Dadr'Ba

by Tetsu'Go'Ru Tsu'Te

  Chapter 9, Dr. Pan’Ju[45] Performs Su’Zi’s Bio-mod

  The surgeon, Dr. Pan’Ju, studied the bio-mod order on the screen. Then, with a swipe of his hand panned down to the mentor section “I knew it,” he said to himself, noting the mentors, Pri’Api, and Ti’Reso in the mentor block.

  Although not always the same P-T’s (Pri’Api and Ti’Reso) bio-mods are personalized based on the individual yet have a certain flamboyancy to them that Pan has come to recognize.

  P-T has performed lots of mentorships and provided many more bio-mod recommendations. This tops them all; it pushes the envelope of their flamboyant standard to the limit. It’s a little over the personal discretion bio-mod budget, but as the surgeon in charge, he has some discretion and knows how to get past the CA’s audits.

  P-T must be doing something right, though; Pan hasn’t had a single request paid or not, to reverse or undo any of their recommendations. There have been a few requests after the fact to add more to the bio-mods that P-T has recommended, but Pan suspected that it was due to a reluctance on the individual to go all the way with P-T’s initial recommendations and not the recommendations themselves.

  The sexual mods on this one are extensive P-T must be getting feedback from some of their other clients, the cosmetic mods were standard enough, hair, skin tone basic eyeliner a little extra fullness here, no reductions. This one wants to accentuate a shapely figure, much more than the latest trend; this one will be a real looker even spotted from a distance, more of a classic almost retro look.

  Nowadays the emphasis is trending to a slimmer, demure look. Pan checked the family status... very near the bottom. No wonder she was the last on the list of the graduation bio-mods. Ordinarily, this bio-mod order would be over the authorizations for someone of her class. The scheduler should have probably not allowed this order to go through, but undoubtedly left that decision to the attending surgeon, which is sometimes the case.

  Then he checked her job classification, which ordinarily would’ve been the first thing he checked, but the sex mod had distracted him. She’s going to be a Zone Four Mi’Nr and requires the deep mining package, extreme cold, low light vision, High-G joints, reinforced skeleton and core muscles and, of course, endurance. She’s going to be working down near the outer reaches of zone four, the death zone. She’s going to need all the help she can get; a little extra volume here and there will provide room for the additional strength, energy, and insulation she’ll need to survive.

  Before he closed the order narrative and submitted the requisition that would automatically retrieve the parts from the automated warehouse, he noted the scheduler comment. “Thank you” in the comments area.

  Pan will make this an extra special mod, this being the last of the grad bio-mods and with no others scheduled; he won’t have to deal with the pressure of other anxiously waiting graduates and their families. Today will be one of those occasions when he will be able to set aside the mechanic, and become the artist, the sculptor of living art and life.

  He frequently touches people’s lives, emotionally as well as physically and on rare occasions like today can create living art, he’ll be able to take his time on this one and make it special.

  ____________________________

  Later that day, Pan walked briskly toward his apartment proud of the day’s work he had accomplished. He wondered if he would ever see the work of art he had created that day again.

  The e’TaC-M[46] (enhanced Tracking and Communications Module) fused to his skull accessed his front door and his flat panel displays activating in all his rooms, his wife Nu’Wa[47], wouldn’t be home for several hours.

  They realized, like many other couples that, each needed some quiet time alone, to muse and unwind, and although his job wasn’t necessarily stressful he often felt the need for quiet and to ponder life’s questions, particularly since he faces the realities of their existence so much during each day.

  Nu’Wa also faced the realities of life on Dadr’Ba but from a different angle, her job as a retirement coordinator brought her face to face with the grim facts of life aboard Dadr’Ba and she had many appointments in the evenings.

  Both Pan and Nu’Wa are active participants, essential even, in the lifecycle of Dadr’Ba. Nu’Wa at the end of life and he, at the first major milestone when a new person finishes Level I programming and is configured to go online and become an active component in this giant machine that is Dadr’Ba.

  Maybe it’s because Nu’Wa is female or perhaps it’s just her personality, but Pan thought Nu’Wa seems to be able to handle the realities of their existence better than he. She didn’t appear to need as much alone time as he after a hard day, instead she seemed to, just need, to be close to him, and he needed to be prepared to support her.

  Pan sat unwinding in his favorite chair, staring at the large flat panel as O’M approached at three thousand kilometers a second, still about a light year away. Pan mused that there really must be a God. Because it really is a miracle that they are alive and can appreciate the gifts that life can give, and soon, within their lifetime, though still decades away, they will reach O’M.

  Pan felt incredibly lucky to be with Nu’Wa. They’re so well matched, with common interests, compatible and complementary in their differences. And both with the same security clearance. Lucky too, that their parents are both healthy and well, though it’ll probably be at least a century, possibly longer before he and Nu’Wa will be able to have children of their own, their children will be born not out here in space but on O’M.

  It’s hard to think of themselves as Thinking Machines, but every day Pan opens up and looks inside sometimes three or four people. People as he’s come to know them, people as they’ve come to know themselves.

  He single-handedly performs the operations; there’s no need to have a life support system and all the associated equipment and techniques, the machines in his office are ancient and only for show.

  He simply puts the brain into standby mode and shuts down the respiration and circulation altogether. There’s no pain, no bleeding it’s not like having to fix a living biological person or a piece of machinery in operation.

  He’s alone in the operating room, sometimes he’s the mechanic with a machine and sometimes an artist alone with his canvas, like today. He’s got a large display for reference, but it’s unnecessary. He’s been doing this for over a hundred years, and he’s gotten outstanding at it.

  He rubs his chest, the left side containing his heart and the right side containing his brain and memory store, respiration only needed to provide cooling for these internal components. He has as with all the other D’En’s, twice the processing capacity and four times the memory as the most advanced U’Te or Mi’Nr in existence, but does capacity equal intelligence? Who’s more intelligent? The D’En, who only uses ten percent of their capacity or the Mi’Nr that uses half of their processing capacity? Pan can think of many people that fit that situation, shouldn’t that make them equal?

  Pan felt proud of today’s job, the last of the graduation season. He spent the whole day making sure everything was perfect, even tuning up the systems that were not part of the work order. This girl, he thought is going to have a tough life, he’d do what he could to make it a little bit easier.

  Nu’Wa would be glad to hear that the parts she recovers are being put to good use, being made to last, most are barely worn when they come into Nu’Wa’s custody.

  Regardless of the component’s source, D’En, U’Te or Mi’Nr each person gets dismantled and each component gets refurbished and thoroughly checked out then warehoused. Pan has never rejected a part for not meeting standards but occasionally will requisition another if he’s not comfortable with it for any reason. A good example would be like today one of the muscle modules installed passed the one hundred N (Newton) standard for that group, but knows they’re capable of a hundred fifty N sometimes two hundred N, since components need to be balanced. He made sure that this system as a w
hole was balanced, capable of operating at a hundred fifty percent of officially rated capacity.

  Nu’Wa may question him on his multiple returns to stock today, but after he explains, Pan is confident that she’d agree he did the right thing. It’s not as if they need any bonus credits for exceeding parts’ conservation standards; they have everything a couple could want, credits in the bank a level four apartment, robotic maid service, flat panel’s in every room, full premium channel access and well-filled spice, tea and liquor cabinets.

  Now the grad season is over. Maybe they should go on a vacation Pan will ask Nu’Wa when she gets home.

  Chapter 10, Nu’Wa Comes Home

  Staring at the screen showing Dadr’Ba’s advancement toward O’M, Pan thought deeply about Nu’Wa. She never shows her frustration, but Pan is concerned about her, he knows she has an essential role to play in the circle of life aboard Dadr’Ba. She handles all the arrangements before and after the retirement ceremony, but she’s not allowed to participate in the retirement ceremony itself. The Church has a firm grip on that process.

  She has on rare occasions mentioned to Pan her frustration about having a closed door between her and the retirement ceremony. Aside from reviewing the retirement application, making sure everything is ordered, and the production schedulers have signed off. Nu’Wa interviews the applicants and schedules the room and coordinates with the Church, which performs its own interview and preparation sessions.

  Nu’Wa is then in charge of the postretirement processing which occurs after the retirement ceremony. Only when the systems have totally cooled and show no detectable brainwave activity are the systems turned over to Nu’Wa for processing.

  Nu’Wa sees them now utterly devoid of life after having interviewed them alive and well only a few days before. When Pan performs his “operations” he knows that they will live again. Nu’Wa sees the retirees as real people, tired and burned out with their lives. Still the retirees have love and hope and dreams of a better life for their grandchildren and being able to be part of their grandchildren’s lives.

  But when Nu’Wa sees them the second time, it’s difficult, even painful, she only sees the once animated, as corpses that will never activate again, at least not in whole.

  She removes the outer protective, sensory membrane, Pan knows the process, which in turn gets refurbished or reprocessed, then packaged and warehoused as does the other components; the muscle modules, joints, respiration system (used for cooling). The pump and hosing truss used for pumping the battery fluid which fuels the system, it circulates from the gut to the various active components and storage locations, then special filters remove the spent fuel, which in turn gets collected and defecated, collected and piped to waste treatment facilities and reprocessed back into useable fuel.

  The miners have the most fuel storage capacity followed by the U’Te’s then least of all the D’En’s, but all have roughly the same operations capacity based on expected workload.

  A retiree’s central processing unit and memory don’t get recycled, which forces the printing of new components or the extraction of dwindling spares from those supplies stored in cargo modules at launch. Their “brains” are considered Holy and the tenuous relationship between the CA and the Church remains carefully balanced. A retiree’s brain is returned to the Church which keeps them in a sacred, secured, catacomb monitored by both the CA and the Church.

  The Church supports the CA by encouraging the people, the system, to work hard and long, obey the CA’s rules and not to retire too early. The CA in return stays out of the Church’s business and allows them a level of autonomy as long as they don’t interfere with the operation of Dadr’Ba or CA business.

  Together the Church and the CA have agreed to withhold the true nature of the crews “biology,” the crew believes that they’re biological clones. The knowledge that they are “just” machines, robots or androids is considered too dangerous to reveal.

  The “people” of Dadr’Ba look down robots, like the soldiers and consider themselves to be superior.

  The Church’s reason for keeping the secret is religious and philosophical. They maintain that the Gamma-Ray burst that struck Dadr’Ba eight hundred years ago and killed all the biologicals, many of whom really were clones, was truly an act of God. This act of God gave life to the people, a miracle, a Holy Act. No less a miracle or Holy act than any dealing with biolgicals, making androids self-aware, it transformed them from machines into people and provided them a soul.

  The CA reason for keeping the crews’ true nature secret predates the Touch of God. The CA guards evidence that some of the androids, even before the Touch of God, were questioning their maligned treatment as non-biological machines.

  Before the Touch of God, a different class structure existed. The pure biologicals were on top, there were only a few animated at a time and they were only able to operate safely in a few restricted areas of the ship due to radiation levels, and they were expensive and difficult to upkeep. They ate specially prepared food derived from algae grown in lighted vats, textured and seasoned to make it palatable. Not unlike the processing done to the battery fluid fuel used by the crew today. The pure biologicals didn’t live very long either and died at best around a hundred years and constantly had to be replenished out of the ships stockpile which numbers in the tens of thousands (in preparation for arrival at O’M). But they held the keys to the kingdom, holding the highest offices and controlled all the functioning of the ship.

  Then there were the GLC’s, back then there was only a single class, and they didn’t have psychic ability and were unable to birth. None of the GLC’s back then were D’En’s or Mi’Nr’s; they were all what we’d call today, U’Te’s. They ate the same food as the pure biologicals but were radiation resistant and lived much longer, as needed spares were pulled out of the ships stockpile, (this time numbering only in the thousands) thawed and revived. GLC’s felt superior to the pure biologicals but had minimal interaction with them.

  Finally, there were the androids, which were not ranked, but considered a piece of equipment, part of the ship. They were divided into the three classes that exist today (except the D’En’s were not called D’En’s then, but were called Sci’Tech’s). To add insult to injury the androids were stronger and more radiation resistant than the biologicals, including the GLC’s, and even the lower models had computational ability exceeding that of the biologicals, but they were never considered conscious. Not even entitled to person status, the world was upside down.

  The Gamma Ray Burst changed everything when it happened, many androids recovered, though some did not, but those that recovered and survived believed that they were alive.

  Some of the survivors, the Sci’Tech’s mostly, an Android model with higher processing and more robust memory systems, knew or figured out the truth of their nature. But after the Touch of God, it was impossible to convince the Mi’Nr’s and the U’Te’s that they weren’t “biologically” “alive”.

  When forced to face the reality of their true existence many of the “people” became unstable or fell into a deep depression or melancholy that almost always ended in death. The same that survived the discovery of the truth fell into a robot status that after a while under the new post-Touch of God social order meant that they weren’t accepted by the new “society” and eventually got shut off or terminated.

  A new class system replaced the old, and the new D’En class quickly realized that to continue Dadr’Ba’s mission meant accommodating the crew’s ‘aliveness’ was the most effective and efficient course.

  Now, eight hundred years later, we’re almost to our goal. We’re alive, and as real as any biological there ever was, we love, laugh, cry, want, desire, hope, we pair bond and even thanks to techniques learned from the Touch of God have children that inherit real, tangible traits from generation to generation.

  We’ve even evolved taste and smell, that along with the development of spices, and a cadre of cooks, have m
ade eating the processed “food” needed to sustain our lives more tolerable. Beyond that, we’ve evolved gender mods and methods of sex that align with gender identities that manifested themselves almost immediately after the Touch of God.

  Pan didn’t know for sure, though he suspected. Nu’Wa had stopped by the school on her way home and watched the exercise yard as the Ko’Ka’s ran and played games with each other. Providing her solace, knowing that these youngsters are the descendants of the people she counsels, and she’s part of the system that brought these Ko’Ka to life.

  Pan still deep in thought, stared at the panel showing the image of O’M when Nu’Wa entered the room. She stood watching him for a long while, oh how much she loved him, after a while she went over to Pan and wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek and then on the neck. Pan reached up and caressed her arm and said to Nu’Wa “I think we’re due for a vacation.”

  Chapter 11, Su’Zi Wakes After Bio-mod

  Su’Zi woke refreshed; it took a moment for her to realize where she was and for what purpose. She slowly realized she was at Pri’Api and Ti’Reso’s, in the room they showed her that she would awake in. Where she had met ahead of time and talked at length with Pri’Api and Ti’Reso about how to conduct the lessons.

  She looked down at her body, not believing what she was seeing or experiencing. She moved without effort; everything felt lighter, and she looked “good.” There was a mirror on the wall across from the spare bed where she woke. She stood up and looked at herself amazed how beautiful she had become. She stretched and turned watching herself in the mirror and let out a little squeal of joy.