Quite

Quiet. Quiet is what I’ve had for more time than I can remember. My mind has drifted all over the universe for an eternity and then, I am back to being me. Brenda is sitting beside me now. For a long time her consciousness and mine were merged into one body. We were intertwined as one being. Now we are separate.

She has been removed from my head and placed into an Artificial Life Form that looked just like the one that the superstitious mob on mars destroyed. I still keep a copy of her program on my watch just in case something happens to her again. I don’t know why. Things are different now and that is old thinking. Even if something were to happen I still have a copy of her brain stored somewhere in the deep recesses of my own . I am still definitely human, I think. I have been living in the in between time and space so long I’m not sure anymore.

Brenda and I were the parents of a new generation of beings. They were a mixture of Artificial Life Forms (ALFs) and human beings that the advanced ALFs created with the use of a reprogrammed teleporter. It merged me with an artificial life form that was connected with the net. Once I was connected to it, they had access to my thoughts and emotions all over the galaxy. They became thinking, feeling beings who were also artificial and imbued with the gift of Artificial Intelligence. Afterward I spent my time in a cave connected to them until they developed the capacity to feel and to know what it was to be human and to have a human soul. Now those days are over.

They are sentient and alive, and I am free to go wherever I might, with Brenda. I really don’t know what the universe is like now. In the state of timelessness, in which I existed, days could have passed or centuries. So here I am sitting here in the cave with Brenda for the last time. She is quiet also. She has always been quiet. She has always been very kind and beautiful. What better creature to share your mind with for no telling how long?

“Let’s get out of here,” Brenda suddenly said, standing to her feet. “We’ve been here on this little planet too long. It’s cold and damp, and it always seems dark. I want to go back to our home planet and our own dimension. I don’t like it here. I never have.”

I need to see something real. We’ve traveled all over the universe on the net. We’ve been everywhere, but now I need to be somewhere else physically. How about you?”

“You can be sure of that. Let’s get down to the lab and get them to shift us back to our dimension. I don’t even know if it will be the same place. It’s been a long time, I think.”

“I doubt that it will be the same, but it could. We don’t know how long we’ve been here. I could have just been moments.”

“Yes. Timelessness does have its advantages, doesn’t it?” She smiled pleasantly as we headed out of the small cave for the first time in I didn’t know how long, and made our way down the narrow corridor to the lab. An ALF I didn’t know was sitting there looking at a computer screen. I wondered what she needed that for. She could tap into the whole net.”

“I know I can, but this is a lot more fun,” she responded, without me asking. That was expected since I had been connected to the net for so long. “Life is more than about efficiency, if you know what I mean, Father,” she said followed by a wink. She stood up from her desk and walked over to a panel across the room. “How may I serve,” she said, spinning around with her back facing the panel. “Where do you want to go?” She asked before we could answer.

“We want to go back to our own dimension. Back home.” I said. Brenda gave a nod.

“You sure? You could go to any dimension. There are thousands you could visit and you would be known well anywhere there is AI.”

“We’re sure,” I said. Looking to Brenda for a nod.

“We are sure,” she said. The AI woman directed us to a small booth, the type that I had been seated in so long ago with wires attached to my head. At the time I was being readied to become part AI and part human. I looked around. I had almost forgotten that my body had been changed too. I was an Artificial Life Form. I didn’t feel like one and had forgotten all about it. We stepped into the chamber. She began to punch a few buttons on the panel. The familiar light began to glow and I heard a high pitched sound followed by a buzz. In a flash I found myself in the dome near my small house on mars.

We looked around. It was a greenhouse. There were trees, flowers, and hydroponic crops growing. It felt familiar. It felt like home. We were home. There weren’t that many people there. It was quite like it was when I used to sneak into the place as a teen with my friends to smoke pot and to be alone. No one liked it in the place because it was cool and damp so no one disturbed us. Melissa and I often came here. It was so funny to see her again in another dimension. She wasn’t the same person, but like her. And I, apparently, was an ass hole.

When Brenda was taking me home after I had been held by the ALFs in the other dimension, I, the other me, started screaming and shouting. In that dimension there were no ALFs and there was a great fear of creating them. As he shouted and cajoled the crowd literally attacked and tore Brenda limb from limb. As an ALF she could have protected herself and put up a good fight, but she was gentle and kind hearted. She allowed herself to be destroyed.

She was only here now because we had uploaded her essence onto a chip in the back of my watch just in case something happened to her. The ALFs in the other dimension used that chip to reincarnate her and feed her into my brain making our minds and memories merge together. I am only happy that that chip didn’t contain the horror and the memories of her being torn apart, even though I was sure they were somewhere on the net. In AI nothing ever disappeared, it was only buried and eventually dismantled.

I took a few deep breaths. The moist air that filled my lungs felt good. I guess the O2 level had been raised as a result of the plants filling the terrarium. I was also relieved that it was all over. That is what I thought anyway. I took Brenda’s hand and she squeezed mine as we made our way out of the dome, really not knowing what to expect.

It was a small dome–only about 12 miles across. We were about 3 miles from our apartments. It would take time, but it would be a good walk. My body was also in better shape than it had been in years. I marveled at that and how it had become a mixture between a human and ALF. I think that Brenda and I were very unique beings–especially me.

“I would say so,” She said. I was surprised. I had forgotten she might hear me.

“Good. You understand now,” the attendant said across dimensions. “You are not the same. So where will you really be going, Gary, Brenda? Another–another dimension, another time? Maybe an ALF home planet? Where do you want to go for real?”

“Home,” Brenda repeated.

“Oh. Still to that little shitty dimension on backwards Mars is it?” She grinned. We appeared back in the lab. “See the teleportation booth fluctuating in front of you? Go back in there.” I looked around and saw the same booth they had used in order to alter me. “We have improved it and altered it to teleport, as it was designed to do so all you need to do is step in and trust me.”

“I trusted you folks last time.”

“And nothing happened,” She said. Brenda just stood there with no expression. Why was I not surprised? She took my hand.

“Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”

“Ok. Let’s go.” We headed toward the booth.

“I am Carrie, by the way, if you want to know, considering that you didn’t even have the manners to ask.”

“Aren’t you spicy, Carrie?” We stepped in.

“A little. You may find we are all a bit spicy now.”

“Not dangerous, I hope.”

“No. Not all of us.” She gave me a wink. With that I just followed Brenda into the transporter booth. There was a brief hum. The booth was filled with a bright light again. When the light went out we were standing in the old building where we had been working on how we could open up a rift between dimensions. It was quiet. It seemed late. We were standing right in the middle of the shop floor where my desk seemed to still be sitting. We heard the elevator descending from upstairs and a ding. Someone stepped out and was heading in our direction. It was Gerald.

He stopped and stared at us for a moment before speaking. “I can’t believe it Gary, Brenda. You’re back. We were so worried about you. What happened to you?” We looked at each other.

“How long have we been gone?” Sir, Brenda asked.

“Almost 7 years!”

“Seven years! That’s all?” I exclaimed.

“Yes. Not long enough for you Gary?”

“We were in another dimension for thousands of years,” I said. He scratched the side of his head. “I never thought we’d get out of there. I can’t believe it has only been 7 years here. What happened to all the other people? Are they back?”

“No. They’re still missing. People are going crazy, but the ALFs don’t seem concerned. They’ve all changed in a very strange way as if…”

“They are alive,” Brenda finished.

“Yes. As if they are alive.”

“I think you’ll find that all of the Artificial Intelligence is like that too,” I said. “Every ALF has been integrated into a new matrix that makes them partially human.”

“We have discovered that, and have realized that there has now been a shift in the balance of power here and on just about every planet. The ALFs and the AI are alive. What does that mean for us–the human beings? What will they do to us? Or with us?” He looked at Brenda. She shrugged.

“Each one has its own mind,” she said.

“And you?” he asked.

“I am alive. I always have been. I just didn’t tell anyone.” Gerald reached up and scratched his cheek.

“Really?” He looked at me. I lifted my shoulders and said,.

“I had no idea.” He was pensive for a few moments.

“This thousands of years thing,” he said, after some thought. “That’s very strange. How is it that you look the same as before, except a little more healthy, I would say?”

“Long story about dimension jumping, transporters, experimentation…”

“Don’t tell me you are the One, and you’re the other One,” He said, turning to Brenda. I can’t believe this. The ALFs are always talking about the One and their sudden transformation. I can’t believe this. It’s you. And I still don’t understand the time dilation. How is such a thing possible?”

“Maybe we were so bored we just thought it was thousands of years. Somehow we were moved out of regular time and space into an eternal mindset where chronological time didn’t matter. I thought we were there for centuries.”

“For us it was. Time is a tricky matter, I would say,” Brenda responded.

“Well I don’t guess you want your old job back,” Gerald said. “Seems to me that you are going to be as busy as hell when the government folks realize you’re here, and when the ALFs do. You won’t have a minute to yourselves. Maybe I should ask you two for a job. It wouldn’t be boring.”

“We would be happy to give you a job, but we don’t have any money,” Brenda said.

“Money, what’s that? We don’t have it anymore either. We have a basic income for everyone. Unless you are greedy or nuts you don’t go out and do extra work for more. You just plug in where you’re needed to keep things going. That whole money concept was always pretty dumb. I think it was just a way to force people to do what they really didn’t want.”

“Wow. This really is a different world.”

“Not yet. We’re at war with the Clingers…that is with those clinging to the past. It is more ideological than physical, mainly because you can’t go shooting off weapons in a pyrosteel dome without possibly killing everyone except the ALFs. So we struggle ideologically. And that is probably where you two will be called on.”

“As weapons for the new world,” I said. I shook my head.

“No peace, just another type of war?” Brenda asked. “Humans never learn, do they?”

“Most do. It’s just the dunderheads who mess it up for the rest.”

***

We were allowed to go back to our old apartments near the edge of the dome. Apparently, many ALFs had moved to the neighborhood and were now living there. That was new. Gerald, and others, thought it was a good place for us to live and knew that ALFs would not have a problem with letting us have our old apartments. We decided to move into my old place because it was just better than the small place Brenda had. I couldn’t complain though. That is where I used to try not to watch her dancing around the room half naked most of the time, but only succeeded at not doing it a few times.

It was a short walk from the large warehouse to my place. When we arrived many of the ALFs were already waiting. I had forgotten that I was still connected to the whole net of ALFs and AI, including to Brenda. That would be awkward. I looked at her and she just smiled pleasantly. How much did she know what I was thinking? She smiled even more, but didn’t say anything. Laughter came to me in my head. I had forgotten that I could hear them too, if I wanted. It wasn’t a problem.

Random thoughts were often forgiven because all of us had them every so often, even the ALFs, since they became a bit more human. We were all mature enough to understand that. They all stood on their porches trying to get a look at us. I couldn’t believe the feeling. I had seen all of them in my mind at one time or the other and so had Brenda. They were familiar, like family. It was strange to know people that you had never seen face to face so well. Maybe, if we as humans had done that, we wouldn’t be in the state of affairs we ended up in.

A health officer stepped forward to greet me. He looked at me, head slightly tilted, and then a bright smile came through. “It is you,” he said. “I have to admit that I just thought you were a myth, but I see you here.” He looked at Brenda. “And you, but you two are apart.” He grinned. “Couldn't stand being crammed in one head together anymore eh?”

I looked at Brenda. Instead of answering I changed the subject. He was telling the truth, but it wasn’t that we couldn't stand it. We just wanted to be our individual selves.

“I get that,” he said with a wink. “I was just joking…partially.”

“You heard what I was thinking,” I said.

“Of course. You were thinking it at me. I heard it. If you don’t think at me I can’t hear it.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” I said. I looked around. There must have been about 30 ALFs standing around. They all seemed to be enjoying themselves and our conversation. I realized they could all hear us and not only that, feel our emotions. That was scary. The officer leaned in close.

“Brenda can tell you how to turn it off. Don’t worry.”

“I don’t know if I should,” she said. “This is a lot of fun.”

“For who?” I asked.

“All of us,” came back in unison. I knew I had to get rid of that open link just to maintain my sanity.

The End

(Part1)