Tasmania
“Like the Tasmanian ‘tiger’?’ The thylacine?”
Professor D’aoud, piloting the inquiry from her mech chair, like an old-time ship captain, nodded sagely. Her green eyes glittered.
But all she said was: “You know your Earth history.”
“I have ancestors among the original New Zealand survivalists.” Callie smiled shyly. Making clear, perhaps, that she was not boasting. Just asserting verifiable fact—like a good empiricist.
And letting her boss know she had no idea where she was going with that analogy.
“My goodness! I did not realize I was in the presence of Coalition royalty.”
Of course, the way Professor D’aoud spoke, clipping every syllable with those very untechnological rose petal lips, told Callie she was not genuinely impressed in the least.
And left Callie to muddle through the logic on her own, as usual.
D’aoud expected Callie to know and understand every nuance of her, D’aoud’s, work, her thinking, her plans, her world. For the duration of the Reconstitution Project (as they were now calling it) at the very least, not only was D’aoud’s work Callie’s work. Everything D’aoud was Callie’s job.
In the two years Callie had worked with D’aoud, the young scientist had learned that about half of what came out of the renowned Unervian academic’s mouth amounted to straight-up sarcasm. It was not just D’aoud’s personality, Callie had come to realize, but part of a carefully-constructed image, as elemental to the icon’s distinctive public style and cultural mythos as her unusual clothing choices.
Communication between the pioneering luminary and her wide-eyed protégé sometimes seemed to consist of Callie parsing the professor’s odd phrasings and pronouncements to try to sort out which were directions, which were factual assertions, which efforts to impart knowledge and which effectively digs at her research sidekick. There was a lot of paying attention on Callie’s part, a constant mental processing effort every single moment they were together.
It was exhausting.
Callie wondered at times if that was intentional.
Callie was not at all embarrassed to be the deferential protégé or scientific sidekick. D’aoud was galactically famous, after all, and all Callie’s friends and colleagues in the tech community—including her old professor-mentor (now more of a friend), Dr. Parvati Harrington, for one—were openly jealous of Callie’s access to the much-celebrated “preeminent scientific mind of her generation.” In her conscious thinking, Callie likened their discursive process to translation programs. Not the basic human language-to-language utilities; more like the algorithms that translated interspecies communications. Callie was constantly absorbing D’aoud’s knowledge and beliefs, her attitudes, her agenda, even her foibles, consciously and conscientiously making space in her own head for it all.
But wasn’t that essentially what human dialogue, socialization and education had been about since civilization began way back on Earth—endeavoring to figure out meaning conveyed by others, acquiring new knowledge, testing out new ideas and viewpoints, and yes, allowing oneself to be educated, taught—even indoctrinated, in a way?
As to the sarcasm, Refa would say, “Well then you don’t have to worry that s/he’s Mech, a Droud.”
Conspiracy theories about the possibility of another or renewed Machine/Mech Takeover—a replay of the near-catastrophe of a century and a half ago in world history—were rampant in social media at the time. On all the tele-props boards. Chewed over in every stimulanterie and drinkshed from Unerva to the 6 Centrals. A theory Callie thought had, and should have, died out around that time, when the Human Code had been rewritten to protect biological autonomy, held that sarcasm was inimical to AI. Maybe because, the thinking went, it had no overt purpose except to entertain the speaker, the sarcastic one; sarcasm actually inhibited communication, and was therefore inherently counterproductive in a way antithetical to logical mech processes. So sarcasm was fashionable because lay people imagined it tacitly protected the against any and all risk of mech hegemony—?
Right, Callie thought—brilliant!—as if something so trivial could be broadly diagnostic!
But then, since biology was biology, with its inherent idiosyncrasies and stochasticity, families of origin continued to turn out polar opposites, in terms of siblings, even after a century or more of genework and GeneticEd proliferation: Refa, younger than Callie by just over a year, and as unlike Callie personally as night and day, had none of the OCD-like attention to detail Callie suffered with—nor any interest in empirical anything.
Dear sister Refa was an advocate of sarcasm, a purveyor of all sort of theories about mech hegemony, an eager consumer of rumors, stories, goss of every ilk. Callie suspected her innocent, blue-eyed sister of fomenting some of the most exotic ideas herself, conjuring up out of whole dermi-cloth the most credulous conspiracies she shared with her friends, as happily insouciant to truth as Callie was dedicated to it—laughing off any detrimental impacts her fabrications might have upon society or social structure.
You couldn’t fight that kind of craziness head on. So Callie often resorted to sarcasm herself.
“Who ever heard of a trans AI, either?” Callie was responding to Refa’s comment about D’aoud’s mech proclivities.
They were in their shared bedroom unit in Coalition Central close by the Spaceport, dodging around each other in the early morning as they got ready to leave for their respective jobs—about the only time the two siblings seemed to talk anymore.
“And D’aoud told you she is transitioning?” Refa could let you know she was doubtful about something just by the way she turned her head away.
“That’s exactly what she said. The date is on the lab schedules—it’s just over a week off.” Callie snapped her sonic toothbrush back into its wall slot for punctuation. Like: “there!”
“You know I’ve met her, right?” Refa looked away again. “She is like a slightly older highly educated but completely biological Tabicobot. I mean if you took her out of the lab and her dowdy lab jackets and scrubs, she would be … no she is disturbingly hot. I’d date her. I’d do her. She could probably make me beg to … do so.” She looked back at Callie, considering. “I mean you really have to wonder if any of her assets have benefitted from her access to top notch scientific … support.”
Callie rolled her eyes. “D’aoud’s a scientist; she doesn’t care about that sort of thing. And you would beg. But you date—you do—anyone and everyone.”
Refa laughed, not offended in the least. Callie’s sole sibling generally reveled in her promiscuity. “True. I’m a true fan of the romantic—“
“Meaning you love sex—“ Callie inserted sotto voce—
“Meaning—yeah. But I have to compensate for a semi-frigid sibling—” Refa squirted water out of her cupped hands, hitting Callie, who had just emerged naked from the shower, right between her breasts.
Which somehow struck Callie as sexy.
Weird, that.
But then, contrary to her sister’s characterization, Callie had been feeling distinctly un-frigid much of the time lately.
Was Refa rubbing off on her?
Then, getting a glimpse of her sister’s really jaw-dropping curves, her firm shape, that delicate incongruously patrician face and the body she kept toned in the local clubs where she inevitably drew all attention from both sexes—that sounded sexy to Callie.
“OK. OK. Stop! I’m serious! I want your honest read on this.” Callie pulled the towel off her hair to pat her chest dry, trying not to feel the crazy warmth anything even hinting at sex seemed to trigger these days. She could not explain what seemed to be happening to her, libido-wise, and it was driving her nuts. She stood a moment nude, thinking, but with her arms crossed protectively over her chest. Still she gave Refa her best “I’m a scientist considering the empirical evidence” look.
“The very theory of being trans—transitioning—assumes some sort of gender characteristics to begin with, right? And except for all the various permutations of sexbots you see among the rocket-setters, the Tabicobots and Jukebox Girls™ everywhere—commercial products specifically designed to satisfy human sexual cravings—it just plain makes no sense to believe that AI not designed for pleasure, that is, machines born of machines, would involve sexual attributes of any sort. Right?”
Basic logic—Callie blinked—but: Callie could not believe she was actually discussing the whole idea that her boss was somehow not fully human with a straight face. She worked for the woman, the professor, the person who, to millions of electronic post followers, was practically a guru, their goddess of science!
Besides, what was really bothering her was frankly the reverse—how human D’aoud had been seeming to her lately. At times what was going on inside Callie felt like, for lack of a more condign phrase, a school girl crush.
Refa, wild child and party girl that she was, was no fool. One of the things that frustrated Callie about her sister was that, statistically, Refa was in the top one or two percent of the population in all the standard gauges of intelligence. Childhood tests, university admissions—Refa could keep up, and more, if she chose to. Why Refa did not use that excellent brain of hers for better purposes than satisfying her basest biological urges mystified Callie. Callie respected Refa’s insight and her opinions; she was not turned on my Refa’s constant teasing and temptations, or the lure of Refa’s exotic lifestyle and dangerous friends.
Callie’s darkest nightmare was winding up like Refa.
Callie’s fear was that if, in a genetic sense, biology was destiny, she would no longer be able to live a life of scientific purity in the satisfyingly antiseptic atmosphere of scientific protocols and objective absolutes. If it all instead somehow devolved into some sort of deepening dependence on sexual pleasure and the need to satisfy her human impulses—Callie was pretty certain the nympho image would not look as good on her as it did on Refa.
Some nights when Refa brought home a friend, or three, and the thin walls of their apartment failed to contain the sounds that came from Refa’s suite, Callie would have to bury herself under the covers and focus on a difficult mathematical conundrum to avoid emulating privately and singly what she imagined going on just a few feet away from her behind closed doors. But that was her secret.
“So you are thoroughly convinced, Cal, that the claim we’ve all heard, the rumors that D’aoud is in some part well-camouflaged AI, is—what?!—just more of the typical and habitual anthropomorphosization that has handicapped human thinking since antiquity, blah blah blah?”
Any time Refa quoted one of Callie’s pet theories, or really anything Callie had said, Refa traditionally finished with “blah blah blah.”
“Of course it is,” Callie snapped, although as she said it, she was not sure which part of ‘blah blah blah’ she was confirming. “Going back to the earliest history, the notion of Greek and Roman gods being of different sexes—it makes no sense if they were gods with super creative powers, right!?”
But as soon as she had spoken, her point seemed less obvious and less important than she had hoped it would.
“As brilliant as she is—“ Refa started, clearly referring to D’aoud. Callie cut in immediately.
“I’ve never even seen ANY sign of an implant.”
“What about those eyes? Everyone comments, obsesses really, about those distinctive eyes! You don’t think there is some ocular mech in—in that incredible green color alone?”
“D’aoud’s a Purist!” Callie half shouted, sweeping a brush through her now-dry blond hair. Purists were the sect that had most firmly rejected the machines from the time of the abortive Mech Takeover. Over time, Purists had turned their antipathy and fear, frankly, into cultish dogma and the group as a whole had evolved many of the trappings of institutional religion. “Maybe some Gentech,” Callie conceded, slowing. “But she can recite Purist scripture like a podium-pounding preacher at an old-time, bible-belt revival.”
Refa was laughing. “Let me get this right, because it is so perfectly Callie: ‘a podium-pounding Purist preacher at an old-time, bible-belt revival.’ Love your phrasing. Really good, girl! Good girl! That’s great! I guess you do know your Earth history.”
“What?!” Callie paused, momentarily confused by something she could not quite place.
For god knows what reason, she caught her hand slipping down to … her crotch. It felt for all the world as if it were moving on its own volition.
Stop! She straightened and folded her towel.
“You of all people should know that all the rumors about D’aoud are about jealousy. We humans are supposed to be long past the superficiality of external looks, with gentech and LooksChoice engineering available to even the poorest project products these days. But it’s still the same old story. No one wants to believe looks like that can go together naturally with her brains and talent.” Callie was putting on her work suit now but, pondering the issues seriously, intelligently, she was not done:
“People are jealous of D’aoud’s looks, her brains, her reputation and position in the academic community. The influence and power she’s accumulated over her long and storied career, her wealth...and…” As she tallied up all of D’aoud’s favorable attributes, Callie found she was losing track of her thread, standing still by the sink, her body now just half naked in the mirror. She was picturing D’aoud, again, and that almost seemed to put her into a trance. It was a nice feeling, but where did it come from? She rubbed the back of her neck absentmindedly. This had been happening a lot lately, and it was accompanied by a warm tingle in the back of her skull, at the top of her spine, and—well—at the other end of her spine, in the organ Callie felt Refa tended to share too much too readily. Dammit.
“She sure does keep herself in shape, physically,” Refa husked out, mischievously. “Those long legs, those high cheek bones, those breasts just about this size—perfect!” She chortled at Callie’s expression. “Always dressed in silver and black like the dream of perfection in a robot’s central data processor! Rowf. Mmmmm!” She shot Callie a smoldering glance. “Can you imagine kneeling at her feet and submitting to her charms by leaning into that heavenly delta?”
The problem was, of course, these days Callie could very much imagine just that, disgusting, unscientific and grossly unprofessional as the image was. Lately she had been trying hard not to picture D’aoud in her mech chair, Callie before her … slipping off her lab chair … into submissive obeisance. Was Callie that transparent? And if Refa could tell, why the constant harangue of sexual imagery? Was it just sibling teasing or—whose side was Refa on?!
As Refa very atypically finished her morning ablutions before Callie and headed to the els, the best retort Callie could come up with on short notice, with all her proven intelligence and scientific training was, “Shut up!”
The els zoomed, rattling Refa down to street level, and Callie was alone.
“Shut up,” she repeated softly when the outside door had clapped shut. The fact was something had seriously bothered her about the whole exchange, not just in the now-predictable physical way, but mentally, too, logically. With regard to the weird sense that something about the conversation reminded her of something she had meant to remember, and that increasingly any and every thought of D’aoud made her wet, Callie had gone back and lain in her bed for just a few minutes, trying to relieve her urges manually. But when she left for work, she was still not clear what it was that had made her feel as though she were missing a connection, a logical piece, she should have seen.
Would have seen if Refa had not gotten her so worked up.
It certainly wasn’t the consideration of Tasmania or marsupial tigers, but something about just being in the Unervian’s presence day after day could be distracting—it was distracting Callie today. Not just D’aoud’s appearance, as Refa had detailed it so evocatively—and accurately—but her coolness, that impersonal distancing element, the calm awareness and casual, if polite exploitation of the uneven power dynamic perhaps—hit Callie in the gut. The professor’s tightly-wound personality and her complicated body language strummed a physiological harmonic in Callie…Callie was not especially proud of it, of what she observed in he own psychological makeup, but there it was.
And as they considered Tasmania, D’aoud drawing Callie on another of her mental journeys down some esoteric rabbit hole, Callie realized her gaze had dropped to the great scientist’s legs, which were encased today in a silvery-blue dermacloth, sort of like old fashioned yoga pants. Unlike Refa, Callie had never dated a woman. Callie was definitely not into women as a rule. But you had to acknowledge as an empirical fact that some women just had a kind of magic—an inborn, organic allure …
A touch of her boss’ fingers under her chin, an oddly familiar and personal gesture, Callie could not recall ever having experienced before, brought Callie’s eyes back up to the hypnotic green ones.
Oh!
“Callie? Have I lost you? You look preoccupied. You were … somewhere else.” Callie’s eyes were fixed on the professors’ and she would have sworn the hypnotic green eyes across from her did not look downward to where the dermacloth converged in that most private and biological of conjunctions—or showed the slightest hint of humor. So what made Callie certain D’aoud had meant there when she’d mentioned ‘somewhere else’?
“You assimilated my, uh, meaning, I see” D’aoud breathed, the odd phrasing seemingly intended to allow for an extra exhale, and extra meaning. “Do you know that the male thylacine had a back-facing pouch, too?”
What in Seven Suns did the brilliant educator mean by that?!
Sometimes the whole situation was, as Refa often commented, more than a little creepy.
But then oddly, Callie did know what D’aoud meant. Again. It was not that D’aoud was able to trigger Callie, or had telepathic powers, obviously. It was just that Callie had come to know D’aoud’s way of thinking very well; she had learned like any good student did and should.
“The point, though—“ Callie started, still hesitant about presuming a conclusion before they had traced the argument through deductively, but feeling like a star pupil reciting the day’s lesson; “is that the thylacine was only assumed to be extinct for about a century, if I recall.” But she paused and looked at the professor for guidance. “How would it have …” She raised her gaze as high as D’aoud’s chest and paused again, feeling a little unmoored, fuzzy. Worse, she liked the feeling, she found, and did not seem to object to the fact it was very unlike her.
D’aoud’s breasts might in fact be enhanced, Callie thought darkly. She was not thinking of anything Refa had said; she was thinking elliptically about Tasmania—a remote and pristinely beautiful island on the original Earth, if she recalled; it sounded beautiful with thylacines and kangaroos, was it?, running around—but she could not ignore the facts in front of her. The parabolic curves of her professor’s breasts were so perfect it was hard to imagine improvement.
But this kind of abstraction was very unlike Callie in the most fundamental and personal respects. Since childhood, Callie had struggled with OCD. At four, she had to check and recheck that her toys were in their set places. She washed her hands six times, precisely, before dinner with their mother. When older she had to verify that she had locked her apartment door endlessly. Her salvation was that in science, the compulsion to be meticulous was actually beneficial in a number of ways, from maintaining sterility and rigorous inventorying to rechecking every experimental parameter to a certainty. The need to repeat things was ideal for such professional purposes as committing to memory every one of the 179 elements in the periodic table, for example.
But then the thought occurred to her—was D’aoud encouraging her to repeat, to obsess with regard to non-scientific matters too? How and when did repetition become a behavior or, looked at objectively, a tool for manipulation? Learning from D’aoud involved turning over so much control of that vulnerable part of herself to D’aoud. Callie would worry worry worry a given detail, obsessing over a test temperature setting, for example. Then D’aoud would approve it, telling Callie it was right, say something like “good girl,” and any questions and doubts on the matter just seemed to dissolve out of Callie’s mind.
D’aoud knew of Callie’s history of OCD naturally; D’aoud knew everything about Callie by the time the unusually invasive interview process was finished and Callie had been hired, and, anyway Callie had confessed her condition when D’aoud asked about it.
Or … how had it come up?
Anyway, they had discussed OCD—it was not a disease but a condition, it was important to remember—as a mechanism for learning. The more cogent question was how aware was D’aoud of how seductive her ability to effectively defuse Callie’s focus on all her habitual iterations was? D’aoud was the first person Callie had ever known able to channel and neutralize her OCD this way, and the professor did it merely by teaching Callie new ideas and reassuring her that she had learned what she had been taught properly, and ultimately that she had been a good pupil, “a good girl,” as D’aoud so inclusively put it. Callie understood the phrasing, coming from D’aoud, was not sexist; it was intended to acknowledge that they were a team, the girls in the science department working together to accomplish great things.
The gleaning steel and glass of the lab instruments arrayed in neat rows like armature in a military parade down towards the lifts and the sealed rooms; the expensively-furnished lab was stone silent as Callie and D’aoud pondered together. When no wisdom was forthcoming from The Oracle (Callie’s own reasonably respectful nickname for D’aoud), she waited just a second before she felt a ripple in her mind.
“Oh, I see.”
Seated in her modest desk chair, elbows on her knees, Callie dropped her gaze to the floor again a moment, thinking, thinking, and then, off topic entirely, again, wondered self-consciously if her body language made her appear subservient. Like a supplicant before an—empress. Or a sub facing her dom. That would be Refa’s way of seeing it. Callie recalled Refa’s imagined tableau and almost giggled. Why didn’t that crack in their professional demeanor bother her?
It all felt so good to Callie. She was learning so much!
“You mean that the found artifact could have evolved technologically,” Callie started, feeling certain the professor could have phrased the concept so much better and in much less time if she would just deign to do so, “before it was found?”
Was there a glint of affirmation in D’aoud’s gaze? Suddenly, Callie was not sure what she herself meant; wasn’t evolution so inherently a biological concept in the same way as sex as to be inimical to tech, to machines, to mech—just as much as, say, sarcasm? How would it even work? Callie felt as though she needed convincing. Convincing, confirmation, persuasion, hmmm.
They had been working since 6 a.m. that morning with only one brief rest, lunch, the merest concession to their biological needs, and the Net Sun had set behind the Cawolar Hills—Callie was not facing the one outside wall-screen D’aoud permitted as the sole concession to the existence of an outside world, the sole “distraction,” anywhere in the labs, and, yes, even in her rather sumptuous office at the end of the lab floor. But Callie could see the sunset, “the remains of the day,” reflected in the surface scanner screens, the colors and clouds replicated in miniature in the curving chrome of myriad nameless instruments.
It was getting late and the day long. Callie was spent.
And when she was run down to her last bit of energy, she started obsessing.
Why was she always working on being convinced?
Why did she want so badly to help D’aoud teach her? Was that healthy, really? Callie had taught courses on some of the topics they worked with here, and always agreed with the theory that the best way to learn was to teach.
Was she turning that principle back on itself and beginning to indoctrinate herself? At what point did a lab tech become so completely a part of the lab and its processes, as to be in essence just another specimen? So many things were disturbing to Callie here, so much confusing—but she looked to D’aoud, her teacher, as her guide, to resolve them.
And those breasts, those lips, those legs; she obsessed about them too.
What had kicked things up to the next level, intensified an already all-consuming work schedule and environment, what they had found at the First Moon archaeological site, what they were calling now “the Failed Settlement Artifact” or “FSA,” and what sat in a sealed, germ-free, protected room just out of sight around the corner from where they sat—was indisputably a major discovery.
A ‘Discovery’ with a capital ‘D.’ Historic, D’aoud called it, perhaps with some pride of proprietorship.
But so did the Coalition news media, the Galactic Coalition government, the public, the gossip rag press. It was a big deal, no question, and Callie was glad—more, deeply grateful—to be part of the process of analyzing it. On board for the wild, historic ride of learning what this completely new invention, creature and/or machine-evolved creation, and the intellectual windfall it represented to the human world, meant in scientific terms.
The young researcher shot a covert glance to her right, down past all the mechanics they used to learn more about their world, feeling it, It, the thing or the device as yet unnamed except for the temporary acronym ‘FSA.’ Like a planetary mass, the FSA seemed to distort space and time around itself—like D’aoud herself, the second sun of her planet, the center of her imagination and focus for the past month—but even leaning, Callie could not see past the spectral analysis monitors at the point where the floor split for the breakout labs.
The FSA. Somehow its significance to Callie now in her research assistant role, in her job, was so amped up on a day-to-day basis that she felt directly linked to it on a cosmic level. She had told Refa that she was quite sure that, at a minimum, in her professional research resume, the FSA would figure importantly throughout her whole career.
And she was. It was that pivotal, scientifically.
Apparently nearly two centuries old, and obviously from the era before the rewrite of the universal conventions that set in stone the essential distinctions between technology and biology, their—the professor’s, really—discovery had apparently been created (they surmised as a working hypothesis) as a kind of conjunction of the two basic opposing forms of autonomous existence. By whom or what was not clear. The Institute had a team of document experts and records custodians digging into the civil circumstances of the time, but apparently the project was private or at least creatively structured under the auspices of a contemporary NGO of the era.
But it was manifestly intended to be more than a cyborg; it was a complete integration, in concept at least, of biology and technology.
And then, according to D’aoud’s theory, it had evolved...?
On its own?
As a found object, they had observed immediately that, as might be expected, the biological portion was defunct, inoperative, long dead—for lack of the basic sustenance biology always so inconveniently required. Food. Water. Maybe, in the catacomb-like tunnels in which it was unearthed, air, oxygen, as well. Each necessary for life.
But evidently D’aoud believed that the tech part had, in some as yet unexplained way, continued operating, persisted by itself, forging forward in a technological sense, self-directedly changing and advancing long after a meteor shower (apparently; the historic records were damaged) had decimated the facility and the civic entity that had originated the project, and the project itself had been dissolved organizationally.
It was Callie’s OCD brain that caviled silently: Had the FSA used the biological remains cannibalistically to fuel the technology?…Callie shivered. Was it just the old OCD habits that insisted in inserting into the most elevated debate the basest quibble?
“Your question, Callie, was how that insignificant old-world proto-marsupial would have had time to evolve in what, in evolutionary terms, would qualify as a miniscule interval, yes?” D’aoud looked owlishly at Callie from over an old-fashioned set of bifocals she had affected of late. (Callie had no idea if the affectation was somehow related to her upcoming transition, or purely a pose. Callie had not seen any sign of D’aoud taking the medications that usually accompanied a transition, in her experience.) In any case, D’aoud had gauged Callie’s train of thought correctly, as usual so … there was nothing to say.
Callie blinked. In her mind, she heard, ‘Good. Good girl.’ Callie was feeling a tingle she sometimes experienced at the top of her spine or the back of her skull when D’aoud approved of her. (Nothing had ever happened there; she did not recall ever being touched there, even. Ever…) It came when Callie had finished a project or accomplished something as instructed.
“I referred to the Tasmanian tiger—also called the Tasmanian wolf, ironically—as an example of famous extinctions that have, in effect, been shown actually not to have occurred, not of the phenomenon of interregnum evolution. But the time element is important; the disparity is huge.”
D’aoud focused in on Callie’s face now as she spoke in a way Callie understood to mean that D’aoud wanted to be especially sure that Callie fully absorbed the coming concept. “AI, electronics and computer technology obviously move much more quickly—at warp speed, relatively—in terms of repetitive iterations and cycling. So if there is a self-driven component, what we might call metaphorically an evolutionary development, it is quite conceivable it could easily occur in seconds or minutes. More, the evolution in tech could be driven by the tech, and certainly a century and a half would be enough to accomplish major changes.” The entrancing eyes glittered again. “Can you imagine?!” D’aoud herself appeared utterly enthralled by the thought.
“Major changes! It could be the most advanced tech in the universe now.”
Callie could feel the professor’s breath on her face as D’aoud, in her intellectual excitement leaned forward and D’aoud’s passion for—for her ideas seemed to suck Callie in bodily, like a virtual tarpit enveloping Callie in a warm goo that might just swallow her whole, drowning her in the mental certainties...
If Callie were so lucky.
That’s what it feels like at times, Callie thought.
Maybe that’s what Refa could never understand. No tactile, skin-to-skin contact could come close to the frisson of the mental interplay she experienced with Professor D’aoud, not even close. Although Callie had her fantasies and could not help but wonder how the silvery leggings might feel to her hand—purely as an observational query, she thought with a self-deprecating sense of her own absurdity—it was the sharing of ideas, the mental connection that so enraptured Callie.
But Refa, damnit, would counter with something like, “Well what is the number one sexual organ in the human body?! It’s the brain!” and, too, right at that moment, Callie had a visceral sense of how strange it was to be completely sealed in a topnotch research lab, insulated from the rest of the world, unable to hear or smell or even feel the city or the nearby space port, just D’aoud and her, as though they, themselves were in their own private isolation chamber together. Like the FSA, for example. Alone, cooperating in time and space with no connection to anything else in the world—Refa, her friends, their friends, their relatives. Like intellectual sexual congress, if one were to use a Refa-like analogy. Closer to the strangeness that was the FSA, sealed in its room, too, than any person.
What bothered Callie, however, if she could admit it, was the subtext. Something under the surface. Callie recognized she was missing something. What she understood D’aoud was proposing, or affirming as a properly-deduced conclusion from the information they had gathered so far, was that somehow, in the time since the FSA’s biological component had crapped out, maybe a century back, the technology, perhaps conserving and using its inoperative biological components as a resource, a source of energy, theoretically, had continued to develop—in essence, changing inside itself, by itself. So what they had found was not just a link to history or some odd cult-like movement in the past, but something entirely different, a novel branch of the technological evolutionary tree, heretofore completely unknown, something beyond whatever had been designed by humans, then or since.
It was like an entirely new alien species or genus, one that functioned in an utterly unknown way.
In the FSA maybe they could see, in microcosm, what might have occurred had the machines been successful in the aborted Mech Takeover, something technologically and inherently (since biology had been involved originally) original. A technological creation for which there existed no plans or owner’s manual, and never had, something completely different.
It was a radical proposition. Outlook altering, intellectually, actually, if you knew enough about how things normally worked. Or believed, as D’aoud often asserted, that in general, chaos ruled … everywhere, all the time, normally: chaos, particularly the inherent or imagined chaos of biology.
Stochasticity.
Was the Purist doctrine that technology and biology were best kept separate on their opposing ends of the existential spectrum, except as cooperating modes of existence, somehow true?
So much to consider, to ruminate on, to ponder, going deeper and deeper.
And stranger still—here it was—why in Seven Suns, even for a scientist who lived for intellectual revelations, would she, Callie, find that oddly and, yes, biologically—exciting? Why did she find herself reacting physically? Was it a function of the mind’s inability to fully comprehend what had been discovered, and so the body chimed in somehow—as if her body had to make up for some of the excitement when the mind got overloaded?
Or was something else entirely going on?
Just when it seemed that a machine-like creation might have accomplished a particularly biological process without the biological component, how ironic was it that something in Callie seemed to want to bring the biology back into the mix?
And most urgently just then—did D’aoud feel this way too? Was the FSA having an effect on the professor, the ‘preeminent mind of her generation?’
Observing the sensibilities generated by her human body below her waist, the unacknowledged wetness she hoped was not showing on the front of her very conventional businesslike dress pants, and squeezing her thighs together as subtly as she could, yes Callie wondered—did D’aoud get these same feelings?! Did she dampen down there under her more creative garb in the same place Callie did and was there … a biological smell now mingling with the metallic atmosphere of the analyzers and spinners these days?
Possibly even more unsettling, was she, Callie, receiving that feeling in part from D’aoud, in some way, the professor’s notorious intensity affecting her assistant like an uncontained psychoactive lab chemical? That was a weakness of biology, no doubt, the susceptibility to chemical and—other—influences. Where was the line between learning—straightforward education—and converting whole.
Asking questions and trying to find answers was Callie’s job. It was the very nature of the scientific process.
So an obvious corollary was: would she be less affected if she did not idolize the professor (at times, and with intelligent reservations, she caveated) so? Or find her—yes, concededly—sexy, hot?
But then wasn’t excitement of any nature, in a biological sense, always and inevitably contagious? Callie had relatively little experience with sex—she had been the sibling always studying or working, leaving the experimenting to Refa—but in theory, wasn’t the point of sex the mutuality? In order to replicate the biological entities involved? Which required … physical congress?
Was it inherently ironic that the conjunction, or confrontation between biology and mech that this Major Discovery had revived and re-highlighted for the wider scientific community, had collaterally made Callie intensely conscious of late of her own biological impulses?
For the first time, quite seriously, Calle had begun to wonder if Refa was right that she, Callie, was too involved in her work and too obsessed with Professor D’aoud…that she was changing somehow without being fully aware of it.
Callie had first seen the discovery, the creature, the artifact, whatever-it-was, the “FSA,” personally when she’d joined a little clot of junior scientists and lab techs hurrying over to the First Moon Site during lunch hour one Friday afternoon, to watch the powers-that-be from the Institute haul the ancient artifact, wrapped in its bulky protective packaging, out of the cave-tunnels of the archeological reserve.
They had used an elaborate-looking air crane. A team of security personnel, workers and droids stood by to cover any and every eventuality. Yet the whole process looked haphazard, hurried. It had reminded Callie of a vault video she had seen of protestors toppling outmoded statuary in early 21sth century Earth history, during the First Universal Race Protests.
What struck Callie was how, in the forcible removal of the artifact from its hiding place of two centuries, the Coalition Institute’s actions had seemed somehow invasive. In shape and size, the unknown item did look and feel vaguely like a statue, maybe a statue of a huge fat baby, actually, bundled up in winter wear. But it was obviously impossible to discern features, parts, appendages, much less any attitude or expression at first glance. Still Callie had the strange feeling that any kind of sentience that might inhabit the immense bulk being hoisted skywards like an offering to the Seven Suns, would not—did not—appreciate being disturbed. When they swung it across to the back of an oversize cargo floatplate and it was lying there, exposed and immobile, it looked distinctly out of place. Lonely. Maybe a little put out.
Callie had turned to Adele Achinki, D’aoud’s admin assistant, one of Callie’s few true friends at the Institute, to find something mirroring her own feelings in Adele’s expression.
“Do you think it is angry?” Adele had whispered. Which, as odd as that sounded, was not too far from what Callie had been thinking.
“Maybe not angry. But … do you think it will want payback somehow?” Callie grinned to convey that she was not serious. Or at least not very serious. And even Callie had not been sure what she meant. But they had both been rubbing their foreheads and the backs of their necks, commenting that maybe a smell from the artifact was making them dizzy, a little spacey.
It was all very strange, to say the least.
When Callie had a chance to inspect the FSA in the clean room, secured, supposedly de-activated and ensconced in a research context, matters had only grown more bizarre. D’aoud and security staff assured her that the biological portion of the creation or creature was ‘defunct,’ and they had rendered any technological or machine part inert as double protection by disconnecting it from all energy sources and putting it in an “applied stasis” mode, whatever that meant. (Callie was a research scientist, thank you, not a safety tech.)
But Callie, herself bundled in a jacket and hat against the cold, had automatically wondered if the fact that they seemed to be keeping it in deep freeze, as a backup backup, proved they really were not sure about any of this. How did you turn off something with no obvious switches, was one conspicuous question?
Or when you were just beginning to study something entirely new, how could you claim to be sure of anything about it?
It—the FSA—was so sui generis, so totally unknown that, logically, they could not be sure of anything about it.
In the lab, with the padding and wrapping removed, it looked even more human in overall shape, as if the human form were the original paradigm from which they had started, just a little larger and blockier, with only generalized arms and leg shapes. It had what looked like a large hollow dish on top, maybe an oversize helmet—surrounded by long hanging strips of material, as if festooned all around with octopus tentacles that had been deactivated and left to dangle. Of course, that was probably simply the observed human tendency again to put anything and everything in human terms, anthropomorphically. But you started where you started, as D’aoud always said, yeah? After only about five minutes in the sealed room, Callie had found herself wondering if there was any chance she could catch some disease from it, or breath in a lingering toxin from its strange composition or—the huge creation could move on its own …
And how utterly unprepared she would be for any of those eventualities.
Callie had to leave the claustrophobic space because she was shivering uncontrollably. She decided she could continue learning about the FSA by more impersonal, data-driven, scientific means from a from a safe distance. She sealed the secure room going through all the tedious protocols conscientiously. But weirdly, that first day, when done, when she had removed her hat and down jacket, she realized she was not that cold, not shivering cold, and she had the same kind of tingling, dizziness and headache she had experienced when D’aoud told her she had done well.
And then she had found, doubly oddly, that she badly wanted to go back into the sealed room to be close to it again. Where did that impulse come from? And was it biological?
This was what Callie imagined it must have felt like when humans had their first contact with off-world aliens in the late 21st century. She recalled the stories of how utterly unprepared humans had been…
But that the feeling was natural did not lessen the effect any, and the weird sense Callie had gotten when they began to discern that it showed signs of designing itself for replication, in essence mechanical reproduction, had been so disturbing that she had several times met with the Institute’s psychologist/on call counselor—just to get some help needed until she got acclimatized to the presence of the FSA in her near environment, Callie figured.
There was a power there, a force, even if now inactive, that intimidated, fascinated, excited even Professor D’aoud who was everything Callie ever hoped to be or become.
Callie shivered as she got off the elevator the following Saturday morning.
The lab looked like a submarine environment when you first entered. All glittering chrome and watery reflections, now in a deep kind of suspended underwater stasis.
At least when it was not bustling with the dozens of researchers, techs and chemists constantly present on any given weekday.
Callie had once seen photos of the early undersea colonies, back on Earth in the 21st century. There was something there that resonated with the lab’s peace, its repose, a stillness and darkness and depth recalling the bottom of the ocean.
Except for the chills and a vague sense of danger, Callie liked to work here on the weekends, particularly an All-Sports weekend like this one, when the huge equipment-packed rooms were deserted. Raised in a strict conservative family she had never perceived herself as good looking or particular attractive in any way. Any mention of looks was out of the question when she was growing up because—one did not seek “machine-like perfection”—anything that seemed like a throw back to the Mech Takeover was anathema—and her family creeds emphasized personal humility, and “grace.”
But during her first year of university, Callie had begun to tumble to the fact that her musical sister was not the only family member attractive to the opposite sex. And in her current position, lab work during regular hours was constantly disrupted by repeated requests from men—and even women—to help, to teach her procedures in which Callie was often as much or more expert. Any excuse, it seemed, to be near her.
Callie was not immune; people were getting ever more perfect with gentech and she was complimented by the attention, no question. But she got much more done when she was not perpetually being interrupted by other scientists offering to teach her spectral element graphing, chemical analyses, whatever.
At times, Callie appreciated D’aoud’s cool neutrality and dispassionate expression all the more if only for the contrast.
But today—some recent dreams had Callie off kilter. The night that Refa had last had a ‘guest’ in her room, just a thin nanosheet away from where Callie dozed in her bed, the noises of her sister’s tryst or trysts, plural, had shaped her, Callie’s, night time fantasizing. Callie had dreamt that she was interacting with D’aoud, and, evidently, because of what Refa typically did at night, Callie’s dream had a at some point acquired a sexual element. At one point, Callie had even woken up with her panties wet, wondering if Refa was right that D’aoud had an almost hypnotic hold over her and, more, that she was somehow sexually attracted to D’aoud—not just fascinated by her over-the-moon intelligence.
And some time still later in the night, her dream had involved images of D’aoud leaning over her and massaging her, Callie’s, temples and/or doing something to Callie’s head. The back of her neck and the base of her skull had been tingling, she recalled later. Towards morning, exhausted from lack of sleep, Callie had pictured D’aoud holding her head against her—D’aoud’s—breasts and seemingly forcing Callie to suck from them.
Callie had jerked awake, disgusted, with a stringent, chemical taste in her mouth and her pussy … throbbing. Sick.
It had been very upsetting to Callie, and not at all in character, from her standpoint.
Obviously Refa’s sexual shenanigans had colored her scientist sister’s dreams and her, Callie’s, dreams actually had nothing to do with sex. Obviously, they were allegorical and the dreams expressed a genuine concern on Callie’s part that she was imbibing too much of D’aoud’s essential ideas, her way of thinking and her beliefs, and thereby in some way becoming almost brainwashed to D’aoud’s ways of thinking as a result. It was worrisome, but not really sexual.
But the most disturbing aspect of this line of thought was that it seemed to lead ineluctably to the logical conclusion that the intellectual aspect did excite Callie sexually apart from any influence from Refa. Or D’aoud.
It occurred to Callie that D’aoud had once mentioned that sex was, from her perspective, as a matter of empirical fact and logic, the most powerful influence and motivating factor for humans, and conversely therefore too the most effective means of controlling of others. D’aoud was supremely cerebral of course, but was it possible that she was using her sexuality, Callie’s attraction to her, as a means of extending her personal control over Callie?
The thought was like a knife stuck in Callie’s gut. In some basic way it was a terrifying betrayal. But then, as Callie thought about it, it became—well still a betrayal but also … a stroke on her clit. Exciting in a sexual way.
What was wrong with her? This was psychotic, sick! Callie cringed from herself and her own reactions.
What was most terrifying of all, perhaps, was how overmatched she felt with D’aoud, especially if D’aoud was doing anything untoward. Callie had been identified as precocious when she was a very little girl, and called bright and then brilliant as she grew. But no matter how much all that was true, Callie knew that she was not even in the same league in terms of intelligence with the professor. D’aoud was leagues beyond Callie’s highest aspirations. Ultimately the fact was that Callie had no control of, no power over, no protection from, the esteemed academic … whatsoever.
In the lab that Saturday morning, Callie quickly stowed her purse and brief bag on the modest desk she had claimed near the corridor to the breakout labs. After checking the main files from two different terminals for anything new or off-script, she stood in the central lobby and looked around trying to figure out where to start.
She was facing the elevators thinking maybe she should not be here at all and feeling tempted to leave. Was it safe here? The FSA, a complete unknown, was just down the hallway, very close…
When she turned around from the elevators, she was confronted by D’aoud’s large mech chair. It was like the professor’s throne front and center in her scientific throne room. It was so obviously dominant, visually and spatially, symbolically, that Callie avoided looking at it. Its very presence right there made her feel small and submissive.
Then she thought, ‘Of course.’ Where else?
When she walked over to the mech chair, she felt an almost electric sense of anticipation—this was it, the right choice. Or no—forboding and—well—power. As a child Callie had once wandered too close to a large power transformer out in a field by a dam; the mech chair seemed to vibrate her guts the same way the high-voltage transformer had. It was so large, blocky and—elevated. It was the seat of power.
Callie stepped up on the pedestal and scanned the back of the chair. There were various knobs and buttons on the arms, but the back was mostly smooth, the seat soft and comfortable-looking. The scientist in her was beginning to think that, since she never saw D’aoud accessing the lab laptops or desktops or digging into general files, D’aoud must have the technology she needed incorporated into the mech chair. There was some sort of a screen on each arm and there were hinges or flexors along the sides of the seat that possibly allowed the arms to lift up. Would that be to expose data ports beneath them?
Or give D’aoud’s hands better access to controls?
Why had she never watched D’aoud operate the chair more carefully, considering all the times she had interacted with D’aoud while she was ensconced in it? Notably, Callie could see no sign as to how the chair might turn on, as a whole or any of its features.
Finally she decided she should just sit in it and see if that helped her figure out how to operate it. More than anything, she reminded herself, she wanted to see if D’aoud had files on her, Callie L—some sort of standard employee or personnel files. They must exist somewhere. The Institute specialized in bureaucracy and paperwork. Callie thought her files might answer some of her questions, and she was pretty sure that she could check them out without leaving any indication that she had done so.
She was entitled to see her own files, wasn’t she?
With a breath, Callie turned and seated herself in the chair.
She leaned back.
She sank a little into the cushion.
She leaned forward just a little and squinted.
She tried twisting a couple of knobs that looked like old fashioned toggle switches. Or were they just decorations?
Shit.
Nothing happened.
Enlightenment did not strike.
Callie looked over at D’aoud’s office, but it sure appeared to be locked.
What now?
Then she felt a slight tickle at the bottom of her spine, just above her pelvic bones. Maybe there were hidden controls—a panel perhaps. She started to turn, but.
She didn’t turn.
She couldn’t turn.
Why was that?
Then she felt the strangest feeling she had ever felt in her life. It was like someone was tickling her lower back, where the last of her vertebrae started to curve into her pelvis, and it was—in some way, in part—sexual.
It felt very good.
Callie’s first thought was embarrassment and a bit of reproof—the old pervert. The professor had a Tabico attachment on her chair! No wonder she could stand endless hours here!
But it was not increasing, and Callie realized she was not turning to look, either. She was still sitting straight in the chair, very erect, and—there were some twinges of pain at the same place at the base of her spine, and then she felt really good, really really good. Something was running up her spine like and electrical wire, or—weirdly—a tendril? A wire.
She almost came.
Then she did come, a burst and then calm.
But somehow, too, she realized, she was not thinking anymore. There was a stringent taste in her mouth and something was tickling the back of her neck, at the base of her skull, and she was not turning or thinking and—
—it felt very familiar.
Callie felt it urgent to recall—something. When had she first noticed D’aoud’s mech chair? No one else had a mech chair, although she had seen photos and vines of them in high end boutiques, online, or by the Spaceport.
Callie was aware of a faint vibrating in the chair—or no, she was vibrating. Oh. There was a slight vibration in her, as though she were charged steel—why did that image come to mind?—and she was.
She was.
She was.
Callie was feeling very strange. She was pretty sure some time had passed. It almost felt like she was a part of the chair. And the chair—it seemed to have a connection to the FSA.
The what? That thing down the hall! In the secure room, sealed in its protective—oh!
Callie was suddenly pretty sure she had never seen the mech chair before the prior month when the FSA had been brought in.
That seemed important.
At some point she would know better why it was important.
It would come to her.
She would come—it would.
It felt very good, very strange and different, but intensely right to be part of, part of part of the lab? D’aoud’s world?—part of the chair.
And then Callie was aware that she could see the files for which she had been hunting. Somehow they were there in front of her eyes, glittering for her to review. Were they about her? There was a large heading reading “Callie” and her last name, together with a number? A number? Should she recall that number? Write it down? It might be important, logically. Then she laughed; she knew the number. It was.
There were several sub-files, smaller headings as well. They read, “Callie—Hypnotics.” “Callie—Chemicals and Medications.” Several tabs further down at the bottom—she had an urge to jump ahead—the last subheader read, “Callie—Transition.”
And Callie suddenly understood that the transition had nothing to do with gender. That was D’aoud’s joke, her humor.
And of course D’aoud did not have an implant!
She did not need one any longer, not since the mech chair came!
Like the best idea solving a complex legal conundrum, the answer to an astrophysicists most difficult postulate, the next iteration beyond Einstein’s theory of relativity—the answer arriving whole in Callie’s mind was terrifying and electrifying, both.
After a moment in which Callie felt as though she were being electrocuted, and for a moment pictured Refa, wondering if she would ever see her again—Callie felt a frisson like a huge intellectual epiphany in her brain, the realization of realizations—but it built and shot all through her body, and it was huge but at the same time almost irrelevant because her pussy was just one part—and there was something in the chair rising up into her, ah the old, hot pervert, D’aoud it was in her—but she, Callie, was coming with her whole body, her whole being.