The Passenger Ch. 05

I shook my head.

"No, Anne. You're not a machine."

I reached out and put my arm around her.

"You're feeling pretty awful right now, aren't you? You're hurting. You feel grief, anger, pain... And only you know what else. Don't you?"

She nodded wordlessly.

"Do you honestly believe that a machine could feel what you are feeling right now? A droid is a machine. It's designed to mimic human behavior, but it's still a machine. It can't feel. I can't love. It doesn't know what it's like to be loved... But you do. I know it's a cliché, but it's still true: pain is ow you know you're alive. You're in pain. Machines can't feel pain. You're not a machine."

"But part of me is machine. You said it yourself. My body is artificial."

"So? Look at it this way, Anne. If I lose an arm or a leg, I can have it regrown in a few weeks, because that's possible right now. But a few centuries ago, nobody knew how to do that. If I'd lived in those days and I'd lost a limb, a prosthetic was the best I could have hoped for. I'd have had to live out my days with an arm or a leg made from plasteel and artificial skin and a bunch of mechanical actuators. And before that, in ancient times, people had to make do with a piece of wood for a leg, or with a steel hook instead of a prosthetic hand. But tell me this: would such an artificial limb have made me less human?"

"I'm not a human with a prosthesis, Harvey. All of me is fake. Not a single part of me is real."

"Wrong," I told her. "All of you is real."

I thought for a moment.

"Have you ever heard of a world named Corey's Folly?" I continued. "It's about halfway from here to the core. It was settled roughly three hundred standard years ago by a bunch of religious nuts who were led by a guy named Corey. Hence the name. They decided to set up their own version of Paradise. That idea stemmed mainly from the fact that their own home world was sick and tired of their religious nonsense and pretty much shipped them out at gunpoint."

She shrugged.

"Not the first time that happened."

"No," I agreed. "And it won't be the last, either. Although I understand that in this case both parties were glad to see the last of each other. Anyway, they settled Corey's Folly and rubbed blue mud into their bellybuttons while contemplating the Great Cosmic All, or whatever it was that they did. For about a year, and then they knew they were in trouble. They had begun to age far too quickly. Before long, the oldest among them began to die from advanced decrepitude. They finally managed to trace the problem to a local virus that attacked them on a genetic level. They had to find a solution quickly, and they did. They altered some of their own genetic sequences by synthesizing the proper recombinant DNA, and that stopped their premature aging."

I drained my mug, then went on: "Unfortunately, it also stopped their procreation. The genetic modifications that made them resistant to the virus had also made them sterile. And they couldn't crack that particular problem, no matter what they tried. So they still faced extinction."

She said nothing. Listening. Waiting for me to get to the point.

"Their solution was based on the same skills they had used the first time," I continued. "Instead on relying on natural reproduction, they decided to grow new bodies artificially. And while they were at it, they edited the next generation's genetic makeup to optimize it. They wanted more intelligence, a better immunity to their planet's microbes and viruses, and an optimized body configuration. They eliminated their equivalents of heart attacks, the appendix and the common cold."

"Didn't their religious background get in the way?" Anne asked.

"Apparently not. If it did, survival was obviously more important to them in the end. And as an interesting side effect, the next generation's increased intelligence eliminated all of their original religious impulses entirely. But that's not the point. The point is that they now have a thriving society, and they're actually a very pleasant people to deal with. I've made cargo runs to Corey's Folly several times, and if I hadn't done my usual read-up on worlds to which I've never been before, I'd never have known about the completely artificial nature of their bodies. Because today there's not a single Corian whose body hasn't been vat-grown on spec."

"You mean they're clones?"

"No. Clones are just copies of the original organism. The Corians are not nearly that natural. They design and synthesize a DNA blueprint from scratch, and then they grow a entirely new Corian around that DNA template. You can't get more artificial than that with a fully organic body."

She gave me a sad little smile.

"You really have an answer for everything, don't you?"

I shook my head.

"No. Not even close. But this is the best I can give you, and it's nowhere near to the answers you want. I just wish I could give you more than just words."

She held out her hand and I took it.

"It helps," she said simply. "And words are not all that you've been giving me. Not by a long shot. Thank you."

"I love you, Anne. And nothing is going to change that."

She squeezed my hand.

"I know," she said.

She gazed at the bulkhead for a few long moments.

"Can you at least tell me what memories I've lost?" she asked finally.

"I think so. From what I understand, I guess it shouldn't do any harm."

I thought for a moment.

"I'm not sure if I know all of it, of course," I continued. "I can only go by what you told me earlier, and what Pete told Brax while you were unconscious. He said your neural matrix overloaded, because of your emotional response when you fell in love with me, and he had to remove all memories with an intensely emotional or sexual content in order to stabilize you. So the best I can do is to go over everything since I first met you. If there's anything else that I don't know of... Well, there's no way to tell."

She nodded.

"I understand."

"Alright," I said. "During our first night together on the Slowboat you told me about your trip on the Excalibur. You told me that the crew was all female, and all lesbian."

She raised her eyebrows.

"Interesting."

I chuckled.

"Yes, indeed. You told me that you weren't very experienced when you came on board, and you thought that someone was in pain when you first heard the screaming, but what you walked in on turned out to be something entirely different. They seduced you and they all taught you a lot about pleasure and about ways to give it and to receive and to enjoy it. You were tempted to stay on board for more of it, but in the end you decided it wasn't the life you wanted, so you moved on."

She stared in the distance, the expression on her face indecipherable.

"It... resonates, somehow," she said finally. "I don't remember any of that. But... It feels... right."

"I suppose that's the memory of a memory," I said. "At least that's what I'm guessing it might be."

She smiled wryly.

"A damn shame. It sounds like a good memory to have."

I caressed the back of her hand.

"You'll have other good memories, Anne. I promise."

"What more did we lose?"

"From the way you phrase that I guess you've worked out by now that we made love lots of times on or way to Ursa."

She smiled, looking just a little bit shy, then she nodded.

"Our first time was that same first evening," I continued. "It just... happened. It was a little sudden, and I think neither of us were expecting it, but it happened, and it was amazingly good. We did it again the following morning and that was even better. And it's been absolutely awesome ever since."

"A few nights ago, in that little hotel on Ursa," she said, "It was so... I don't know. I was excited and a little nervous, because as far as I knew then, it was my first time. But it felt so... Right. Familiar. I wondered how it could be that easy. I didn't expect it to be, but somehow it wasn't."

She smiled sadly.

"Now I know."

"Maybe that means you haven't lost all of it," I suggested.

She shrugged.

"I don't think it makes that much of a difference. Or maybe it does. I don't know... So... What did we do, you and I?"

I smiled as those sweet memories welled up in me, ready for me to share them with her.

"Well, let's see. The first time we made love, you took me in your mouth and you made me cum that way. Then I licked your nipples and you came, just from that, and you told me that had never happened before. Then I went inside you and we made love that way until we were both satisfied, and we slept in each other's arms. The next morning, when we woke up, we cleaned ourselves up and then immediately got ourselves all gooey and sticky again." I smiled. "And we can get all of that back, Anne. I know it's probably not much of a consolation right now, but we can create new memories together. Great memories."

"Well, I've had guys trying to seduce me with less original lines, I'll give you that."

"Hey, I'm not trying--" I began.

"I know," she said, smiling.

She reached out and touched my face, and some of the haunted look disappeared from her eyes.

"I know you're not," she said softly. "I know. Because you're a good man."

"I wish I could do more, Anne."

She smiled, and while it wasn't a happy smile, at least it was a little less sad than before.

"You are," she said. "More than you know."

I stood up and held out my arms. She rose, stepped into my embrace, and I held her.

"You know what the really bad thing is?" she said, a little later. "I no longer really know who I am."

She shrugged, and she looked so confused.

"Why am I thinking what I'm thinking?" she continued. "Why am I doing what I'm doing? Is it me? Is it the droid software? Is it AI programming? I mean... How can I tell?"

I slowly nodded. I completely understood where she was coming from. I just didn't quite know how to answer her.

Over the years I've had to deal with just about every in-flight repair job you can think of: from blockages in the recycler (unpleasant) to hiccups in the artigrav system (even more unpleasant, in their own way) and once with a small bug in the electronics that control the laundry unit. And when I say "bug", I mean "bug". There's a small ant-like insect native to the swamp world Krre'ach-cha, just beyond the far end of the Rift. While the critter itself was completely harmless to human life, it did have an inconvenient appetite for certain polymer resins, including the type used as an insulator in the laundry's control unit. The bug itself was barely visible to the naked eye, but the domestic disaster it caused was of epic proportions. Still, I was lucky that it was only the laundry unit that went sideways and not a more vital system.

In short, I've had to learn my way around pretty much anything on a ship that may need fixing one day. But healing a broken soul came in an entirely different category.

"How the hell am I going to deal with this?" I asked myself.

Myself shrugged. "Same as always," he said. "You consider everything you can think of, until you find something that looks like it should work. Then you try it and you improvise as necessary. You use whatever you have. Hell, you know the drill."

I sighed. Myself was right. Again. That was getting to be an annoying habit of his, and we'd have to work on sometime soon. But that could wait. Right now, Anne was my most pressing concern.

"Art imitates nature," I said. "You and I are not so different. Yes, your body is not fully organic, and mine is. So what? What makes us tick is still pretty much the same."

The deeply skeptical look she gave me spoke volumes.

"What I mean is this," I continued. "My brain works in layers. Deep down, at the lowest level, there's the autonomous part that keeps my heart beating and my bowels moving. It does that all by itself and I can't really change any of it. Then, just above that, there are parts that I have some control over, like my breathing. I don't have to think about it, but if I want to, I can take a deep breath or hold my breath, or whatever, but if I stop paying attention to it the whole thing reverts to being an automatic set-and-forget kind of thing. And when I breathe, or walk, or whatever it is that I do, I don't have to worry about which muscles to contract and relax; I just decide to take a step or a breath, and the lower layers of my brain pulls the right strings for me, all by itself."

She nodded wordlessly.

"Then there's my subconscious. For the most part, I have no idea what's going on in there, but some of my deepest hopes and fears supposedly live there, or so the shrinks say, and that does control me at least in part. They influence my opinions and my actions and everything else, except I'm not aware of it, and I think I'm making the decisions all by myself. Meanwhile that old subconsciousness quietly sits there in the middle, and it influences all my decisions significantly. And it controls my autonomous system, too, because whenever I subconsciously react to something, my heartbeat changes or I begin to perspire, or whatever.

I felt a wry smile find its way to my face.

"In fact," I continued, "When you think about it, my conscious mind has far less to say about my actions and the state of my body than I would like to believe. I think I'm in charge, and nominally maybe I am, but the restrictions and the limitations are so tight, that ninety-nine percent of the time I don't even know they're there. Yet I think of myself as a free agent. But in reality, nobody is that free. Everyone operates within the matrix of their own hopes and fears. They are slaves to the needs of their bodies, and not only can't they control it; they don't even realize it for the most part.

She slowly nodded.

"So what you're saying is..." she mused.

"I'm saying that, for you, it's exactly the same thing. Your body originally came with certain mechanisms that are regulated by built-in software, over which you have no control. That's like my autonomous system. Then there's another software layer on top of that, to interface the autonomous layer with what was originally your behavioral software, but is now replaced by your AI-supported consciousness. It's that consciousness that is the real you. You are a person: you are self-aware, you have hopes and fears, you feel joy and pain. Yes, your brain is a nano-crystalline matrix while mine is a lump of carbon-based cells that form synapses, working on an electrochemical basis. But that's only a detail. The difference between my human brain and that of, say, a Tragulan, is just as great, because Tragulans are not carbon-based, either. But they're just as much alive and as much conscious as you and I both are."

She smiled.

"So you're saying I'm closer to a Tragulan than I am to you, and that's supposed to cheer me up. Really, Harvey? Seriously?"

I chuckled. It was so good to see her smile again, so good to hear her make a joke.

"Yeah, okay, I get it," she said. "But I can't help wondering which part of me it is that makes me think something or want something or do something. You see..."

She hesitated.

"What is it?"

"Well..." she said slowly. "It's also the way I feel about you. Is that me, or is it the sex droid software talking?"

"I suppose that depends on how you feel about me," I said carefully.

"I love you," she said simply. "That much I know. But..."

She looked at me, took a deep breath.

"But I also want you," she rushed on. "I want to make love with you each and every time I look at you. I want to feel your tongue on my clit, I want to taste you, I want you to cum in my mouth. I want to feel you deep inside me, I want you to hold me while I cum, I want to feel you grow so hard inside me and watch your face when you finally lose it and you cum inside me. I want all that, and a lot more, and I want it all the time. And... I don't know if that's me, or if it's the sex droid software that wants that."

I held her hand, thought for a moment.

"I can't tell you which is which," I said finally. "Most people have trouble at some time in their lives telling love and lust apart. But... What I'm trying to say, Anne, is that it doesn't matter. I'm as much unable to tell what's what as you are. But what I do know is that I'm attracted to you because you're a woman and I'm a man, and that means that my own genetic programming plays a role there. Nature compels me to be attracted to a gorgeous woman like you, because I'm genetically programmed to reproduce. That programming makes me want to make love with you and not with Raz, to give you a suitably wacky example."

She chuckled.

"I bet it's the fur."

"Yeah, right. My point is that I'm attracted to you and not to Raz because, to be blunt, all that my genetic programming cares about is to get me to reproduce. So I feel no special attraction to Raz at all, while I'm close to having wet dreams about you. But at the same time, I do love you with all my heart, and I know that's me and not my primitive hind brain that only wants to propagate its stupid little genes."

She sighed, looking a little sad.

"I'll never have children, Harvey."

"Well, we can always adopt some. There are countless orphans out there who could do with a couple of loving parents. But that's not the point. What I'm trying to say is that I love you, and that's just me. I know that. And don't ask me how I know. I just do. But at the same time, I can't deny that what I want to do with you as soon as I get you into bed is at least in part the result of my genetic programming. I can't separate it out any more than you can. But while that is true, I also want to make love with you because you make me happy and it makes me happy to make you feel good.\\ Giving you as much pleasure as I can is something that's important to me, and my genetic programming has nothing to do with that. As far as spreading my genes is concerned, raping every woman in sight would do the job quite nicely. But that's not how this works. I want to give you pleasure and make you feel good and make you happy because I love you."

"Do you really mean that?"

"Yes, I do. I can't be happy when I see you being unhappy. I love you, Anne. And whatever primitive impulse might be hidden in there doesn't matter. I love you, and that's just me. Me, Harvey. Nothing else."

"No, I meant about adopting children. Do you really mean that?"

"When we get to that point, yes, I think it would be great. As you said, we can't have children together. That is one of the ways in which the artificial part of your background is a restriction, I'll admit. But infertility isn't exclusive to AIs. And it's no reason why you and I shouldn't start a family together."

Two big tears ran down across her face, but this time they weren't tears of grief or pain. She held out her hand and I took it.

"But I think that's still a little down the line," I continued. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves quite yet. Unless you're eager to get started right now, of course, but first want you to be happy. My only problem is that I don't really know what else to say or do."

She smiled through her tears as she wiped her face with her one hand, still holding mine with the other.

"You don't have to," she whispered.

Then she looked at me closely.

"You're tired," she said.

I smiled and nodded.

"I'm used to keeping strange hours when there's a need for it. But this has been a little... emotional for me."

"Yes."

She looked a little forlorn all of a sudden.

"I... I don't know why I would need sleep at all. I mean, my brain is artificial, right?"

"Yes, but it's modeled on organic brains, and organic brains need sleep in order to do some housekeeping. It's quite an efficient thing, really. While we're awake we store whatever we can't process immediately, and when we sleep we shut down on the constant data input, which gives the brain a chance to process the stored information and to transfer experiences from short to long term memory and all that. Doing it that way cuts down on the organic hardware requirements. Meanwhile the body restores itself biochemically, too. All that stuff sounds like something you might need as well."