David Simpson - Post-Human Trilogy

“Who are you?” Craig asked.

“No one you know,” the man replied, continuing his custom of avoiding eye contact.

“Who are you?” Craig demanded. “What’s your name?”

The man smiled. “Would you believe I don’t have one?”

Craig could feel the hair on his arms and the back of his neck standing. If anyone else had answered the question the way the man had, Craig would’ve thought they were being coy or straight-up smart-mouthed. But there was something so unsettling and wrong about the figure before him that he knew his answer had been the truth. The man had no name .

“I used to have one—or at least I thought I did. However, it turned out that I didn’t.” The man smiled again, still not looking at Craig, instead looking away in the direction of the wall.

Craig was sure the man was retrieving some sort of memory—something that haunted him.

“You intrigue me, Craig,” the man said, turning to Craig as he did so and finally allowing their eyes to meet. There was still something wrong—something off-center, almost as though the man had two lazy eyes. “Like you,” he continued, “I have recently arrived here in this reality. Like you, I thought I had an altogether different life. And like you, I had to accept that it is gone.”

“You…” Craig began, a horrifying realization suddenly upon him. “You aren’t human, are you?”

The man briefly looked disappointed, the corners of his lips turning down in a frown. Then, oddly and just as quickly, they turned up into an impressed smile. “What was it about me that tipped you off?”

“Your eyes,” Craig answered.

“Mm-hmm,” the man replied, suddenly taking on the manner of an objective researcher, questioning a subject. “That’s to be expected. The hologram is not calibrated correctly throughout the entire facility, so I find it difficult to meet someone’s eyes perfectly when we are moving from room to room. Results vary, depending where we are. I tried to hide it by keeping my gaze lowered, but that only works for so long. Anything else?” He seemed hungry for data.

“Something’s off—just your whole manner, your reactions to things. You’re the A.I., aren’t you?”

The A.I.’s smile returned. “Yes, indeed I am. I am sorry I didn’t tell you at the outset, but it’s extraordinarily rare that we have new people upon whom I can test my progress.”

“Progress?”

“Yes. As of yet, I haven’t been able to pass the Turing test. There are parts of my evolution that are incomplete. I was hoping I could keep up the ruse a little longer, but there are serious flaws remaining in the technology, most of them pertaining to the holograms. For one, the frame rate is too high. Did you notice that I appear in too high a definition?”

Craig cocked his head to the side. “I hadn’t consciously noticed anything about your definition being too high, but there is certainly something unsettling.”

“I haven’t mastered how to appear real. I’ve experimented with differing frame rates and was hoping to have found the right balance with you, but you reported the same unconscious feeling of unheimlich as everyone else.”

“‘ Unheimlich’ ?”

“Yes,” the A.I. replied. “I’m sorry, Craig. Sometimes I still have problems filtering information, and there are more connections than my human listeners can digest. The notion of the unconscious caused me to consider Freud, which then led to me thinking of his paper ‘The Uncanny’ which, in turn, made me think of the original German rendering. Unheimlich is a German word. It is translated into English as ‘uncanny,’ but there is something important missing in the translation that I feel makes it a poor one. You see, heim means ‘home’ in German, so unheimlich really means ‘unhomely,’ but of course, English doesn’t have such a word.”

Something in the A.I.’s explanation caused Craig to turn away from the disturbing figure and put his hand over his eyes once again.

“Have I overloaded you with extraneous information, Craig?” the A.I. asked in a tone that was not so much sympathetic or apologetic as inquisitive. “I do that sometimes. It is a problem on which I am working.”

“No,” Craig replied, “it’s not extraneous. Unhome is exactly the right word.”

A crowd of nearly 100 had gathered in front of the Planck platform in anticipation of the return of a small probe that had spent the last ten hours in a parallel universe. Aldous stood with the others, checking the time readout on his mind’s eye as the seconds ticked down to the probe’s hypothesized return.

“If you turn out to be right,” Sanha Cho—formerly MIT Professor of theoretical physics, Sanha Cho—said in a low voice at Aldous’s side, “you’ll have written your name in the history books once again.”

“Let’s just hope future generations will actually get to read about these events, Sanha,” Aldous replied. It was true; the last decade had been one that should have placed Aldous’s name amongst the best scientific minds in human history, yet all of his greatest achievements had occurred while he and the other post-humans were in hiding. A record was being kept, sure, but it wasn’t clear whether that record would ever reach the outside world.

“Sixty seconds,” Sanha stated. “Nervous?”

“I’ll be right,” Aldous replied. “Watch.”

The probe had been sent into Universe 66, one of nearly 3,000 catalogued parallel universes. Its timer had been set to bring it back after ten hours, but Aldous had theorized that time could pass differently in different universes, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity. He’d been able to detect a slight difference in time passage in Universe 66, and if the probe returned as he expected—fourteen minutes and thirty-three seconds late—his theory would prove correct. The probe was already fourteen minutes and twenty seconds behind schedule.

“Ten seconds,” Sanha whispered.

It should have been a moment of triumph, but the most important element was missing. He clicked on his mind’s eye and saw that his wife was in their quarters, monitoring the A.I.’s progress with her first husband. He felt nauseous.

The probe’s return was instantaneous—so much so that anyone who blinked would have missed its sudden cross from Universe 66 into Universe 1. However, the echo of the crossing was, as usual, accompanied by what was now referred to as “the ripple” by the post-humans. It had been unexpected and terrifying the first time the phenomenon had been witnessed, but this was the thirty-fourth time a probe had returned to Universe 1. The ripple was a wave of space-time distortion that felt different for each individual: by some as a slowing or speeding of time as though God was playing with a film projector and by others as a physical warping of their surroundings, similar to the experience in a hall of mirrors. It was impossible to say how long the distortions lasted. Some experienced it as a matter of seconds, while others experienced the phenomenon for nearly a full minute. The effect appeared to be random.

“It’s back!” Sanha proclaimed as soon as his experience of the distortion had dissipated enough for him to step forward and check the time readout on the probe surface. “Just like you said, Aldous! The atomic clock reads ten hours!” He turned with an excited smile toward Aldous, as did everyone else in the room, only to discover that he was no longer there. “Aldous?”

“Aldous, are you okay?” Sanha’s image asked as it appeared in Aldous’s mind’s eye.

Aldous was marching grimly down a long corridor toward his quarters. “I’m fine. I told you I was right,” he said as he suddenly began to levitate, floating down the corridor and picking up speed, the air becoming a breeze that ruffled his hair.