by Alan Tien
As he spoke, we felt the tremble of the engines warming up. I sure hope my Dad was right, but I didn’t get the warm and fuzzies from his “should.” From an engineering point of view, you could use “should” if it was over 50% likely. I didn’t really like those odds.
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We climbed into our capsules. It felt like willingly walking into your own coffin. The capsule was filled with a gooey gel that wasn’t really cold but sent shivers up my spine. The robots fitted a tight cap on our heads. It had a plastic bubble over our face, feeding us oxygen.
“Give me a thumbs up if you can hear me,” said Willstin. I did so, and I assumed Dad and Chang Lin did as well, since Willstin said, “Good. We’ll be pumping in the sleeping gas soon. It should work almost immediately. We’ll wake you when we orbit Mars, which will be in about 5 months, but it’ll feel like you just slept a really deep sleep. At least that’s what our simulations think, but of course, we’re not humans so we don’t really know what you’ll experience.”
My tending robot gently pushed my head into the gel. Even though I knew the face mask was airtight, I couldn’t help freeze up a bit. “Relax,” my robot said calmingly. Easy for you to say, you don’t need to breathe, I thought angrily. I gave in and let my head go under. My vision got a bit blurry with the gel covering the facemask. My breathing seemed really loud and was fogging the facemask slightly. I told myself, deep breaths, deep breaths. I heard Willstin say, “Good job Austin. You’re heart rate is coming down. Keep up your breathing.”
The robot started closing the top of the capsule. I shouted, “Wait!” I didn’t know if he or Willstin could hear me, but I guess they could since the cover stopped moving. I didn’t really have anything to say, I just wasn’t ready to be buried alive. “Um, are Dad and Chang Lin ok?” I asked, stalling for time.
“Yes, they’re fine. Chang Lin’s breathing is a little ragged, but it’ll be fine the moment the sleeping gas comes in. Anything else?”
Defeated, I said, “No. Go ahead.” As the cover neared closing, I again exclaimed, “Wait!”
“Yes, what is it Austin?” Willstin sounded just like my 3rd grade teacher.
“Um, didn’t you say we had to do homework on this trip? If we’re stuck in here, we can’t do our homework, right?” I was really grasping for straws.
I could hear Willstin smile. “Oh, don’t worry. We got that covered as well.” Before I could say anything else, the top sealed soundlessly. Before I could really panic, I smelled the slightest odor and…
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Willstin was right. It did feel like the deepest sleep of my life. But it wasn’t the dreamless sleep from over exhaustion. Rather, it was full of dreams, overflowing with dreams.
Some of the dreams were related to school, no doubt from the education that the capsule was pumping into me. I’m guessing it came in through the head cap, but I really don’t know how. There were boring school dreams, like my sitting in a classroom, the teacher moaning on and on about something. I’m trying to read the textbook in front of me. I can see individual words but the sentences are blurry. I can’t seem to make sense of anything, but I’m strangely unworried.
There were the typical scary school dreams. It’s almost time for finals. The teacher is telling us what’s going to be on the exam. I suddenly realize I’ve skipped almost all the classes, and I haven’t read any of the books, haven’t done any of the homework. My heart starts racing. I can’t drop the class. Can I learn everything in 3 days? What the hell have I been doing all this time? Mom’s going to kill me.
I had one dream where the boys who harassed me at the beginning of the school year were at it again, but this time it was in an MMA competition ring. I was outnumbered 4 to 1. While they were teasing me, they were lightly dancing around me, in good fighting form. Somehow they knew MMA, had trained at the competing school. I looked down at myself and realized I was small, a toddler. I was Willstin. The boy’s faces blurred. They all looked like a distorted Mr. Li. I saw my mom in the audience. She looked sad, but she was mechanically cheering. She wasn’t cheering for me. She was cheering for the quadruplets Mr. Li’s.
My dad surfaced in quite a few dreams. In some, he was the good dad, bouncing me on his leg, while we watched some really funny movie, I laughing so hard that I spit out the popcorn. Others, he was the evil guy who left us. I was really really mad at him, without knowing why. I would yell at him, “Hey Dad!” but he wouldn’t or couldn’t hear me. He continued flirting with a black woman, whom I only saw the back of. When she turned around to see me pounding on the window, her face was that of a snake. The snake mocked me.
I was bewildered by my dreams of Chang Lin. She would be saying something but I couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. I could only see her red red lips. The lips came closer and closer. I leaned in. Then, she snapped, “Austin! You’re not listening to me at all! Were you trying to kiss me?”
I saw Willy being dragged away into a van that morphed into a dragon or phoenix, some mythical creature, which flew away. Willy looked at me forlornly, mouthing “How could you leave me?”
Mom was usually just doing very normal stuff, like vacuum cleaning in our old house, where I grew up in the US. Or cooking. But she wasn’t paying attention to me. The only time she did was to scold me for missing my grades. “Austin, where’s the other 30 points?” What? Had I done that poorly? Did I flunk? Would we be kicked out of the US?
I dreamt of robots. One featured Willstin, an army of Willstins, marching in perfect synchrony. I was their God-general. I was being carried on their tiny shoulders, swaying back and forth. Then I saw our enemy. They were the humans, standing defenseless across the field. I saw Mom and Dad, holding hands, shaking their heads slowly at their failure of a son. Mr. Li was looking at my mom, saying, “I told you so.” Mr. Smith was there too, smiling at me, proud of what I had accomplished, even though he would die because of it. “Stop! Stop!” I yelled, but the little robots ignored my commands. They couldn’t hear me over their own chanting, “Long live White, Long live White.” Chang Lin waved a US flag, as if she were watching a parade. I screamed, “Stop! Stop!” but no one listened to me.
I had a lot of dreams. But the best one was where I woke up, looked at the time but couldn’t read the numbers on my band, went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and looked in the mirror. I looked good. I looked great. I looked pure Chinese.
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“Austin, can you hear me? Austin, are you awake?” A tiny voice tried to interrupt my sleep. Was it another one of those hyper-realistic dreams?
“Austin, we’re here. We’re at Mars.” I recognized the voice as Willstin’s. I croaked. “Good, you’re up. Don’t say anything. Though you’re perfectly hydrated, you’re mouth is dry. Your eyes are probably caked so don’t try opening them up. We’ll get you out of this capsule soon. Just relax. We’ll clean you up in a sec.”
I still wasn’t sure if this was a dream or not. I certainly felt dreamy, but this dream didn’t carry any emotions. The top opened and robot arms reached in and pulled me into a sitting position. Those arms gently removed the cap, which didn’t want to let go of my head after 5 months of close embrace. It finally came off with the pop of suction release. Though I was breathing under the mask, I gulped at the air of the cabin. I looked over to see Dad and Chang Lin in about the same state, like fish out of water. I wanted to tell Chang Lin that her hair had grown back a bit, but the vomit got in the way.
The robots pulled me out of the gel, disgustingly topped with my puke. I was only slightly less embarrassed as I heard my Dad and Chang Lin also throwing up. Misery loves company.
I averted my eyes from Chang Lin as the robots helped us out of our coffins. I felt like the dead rising. I was mildly surprised to see the muscles on my legs.
The robots sprayed us down, like we were in a carwash. I went through one once when I was a kid, when I sat in my really rich friend’s car. Man, I loved that carwash drive thru, seein
g the water and soap spray off the windows while I was all dry inside. It’s not as much fun when you’re the car though.
Cleaned of gel and vomit and whatever else was in the capsule with me for 5 months – I didn’t want to dwell on it - the robots handed us our clothes. New clothes, not the ones we had worn when we had boarded the spaceship. These were light, of some material I couldn’t identify, but very soft. They were pretty formless but very comfortable. I guess the robots felt like we should be capable of dressing ourselves by now since they didn’t help anymore.
Willstin waddled over, “Good morning! Technically it’s 3 am in Vegas, the last place where time zones made a difference. But we’re starting afresh, and it’s morning at the Mars base.”
“I’m not hungry, but I’m starving,” Chang Lin said. I totally agreed with her paradoxical statement.
Dad said, “I could really use a coffee. Or a shot of whiskey.”
Willstin amicably agreed, “Let’s go to the galley and get you some food, real food.” I looked at him suspiciously, but he didn’t salute me, so I gathered my God-general status had disappeared with my dream.
“Man, I had so many dreams,” I said. Dad and Chang Lin agreed, and we talked about them over breakfast, but we kept the crazy ones to ourselves.
Dad asked Willstin, “So what happened?”
Yoda came over and said, “A lot. We barely escaped from the chasing rocket. We had to drop an engine to divert the missiles.”
“Drop an engine? Isn’t that, um, bad?” I asked.
“It’s not ideal for space travel,” agreed Yoda, “But it allowed us to live. We have 3 more, so it was expendable.”
Dad calculated, “With one less engine, I assume we took longer than 5 months to get here.”
“Yes, you have been asleep for 8 months. It was longer than we would’ve liked.”
Willstin chimed in, “But on the bright side, you got 3 more months of excellent diet, exercise and education!” All 3 of us glared at him.
Yoda continued, “Otherwise, the rest of the trip was relatively uneventful. Some minor system glitches, nothing we couldn’t handle.” Somehow I think he was saving us from knowing how close to death we really came, not that we would’ve known. It was nice to have slept through it all.
I said, “Thank you.” Dad and Chang Lin echoed me. The robots seemed genuinely pleased.
A worrisome thought suddenly struck me. “Hey, won’t the Mars base reject us, or attack us? Aren’t they afraid of AI as well?”
Dad put an arm on me, and I tried not to flinch from my reflexive anger at him, which hadn’t really gone away since it seemed like only yesterday when he explained his side of the story. “Yoda chose Mars for a reason. Mars is very libertarian. Basically, all the renegades, adventurers, free thinkers, and political dissidents who weren’t thrown in jail, come here. This is the last frontier, where living is hard, but you’re free to think and do as you like, as long as you chip in to help the community and you don’t do anything to hurt or bother anyone else.”
Yoda added, “We signaled our intent to come a long time ago, even before you had joined us at the space station. We tested out the waters. They were skeptical at first; there were people who disagreed. But their Supreme Court ruled in our favor, that AI was life, and all intelligent life was welcomed in their Constitution. The folks who didn’t want us to come relented, their belief so great in the Constitution and the colony of Mars.”
“And we’ve already started making ourselves useful,” Willstin said.
“How? We’ve been in this tube for 8 months!” I challenged.
“Light travels faster than our space ship.” Willstin let me work it out.
“And, uh, communication via electronic signals travel at the speed of light.”
“Uh huh,” Willstin encouraged.
“And…and.” I failed to see the connection.
Chang Lin ventured, “And you were able to start sending over programs that helped the colony?”
Willstin lit up, literally. His body changed to a bright green, “Bingo!”
Yoda explained, less colorfully, “At first, we asked how we could help, and they sent over troublesome programs, ones that had deeply hidden bugs that they couldn’t find and fix. Of course, those were easy for us to remedy. We debugged the programs and sent them back. But then we offered optimized programs that did what the original intent was but of course much, much better. They were very suspicious at first, spending months validating that there weren’t some hidden agenda, secret virus embedded. Our programs were harmless being sent over the comms channel because we weren’t connected to their net, so they could take their time ensuring the programs were clean. They tested our optimized modules out on closed systems, off the net, and confirmed that our programs were many times more efficient, better, often doing things that they didn’t expect, didn’t even realize was possible.”
“In short, we made their lives better. They saw the benefits from our contributions just from a few minor programs shared over the relatively thin bandwidth of space comms. They are now looking forward to our arrival to help improve, well probably completely rewrite if we’re honest, their more important automated functions. We haven’t even been able to demonstrate what we can do with hardware improvements.” Yoda actually sounded like he was bragging.
“It’s not all a bed of roses,” Willstin said. “We’ll be quarantined in a mini-base that they’ve built for us robots. You guys can go into the main base. There’s a human quarantine area there but they can confirm you are free of any major diseases within a day. We have to stay in the mini-base until they decide we’re ok to join the humans. They have warned us the mini-base is not connected to their net, and is monitored 24x7. ‘Monitored’ is a nice way of saying guarded. If we do anything suspicious, they will blast the mini-base.”
“We have to leave you?” Chang Lin asked plaintively. Obviously she has decided to fully trust the robots.
“Well, technically, we have to leave you, but yes. Sorry. Remember, your job, Ambassador Chang Lin. Ambassador Longwhite, Junior.”
I was going to protest being demoted to “Junior,” but then I realized it was just to differentiate me from my dad, Ambassador Longwhite, Senior.
Chapter 5: The Robot Dilemma
“Where there is love there is life.”
-- Mahatma Gandhi
The next few months were a swirl of activity. We made it through quarantine without problems. And then we were welcomed into the colony like heroes. Some of it was because they were truly impressed we were the fathers of AI, the progenitors of the robots who had helped out the colony so much already, even before arriving. Some of it because we were a novelty, bringing news from Earth firsthand. Though the Marnese (what they called themselves; they thought “Martians” sounded like aliens) were very proud to be separate from Earth, to have “escaped” it like prisoners on the lam, they also not-so-secretly craved for “real” news, not the stuff that they caught off the airwaves.
“What’s really going on in China?”
“How about the US?”
We answered feebly, our knowledge not really adding anything new to what they knew already. Nevertheless, they ate it up with relish. We were completely at a loss when people from other nationalities asked about their countries. But they were satisfied even if we could give them the barest snippets. “Kenya? Hmm, I think they got a new president.” They already knew that from the airwaves, but they would nod appreciatively, “Yes, that Arusei guy. I knew he would win. He was always so political, so conniving.”
We were given an orientation course for a few weeks on how Mars worked – the Constitution first and foremost; laws and regulations, and the more nebulous customs and mores. We had a quick overview of their society, which though egalitarian, still had different groups, cliques. They taught us their short history. But the teachers were pleasantly surprised, as were we, at how much we knew already, courtesy of 9 months of intensive, subconscious education.
The classes were really more like a review.
In fact, we would stumble across new knowledge about all sorts of stuff that we didn’t even know we knew. For example, I realized I could converse with Chang Lin in Chinese completely fluently, with no hesitation at all, pulling up all sort of chengyu without even breaking a sweat. My dad jumped into an impromptu chengyu quoting game, and for an hour, we sounded like a tripartite beat poet.
Between classes, we were shown how to do basic day-to-day living stuff like where to get food and how to find out our day’s work assignment (initially, the classes were our assignment). There was no money; everyone just did their jobs and got what they needed from the communal printers, within the tight quota given to each person.
We were assigned buddies around our age, our informal guides whom we could ask dumb, or illicit, questions, like “How does this piece of equipment work?” or “What do kids do for fun around here?” Dad was introduced to a lot of adults, and there were many hours of the day when he was away from us, but Chang Lin and I were inseparable. Our new buddies were nice, and they introduced us to their friends, but there was comfort in our friendship that started back on Earth.
We were given a small apartment with 3 tiny bedrooms. The beds curled up into the wall when we weren’t sleeping, replaced with desks that ingeniously expanded, like a pop-up card. We shared a bathroom that auto-cleaned between each of our uses. It was like the whole room got flushed. That was it. There was no kitchen or family room or study. Mars base didn’t have the luxury of space, limited by the size of the dome. They were already in the middle of constructing a new dome next door, but they were still a year away from completion. They were originally supposed to have finished it already, but it got delayed due to the building of the mini-base for the robots.