Forever - Isaac
Isaac appeared a discreet few feet away, just at the edge of my vision. I sat motionless in my wooden chair, legs up on a two foot log round I used as an ottoman. He waited for me to notice him, but when I hadn’t said anything after a few moments he took a step forward .
"Hello, Isaac. It’s been a long time."
"I’m sorry to disturb you, but you did instruct me to notify you if the sentrys made contact with artificial objects." He walked around in front of me, smiling apologetically. Except for the lack of a shadow, I could have believed him real.
"So I gather someone has finally disturbed my peace."
He nodded. "A large ship has entered this system. It is currently three AU’s distant, ten degrees above the ecliptic on a vector which will intersect this planet’s orbit in approximately three weeks."
He spoke like the computer he was. All the human speech nuances I had given him more that 300 years ago had vanished during his deactivation. I missed his personality.
"Approximately?" In the old days he would would have laughed and had a snappy comeback.
"I have extrapolated the ship’s course based on current data, but course changes will affect their ETA. Therefore I can only--"
"What’s wrong Isaac? Have I left you alone too long?"
"I don’t understand the question. Will you rephrase?"
"Have you lost your personality over the last twelve years? You used to be so ... well, life-like."
"I have been operating at minimal awareness for the period you mention. I have not yet reactivated all the pathways necessary to support the complete program you refer to as personality."
"Well, do so because you’re damn boring this way. What else can you tell me about our visitors?"
Before he answered, his image flickered slightly--he had booted the rest of his personality. When he spoke again he was the old Isaac.
"Well, they’re still pretty far away, but judging from sentry three’s mass readings I would say it’s an Expedition Class vessel. Probably six to eight shuttles, maybe two hundred people." He bent to the grass, "pulled" a blade and made a good show of studying it.
"Scout ship for a colony, maybe," I said, knowing it wasn’t.
Isaac dropped the faux blade of grass, which vanished just as it reached the ground, put his hands in his pockets and looked out over the valley. "I don’t think so. The Terran Sphere would not have spread this far in such a short period. We are more than ten parsecs from the nearest frontier planet shown on our charts before we came here."
"What do you suspect then?" I knew what my trusted artificial friend suspected.
He turned to look at me, his hair moving slightly in the cool breeze. "They are here to see you."
"No one knows I’m here." I was still trying to deny what I knew was true.
"There is at least one who does......."
There it was. He had said it. I kicked my handmade chair sending it tumbling down the grassy slope toward the cliff and the sea below. He had finally said it. From the moment his program had activated to make the arrival announcement there was no doubt in my mind who was in that ship. And there was no sense getting angry with a hologram.
Isaac stood with his hands behind his back, looking first at the grass at his feet, then down the mountainside to the sea and finally back to me. Waiting.
The sensors in the cabin’s array watched me, read my body language, took my pulse, measured my respirations, perspiration and brain activity and sent the data via an orbiting satellite to The Ship three kilometers away in it’s cliffside cavern. The ship’s computer read the data, made assessments, came to conclusions and, nanoseconds after my last actions, updated Isaac’s image and sent his next words to the implants just under the skin behind my ears.
"What preparations should I make for their arrival?"
"When they reach one AU, broadcast a warning to stay away. If she is with them she will let me know somehow."
She was too far away for me to sense her, to be sure she was on the ship. It had been nearly twenty years, relative, since we went our separate ways. The proverbial eye-blink compared to our long lives, yet because of my self-imposed exile on an otherwise unihabited world, a long time. Time spent using hand tools to build the cabin and its furniture, including the chair I had just kicked. To clear trails through the woods, around the cliff to the north, to the beach where I walked barefoot trying not to think. Work to occupy my mind. To tie me to my past life, my original "self."
Twenty years of thinking and trying not to think. Of searching my mind and memory, and the ship’s memory, for traces of THEM. And THE REASON. That’s how we both, she and I, had come to think of it: THE REASON, all in capital letters. THE REASON for plucking us from our admittedly mundane human lives, changing us, enhancing us, and turning us loose in the galaxy to do THEIR will without knowing we were programmed.
Yet we did know.
The memories that came at the right moment, the knowledge that seemed to appear as needed, were clues to the depth of our changes. And the very subtle and almost successful attempts to hide the lessons from the pupils.
But trying to grasp the moment of change, the memory and method of change was like trying to pick up liquid mercury with silver chopsticks on a silver table--even when we were able to "see" the moment of change because of its movement, it couldn’t be grasped for study. Trying nearly drove us both mad. And our being together seemed to compel us to try.
Now she was breaking our agreement. Ending our estrangement. Why?
The shuttle settled heavily in the clearing. My years of self-imposed isolation ended as the hatch opened, the ramp deployed and three people emerged. She was first.