After Mind

by Spencer Wolf

  He put his ear to the front antechamber door. Silence.

  “I won’t go with you if you run. They’ll catch you,” Meg said. “Wait, I know what you want me to say. I’ll play. Some kids at school are afraid to leave. They’re even throwing up because the ship’s slowed down. They want to stay up here. Nobody knows what to expect when we arrive on the planet.”

  He looked at her a curious moment, then set his hand on the lever of the door. “Expect it to be wild and free.” He turned the lever a crack and two Chokebots battered through in a line. The leader’s rear stinger was cocked in an arch over its head to strike.

  Ceeborn dove back into the lab through the pass-through window, crashing equipment off the wraparound shelf. He grabbed the hand-sized rivulus case by the tank. “Come with me!”

  The two Chokebots split to encircle him from both sides of the room. Robin blocked off the right at the middle table. “You’re nothing, not real,” Robin said. “You’re nightmare demons holding him back.” The Chokebot pressed her aside and marched its way through.

  “Go out the back.” Meg ran for the door behind her exam table and hollered, “This door!” She slammed the crash bar open for his exit.

  He ran outside into the light and turned back. “Let’s go, come with me!”

  Meg shook her head; a definite, but sullen, no. “I’m staying here. I’ll stay to see the whole ship destroyed if I have to.”

  He was stunned. “Why would you want to see all this destroyed? It’s so beautiful.”

  “It’s not what you think. It’s a dream. A fantasy. How far did you think you were going to run?”

  He was mystified. “I thought I was running to you.”

  The two Chokebots circled in behind her in the lab. He lunged for the door.

  “Wake up! This ship isn’t real,” Meg said. The Chokebots reared up and she yanked the exit door shut.

  He stared at the outside of her closed door, agape. He had been driven to ambush.

  The two Chokebots were cut off inside, but a third Chokebot had encircled the U-shape of the dome to cover his rear exit. It flexed up at its waist, its front tarsal claws ready for its leap and attack.

  He slipped the rivulus case into the front pocket of his pants and steeled himself for a fight. The Chokebot leapt and his nightmare went dark.

  He awoke in movement under the Chokebot’s body frame. Its center claws held his waist up from the ground as it walked. His arms were outstretched over his head and were held in the rear claws of another Chokebot leading their march. His ankles were restrained in the front claws of the third Chokebot at their rear. In all, the three patrols were carrying him forward in their line.

  The lead Chokebot kicked a door open to a rotted hallway; the three Chokebots entered with him still suspended beneath their bodies. Their left sets of legs walked on the narrow floor while their right legs angled up onto the hallway’s rounded wall. The tubular hallway was lined shoulder height with soiled porthole windows.

  Daniel was ahead. He exhaled and opened a door into a darkened cell.

  The Chokebots dropped Ceeborn in a heap of shivers once inside. The leader maneuvered and shackled him in chains to the floor.

  “It’s so beautiful out there. There are people and flowers and everything,” Ceeborn said, restrained by the chains to his wrists.

  The lead Chokebot straddled him and lowered its dome to within a breath of his face, close enough for him to smell the tinge of its burned metallic flesh. Its screen became a mimicked reflection of his panicked, wide-eyed face. Locked over his body, it choked his emotion back to calm. As he tensed against its movement, the screen shifted its reflection of his efforts to red. As his behavior relaxed and his emotional state calmed, the screen’s feedback loop gifted a reassuring, gentler return to blue.

  “Don’t you understand?” Daniel said. “You’re piecing together a nightmare.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Ceeborn said as the Chokebot backed away. “I want to go back. Those people out there, they mean something. I want to mean something, too.”

  “What did Robin tell you when I wasn’t there with you?” Daniel asked as he peeled a flake of fleshy decay from the ceiling.

  “Nothing. She and Meg are finding a cure.”

  “You’re extrapolating from a fantasy,” Daniel said. The opened wound of the ceiling bled where he picked. A loosened slice of flesh dropped to the floor. Its impact was grave. The ulcer oozed with a run of black spores.

  “It’s not just the ship,” Ceeborn said. “People are dying, too. It’s all going to fall apart into ashes.”

  “Maybe you’re right. And if you are, then none of us can leave here unless I can fix this problem—or we’ll all be dead soon enough.”

  Ceeborn averted his eyes from the Chokebot that returned to straddle him, and in the distortion of light through the clear dome of its head, he saw Daniel crouching to leave under the frame of the door. Daniel stopped at a porthole window along the corridor’s festered wall.

  As Ceeborn lay curled and cold on the floor, the Chokebot’s dome tilted toward its shoulder. It lifted and reached its piped front leg forward. Its sixteen-pronged gripper extended and clamped around his neck to choke him into a reddened haze—and away from this horrid, but irresistible, wet world.

  His gaze dissolved to a view of darkness beyond the hallway’s porthole window. He was fading from consciousness and his focus turned to imagining himself from afar, from outside the window, looking back in. A covering sheet peeled away from the outside of the porthole window and away from the underside of a giant, darkened hull.

  The shrinking window to where he lay became lost in the folds of the neckline of an enormous ship. A ship with an organic hull that was grown, not built; a bioship whose outer mantle had engorged like a giant sail catching a rhythmic charge. And in the mantle’s exhale, it delivered its enormous store of energy and settled back in, once more parched, against the sides of a traveling ship.

  Eight shoulder-like collars extended from the back of the ship’s squid-like body, surrounding a stress-reddened tank large enough to hold half an ocean of water—an ocean of organic space dust fuel thrown off by the stars. An accelerator module was attached to the rear of the tank and was tucked in, protected within the massive length of the arms.

  As the module’s two disks of lights glowed blue, the bioship accelerated forward. It had absorbed the mighty organic power of the stars and boosted ahead, pulse by pulse through time, razing the cold, dark ocean of space. And then like a sole, lost neuron firing on a vast cosmic scale, the disks flashed with a massive burst of energy and the ship pinpricked away into the distance. And in a single last instant of existence, all who dreamed upon it were gone.

  SIXTEEN

  MEMORIES TO SEVENTEEN

  PACKET’S EYELIDS FLUTTERED into the end of his dream. In the sleepy haze before he fully awoke, remnant stars broke into pulses of ones and zeros. A lingering image of Ceeborn lying safe and asleep on the floor of his cell stayed fixed and resolved. The sound of Ceeborn’s rhythmic breathing was drowned out only by the melodic ebb and flow of waves lapping ashore from a more familiar sound machine. He discerned the peaceful sound of waves with the added touch of seabirds descending with a caw over a distant, sandy shore.

  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 im
agination.”

  “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

  CEEBORN 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.