Holding My Hand For Line C

It was good just to sit and look out over the rolling hills. I was up so high that I seemed to be in the clouds at times as they drifted by. I pulled the bandana out of my pocket and wiped my face. It was hot again, but I was getting used to the heat, which was surprising. Yet again, we weren’t on Earth anymore.

Not on Earth. Even saying that to myself was really shocking. Unfortunately we had had to flee the Earth. As a child I was whisked off to a ship by my parents, fear and nervousness written all over their faces, shoved into a long line and taken away. A nice Artificial Life Form (ALF) saw that I was one of the few children there, stood beside me, and took my hand. I will never forget how she looked at me in such a soothing, loving way. She had tanned skin with green hair and almost black, eyes. I only learned that they were designed to look that way so we wouldn’t mix them up with human beings later.

She held my hand and walked me to processing. There were three lines. Line A went to an Earth-like planet 2 light years away with minimal life. Line B went to an Earth-like Planet 4 light years away that had been explored and colonized already. There were no life forms due to a large sun spike that happened thousands of years ago and caused all life on the planet to be obliterated as the results of an ongoing vegetation fire for centuries.

All life forms simply died out. Line C was for a Planet was ten light years away. There was life there, but only ALFs who had been left over from the previous thousand years of droughts, famine, war and violence. I was sent to line C because I was very young and it would take longer to get there. That would allow for the type of training I needed to live with another civilization.

I turned. Someone was standing over me. I shielded my eyes against the sun. “Carrie. Why are you just standing there?” I asked. She looked down at me for a moment and then sat beside me.

“Why are you just sitting here?” She asked. “You’re supposed to be working, aren’t you?”

“I’m tired, Carrie.” There was silence. “I don’t know why I’m wasting my time doing busy work anyway. I’m just digging holes. You ALFs could easily dig those holes. And we don’t really need them, do we?”

“Well…we don’t, but you need to work to stay in shape,” she said I looked into her green eyes, but really didn’t see any emotion behind her words. Unlike the Earth ALFs the ones on this planet looked human, very human. Despite what looked like no emotions she smiled and brushed a thick lock of black hair from in front of her eyes. I wondered if it was just a learned response. “When you first got here you said that you needed work or your civilization would decay. You said that you would feel helpless, useless, and depressed.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I mean you as in your leadership. We agreed to become helpers to you in that context. We agreed to give you our planet. We agreed to help you stay connected and help you stay productive, and to have peaceful relations with you treating you as equals. Isn’t that true?”

“I guess it is,” I said. “I’m not a politician.”

“Well we kept up our side of the bargain. At least 6 hours you do some type of work.”

“Yes, but unnecessary, manual labor…”

“That keeps the body strong as well as the mind,” she finished. “We don’t need you for the technical work. We can do that.”

“It doesn’t seem fair.”

“What do you mean? It is not only fair, it’s good. We’re helping you. What would you do if you weren’t doing this, spend your money on a gym to burn calories? I’ve read that humans used to do that, and some of your work is very necessary. Don’t you think we need latrines, or sewage, or underground pipes or cables?”

“Yeah. But I’m tired,” I said, leaning over and collapsing onto her. She grinned.

“I must admit. I don’t understand you humans at all.”

“Maybe I just wanted to touch you,” I said sitting back up.

“Yeah. I get that. But you don’t have to fall on me to touch me.” She stood up. “Five more minutes and back to work, OK? Give me just another hour and you’re done. Don’t be so…how do you people say it, lazy? And then maybe you can find one of your human friends to touch.”

“I only want to touch you.” Her mouth formed an “O.”

“I can’t believe that,” she said. I tilted my head slightly to the side, still looking up at her. “Ten minutes,” she said, and then turned and walked away. I smiled to myself, thinking that would be the end of it and turned my attention back to the view.

I finished my hour quite easily. To be truthful, the hard work wasn’t bad. We didn’t do the same things everyday, we switched off every so often, but it was always work that was very physical. Their philosophy was that we humans were designed to live in a way that kept us happy instead of having to starve ourselves or go jogging or something to stay healthy. They attempted to build it into our lifestyles. It was OK. It wasn’t that much and you got used to it and you had many choices of activities, so you didn’t do the same thing until you were sick of it.

Carrie was my supervisor. We were all assigned ALFs as mentors, so to speak, because they had been on this planet for thousands of years and knew all of the ins and outs of the place. Some of them were also old–five or six hundred years old with all that knowledge right there in their heads. Being with one of them was like having a walking computer with personality with you all the time. Some of them were a bit attractive too.

It was bothersome to have a being that looked good and had a wonderful personality around you for so long because if you weren’t careful you would develop an emotional attachment to them which they didn’t usually return. Thus the story of Carrie and Roger–who is me. Roger Denim, named after a pair of old blue pants, probably.

My friends didn’t have that problem. They always saw the ALFs as just machines. They had no problem with them, but as in days of old, they believed that ALFs didn’t have souls. In that sense, they saw themselves as more superior or divine than ALFs. At one time I thought that true, but I began to question it after being around them so much.

Some of them seemed to have something hidden inside that was more than chips. Sometimes, if you caught them off guard, you could catch something in their eyes that was not just information technology or machinery, but you could only do it once.

Once they realized what you had done or seen, you would never see it again. That was how it was with Carrie. It was like she had her guard up now, but I had caught her with it down before. I kept staring into her eyes every so often just looking for that spark of life. She didn’t seem annoyed about it. She didn’t even seem to care.

I often wondered about her. I stepped underneath the nice, warm shower and let it run over my aching muscles. It had only been six hours of work with ample breaks. There was a time on Old Earth when people dug underground in coal mines for 15 and 16 hours a day straight, six days a week. We were only doing 6 for 4 days a week, which was much more humane than humans had been to each other for a very long period of time.

I wondered if the ALFs knew that about us and if they really cared. So Carrie put up with my weird staring without really caring, which only made her a little more elusive to me, and in some ways superior. I was from the first generation living with ALFs for my whole life, which made me relate to them in a different way than the older generations. They were cool to me…something to emulate, not to fear.

I knew I wasn’t one, of course, but that didn’t even make that much of a difference to me. We just hung out as humans, did our thing, and partied like crazy on our three day weekend which was coming up for me with the shutting off of the shower. I turned the nozzle tight, stepped out, and dried myself with a thick towel.

I got dressed in loose fitting clothing and put on comfortable slippers. I pushed a few buttons on the food dispenser and filled a mug of hot chocolate before picking up my newspaper. With my cup on one hand and my newspaper in the other I made my way to the lounge chair to sit and relax. That seat really felt good.

I felt good after a hard day's work and sat there reading the paper. Sometimes I wondered if anything they said in it was true. The ALFs seemed to have their stuff together. The planet had been sectioned off with some of it run by Humans, some of it by ALFs, and some run by a mixture of ALF and Human leadership. It all seemed to be working well. I was in the ALF section.

Most of what they talked about in the news here, not surprisingly, was ALFs, unless you went to the specialty newspapers and broadcasts. We mostly read newspapers. The ALFs thought that TV was bad for humans and thwarted their imaginations. Radio was good; books and magazines; a live play every so often, but no vegging out in front of the TV.

I didn’t mind. Hearing all of that talk on TV really bugged me sometimes. I sat, read, and took the time to really taste my hot chocolate until the doorbell rang. I wasn’t getting up.

“Enter!” I shouted from my seat. Carrie walked in and closed the door behind her. She walked over to the sofa adjacent to my chair and took a seat, which was quite normal in our relationship. She didn’t say a word, she just sat there, which was also quite normal, and then cleared her throat loudly, which was not normal. I looked over the edge of my paper at her.

“Am I disturbing you?” She asked pleasantly. I shook my head.

“Some of my friends are wondering about you,” she said casually. “They wonder why you are looking in everyone’s eyes. They are wondering what you are trying to see.”

“Really? I didn’t know it was that…intrusive.”

“Not intrusive, a curiosity. What have you seen?”

I looked into her eyes. “You know what I’ve seen,” I said nonchalantly.

“And what is that?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. I just thought I saw something.”

“What do you think you saw, Roger?” She asked pleasantly.

“I think…I think you are alive,” I said. “I think you’re not just a machine or circuitry, I think you are really alive. She arched her eyebrows and then smiled a bit.

“Thank you. I’ll tell them,” she said. She leaned back and crossed her arms.

“That’s it?”

“Yes. That’s it. Were you expecting something else?”

“Yes. Some type of confession.” I looked at my newspaper again.

“If I did that I would have to kill you, wouldn’t I?” I looked over my paper again and looked right into her eyes for a few moments before speaking. I couldn’t read her at all. She looked serious and then slowly began to smile.

“No Carrie. With the way I feel about you…you would never have to kill me.”

Her lifted brow, a tilt of the and a slight nod, spoke more clearly than anything she could have said.