Have finished the project. Request your presence in Lab 11 this evening to witness the conclusion to Holographics. I have not yet tested the equipment, but the diagnostics say that all is well inside the machine and would like witnesses to its first activation.
-Anso
Senior Technician Anso intended the memo to be cryptic. Panache was essential to the final presentation. The achievement was independently momentous, but without added smugness the satisfaction of it would be diminished -- maybe lost.
“You don’t want to test it first?” Anso’s clunky but good-natured android secretarial unit, Serial 6, sounded worried, whih was no easy task for such a comparatively simple tool with no affect, no guile.
“No, I’ve tested each component. It’s perfect. She’s perfect.” Fingertips trembling with excitement, Anso forwarded the memo out to the rest of Titan Holographics.
“She?” Serial 6 raised one eyebrow.
Anso did not respond. There was much at stake, but he was certain of his achievement. The diagnostic equipment registered finally that the pool of holographic connections, the veins and arteries, flesh, brains, eyes and pain receptors, all of it, were in harmony. Years of labor, composing, rehearsing, now it was his to sing into being.
A living, thinking human mind, or at least a perfect holographic simulation of one, was ready to emerge from his trillions of lines of code. Human and hologram -- but what's the difference? he had asked himself many times during the gestation period.
The project to create a holographic human mind had languished in incompetent imaginations for years before it had wound up on Anso's desk. He lacked the cynicism with which established industry viewed innovation. He had seen the economic potential of human partners without bodies or genes to worry about. The confinement of AIs into computers and then androids had, to his mind, escaped the essential truth that Anso considered obvious: that the mind is the only thing, and all the rest is life support. Why not, then, suspend a mind in a cloud of interacting light? Free it from all possible confinement?
To Senior Technician Anso, his work was the creation of angels.
“It is a person. Human minds emerge from human brains and I have built a brain. I’ve just built it out of light.”
“Does it have a name?” Serial 6 moved his jaw in the shape of a smile.
Anso just leaned back in his seat and surveyed the quiet mess hall of Titan Holographics Laboratory. He was pleased to watch the reactions of some of the other technicians receiving the notification of his memo. Surprised expressions, wry smiles, skeptical sighs. Just wait, when the curtains come up… “Come on,” he replied finally. “It’s time to go.”
Building a human-like intelligence had been part and parcel of the field for decades -- half of the lab help, including Serial 6, had been built in-house at Titan Robotics and Humaniforma -- but to create a mind that needed no flesh at all, not even a mechanical one: now that was a test. That was a vision.
“Golems need only mud and breath,” recited Anso to the lab team assembled before him “but to conjure a ghost requires… sacrifice!”
Dr. Eckhart, the local elder statesman of engineering who had accepted directorship of the remote Titan Holographics Laboratory only after a favorable omen (his wife dying) and an eight-figure salary had beckoned him away from Earthside projects, sat in a throne-sized swiveling office chair at the back of the room with a digital pad in one hand and a half-finished cigarette in the other. His tiny black eyes stared out from his ancient face past the crowded shoulders of the others huddled around one side of Anso's equipment.
A semicircle of computers and diagnostic readouts separated Anso from his audience. The holoprojectors crisscrossed the ceiling in a black spiderweb mottle, wrapping each other a hundred times over in strange loops.
“Minds are particles,” Anso pontificated, with a knowing tap at the side of his skull. “Consciousness emerges wherever the connections are sufficiently complicated. Neurons were our first try. AI and then advanced robotics came second,” to which he received a sage nod from one of the many android employees of Titan Holographics. “And from robotics, we have learned that there is nothing special about our own consciousness. It is as surely a property of sufficiently complex systems as color or heat is. But it has always had this limitation -- the physical foundation, the brain, the CPU.
“With holographics, we escape that problem with pure light, projected from distant emitters.” He gestured up at the dense black plumbing above him, the holoprojectors that laced the ceiling of Lab 11. “It may take any shape, any form. The mind need no longer be bound to a body. It is unchained! The particles are virtual, as are the connections between them, but they are still real.”
He paused for a moment and licked his lips with anticipation. The final diagnostic chirped its completion pleasantly from one of the computers spread out before him. Program integrity: 100, it beamed to him, confirming the results of the dozens of scans he had run all that day, making sure everything was in order with the program before the great reveal.
“All is ready,” Anso announced, quieting the chatter that had begun to rise in the brief silence. “Lab 11 has been my home for almost ten years now,” he grumbled over an ill-suppressed collective harrumph from several of the older techs, “and in that time, I have learned something.” He leaned forward ominously, his narrow eyebrows crinkling beneath his sweat-streaked forehead. “A mind,” he began while sinking one hand towards the activation protocol on the display before him, “is a mind,” he whispered while pressing a finger against the bright green square at the center of his displays, “is a mind.” And with that, the holoprojectors awoke.
The lights dimmed for a split second with the surge of energy into the massive power sinks of the projectors, followed by a wild cackling of electricity. A black mist coalesced slowly, cautiously, a few feet beneath the projectors. Anso watched with widening eyes, his hands wringing with excitement at the sight of the cloud spreading out before him into an inky vertical pool.
A smooth, featureless head emerged, squeezing out shoulders and a lanky torso over a few crawling seconds. Its outline was hazy and ill-defined like a rolling foamy wave, like black ink dispersing into a clear human-shaped cistern. It shimmered and shook, and then its head arched up slowly, turning to look over those assembled, then back at Anso.
His voice caught in his throat, leaving him stuttering for a second before he was able to let out a pointed “Hello.”
The ink-shape's head cocked, and somehow Anso sensed a smile on the smooth face-shape. “Hello,” it whispered to Anso.
He glanced over at the assembled lab techs, eagerly searching out the gaze of Dr. Eckhart, who was leaning forwards in his seat staring quite obviously not at the holographic shape, but at Anso.
“Why don't you... tell us your name?” Anso inquired breathlessly of the tall, looming figure that peered into him out from its great curtain of blackness.
An eerie giggle echoed in Anso's ears. It stepped forwards and arched out towards him what must have been an arm, draping a nearly formless hand over his shoulder. “You know my name,” whispered back a voice that was steady and certain. “And I know yours,” she groaned politely while withdrawing her hand back into her black void. “Anso.”
A triumphant smirk broke over Anso's face. He nodded, his eyes darting back and forth between the holographic form and his colleagues, suppressing puzzlement over the way they stared at him, and not at his creation. “And you are... alive?”
A scoff rose up from the crowd. One of the technicians took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Most of the robots were already heading towards the exit from Lab 11, some with a fearful eagerness that Anso did not understand.
“Wait, wait,” stuttered Anso. “Where are you going?” Serial 6 glanced awkwardly down to the floor, covering his mouth with one hand.
The black shape watched, seemingly amused, as Dr. Eckhart pushed past the rest of the audience towards Anso. Leaning over the bank of computers, he extinguished his cigarette with an annoyed sigh and reached over the control panel.
“Get some sleep, Anso,” his staccato bass voice rumbled out.
“Wait! Don't!” Anso cried, panic-stricken, when Dr. Eckhart hastily keyed in the commands to power down the holoprojectors.
* * *
“I just don't understand it,” Anso repeated to himself for the hundredth time that night.
Sitting there, a full mug of coffee in his trembling hand, he stared slack-jawed and defeated at the recording of his presentation.
A hundred times he watched as the holoprojectors whirred to life, the lights dimmed, and then -- nothing. No blackness, no voice but his own, stupidly stammering one side of a conversation into empty, open air beside him.
Like a child, like a crazy person! holding his half of a conversation with nothing at all. There wasn't a trace of the woman, of the creature he had labored to simulate, to create, for years. Just emptiness.
The second thing that puzzled him was that she remained there beside him in that very moment, standing behind his chair in the mess hall, even after the projectors had been deactivated.
“What's not to understand?” she asked innocently.
Shaking his head slowly, Anso rewound the sequence and played it again. “I remember -- I saw it -- I saw you!” he accused. “You were there!” Turning to face her, he had to lean back in his seat just to see her entire impressive height at once. “Here you are,” he accused angrily with a gesture over her, “and here you aren't,” he said to the video recording, which silently replayed Dr. Eckhart deactivating the holoprojectors.
She shrugged. “Oh.” Her voice was like the grinding of machinery, a metallic echo of saw blades smacking against sheets of iron. Every sound she made rang in his ears. It was orchestral to him, even when she spoke quietly.
Heaving a weary sigh, he rewound the entire sequence and was about to play it again before Serial 6 interrupted him over his office com. “Anso. Your wife's here.”
“Send her in,” he said halfway through the whooshing sound of the tall glass doors at the rear of the lab already opening before his wife. Kara was small, a formerly compact young woman now bulging with the imminence of their first child. She had been a pilot for the shuttles between the Labs and Titan's sole non-corporate settlement before he had dragged her to Titan full-time.
“Anso,” she began. He rose to greet her, beginning to say her name back to her, but she interrupted him with a tight embrace. “I heard about -- what happened, with the project,” she said, with genuine worry, into his chest. “I'm sorry. You must be --”
“Can you see her?”
There was a moment of silence between them, and she stepped back. She looked around the lab, her gaze passing right over the smiling black shape beside her husband. “Anso.” Another moment of silence -- a long moment. “See who?”
He counted the beats of his heart until he was ready to say, “No one.”
The long hours of the night ticked off one by one. Outside of the domed Lab, the terraformed atmosphere above the complex had coalesced into a sickly greenish snowstorm, drizzling the surface of Titan with thick clumps of frozen acid rain. Titan was still generations away from being habitable outside of the domes that spotted its surface. For now, it was barely breathable and freezing on a good day.
Turning away from the window of the mess hall to look back at Anso, who was slumped over an untouched tray of rations looking like a man two steps behind a scaffold, Serial 6 helpfully offered: “I will call you a shuttle home, Mr. Anso.”
“It doesn't make any sense,” Anso weakly whined. He glanced up, his upper lip curling in revulsion at the sight of the now-familiar black cloud of a woman slinking back and forth between the tables of the mess hall, half pacing, half skipping. She was humming, almost whispering, a song Anso didn't recognize. “You didn't see anything?”
“I saw the holoprojectors activate perfectly,” Serial 6 replied optimistically.
“And then?”
Biting his lower lip, the secretarial unit quietly whirred for a moment before replying, “and then Dr. Eckhart deactivated them. Perhaps you should have the diagnostic equipment checked for-”
“It worked perfectly!” he cried with frustration. The sky outside was glowing with early dawn, plumes of blue and green igniting up in crooked veins between the dense snow clouds. “It was there.” She is here, he thought. “I spoke to it, and it spoke back.”
“What did it say?” Anso was suddenly startled by a high-pitched giggle from directly behind him. Her dark form leaned down right over his shoulder, whispering into his ear. “Isn't he polite?”
Serial 6 watched Anso with concerned eyes as Anso turned his head and snarled angrily, “You've really made a mess of my career, you -- whatever you are.” Turning back to Serial 6, he raised one hand towards his shoulder. “You can't see this? You can't hear this? She said she knew my name, and --”
“What is her name?”
“She said I already knew it.”
“Do you?”
Anso replied “no” at the same time that the shape behind him emitted a “yes.”
“It is all... very peculiar, Mr. Anso,” Serial 6 said calmly. “Let me call you a shuttle home, sir.”
Anso stared in silence down at the table for a long moment before rising from his seat. “Come with me,” he said to at least one of the people in the room. “We're going to try this again.”
And with that he whirled around, storming towards the doors to the mess hall. The black figure leaped in front of him, but Anso did not stop, sliding past her as her suddenly gravelly, angry voice filled his ears. “Don't,” she said. “Do. Not.” But on he marched, Serial 6 half-jogging to keep up with Anso's determined strides. “Anso -- don't!”
The doors to Lab 11 slid open before him. Ignoring the increasingly savage anger in her voice, he wheeled around to the computer controls and hastily keyed up the essential work.
“Mr. Anso, perhaps you should check the diagnostic equipment first,” advised Serial 6 as the doors closed together behind it.
The computers began to hum as the activation protocol counted down. “I'm not going to let her get away with it,” Anso replied.
She stood behind him, looming larger now than she had ever before. There was somehow anger on her ovular cloud of a face. Her hands gripped Anso's shoulders uselessly. “Anso,” came her voice, causing him to wince with the grinding inflection she had assumed. “You have no right!”
His hands played over the computer systems, flushing a wave of energy into the holoprojectors, cold-starting them as quickly as he could. Her voice rang around the room, and Anso had to squint to see through the dense black fog that had once been the person behind her. She had become a storm, her cries rising to a continuous screech. Through the billowing black clouds he saw the outline of her long arms split and stretch into tendrils up to the black wires lacing the ceiling.
Anso blinked back sweat that ran down his forehead. Her sickening wails drowned out Serial 6's insisting, desperate pleas. The computer offered up the green activation square, and Anso pressed it without hesitation.
The room was suddenly plunged into silence, pitch black. All was still.
“A malfunction?”
And then came a roar from above. Long electric arcs burst from the ceiling, a dozen alarms sounding together over the screech of metal tearing, sparks flying out of every piece of machinery in Lab 11. Anso dropped to a crouch behind his computers. Serial 6 let out an uncharacteristically guttural scream, and covered his head with his arms.
Her voice alternated impossibly fast between banshee screeches and a warbling cackle of laughter. A beam of steel tumbled out of a wide gash in the ceiling, sparks striking the floor at harsh angles as the holoprojectors shorted and superheated simultaneously. She was a hurricane now, blowing out the glass on the doors and nearly ripping the computers from the floor.
She became silent just as quickly. The alarms still rang, but they had become the only sources of sound in the Lab other than Anso's panicked breaths. His heartbeat thundered in his ears. He rose slowly on shaking legs, peering over the computer screen. Sweat streaked his half-blackened face. Smoke and the acrid smell of liquefied rubber tubing filled his nostrils. He staggered out from around his computers and pushed wordlessly past the sheepishly-smiling woman who had resumed her perch beside him.
“Serial 6!” he called out, coughing heavily and blinking back hot tears. His vision steadily focused and Anso saw the robot lying beside a ruined terminal. Serial 6's half-closed eyes stared up at nothing in particular, a shimmering electrical crackle shuddering visibly in the enormous gash that ran up one side of his torso to his neck. An electric arc had nearly torn him in half. Anso dropped down beside the android, cradling the back of his head in one hand.
One of Serial 6's eyes twitched and he looked over at Anso, an eerie half-smile spreading across his chin. “Mr. Anso, you should have let me call you a shuttle.”
“We can fix this,” Anso replied breathlessly. “Let me get maintenance. We can fix this!”
Serial 6 wheezed, illuminating his gaping wound with a faint blue glow. “I do not believe we can, Mr. Anso.”
She slowly stepped over Serial 6 and leaned down over him. Serial 6's head slowly turned and he looked up, their eyes meeting. Anso’s mouth fell open when it became clear to him that the dying android could see the dark scorch of a woman that he had created, or summoned.
“Ssshh,” she whispered. One of her hands descended towards the android, and Serial 6 used his last measure of strength to raise one up back to her. “Ssshh.”
She took Serial 6’s hand in hers and squeezed it affectionately. They held onto each other tightly, their eyes locked together. Finally, Serial 6 let out a rattling gasp and relaxed against the floor, his eyes fluttering closed. She guided his hand to rest upon his chest before standing slowly. “Ssshh...”
And with that, Dr. Eckhart loudly cleared his throat from the rear of the lab. Climbing through the space in the doors where the glass panes had been were two enormous security robots right behind him. “Mr. Anso,” he rumbled. “I instructed you to get some sleep.”
“Tell it to me again. Slowly.”
Anso sighed, clearing his throat. “I already told you everything.”
“God dammit, Anso!” cried Dr. Eckhart, slamming his balled fist on the metal table between them. “Do you have any idea how much it's going to cost to fix Lab 11?”
Anso's smoke-streaked face was downcast, focused helplessly on a point on the floor beside the table. “It doesn't matter,” he replied softly.
She orbited the table, stepping in wide strodes around the two of them, pausing to occasionally inspect the security robots whose huge, white eyes stared down at Anso. She was humming to herself again, whispering the lyrics to whatever ancient song was on her lips.
“Doesn't matter?” Dr. Eckhart sat heavily in his chair, almost chuckling. “Tell that to the insurance adjuster when he arrives in the morning.” He looked back over his shoulder at the security robots, then back to Anso. “Get out. The board is revoking your access to any Titan facility, and I've asked the Titan Commission to expel you from the surface.”
Anso didn't respond. He just shook his head slowly, rising up out of his cold metal chair. Eckhart waved for the security detail to escort him out.
* * *
“Do you know what's coming next?”
His burned clothing clung to his wearied frame. His cheeks and face were still black with ash, his ears ringing with the screech of metal on metal.
The shuttle silently glided away from Titan Holographics towards his home. In a few hours he would be bound for Earth with a pregnant wife, an invisible tormentor, and his own chapter in the industry blacklist.
“Do you know what's coming next?” she asked again.
He slowly turned his head toward her. She stood between the cockpit at the front of the cramped shuttle, where the two security bots sat in the pilot seats, and the rear bay, where Anso stared down into his upturned palms. He looked away to peer out the front portal of the shuttle between the pilots’ shoulders. The light mist of acid snow that had started hours before had become thicker and heavier. One of the security bots lit a cigarette and murmured to his co-pilot about the weather.
“You won't be disappointed,” she whispered into his ear.
“Starting descent procedure,” one of the security bots said.
“Hear that?” called out the other pilot to Anso. “Almost at the end of the line for you,” he said with a chuckle. “I wonder what that wife of yours is --” began the robot as he half-turned to look back into the rear of the shuttle, the leering smile on his face suddenly collapsing into a wide-mouthed look of terror. “Jesus, Eight, we've got an intruder!”
With a high-pitched gurgle of delight she hurled herself into the front of the shuttle. The plexiglass front portal exploded into a shower of dancing shards. Her black cloud filled the shuttle completely and Anso squeezed his eyes shut. He whispered his wife's name under the blasting alarms as the shuttle plummeted toward the surface of Titan.
* * *
Cold. Dark. So loud in his ears -- silent all around. Eyes sliding slowly open, Anso pulled himself weakly up out of the dense wet snow beneath himself. Titan had finally stopped snowing; now there was only a light drizzle under a nearly cloudless sky that misted over the stars behind. He stared at the broad dome of the settlement in the distance. His breath came in raspy, uneven gasps. Each plodding footstep through the snow was heavier than the last, his pace away from the twisted wreckage of behind him getting slower and slower.
Even if he hadn’t been bleeding from a multitude of cuts and scrapes, Anso knew he was dead already. Just a few breaths of Titan’s atmosphere, still in the adolescence of its terraforming, was enough.
She danced ahead of him. Her long, spindly limbs arched through the snow. She raced around him, swirling with delighted cries like a child seeing snow for the first time.
He no longer felt the jagged cold beneath his feet. The stars overhead were dimming and the blood in the footprints he had left behind was freezing. His wheezing breath left him in crumpled clouds, a mist that wafted up into the incomplete atmosphere of Titan and disappeared into the blackness above. At last he could go no farther -- the exhaustion that he felt was merciless, and he was too tired to force from himself the will to pursue the shadow that goaded him forward into the night.
There was only the meekest flicker of pain when he plunged forward and collided with the greenish snow. His cheek lay against the cold ground for a moment before he was able to roll himself onto his back. Above him he saw nothing but the limitless expanse of sky, with only a starving ember of Saturn’s light to complement the distant glow of the laboratories and the fading stars.
He could hear the snow crunching beneath her when she approached. She looked down at him with a shy smile. Her long, dark hair flowed out into the sky, melded with it, became it. Beyond her eclipse he could see nothing but the dark woman standing over him; she had moved in front of the moons and there was no light that could escape her.
Black eyes stared down into him. In them he saw none of the soft affection that had greeted him in the dark basement laboratory; in them he saw only an intractable loneliness that could not be in anyone but her; in them he saw her dawning realization that she would outlast and continue beyond him.
Her lips pursed and it looked to him like she was saying something, but he could not hear it over the ringing in his ears. She took another step beside him, his eyes following the starless sky in her hair. Slowly she turned and drifted away from him on heavy footfalls. Only in those last moments did he realize that her feet were leaving physical impressions in the snow now.
It is so cold, he thought.
A calm breeze passed overhead. Anso closed his eyes and called out her name in a rasping whisper.
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