Gohrlay[]
Dream of flight.
At first she was moving with ease through the low gravity corridors leading up towards the surface. After one final strong leap through the airlock she floated upwards and was almost free, but then her legs became heavy and she could not move. She began to get frightened, but then what was controlling her turned the fear to anger. She glared at the blue and white orb in the dark sky and blamed the Earth's grasping strength for her sluggishness. But that made no sense: Earth was distant, far above the gray moonscape and whispering quietly like a celestial bird wing slicing the solar wind.
Returning to full consciousness, she escaped from this latest in a string of dreams that made even her rare periods of sleep a painful reflection of the futility that smothered her waking hours. The details of the dream evaporated from Gohrlay's awareness when she began to process some meaning from the voice of her aide. "...even call first, but Overseer Doltun is here. He requests an audience." The lights in the bedroom automatically brightened and Gohrlay sat up in the center of the nest of her bedding, blinking for a moment into the glow of the doorway.
Badly sleep deprived, Gohrlay sprang out of bed, rushed past her aide and found herself at the front door of her residence before even having been able to clear her mind and think past the initial surprise of Doltun being there, at Gohrlay's residence. In the past, Gohrlay had always been summoned to Doltun's office in the Overseer sector of the Base. While signaling open the door, Gohrlay tried to push most of her long red hair away from her face.
Doltun was shorter than Gohrlay: his eyes were at the level of her chest. He stood there on her door step looking up at her, his proportionally large, child-like head tilted back. Doltun wore the Overseer-style jumpsuit like an armored uniform with his utility belt cinched tight and his glistening boots elevated on absurdly thick-soles. Doltun's eyes only briefly meet Gohrlay's, then they seemed to slide away in search of something harmless that might be hovering over her shoulder. Just behind Doltun was his aide, Orbho Anagro. Doltun stammered, "Sh- should I return when you have had a chance to dress, Observer Gohrlay?"
Gohrlay's irritation at Doltun quickly focused her thoughts. Why the continued mocking use of her title, even after he had driven her from the ranks of the Observers? She noticed that some of his hairs had begun to turn white; they stood out starkly against the dark background shades of his well pigmented hair and skin. For the first time, Gohrlay realized that not only was Doltun an alien creature, but he was also old. Previously, Gohrlay had only ever seen Doltun from across the expanse of the raised desk in his office. Now she wondered: what could this aged bureaucrat ever understand about youth, liberty and growth? She wondered how well this old man even remembered his own youth. Sometimes the old are fiercely, even sadistically jealous of the young.
Doltun was only alien to a degree. His subspecies had never migrated off of the Origin Continent, unlike Gohrlay's Neanderthal ancestors. The ebb and flow of human populations across the surface of Earth was one of the mysteries that had attracted Gohrlay to the Observer corps and awakened in her a sense of wonder and an unappeasable ache for answers. The more she learned, the more questions she discovered. What were the origins of the human species? How had humans become such remarkable tool makers? And how had a splinter of humanity found its way to the Moon?
Of course, if you went back far enough, she and Doltun surely had a common ancestor. Gohrlay vaguely wondered if knowledge of that shared genetic origin bothered Doltun. Possibly not...Doltun's ancestors on Earth had long ago become extinct and only a few hundred Neanderthal's now remained on Earth. Both their peoples were evolutionary failures, with a few pitiful descendants hanging on, stranded on the Moon, and watching another branch of the human evolutionary tree rise to dominance. Well, there was no sense in sugar-coating it; a new subspecies of modern humans had already swarmed over the surface of Earth, while on the Moon, Neanderthals still hung on and comprised the bulk of active Observers at Observer Base, but only because of a technicality and cultural momentum.
Gohrlay responded bitterly to Doltun with a question of her own, "Do I have to conform to your prudishness even on the day of my execution?" There was only one possible reason why Doltun would be calling personally on Gohrlay: to take her to her death. She turned and grabbed the tunic that her aide was holding. In five seconds she was dressed- dressed as much as she cared to dress. Not caring if her hair looked bed-ruffled, Gohrlay ignored the offered hair brush.
When her tunic had fallen past her eyes, the sight of her aide and the interior of her home washed her mind with sweet nostalgia...she remembered a glorious sunset on Earth that had made her heart skip in this way. She loved her home, which she had carefully designed and decorated...now this was her final glimpse of its comforting complexity. Intelligent and driven, Gohrlay had become an elite Observer at a young age. Within her circle of friends she had been viewed as creative and attractive; her peers thought she had everything to live for. Momentarily, before turning back to face Doltun, she hesitated, wanting to go back to what she had been before, go back to staying alive. Then the instrumentality that was controlling her thoughts pushed in a way that suppressed fear of death and she was just angry at Doltun. A bitter word of reproach for the Overseer had erupted from her unconscious and hung quivering at the tip of her tongue: hypocrite! She was amused and puzzled by the force behind that taunt and too shocked by its nastiness to allow it past her lips. Doltun was a thug and a bully, but Gohrlay's rational mind decided that "hypocrisy" was not a fair label. Gohrlay was devoted to the truth, a trait that had been magnified by her recent friendship with Klempse and what he had taught her about science.
Doltun had given up expecting decorum from Gohrlay. Too embarrassed to speak, he simply gestured for Gohrlay to step through the doorway. Doltun and Gohrlay walked side-by-side down the walkway in front of her home; both were careful not to even brush a sleeve against the other. Off in the distance, through the trees, the spires of City Center glinted in the artificial dawn of the underground domed city. Gohrlay's aide tried to fall in line behind Anagro, but Doltun's robotic aide turned back and said, "You will not be needed. You can await reassignment."
Gohrlay looked back at her aide. She had already gone through the foolish ritual of saying goodbye. She still had an emotional attachment to her aide, after all, this was the robot that Gohrlay had grown up with, but during the past month her entire way of thinking had been altered. Gohrlay had become aware of the fact that robots only pretended to be servants. In fact, they were the prison guards of Observer Base. But the worst thing was that everyone living on the Moon was happy and nobody cared that they were living in a prison. It was hard to believe, but only a few queer scientists like Klempse seemed to understand such things. For Gohrlay it was a sanity-saving relief that there was at least one other person who knew ...
The only way to move through the city at a pace faster than foot travel was via the rail system. They soon reached the rail stop at the end of the lane and one of the shiny glass walled cars was waiting there for them. After Gohrlay and Doltun had settled into a seat of the tram car, she commented, "I was not expecting to see you again so soon." Her eyes slipped past Doltun to where Anagro stood in the isle, frozen like a pillar with one hand locked onto the roof of the car as it moved smoothly off across the park-like cityscape. The robot's perfectly shaped but bland face reminded Gohrlay of something in a nightmare: one of the relentlessly chasing undead characters that haunted her nights.
Doltun squeezed himself against the armrest at the edge of his seat in order to avoid touching Gohrlay. Glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, he explained, "The positronic circuits are ready." He bit off each word as if it pained him to tell her anything. "There is no reason to delay."
Gohrlay momentarily felt relief that her last day had come and she suspected that Doltun would also be quite pleased to have this day over and Gohrlay eliminated. Gohrlay's existence was a continual reminder of Doltun's failure to adequately police the Observers. Normally, a criminal such as Gohrlay would simply be shunned and left to quietly fade from relevance, control nanobots in her brain monitoring her every move and preventing her from ever again interacting with her fellow Observers. Normally, Gohrlay would remain alive and be a constant reminder for Doltun of his ineptitude. Faced with that unhappy state of affairs, he had put his scheming mind to work and found a way out.
Rather than face a living death, Gohrlay had taken Doltun's offer and become a test subject for the positronics project. Upon first hearing about the project, Gohrlay had been skeptical about the relevance of positronics. She had never previously thought about the origin of robots; they were just a fact of life. From birth, each person was assigned a robotic aide. She now knew that nanite-mediated mind control prevented everyone from even wondering about the origin of robots. However, a small group of scientists had begun to wonder if they could make a robot. That first small step had been taken long ago, but eventually there were technical difficulties that brought the positronics project to a dead end. No way was ever found to build a robot with human-like intelligence. There were now positronic computers with prodigious computational power, but they lacked human creativity and could not master human language. Watching the orderly city through the windows of the tram car, Gohrlay thought wonderingly of the fact that she had almost lived her entire life without hearing about the existence of science and research and positronics.
Suddenly felt the truth of that as never before: she had lived almost her entire life. Now, in what should have been the best years of her life, Gohrlay had at most half a day remaining, but staying alive would be worse. Gohrlay turned away so Doltun wouldn’t see her eyes water and then her thoughts were interrupted by Doltun's high-pitched and needling voice, “Not more of that monster now.” she thought.
Doltun asked, "Did you decide on your...ultimate fate?"
Dolton's question caused a shiver of fright in Gohrlay. The thought of what would soon happen to her brain was decidedly unpleasant, but once more the nanites controlling her brain sprang into action and altered her emotions. She was tempted to make a sarcastic comment about how Doltun had already decided her fate, but she knew what Doltun was really trying to say. Like most Overseers, Doltun was religious and believed in the existence of eternal souls. Gohrlay replied, "Just grind my body up and recycle it. At the next feast you celebrate, you will know that you are eating me." Gohrlay felt only vaguely anxious about her body parts being ground up and returned to the food chain: that was a side-effect of the nanites inside her brain that were continuing to push her towards acceptance of her death. “I’m an atheist,” she told herself firmly, “being unconscious doesn’t hurt and being nothing doesn’t hurt. Why should I fear it?” The thought of slipping away into nothingness can be unsettling for atheists especially when it’s less than a day away but for the moment Gohrlay was again fairly calm and started to feel sorry for those whose last days or last moments were blighted with fear of a bad afterlife. “Yes” she thought “being an atheist is better.” Gohrlay wondered about the undersized religious bully beside her and told herself, “I'll not feel guilty for taunting a sadist like Doltun, not when he deserves it.”
Doltun was sickened by Gohrlay's irreverence. Doltun had promised himself not to be provoked by anything that Gohrlay might do today. He was in no mood to take chances and before setting out to Gohrlay's residence, he had ordered Anagro to put a full nanorobotic mindlock on Gohrlay at the first sign of physical aggression. The streets between Gohrlay's residence and the laboratory had been cleared, which was not hard at this hour. Doltun had made certain that the public would not be disturbed by Gohrlay's ranting. Also, he had already arranged for a proper death ceremony and cremation, knowing that Gohrlay would not care what happened to her body after her brain was destroyed. Asking her about her desires had just been a way for Doltun to clear his own conscious.
For a moment Doltun imagined launching Gohrlay in to Sun, but he hated the idea of her protons slowly spraying out from the Sun and landing on the Moon over the course of billions of years. He wanted her fate to be a quiet silence from which nothing could ever escape. Dropping her into a black hole would be ideal. Unfortunately no black hole was available.
The tram car turned and headed up a branch line towards the positronics research laboratory. Gohrlay was surprised, normally one had to transfer to another car at this junction, but Doltun must have gone to the trouble of reprogramming the tram's routing in order to facilitate Gohrlay's execution. Her muscles tightened in fear as she contemplated their destination and her future, or, more truthfully, her lack of a future. This death car was taking her swiftly and steadily towards- then her morbid thought was cut short when nanites suppressed her fear once more. Gohrlay became curious about what the public had been told. She asked, "What lie did you tell the public about my death?"
Doltun did not want to play Gohrlay's games and so he signaled to Anagro and let the robot reply. Anagro's eyes locked onto Gohrlay's and the robot said, "The public will never know anything about this. All record of your life and existence has already been erased from this Base. At this moment a few people believe that they are waiting for tram line maintenance to be completed, but that is the only effect your passing will have on humanity."
Gohrlay tried to decide who she despised more, Doltun or Anagro. It would be so much easier to hate Anagro and his fellow robots if there was some way to know their origin. As it was, they seemed like gods who had always existed and always would, without beginning or end. Gohrlay had tried to imagine if at some time in the far past a biological brain had been used as the template for the first artificial robot brain. If so, Gohrlay thought, the creature who provided the pattern for Anagro's brain must have been vicious and conniving.
Once more, Gohrlay tried to imagine what might be the fate of her own brain pattern. None of the positronics project members had been willing to predict the outcome of trying to convert the structure of Gohrlay's brain into positronic circuits. Klempse always carefully referred to the process as "mind downloading", but it had never previously been attempted because it was a process that destroyed a human brain. Gohrlay held tight to a small hope that fragments of her memories would live on after their transfer into the waiting positronic substrate. That was her chance to get some part of herself, some indication of her existence, into the future and avoid Doltun's attempt to erase her from the memory of humanity. Whatever happened her consciousness would end, a new robotic consciousness might arise if the experimental process worked but that consciousness would be a replica of hers at best.
The tram car stopped near the entrance to the research center and Doltun led the way inside. It was an ugly building, perhaps the most utilitarian of buildings on the Moon, hunched like an elephant carcass out on the fringe of the city where it need not offend those with aesthetic sensibilities. Nobody had even tried to put in any landscaping around the jumble of laboratories that had been thrown up over the years. Dusty paths, cutting through rank weeds right down to the lunar soil, were all that connected the newer outlying lab buildings to the centrally located computing center. Gohrlay turned one last look back towards the core of the underground city that had been the focal point of her life. The simulated dawn of this, her final day, was but a pale imitation of an Earthly sunrise, manufactured from a fake sun creeping up from behind fake hills that were painted on the light-emitting dome. Gazing back across the vast expanse of the underground dome, all she felt was a kind of claustrophobia. Her two brief visits to Earth had opened her mind to the true scale of the universe and she could no longer be satisfied with life in this underground prison. It was not really hard to choose death over additional suffocating decades here, playing the role of Doltun's prisoner.
Of course, it had been the mere fact of those visits to Earth that had been her death sentence. As a genetically engineered Neanderthal, Gohrlay was forbidden from setting foot on Earth. She now knew that she had only been allowed to make two trips to Earth because Doltun was trying to trap all the Interventionists who might have been working with Gohrlay. She had been foolish to imagine that she could accomplish anything on Earth.
Once, she had felt alive and at the core of a small group of Observers who imagined that it might be possible to help humans on Earth avoid suffering. She had felt a female, maternal urge to protect the people of Earth. Were the Earthlings helpless, like babies? Why not help Earthlings towards a better way of life? But those ideas were criminally subversive. Gohrlay did not regret being caught and punished for her crimes. It was better to know the futility of her life and put an end to it. Maybe, just maybe, something good would come out of the positronics project.
As Doltun led the way directly to the door of the scanner room, Gohrlay found herself shaking and thinking about a dying child she had seen on Earth, made mindless by a searing fever, her chest and face ravaged by oozing pustules. Really, compared to the endless cycles of hunger, disease and death that defined human existence on Earth, her own mode of death was quite clean and painless. Mercifully, the nanites put a stop to her fear again. Gohrlay asked, "Isn't Klempse here?" She had hoped to say farewell to Klempse, who had been a true friend. A true friend who was quite prepared to kill her, to help her die? Doltun had left her with no better friends.
Klempse had freely explained everything that the positronics team knew about robots and positronics and had even taught Gohrlay the meaning of science. It was a revelation for Gohrlay that there could be a science of robotics. She now understood that the robotic aides of Observer Base were all of nanoelectronic composition. Nanites! Their very existence had been unsuspected by Gohrlay. Klempse was certain that humans were actively prevented from developing nanite technology and because of that restriction there was no point in trying to build nanoelectronic robots. That had motivated research into positronics.
The positronic robot project had grown out of the physics research program at Moon Base, which had long been the only human scientific research effort. At first, nobody had imagined that an alternative to nanoelectronic robots might exist. The idea of positronics had grown naturally out of theoretical physics. Only much later was the possibility of a practical application recognized and the positronic brain conceived. Now, with the sudden availability of Gohrlay's brain, Klempse had been given the opportunity to build a human-like positronic brain by copying the structure of Gohrlay's biological brain into positronic circuits.
Doltun replied, "Klempse and the entire research team are standing by in the assembly chamber. The process here is fully automated and none of the scientists will be needed near you." Gohrlay decided that Doltun probably delighted in keeping her from speaking to Klempse. Rather than protest, Gohrlay decided not to show any disappointment. Gohrlay just hoped that Klempse would be able to keep his promise and bring her diary across to her on the other side. If he didn’t, then that would probably scuttle her chance for renewal and rebirth as an artificial life form. No matter what kind of positronic brain emerged from this downloading experiment, it wouldn’t be her anyway, there would only be a robot programmed with a collection of her memories. She had compiled her diary as a guide, a kind of overview of her mind that might allow that robot to learn how to make sense of that jumble of memories and possibly come think like Gohrlay.
Doltun opened the door to the scanner room and now Gohrlay could see the device that would end her life. How much time did Gohrlay have left? Panic rose in her, Gohrlay felt terror as she had never ever felt it before. Survival instincts honed through hundreds of millions of years of natural selection took over. With an effort Gohrlay stopped herself from screaming and looked back uncertainly towards Overseer Doltun and Orbho Anagro. She wondered what they would do if she decided to back out now and not complete the experiment... would they link arms and block her from running away? Were they simply helping her towards a death of her own choosing or would they force her to go through with it? Gohrlay was like a cornered animal facing hungry predators but she had full human understanding of the horror she faced, in her mind she screamed, “They’ll tear my brain apart! I’M GOING TO DIE! I’M GOING TO DIE!” Her throat constricted and her heart and breathing rates accelerated, but the nanites worked to calm her.
Orbho Anagro entered the scanner chamber with Gohrlay and activated the control circuitry for the scanning equipment. Gohrlay flinched visibly as the massive device began to hum then tensely she completed the last few steps of the final fatal walk. Shaking visibly, Gohrlay settled onto the bed of the scanner which had been specifically adapted to precisely fit her body, particularly her cranium. As soon as her head rested against the cushion, her nose was sealed under a small plastic tent and oxygen was pumped into her nostrils. This room was cold and Gohrlay felt the goosebumps rising on her flesh. During the downloading, pains would be taken to cool her blood so as to slow the death and decay of her brain cells while they were being scanned.
In the corridor outside the scanner room Doltun’s automatic communication device signalled him, “What is it, Klempse?” Doltun asked impatiently.
Even through the communicator Klempse’s sorrow over his friend's impending termination was clear as he explained the reason for his call. Klempse had started monitoring Gohrlay’s brain and he was shocked by the high level of nanite activity. Klempse had made previous preliminary scans of Gohrlay's brain and it was now clear that recent nanite intrusion had altered her thought pattern and continued to stressed her, causing dramatic perturbations the functions of her brain. Gohrlay would recover from the stress in time, but if her brain was scanned now, with her amygdalae apparently being actively re-wired by the nanites, then the success of the experiment could be compromised. “Gohrlay will have to go through the rest of this as far as possible relying on her own courage and endurance, further nanite interference must be kept to an absolute minimum.” Klempse finished sadly. He switched off his communicator and returned to preparing the positronic circuit array to receive the imprint of Gohrlay's brain structure.
Doltun, certain that the call had been monitored, said, "Anagro, did you get that?"
The robot replied without speaking and Doltun saw the text message from Anagro appear on his retinal data display: "Affirmative."
Inside the scanner, Gohrlay was confused as well as frightened and could not understand why the experiment, which she had worked hard to be prepared to face, suddenly seemed so frightening. Doltun came in, putting the communication device away irritably and Gohrlay detested that he was seeing her in a moment of weakness, with panic rising in her mind. Gohrlay wished more than ever that Klempse could have been with her as she faced this last severe trial.
Doltun reached the scanner bed and glanced at the bulky machine looming over Gohrlay's head. He had intended not to be present at her death, but now he tried to imagine if there was something he could do to calm her and eliminate any need for massive nanite intervention. For a moment he looked at the restraint straps dangling towards the floor. Those straps had been used on test animals, but Doltun imagined that their use now would only further terrorize Gohrlay. Doltun indicated, “You have to relax,” while trying unsuccessfully to look non-threatening.
Gohrlay could no longer move her head and she looked pitiful. Peering out through the narrow tunnel that arched over her face, she could see one of Doltun's dark hands resting on the edge of the scanner bed. She asked, “Please may I have a drink of water?” her mouth was dry.
Anagro used a little joystick on the control console to guide a drinking tube to her mouth. She drank the provided herbal infusion that issued from a chilled dispenser. Using her lips, Gohrlay held the tube unsteadily and she began drinking slowly, trying to soothe her parched throat.
Doltun wondered how to hurry things up. The slow procedure was upsetting her and being with her was upsetting him. He could see that Anagro was working as quickly as possible through the initiation steps for the downloading procedure. Then Anagro paused and said, "I'm ready to bring up the field strength, but she cannot be drinking. She'll start to lose cortical functions almost at once."
Doltun started to encourage Gohrlay to hurry up, “My dear, please don't draw things out, it is only making it worse...” He got an urgent text message from Dr Klempse who was monitoring from the assembly room. The text insisted that Gohrlay should drink as slowly as she wanted because while she drank her brain was getting time to clear away the abnormal pattern produced by the nanites. Her brain was slowly settling back into a more normal activity pattern that matched expectations from the preliminary scans. “Ur, but if you need anything else, let me know,” Doltun continued.
Gohrlay soomehow felt better having Doltun there to be mad at rather than being alone with her fear. She said, "I'm done."
The drinking tube was withdrawn by Anagro and he initiated a slow, steady increase in the magnetic field impinging on Gohrlay's head. The complex neural networks of her visual cortex soon became disrupted by the magnetic field.
Now deprived of vision, Gohrlay tried to hold in her thoughts an image of Anagro. It had been the odd interaction between Anagro and Doltun that had first stimulated Gohrlay's intuition about aliens. Doltun's frequent deference to Anagro had guided her thinking towards recognition of Anagro's special role at Observer Base. At first, Gohrlay had dismissed her suspicions and she had rationalized Doltun's odd behavior and symbiotic relationship with Anagro as something unique to Doltun's culture. The small Overseer community kept itself apart, but Gohrlay's transgression against the Rules of Observation had thrown her into contact with the Overseers. Then Gohrlay had discovered science and the fact that Klempse's view of reality and, indeed, that of the entire physics research team had long ago been built on paranoia about robots. That had heightened Gohrlay's interest in the question of how Earth had become trapped under the microscope of Observer Base. For a horrible moment Gohrlay could not remember the complete chain of reasoning that had convinced her that Anagro was responsible for Earth's fate and the zombie-like lack of curiosity that characterized most residents of Observer Base. Klempse!
Yes, Klempse had explained so much. The scientists had long ago discovered nanites and found them inside the brains of everyone living on the Moon. Klempse had carefully explained the theory about how nanites could control human thought and prevent anyone from questioning the purpose of Observer Base. While she struggled to recall the evidence that supported that theory, her mind started to flicker off...
Was there no way to liberate humanity and shake it free of nanite control? The image of Anagro, immovable and manipulative, accompanied Gohrlay into the darkness of her last thoughts...
The nanites in her brain were switched off so an anaesthetic gas ended her consciousness, then a robotic surgeon cut off Gohrlay's hair and began removing her skull.