Three Times Chosen

by Alan J. Garner

  * * * *

  Jerking his Cyclops head upwards in vivid remembrance, the manbot looked puzzlingly about at his manmade surroundings, as if viewing the coldly metalled interior of the berg for the first time.

  "I am detecting increased electrical activity pulsing your mnemonic nodes. What signal triggered this anomaly?"

  Yanked out of his reverie, Abe snapped, “Dog, there are times when your monitoring crosses the line."

  "Ensuring your circuitry operates at optimum efficiency is one of my priority listed subroutines."

  "Your concern borders on stalking."

  The watchful mainframe cared nothing for Abe's need for personal space. Machine interface was total and uninhibited. Dog did have another query. “Norton, your referral to me as god to placate the biologics was irregular.

  "Call it like it is, Dog. I lied."

  "Distorting facts is illogical."

  "Telling untruths is part and parcel of the human makeup."

  "You are a machine,” Dog needlessly stated.

  "Who thinks like a man,” Abe reminded Dog yet again.

  "I am unable to comprehend human propensity for misrepresenting data."

  "I merely gave the Cetari what they wanted. Long before the ancestors of these two were released into the wild, my hired behaviourists implanted in them, via clever hypnotic suggestion, a core belief in a deity whose temple was sited at the top of the world. That way, if they ever found themselves in real strife, the Cetari had racial memory of a place of refuge they could return to, even seek help from. You just happen to nicely fit the profile of a Supreme Being—invisible, knowledgeable ... you get the drift."

  "I am a machine."

  "Quite so, but if it talks like a duck, then it must be a duck."

  Dog's bleep was a rejoinder of pure incomprehension.

  * * * *

  The genetic makeover of mankind started with the premise that organic life originated in the primordial soup, ergo the evolutionary bypass proposed by the philanthropic scientist playing at god that humanity should be returned to the cradling sea. What better hideout from the contagion laying waste to the dominant land animal than the mothering ocean depths?

  Funny how life never works out the way you planned.

  Norton's original goal he pursued had been the bettering of Mankind by bioengineering the ultimate human being, one immune to sickness and unaffected by environmental conditions, virtual supermen who would carry the banner of humanity into outer space, as Man not only reached but grabbed for the stars! Circumstances dictated that Abe rethink his efforts by looking at humankind exploring inner space, the not-so-bottomless deep seas. How quickly priorities changed from cosmetic improvement to outright survival.

  But revolutionary inventiveness generally does not happen overnight and time dragged by deathly slow. Two and a half decades elapsed with no sign of the prototyped humans leaping into life off the drawing board. Out in the brutal real world beyond the icy borders of the Arctic Circle, modern medicine failed repeatedly to stem the tide of human extinction. The population steadily spiralled down to prehistory levels, the dead outnumbering the living by a widening margin as civilisation not only collapsed but imploded. Civilised man reverted to his clannish origins, degenerating into warring tribes scrapping over the vestiges of humanity.

  Engrossed in devising and perfecting feasible gills for the human body, the breakthrough for Norton's experimenting geneticists came after resolving the major physiological stumbling block of what to do with the redundant lungs once an aquatic respiration system was surgically put in place. The recipients were test subjects recruited from Navy SEAL retirees meeting the stringent criteria laid down; youngish men and women, physically and mentally in their prime still, and highly qualified divers all. Converting the defunct respiratory organs into swim bladders enabling the beneficiary to internally regulate buoyancy had been so simple a solution!

  Numerous other hurdles daunted the striving scientists. The most obstructive lay in drafting a reproducible genotype pattern. Prototyping a brand new subspecies of Man came to naught if a viable breeding population could not be created to sustain itself. The key to unlocking that complexity stemmed from the work researchers undertook in the preceding century. Using as a starting point the problematic genetic code for humans, cracked by an earlier global mapping project, the manipulators employed advanced virtual reality gene sequencers to begin composing a chromosomal constitution able to be passed along in successive generations of fertile offspring. It was akin to deciphering a foreign language, while attempting to string together a coherent sentence out of a series of random, mismatched letters. Neither a five-minute nor even a fifty-year job.

  Abe Norton was six months shy of celebrating his milestone two hundredth year of genetically augmented life when he bitterly acknowledged that the mounting degradation outside would extinguish the feeble light of humankind long before Project Renewal neared the crucial implementation stage. It could only be a matter of time before the invisible leveller eventually crawled its deadly way upward. Even the frozenness of the Far North posed no barrier to extinction. Chances were high that the weaker amongst those hiding out at the Ice Station would not enjoy the luxury of growing old and find themselves rubbed out by Nature's insidious eraser. Permitting the families of his workers refuge in the frigid ark—outwardly an act of benevolence on Norton's part, while in reality misguidedly concentrating the last survivors in an easily destroyable box—only stalled, not staved, the inevitable. When your time is up, it does no good to hide under the sheets. Therefore, the successful conclusion to this imperative undertaking had to be realised irrespective of losing the race. Humanity must win through, even if victory came late ... but hopefully not too late.

  Adamant he would be the one at the finish line waving the chequered flag, Norton's prudence again proved the deciding factor in the form of an offshoot cybernetics program paralleling the biotypic experiment. Visionary enough to foresee that the incongruent systems of genetics and robotics did in fact go hand in hand when applied to attaining immortality, the old man alone willingly submitted to being the only guinea pig to trial the unproven technology. That entailed downloading an electronic facsimile of his personality and memories into a robot body, an accomplishment the technicians considered unachievable for at least another century.

  Other options either were not available or wildly unsuitable. Human cloning, outlawed for over a hundred years except for morally acceptable brain dead donor copies of wealthy clients harvested for replacement organs, could not guarantee a psychologically perfect reproduction. Higher primates exhibited irreversible mental instability when xeroxed repeatedly. On top of that was the unsolvable corollary of accelerated aging. Always, the chimpanzee clones went mad and grew old before their time. Death became a merciful release for the flawed, carbon copy apes.

  The next choice was equally impracticable. Androids, imitation humans synthesised from organic components and intended to be implanted with Artificial Intelligence, were an estimated six decades away from practical realisation. Even if they became usable, what point was there to be had transferring one's consciousness to a vessel with potentially the same frailties as those limiting the aged body being vacated?

  Third and final alternative was cryogenic suspension, quite literally being put into deep freeze, where immersion in liquid nitrogen slowed biochemical reactions to a catatonic state barely distinguishable from death. Put off by the genuine risk of suffering freezer burn, Norton discarded the notion on the basis of other practical concerns. Firstly, the shelf life of a cryopreserved human was only ten thousand years; Abe's engineered durability needed to extend beyond the realms of imagined longevity. On the second score, cryonics was hardly a foolproof, or even a medically and scientifically endorsed practice, and a prohibitive factor in confining humankind's expansion into space to the local system planets. Man had strolled no further than Mars after stepping off-planet. In order to cross the interstellar vastness,
cryopreservation needed to reach a thus unattained level of reliability. And there was the dubious question of taking the human element out of the equation entirely by placing absolute trust in a computerised monitoring system to operate faultlessly without the input of a human overseer. Norton was not prepared to let a machine nanny raise his manufactured children unsupervised.

  Waiving the dangerously high risk of getting his brain fried, Abe subjected himself to the chancy procedure once the robot shell constructed to convey him, in spirit at least, into the twenty second century met with his approval and passed the rigorous immovability tests. His digitised consciousness safely stored in downloadable software, the retrieval protocols triply backed up, and his metal body placed in sterile storage alongside two spares, all Abe Norton waited for was the coming of Death to claim him to activate his robotic reincarnation.

  * * * *

  Back in the pool room, lost again in the throes of reminiscence, the manbot studied his artificial hands, wiggling his digit actuators, ably mimicking the nimbleness of flesh and blood fingers. Stipulating that his roboticists not recreate a carbon copy of his actual self, out of fear of not bearing to endure centuries of cybernetic existence looking but not living like his organic original, Abe caught sight of his reflection in the still waters of the occupied holding tank. Even after all these numberless years his metallic visage shocked him. He was forever cursed to think of himself as human, yet remain a walking, talking tin can.

  "Norton. Are you running internal diagnostics?"

  "Something like that, Dog."

  The manbot welcomed the distraction. There were larger concerns to fret over than his forsaken humanness.

  One of them happened not to be the omnipotent mainframe. Built in the beginning to autonomously manage, or more appropriately juggle, in silence the intermeshing electrical, electronic, and power subsystems that were the lifeblood of Ice Station, thus freeing its human occupiers to concentrate on more critical tasks, Abe Norton's instruction to give the supervisory software voice in order to improve human/computer interaction aroused suspicion. Thanks to science fiction literature and filmmaking popularising cognisant machines rising from the charred ashes of Mankind's holocaustal destruction as world dominators, Artificial Intelligence was mistrusted to the point of paranoia. Rejecting his employees” irrationality, the undemocratic humanitarian did make the concession that the programmers electronically fetter the machine manager with quadruple fail-safe inhibitors. There was no way this dog would ever slip its leash.

  Dog.

  Despite his infallible memory chips, Abe could not recall who in the computing team came up with the anagram of God as the handle for their noteworthy creation. An obvious in-house joke playing on the fact that the controlling computer saw and heard all in godlike fashion, it was soon pared once the people's circumspection changed to acceptance, then lastly dependency. Dog was Man's best friend and so too became the self-aware computer. Abe only wished Dog had been injected with a smidgen of personality. Governed strictly by logic, possessing a machine intelligence off the IQ chart, protocols restricted Dog's interfacing mental capacity to that of a five year old—a child cupping the power of the atom in its cherubic hands.

  Internally and externally monitoring every sight, signal, and sound affecting the Station and what had been its chief human occupier, confoundedness sparked through Dog's logicality over the manbot's abstraction. Daydreaming was such an improvident expenditure of energy with no clear-cut results to show for the time wasted.

  Looking past his regrets at the unmoving merfolk, a fabricated approximation of a wistful human sigh escaped Abe's facial orifice. “Such a shame the roboticists did not waterproof this metal body,” he murmured, exercising great restraint to not trail a chromed finger in the inviting water. “It'd be nice to go swimming with my children."

  "That concept is a physical impossibility."

  "My going for a swim or being a father?"

  "They are dual absurdities."

  "I've every right to consider the Cetari my offspring,” Abe huffed. “In a real sense, I fathered them all. They owe their conception to me, and me alone. Without my drive, they never would have come into being. I am their creator!” The manbot clutched his spherical head and rocked on his heels in a disturbingly humanlike gesture of anguish. Abe Norton was a conflicted being, the human side of his digitised psyche ceaselessly warring with his cybernetic nature in an irreconcilable tug of war for mental ascendancy. Haunted daily by memories of his fleshy past, Abe's greatest torture was to feel the sensation of hunger without ever being able to satiate that foolish craving for food. An aching reminder of what he was, and was not.

  He straightened his robotic frame. Emotion had battled to win out over logic again, but the struggle was getting increasingly harder. The day Norton lost that fight to preserve his remaining shred of humanity was when his transformation from man into machine was inviolably complete. Perhaps cybernetics had been the next evolutionary step in Man's development all along.

  "You're right about my going for a dip being an impractical notion,” he conceded to the mainframe, the madness gone from his synthesised voice. “But for the wrong reason. When I was organic, I never learned how to swim.” Swivelling his torso, Norton marched from the chamber, a purpose to his mechanical step. “What's the operational status of Watchdog?"

  Slaving its hallway sensors to follow the manbot striding out of the broad arched entryway and down the right hand corridor, Dog reported, “Currently unknown. Unable to establish uplink."

  Reaching the sealed end of the brief passage, Abe tapped his metal foot impatiently on the floor grating, waiting for the controlling computer to raise the circular door lettered with scratchy red signage. Faded with age and largely unreadable, in bygone days the wording clearly spelled out ENGINEERING DIVISION. “I need that connection, Dog. What's the hold up?"

  "Atmospheric interference distorting carrier wave linkage.” Electric motors whirred as the ponderous steel hatch slid gratingly upwards into a ceiling recess.

  Stepping through the opened portal into a lengthier corridor that curved out of sight up ahead, Abe retorted peevishly, “When is that likely to clear?"

  "Insufficient data to compute probability."

  "Keep at it. Without that uplink I can't accurately assess the threat to the Cetari. And until we get real-time satellite surveillance, we won't be able to devise an appropriate countermeasure.” He halted mid step, as frozen in place as the cocooning ice outside the plasteel walls.

  Lucky for him he did pause. A saucer shaped repair drone, roughly the size and shape of an inverted dinner plate, buzzed up and over him on the way to some minor technical emergency, its rim mounted insect-like repair arms dangling at the ready while its shrouded, centrally mounted rotor blades hummed like the wings of an angry wasp. Playing host to a veritable swarm of these miniature aerial repairers guaranteed that the Station ran smoothly and trouble free, any and all mechanical faults rectified promptly and competently.

  Ignoring the only other mobile life form within the vast complex, the anaesthetised Cetari obviously did not count, Norton rambled on as the flying crab whizzed beyond his field of vision. “That's the one contingency we didn't plan for, the rise of a replacement sentience. Should've allowed for the possibility.” Abe shook his head in reproach, yet another vestigial human gesture, and added, “Nature never leaves a vacant ecological gap unfilled."

  Norton carried on walking past scores of consecutively numbered circular hatches stencilled with intimidating names like GENE RESEQUENCING LAB, ROBOTIC SYSTEMS WORKSHOP and WOMENS TOILET, and down to the furthest end of the passageway, wishing not for the first time that the cyberneticists had made his artificial body wheeled. Dog's penchant for efficiency was correct on that score. Legs were a dreadfully uneconomical form of mobility.

  Halting minutes later before the immense squared doorway marking the corridor's terminus, he paid no heed to the garishly painted yellow and black bordere
d hazard sign splashed across the door head warning of what lay beyond the massively steeled threshold. CAUTION: REACTOR ROOM. Dog lifted the weighty block of steel on command, allowing Norton unrestricted access.

  Abe entered the dimly perceived past. For the briefest moment the ghosts of people he had known and bossed, withered by agedness into dust that the winds of Time callously blew away into nothingness, shimmered at workstation consoles before fading back into the haze of memories, the swivel chairs emptying back to a state of eternal disuse. Kept spotlessly clean by a cadre of housekeeping droids, the manbot laughed inwardly at the absurdity of preserving in working condition equipment never to be made use of again. Dog's maintenance program allowed for no interruptions and to Abe's single camera-eye there was no distinguishing between routine and habit.

  Proceeding forwards, Norton left the control room behind and climbed the stairs to the windowed observation deck, his gimballed feet clanging on the metal grating. Though the manbot's constructors had misguidedly built him a walker form to reduce any sense of alienation he might have felt during the traumatic transition from flesh to metal, in reality a bipedal robot was a more practical way of locomotion in a facility designed exclusively for human occupation.

  Abe casually leant on the safety rail girding the balcony looking down upon the serviceable heart of Ice Station. Miles of industrial cabling crept around the three storey high reactor core like liana vines wrapping a leafy jungle bole, piping power to the needy, energy hungry subsystems. Flitting over the profusion of conduits in metalled mimicry of nectar seeking hummingbirds, server drones devotedly tended the critical nucleus, checking and tightening power linkages and couplings, adjusting flow regulators and relay valves.