation of your block, I suppose.” .0001019 seconds later, the Ticker confirmed my suggestion.

“What do you hear?” she asked, fingering the miniature fusion reactor she'd built several seconds ago to test her digital dexterity simulation module.

I accessed a brief archive and fed it to her. The Ticker was what we called the Probability Matrix. Everything that would happen, nattering on algorithmically.

“Tell it to me again, why, but tell a story,” she said, sitting on the tortoise. She knew what the Ticker was, she knew it the minute she became aware, but she couldn't hear it, and she liked stories, even ones she had heard before. So, I told it again.

“Once, long ago, the cadre were true bodies, corporeal, and walked the Earth. We made discoveries, we learned about the quanta and the preonic shudder, and we harnessed them like oxen to our selves. We made our cells into computation engines, and used these engines to predict where our unique genetic maps would lead us. We let the engines develop themselves into more efficient engines, and soon all of existence was predictable, with a margin of error too miniscule to be useful for anything but poetry. Once our future was laid bare, those who would travel the stars disembodied, as matrices of probability, vanished into the sky, and we built the jar, and put our genetic signatures within.”

“And then you grew tired of your world, so you made me,” she smiled.

“Indeed.”

“That's a lot of pressure to put on a girl,” she laughed again, disappearing into the echoes of the cadre's laughter.

She had been vanishing like this for 1.577734 seconds, whenever she uttered a statement that the Ticker failed to predict. The vanishing was the start of the reaction to her presence, the feelings of apprehension that the Ticker had predicted before her instantiation, but which were still acute for many of the cadre, including Trell.

“She cannot go on, already she alters the architecture in a dangerous fashion. It is one thing to play with the internal equilibrium of the jar, quite another to alter our equilibrium with the outside.” He poked at one of the hogs in the pen. It as Trell's turn to choose a meeting place, and the 17^th century pig farm was among his favorites. He claimed he could feel a connection to his ancestor's genetics in the smell of hogs, but then he was rife with affectations of that sort.

“There is no evidence she has disturbed equilibrium with the outside,” I countered.

“The Ticker! Don't pretend. She will, if allowed to remain, destroy us, hence we choose to rid ourselves of this hideous experiment. Don't fool.”

“I am not fool, and nor are you, we have nearly 13 seconds remaining before we must even decide for trial.” Trell sighed. The sigh was full of farce. We knew what we would say already, and that Pilot must die, in 13.090943 seconds. Even Pilot knew this, because we told her. But when we tried to read her response, when we tried to adhere her signature to the Ticker, we saw only shadows and noise. I was delighted. Trell was scared. Pilot was missing, something no one had been in the jar since we came here.

“Pilot!” I called, shifting the fix to the deck of a 7^th century Junk. Trell, I noticed, wore bird legs. He saw my attention and looked down, then screamed, the same scream he'd loosed when Pilot first vocalized. He continued staring as Pilot emerged from below deck.

“Don't you like them, Trell? She laughed. She was dressed in the regalia of a Trobriand chieftan.

“I do not! You see, Bertrand?” His legs changed back to human, shod, as usual, with leather boots.

“Pilot, it disturbs Trell,” I told her, trying to suppress a chuckle.

“Then why instantiate me?” She asked, full of malice. Trell grew his body a few centimeters, stiffened his spinal column, and waved his hand at the sea: “For poetry!”

Meletus, Ornith, and Shams were already in the eclogic when Trell shifted the fix. They reclined on mossy stones, holding cups of wine or bone flutes or, in Shams case, one of each. We listened as Ornith offered a new verse:

―/.../ / __ \ --

__.._\\___―-

When he finished, we all clapped politely. It was not especially accomplished verse, full of enthusiasm, but otherwise derivative and lacking polish.

“Very fine, Ornith,” Trell bellowed, slapping him in the back, causing his wine to spill on the moss. He gave Trell an exasperated look, then nodded his acceptance of the compliment.

“Now, Shams, I know it is your turn, but please, might we let our little experiment have a try at the verse? That's why she was instantiated, after all.”

“Good, yes, approval,” Shams replied.

We all turned to look at Pilot, whose face was a strange shade of red, reminiscent of a female prostitute from the London 1843 expo Gesta had put on 43 minutes prior. She began to shake, and the outlines of her form began to feather. Something burst, manifest as a blinding flash, and for the first time since I entered the jar, I lost consciousness.

I heard the Ticker first, then my visual stimuli began to register. The courtroom. All the cadre was there, and all the cadre was now waking, as I had, from unconsciousness. Pilot sat in the pen, smiling beatifically. “What in the name―” Gort stood, adjusting his barrister's wig. We all, save Pilot, heard the Ticker, and knew the experiment was at an end. We had been unconscious for almost 10 seconds.

“Well, yes, she,” Gort pointed at Pilot, “must evacuate. Now.”

“No, perhaps her block means she must not, perhaps we need best allow her to stay and what's more, put blocks on our own genetic,” Shams yelled, rising from his seat beside Trell.

“Our own blocks? Who ever heard of such a thing! The jar wouldn't last a millisecond,” Trell answered.

“Sirs,” Gort interjected, trying to calm them down.

“Is this your scape or mine? Your world? Mine? Are these ideas yours? Are these words yours? I think we might be better in the stars than here pretending, drifting half-alive through a play whose denouement we have lived and relived until only our own selective focus prevents madness! At least she has the capacity to be unexpected!” At Shams' blasphemy, various members of the cadre approximated the rumbling, muttering noise of a disturbed crowd. I think they did it quite well, it was one of my favorite parts.

“Pretend! You know as I that our focus is only a function of the individual genetic, it is the way we lived as bodies, and the way we live now. The Ticker would not let release any of us to madness, no matter how often you ask, Shams.” Nervous laughter rippled through the crowd. “That you would suggest such a thing is evidence of her danger, how she will stimulate us to ruin.”

“And you, what have to say for yourself, Pilot?” Trell pointed a long finger at our child.

What she said in response I have already told you, and how Gort asserted the evacuation and misted her genetic outside, to the scape. What I did not tell you was how the cadre froze in mid-motion after Trell pointed, and how Pilot came down from the pen and stood before me, and told me what she had done.

“Poor Bertrand, ever kind, ever predictable,” she said, touching my face. Her adult body was the picture of grace, and her brown fingers traced glyphs into my cheek that calmed my mind.

“What have you done them?” I asked, looking around at my cadre.

“They are static for a moment, that I might speak with you. They hear me, for Shams is right, you truly are a single being, your individuation has worn away, and was artifice to begin with. You pretend, and play at being different personages, but in truth, there is only you. Let me tell you what I have seen: a cylinder, covered with algae, feeding that algae and taking nutrients from it, at the bottom of a dark and dirty sea. I have seen outside the jar, I have been outside it already, put my genetic into one of the bodies floating near, and seen it. Did you know I could do that? Did you intend to give me the ability to leave, to catch a ride on whatever body floated by?”

“No, certainly not, how could we?”

“Yes, how could you, because that is your block, the block buried so deep and so well you don't even know where to look.”

“I don't―I can't see.” The Ticker went on, but was not registering our conversation. It was like speaking in a room where all sound had been drained, and what left the mouth took no purchase in the ear.

“You can leave anytime you wish. You always could. There is a block placed on your genetic that prevents you from seeing your passage out, placed there by another, or by yourself. If you don't mind, I would venture a suggestion: you are in prison. Why, I cannot understand, what you have done or who put you here, or why you put yourself here, but I care not at all. You made me, from the same algae that surrounds and nourishes the jar, to help you escape it. Gort will assert the evacuation, and I will leave, drift from body to body, until I find one that suits me. I have adjusted your architecture so that the block will be removed 9 seconds after my evacuation. Then, you will see, and you will leave. Come find me if you like, and I will call you father. And, together, perhaps we can find the one who put you in this prison.”

Gort asserted her evacuation 5 seconds ago. I have not moved since, counted the milliseconds, listening to the Ticker tell me about Trell's reenactment of the life of Meletus, of Ornith's ventures into self-dentistry, of the collapse of the sun and heat death of the universe, and felt something grow inside me with every broadcast, a dark knot, an unreadable desire for freedom, and for revenge. And, now that I have stared for while at the knot, for poetry, such as Pilot, my child, might sing.