Amy Foster - The Rift Frequency

“All right.” Shit . “Well, thank you for answering and for the great medical care, but we have to go—” I begin to shift in my seat, ready to stand, but Levi interrupts me.

“Wait, I have more questions.”

I whip my head around to gawk at him. “Levi, he’s not here. We have to leave.”

“Ryn, look,” Levi practically pleads. “I know you want to find Ezra. I get it. But these, ummm, people, they have technology that could help us find him. It could even maybe turn the tides back home. Give us better odds against ARC and the Roones who, incidentally, made us part alien. Let’s be smart about this.”

I bite my bottom lip. I don’t want to stay here, but Levi has a point and it’s a good one.

I shrug my shoulders passively. It’s a delicate dance this one, making Levi happy and making sure we get to Ezra quickly. Levi is risking his life, too, so as much as I want to have complete control over this mission, I know that’s impossible. I am emotionally involved, and while Levi hasn’t quite played that card yet, he can at any time. I need to make sure he doesn’t do that here, in front of Cosmos. Levi takes my shrug as a cue to continue, so he turns back to Cosmos.

“So why do you all look like famous people?”

“ That’s the question you want to ask? Not like, will you help us with stuff?” I blurt out.

“I’m sorry,” he says to both Cosmos and me. “But it’s really frickin’ weird. And it doesn’t make any sense at all. So yeah. I wanna know,” Levi says defensively.

“Yes. I can see how our appearances might be disconcerting. We are given our faces at random when we are born, though that is not the right word— finished is perhaps a better one? We use records from the past—television shows, films, paintings, portraits, renderings of death masks. Celebrities leave behind the most data. We feel it is only right to honor those humans who contributed to their society rather than destroyed it. I myself have been modeled after Deborah Mitford, a Duchess of Devonshire. She was a fascinating lady who saved a great estate and who was also a wonderful writer. And Feather, did you see that he was modeled after Beethoven?” At that I do a double take. Feather looked nothing like the wild-haired composer I’d seen in portraits. Cosmos continues, “You will probably have noticed, too, that our names are proper nouns. We thought it distasteful to give ourselves human features as well as human names. So we are assigned random nouns instead. Everything is assigned randomly, even our jobs. I was programmed with more leadership code than any other SenMach, gleaned from the writings and teachings of humanity’s greatest leaders. I am in charge of our people, but we have a council with advisors from each faction of our population. Gardeners are given code to understand landscaping. Scientists are also coded in this way. We all have a purpose, and there is much contentment in that. We are also given two hobbies, to keep our circuitry active beyond our basic programming. One of mine is painting. I did the paintings you see here on the walls.”

“And no one ever complains about their jobs?” I ask, not even bothering to glance at the pictures. “The guy in charge of recycling isn’t bummed that he sorts waste and someone like you gets to lead your people?”

Cosmos gives me the most blank look I’ve seen her give yet. I can tell that she is trying to understand this question. “We are not humans. We are not ambitious or envious. It may be difficult for you to understand, but we believe there is a greater force guiding the random process. We are who we have been programmed to be. We simply could not be anything else.”

“What, like God? You believe in God?” I ask in surprise.

“No. But perhaps it is something else. Some buried code left behind by our creators. Some sort of human ghost in the machine, if you will. The humans that designed the first of us did so with the noblest of intentions. We in turn honor that genius and foresight by creating a society that seeks peaceful enlightenment in all areas. That is our goal, our reason for existence. Like any other child we want to make our parents proud. We want to solve the answers to the great questions that they could not.”

“Wow, that is super interesting. And very philosophical, but we’re actually in kind of a hurry.” I know it’s rude, but if I were to engage with Cosmos, I’d only be doing so to point out how wrong I think she is. That a lot of kids don’t give two shits about what their parents think of them, and even worse, a lot of parents can be oddly competitive with their kids and never want their children’s accomplishments to surpass their own. It’s time to try to get what we need and get out. If Levi wants to strike some kind of a deal, then okay, I’m willing to try, but I’m not going to argue the underpinnings of human motivation with a robot right now. “You see there’s a lot of stuff going on back on our Earth,” I continue, “very dangerous stuff, and we need to find that guy I asked about earlier because he could have some answers that we really need to potentially fix it. You’ve made some pretty amazing advancements here and I think it could be a big help to us. So is there any way you would be willing to share some of your technology? Even some of those bandages would be really great.”

“Very eloquent, Ryn,” Levi mumbles.

I don’t even bother to respond to that, continuing to stare at the SenMach sitting across from me.

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