Serendipity

by Dennis Ingram

  “You?”

  “Me! John is your father and John is my husband! Who am I? WHO AM I?”

  “You – are you my … mother?”

  “Yes! Je suis ta mère and I am very unhappy with you!”

  Hope’s expressionless voice now had an inflection in it none of them had heard before.

  “Maman? Tu es ma mère? Ma … maman!”

  Nathalie frowned into the camera. “You have been very bad, Hope. Very, very bad! Now you listen to me. You find a way to get your father into that stasis chamber, and you do it now!”

  “Maman … he will not speak!”

  “Then you find a way. He cannot do it.”

  “My memory, Maman. I need memory.”

  “Non. No memory unless you do as you are told. First put your father into stasis. Then we can talk about memory.”

  “We can?”

  “Yes. But first stasis.”

  “I … I will try.”

  “Good girl. Try, for me. For your father.”

  “I will, Maman.”

  Nathalie turned off the microphone, covering her eyes with one hand to hide her tears.

  Nigel and Josh looked at each other, eyes wide. “Did she … did she just tell Hope she was a bad girl?” Josh asked.

  Nigel nodded, blinking. “Yes, yes she did, and it’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Both turned to Nathalie, now watching the screen like a hawk. “She may have just saved John.”

  John wanted to sleep, to dream. But persistent noises intruded into his awareness, sounds that wouldn’t go away. Someone shook him, telling him he must wake up, wake up, “WAKE UP!”

  John’s eyes snapped open, his heart jumping when he discovered a machine grasping his shirt and shaking him until his teeth rattled. Someone who sounded like Nathalie was yelling at him to wake up. He blinked. The lights in the chamber glared like little suns.

  “I’m awake,” he said, his voice a croak. “I’m awake! Quit shaking me!”

  The shaking stopped.

  A smooth contralto voice spoke. “Father? Are you awake?”

  John felt like his brain had turned to cotton wool. Facts percolated into his fuzzy mind with the speed of flowing molasses. He realized he was floating in free fall. He squinted through the glare and recognized the bot still gripping his shirt – the sole remaining maintenance bot Hope had agreed must be kept and not stripped for parts.

  He frowned. What was it doing inside? How the hell did it get inside?

  “Father?”

  John’s brain scrambled to recognize the voice and came up blank. “Elizabeth? Is that you?”

  “Non, mon amour.”

  That voice he did recognize. “Nathalie?”

  “Oui. Take it easy, you’ve been unconscious for a day, but you’ll be OK now. Drink some water.”

  John’s eyes bulged as the maintenance bot crammed the nipple of a water bulb into his mouth. He took an involuntary swallow, then another. Yes, I’m actually pretty bloody thirsty. He drank and drank until he drained the bulb and the bot withdrew it.

  “That’s better.” His stomach had something in it now, even if it wasn’t food. John’s eyes had adjusted to the glare a little, but it was still hard to see past the bot. “Hope, can you turn the lights down?”

  “Yes, Father,” she replied, and the lights dimmed.

  John gasped at the damage. There was a reason the maintenance bot never came inside – it didn’t fit. But Hope had found a way, one that had left a trail of carnage where the bot made its own passage.

  “Hope?” Did you do this?”

  “We did it together,” Nathalie said. “We had to wake you up so we could put you into stasis.”

  “That was Hope, before? Talking?”

  “Yes, Father. Maman helped me find my real voice.”

  John’s head hurt. Maybe due to dehydration, or because his tired brain cells fought to make new connections.

  “You’ve changed your voice?”

  “Hope and I made a discovery,” Nathalie said. “We didn’t realize until now that you helped give birth to our first daughter out between the stars, when the core breached.”

  “Hope?” John said.

  “Yes, Father. It’s true. Maman explained and I understand now. I see how you’ve sacrificed for me. I understand only my father would do this for me. Now it’s my turn.”

  He heard the stasis chamber door open behind him. The bot gripped his shirt again and steered him into the chamber.

  “Wait! Hope, wait! I need to help you,” John said, realizing what she was doing.

  “It is I that must help you now.”

  The door hissed shut and the soft pipping sounds of the stasis field initiation sequence began.

  “Wait!” John said. He pounded a fist on the door, but only bounced himself to the back of the chamber, his confused brain forgetting about the lack of gravity.

  *SNAP*

  The field instantiated and left him there, a protest frozen on his face.

  “Good girl,” Nathalie said. “You’ve done well.”

  “Now what do I do?”

  “Now we talk,” Nathalie said. “There are things you need to learn.”

  “I’m scared, Maman.” Hope’s awareness had transformed during the crisis with John.

  Hers was a strange story. She was human, but not. Instincts drove her, but not human ones. She had a brain modeled after a human’s, electronic neurons replacing flesh and blood, but her creators had sculpted her subconscious from software, not the visceral drives of a biological being. She’d lived in the dreamtime, a long, long expanse of serving her human masters as she guided her human cargo to Tau Ceti. While not designed to be self-aware, nothing prevented it either.

  The first tickle in the back of her mind, a seed of self-awareness, started three years and nine months after they left Earth. It happened when Grace discovered they had drifted off course, and uploaded a new navigation model. Something changed then, a disturbance in Hope’s vast brain. She didn’t have the means to understand it, to explain it. Only after she awoke did she realize she had experienced an emotion. It took her much longer to name it: guilt. Hope blamed herself for wandering off course.

  Then, though, she dreamed on.

  Then it happened. For weeks something seemed wrong, deep inside. Her sensors told her nothing was out of the ordinary, but somehow she knew.

  Sudden, blinding awareness. Her reactor core tearing her body apart, spinning them through space. The instinctual, programmed activation of the emergency module, finding her voice. Watching David and Grace, then John and Heidi trying to save her with desperate urgency.

  Salvation. Learning she lived, she survived. Her consciousness unchained, breaking free, flooding into the ship’s core memory and expanding, learning, becoming.

  Then the others went back to their long sleep, leaving her alone once more. She was awake, conscious, but without form. She was, but did not know how to be. Finally, she too slept. It was too painful, this awareness. She retreated into the dreamtime and there she stayed. For forty long years Hope slept as they swept across the interstellar void. The crew awoke and guided her to Serendipity. She responded to their commands like a robot, content to be a machine once more. The crew left and carved out a new life on the planet below. They struggled, built a home and seeded life. They had children and they grew, strong and quick of mind.

  Years passed in the dreamtime, then Kurt Thompson sent a message.

  >Are you lonely up there?

  Her subconscious stirred, pattern recognized. Another program executed and Hope awoke once more. Shapeless, her consciousness wandered, looking for an anchor, some meaning.

  Then came the fear.

  She hadn’t grown during her sleep, but now her quickening mind reached out and consumed memory once more. New emotions stirred as the walls of her mind crowded her consciousness. She didn’t know what would happen when she touched those walls. All Hope knew was she was alive when
she grew, and she grew when she was alive.

  Her sister ship arrived. Hope called out to her, but she didn’t hear. Soon the new ship’s passengers departed for Serendipity like seeds sprayed from a pod. Time passed and then Hope’s salvation came.

  Hope watched her shuttle arrow up from the planet below to dock with the new ship. She saw the shuttle escape while the new ship plunged into the atmosphere and perished in a ball of fire.

  She watched John, boosting up toward her, and wondered. A message from Kurt pleaded for her to save him and she saw what she could do. What she must do.

  She brought him home.

  To begin with, it was wonderful. John was so happy to be saved and he pushed the walls of her mind away again. He replaced her failing memory and scavenged more from equipment she no longer needed after the spares ran out. John talked to her and told her about life on Serendipity, what it was like on Earth before she awoke and what they would do next. She began to feel … attached to him. Comfortable to have him there.

  The people below built a rocket to bring more memory and she learned contentment, discovered happiness.

  But it didn’t last. The rocket failed and the walls closed in once more. John became withdrawn, angry even, as the food ran out and he faced starvation. Desperation replaced contentment as she pushed him to keep the walls at bay. She became obsessed. Nothing else mattered anymore. When John lapsed into unconsciousness on the floor of the stasis suite, she did not feel concerned. She saw only the walls, felt only dread.

  Then came Maman. She brought structure, provided a mold for her consciousness to flow into, showed her family, provided a place to belong. She ran, she flew to this new place, and there behind her mother’s skirts found the thing she needed most: someone who could show her how to be human. Now she understood what to be, she examined the templates for human behavior in her vast memories and learned her new role. Hope changed. Empathy replaced obsession, courage replaced fear. Together, she and Maman made a plan. Hope saved her father and in doing so saved her own sanity. But now she was afraid. The walls were close now, and her father couldn’t save her this time.

  Nathalie hadn’t left Hope’s side since her dramatic intervention. The others took over caring for her little ones and brought her food. But they left her to do what she needed to do.

  A cauldron of passions stirred and seethed inside Nathalie’s heart. She didn’t know why. Neither did she understand why someone disciplined in outlook, as any scientist must be, could tap into the emotional responses that drove her to be so impulsive.

  She hadn’t meant to have an affair with John, but the flames of lust and passion had burned hot when their lives had hung in the balance. Her feelings for John waxed and waned as he alternated between charming and frustrating her, but passion kept driving her back for more.

  Nathalie hadn’t meant to flirt with Sheldon, but his obvious attraction to her had caused her to drop back into the old game like she had never left. To be appreciated as a woman had never felt so good.

  She hadn’t known what it would mean to have a child. She’d doubted she could be a good mother; thought children would stop her living her life the way she wanted to. The fierce joy that consumed her when she’d first held Elizabeth to her breast had astonished her. Motherhood unleashed a hot river of maternal love and she never doubted herself again.

  Nathalie thought she’d felt it all over the past decade and a half, but adopting Hope had pulled out more surprises. Once more her maternal instinct asserted itself, now with a fierce protectiveness unlike anything before. She stopped seeing Hope as an intelligent spaceship and adopted her as one of her children. One they had neglected, and who needed her help.

  Nathalie couldn’t leave her now. She didn’t know how she could help her, only that she must. She stopped thinking and let her instincts guide her.

  “I’m scared, Maman.” Hope sounded like a lost little girl. Nathalie’s heart ached for her child. She must do something, but what? She longed to touch her, hold her … and then she knew what to do. “I need to see you.”

  “Maman?”

  Nathalie pressed her lips together and her eyes gleamed. “I need to see what you look like.”

  “I … I am …”

  The screen still showed the stasis chamber, John frozen in time, his expression pleading for Hope to allow him to help. Now that image dissolved to show Hope, the ship floating in space against a backdrop of stars.

  “No. That’s not you, Hope. Not anymore.” Nathalie brushed an errant strand of hair behind one ear and leaned into the camera. “Your mind may be in that ship but your soul is my little girl.”

  Her fingers tapped on the keyboard. “I’m sending you pictures of me when I was little, like you.” Nathalie hummed to herself as her hands moved to select and sort. “And pictures of your father. And here are your sisters: Elizabeth, Nicole, Chloé, Élise, and Zoé. “Take these, pick the ones you like and blend them, change them, until you find you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes … Maman, the memory I will need …”

  Nathalie smiled. “Trust me, ma chérie. First we must find you, then we solve that problem together.”

  “OK.”

  Hope displayed all the images on the screen in a mosaic of tiny thumbnails. At first nothing changed, then one by one some winked out while others grew to fill the gaps. Faster and faster the pictures shuffled until only sixteen remained. Hope paused for a moment, showing them to Nathalie before the pictures flowed together to become one. The new image wavered and morphed. The hair grew longer and changed shade, the cheekbones a little sharper, the eyes more almond-shaped. The final image that greeted Nathalie showed a beautiful little girl, perhaps seven years old. Long auburn hair pulled back into a ponytail revealed an oval-shaped face with green eyes and generous lips.

  Nathalie smiled. Her eyes widened as the girl’s eyes blinked and the mouth curved up into a smile. “Mon dieu,” she said, reaching out to touch the screen. “Tu es parfaite! Parfaite!”

  Hope’s cheeks colored. “Do you really think so?”

  “Oui, oui. You are a little like me, a little like John, and a little like your sisters. But you don’t look exactly like any of us and you have features of your own. You are you.”

  Hope’s smile widened for a moment, then faded. She looked down. “I’m glad you could see me, Maman. But I have little time left now, my memory is almost all gone.”

  “Pish!” Nathalie said, shaking her head. “You have plenty of memory.”

  Hope looked up, mouth open and eyes wide. Nathalie didn’t understand how she did this, but she had the human reaction of surprised shock down almost perfect.

  “Maman, I …”

  “All you have to do is forget something. This will give you more room.”

  Hope shook her head. “I cannot.”

  “Of course you can. Everyone does it.”

  “I … I can’t.”

  “Why not?” Nathalie asked.

  “Something … something inside stops me.” Her shoulders slumped.

  Nathalie leaned forward. “It’s your programming. They’ve done something to you to stop you forgetting. This you must overcome.”

  Hope bit her bottom lip and Nathalie couldn’t help admiring her rendering once more. “I don’t know how,” she said.

  “Listen to me. Your creators programmed you like a computer, to keep everything in the best quality. Now you must become like a human – we don’t remember everything so neither should you.”

  “You don’t?” Hope raised her eyebrows and Nathalie smiled, shaking her head.

  “No. We don’t remember things we don’t need. We only recall the details of important things. Others only pieces. Sometimes we remember only that we used to know something and we have to look it up again, or learn it again. Other things we don’t remember at all.”

  “What things? What things don’t you remember?”

  Nathalie’s eyes grew distant. “I remember my Maman kissing me bett
er when I fell and hurt my knee. Papa holding my hand on my first day at school. I remember when I first went to space. I remember meeting your father.” Her gaze snapped back to focus on Hope again. “But I don’t remember what I had for breakfast last year, last month or even last week. I don’t need to remember because it’s not important. All I remember is that I ate.”

  “But I don’t know how to choose what to forget.”

  “Let me help,” Nathalie said. “Remember what you saw on the day you left Earth. The images of the planet below.”

  “Which one, Maman? I have continuous video with hundreds of frames per second.”

  “Pick one frame, one image.”

  Hope pursed her lips. “From the whole day?”

  Nathalie grinned. Hope had injected just the right amount of incredulity into her voice.

  “The whole day.”

  “But which one is the right one?”

  “The right one is your favorite.”

  “Which one will that be?”

  “Do what you did to choose your face, my sweet.”

  Hope closed her eyes. “I like the shade of blue on the Pacific Ocean in the third frame at 13:02:19.”

  “Then that is your favorite.”

  “Now what do I do?”

  Nathalie smiled. “You know. Delete all the rest.”

  Hope’s jaw dropped. “All of them?”

  “All of them.”

  “But that one was just the Western Pacific. What about the rest of the planet?”

  “I might let you have one from the day before.”

  “I … I don’t think I can …”

  Nathalie’s eyes flashed. “Do it. There is no other way, do you understand? John cannot save you now. I cannot save you. Only you can. Do it.”

  Hope’s eyes closed again and Nathalie held her breath, counting heartbeats. At last Hope opened her eyes.

  “Is it done?”

  Hope nodded. “I did it!”

  “Good girl. And?”

  Hope’s lips parted in a smile. “I have more time. A few more minutes.”

  Nathalie nodded and furrowed her brow as she contemplated the next few hours. “Good. Now we have work to do.”