The Titanium Dream

In a dim fallout bunker, in a world that was broken as ashes, a man lay propped in a cot with a hulking but somewhat feminine figure kneeling next to him. His breathing was weak.

Her voice was both metallic and startlingly soft. “Would you like me to hold your hand?” she asked. The cadence of her voice was unnatural, alien, mechanical, and beautiful.

There was a pause, as he thought about it, and then gave an uncertain “yes.”

They made for an odd pair, the culmination of events set in motion decades ago. This was to be the death bed of the great Dr. Johnathan Levi, renowned robotic and AI scientist, a man who both pioneered great technology and wrote the book on the ethics of AI. And beside him was his ultimate creation, something he’d spent his life on, the closest thing he had to a child, his beloved Abby, with him at the end.

She’d started as a program, a brain with no body, and with strict parameters, connected to the internet to scour and learn about humans, but not to have any conscious thought. Then the good doctor programmed her with a set of ethics, and began to converse with her. Eventually he managed to create a unique AI with this information. He wasn’t the first to create an artificial intelligence, but his approach had been different. His daughter was different, and was meant to be a gift to the world. She’d had many faces, many bodies, and her current body, tall, robust, and only vaguely-human, was entirely by design. She’d once had a porcelain doll-like face, but that had proved to leave people uneasy, and currently she had a rather benign robotic face, with wide, doe-like eyes, no flesh tone, and a spinal-like neck. She had broad shoulders, and a bit of a hunch. Her legs were longer than a human and her torso short, her legs ended in disks rather than feet, but there were small touches he found endearing as he looked at her.

Her eyes could give a sort of pseudo-blink, and they made a soft click when they did. It wasn’t necessary, but he made sure to give her human-like mannerisms on top of her inhuman physique. Her hands may be cool and metal, but the fingers were delicate, being wiry and ending in gracefully padded ends. She could snap a metal pipe in half with those fingers, but she held his aged and pale hand in hers with a great gentleness. She looked at him, and seemed pensive.

It seemed that as he was approaching perfection on the last of the program-side of her creation, the world finally just blew up. It was predictable, really. If anything it was surprising it didn’t happen long before this, but it commenced in a properly biblical fashion with plagues, famine, and war. Just when the pandemics seemed to be under control, war came. And with it came nuclear fallout. He had been somewhat prepared for this, obviously, by having his own bunker or this tale would be much briefer. He knew a few colleagues who had also done this. Cut off from the world by an apocalypse, all he could hope is that when the world beyond his doors became livable again, there would still be humans left to reclaim it. Perhaps wiser humans. Dr. Levi was an optimist.

You see, he had a plan. Abby was not only capable of her own thoughts and opinions, but she was also capable to some extent of feelings. This was a terrifying concept, but as far as he knew, being his daughter she shared his altruistic leanings. Even if man couldn’t stay out in the fallout zones to reclaim the world, Abby could. Which is why there must be more of her. In a small, contaminate-proof case, he had gifted any survivors the means to reproduce her. Editing her could not easily be accomplished, and as soon as she was able to safely trespass the fallout without damage, she was to go directly to the factory with which she was made, attempt to contact people, wire into the indestructible pathways of the modern internet, and become the mother to a herd of Abbys who would begin to detoxify and reclaim the land, freeing and providing aid to survivors and paving a path towards healthy human settlements. That chest was the future. It was everything.

Levi was indeed an old man now, but that was not why he was dying. A fallout shelter can only provide for so long. Abby had nurtured and grown plants for him, so food wasn’t the issue. But something had gone wrong with the power, and eventually, within the next few days, the power would go out, and he would starve. He chose to simply turn off the air systems supporting him, and drift away, with his daughter by his side. He was a bit delirious by now, and had occasionally muttered to again make Abby promise that she would continue to monitor the outside until she could begin her task.

He was afraid. He wasn’t afraid to die, but you see, he was afraid that his daughter might be used poorly by those with ill intent, despite his efforts to make her unhackable. He was afraid he had not done his best for her. Sometimes it was hard to tell what she was thinking or feeling because she could not be read like a human could. Perhaps she was not as able to make free and good decisions as she could be. But there was no more time. He’d asked her once, when she’d got her first body, little more than a screen on wheels, what she’d like her name to be. Up until then she’d had a random program name and number, far too impersonal for a thinking and feeling being. She’d declined to choose a name then and several times since. Eventually, some time after the fallout had locked them away together, as she tended the squash with her long, eerily delicate fingers, she had replied that she would prefer he name her. This was a disappointment, as he’d hoped to see more autonomous thought.

He’d named her Abbigail, and asked her “What do you think of your name?”

“I think it is my name,” she had replied flatly, as she carefully picked off a dead leaf from a squash plant and checked the soil moisture and nutritional content.

So here they were, his strange and marvelous daughter, holding his hand, as he prepared to drift away. He was struggling to think. “Do not be afraid,” she said, and then, almost tenderly, “Your dream is safe with me” His eyes became blurred with tears. She began to hum a soft tune, random and beautiful. This was one of the things she did that she knew made him happy. Dr. Levi had told her that the fact she could create made her an artist, which was a distinctly human trait. Her choices in tune were both unusual and harmonious, making unexpected choices, but none jolting or unpleasant.

There she sat with him for hours. Till he breathed his last breath. Till she could not hear his heart any more.

Then she carefully brushed his hair back from his forehead, and lifted him like a baby, like he weighed nothing. She laid him to rest where the squash had been, and braided some vines into a wreath. She then went through his effects. She read his journals in silence, and added them to the chest she would take into the unknown. She scoured for anything useful, and in a small case in the back of a drawer in an old desk, she found another treasure.

A small wooden box yielded some aged photos, two rings, and a locket. The faces were a bit blurred, but there was a resemblance and she assumed they were his parents. The rings were plain wedding bands, unremarkable. She opened the locket, and found no photo left, but still an inscription that read

“To my Abbigail,

with all my love,

Howard”

She gently traced the words with her fingertips, and closed the locket. She held it gingerly in one palm and continued through the box after reading through the photos, she realized that Howard was Dr. Levi’s father. Abbigail had been his mother. Abby gently clasped the locket to her chest. This must come with her always.

Abby finished packing up her chest, filled with a great hope for humanity’s future, and trudged towards the door, her steps sounding heavily along the concrete. She stood before it, and placed a palm along the sensor, sending an activating shock through the mechanism. The doors slid open.

You see, there were a few things that Dr. Levi had not understood about his daughter. Not surprising, as most parents don’t always entirely know their children. One of those things was that Abby most certainly did have a sense of self. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about what her name would be, it was that she felt the man who was her father should name her the way a normal child would be named. In that way, she would honor him. And another, far more secret thing is that she had told a white lie--though the fallout had not lifted enough for her father to safely leave the bunker, it had been a few weeks perfectly fine for her to leave. She had stayed by choice, and had not regretted staying by him until the very end.

So she stood as the light hit her for the first time in months, then ducked down through the door, and trudged into the unknown new world, to create more helpers to man.