CHAPTER 7

YESTERDAY'S VISION

Io Station - Three Months Later

‘Where are we going Father?’

A young boy of ten and an older man in a suit walked down the gleaming halls of Io Station in orbit over Jupiter. The older man had a shock of full grey hair on his head and was wearing a crisply tailored navy blue suit. His eyes were focused forward, and he walked with a bounce to his step. A smile creased his face, betraying the wrinkles around the edges of his mouth and eyes that remained unseen when he was serious.

‘Ashton, my boy, we are going to see the future.’

‘Really? Like a time machine?’

Reginald Axion II laughed. ‘No, son, not a time machine, but something that will bring us the future.’

‘Like what?’

‘Something new!’

‘Not going to tell me are you?’ Ashton said, looking at his father with narrow eyes.

‘Nope, you’re just going to have to wait and see.’

They came to a set of doors leading into one of the station’s many Guardian bays. The door’s slid open and they walked in. Sanaa looked up from a work station, wearing a white jacket, and smiled at them.

‘Sir, glad you made it. We’ve made some great progress. The unit is stable, and I think ready for your own test.’

‘Good, let’s get started shall we?’ Reginald said, slipping out of his jacket and taking off his tie.

‘What test?’ Ashton asked, ‘This is just a Guardian?’

‘Not just any Guardian, one that can feel as well feel.’

Ashton’s face scrunched up in confusion. ‘What do you mean?

Reginald undid the top few buttons on his shirt and pulled his shirt down to his shoulders, revealing data ports in his spine and neck. He sat down on a bench and turned his back to Sanaa as she started to connect cables to the ports.

‘I mean that if I pinch myself, the Guardian will feel the pinch.’

‘But… how?’

Reginald smiled broadly. ‘Ahhh maybe when you’re older we can get into the technical aspects of it, but for now, lets just say he learned how to copy a brain.’

‘Way to make things overly simple, sir.’ Sanaa said from behind him.

Reginald chuckled. ‘That may be true. Have a seat my boy,’ he said, indicating a chair next to him.

Ashton sat in the chair and faced his father.

‘Ashton, do you know why this company was started?’

‘You’ve told me this, to make the future happen, whatever that means.’

Reginald nodded slowly. ‘Yes, to make the future happen. You weren’t alive when your great-grandfather died, but when he did he passed the company on to your grandfather, and also his vision for it. Grandfather passed it onto me shortly before you were born, though he still helps run it. I’ve been struggling to see that future through every day since, but it’s been a long time, and I’m not getting any younger.’

Ashton nodded. ‘You mean you’ll die one day, right?’

‘Yes, that’s the reason I decided to have you, so I would have someone to pass on the vision to when it was my time if it ended up being outside of the reach of my lifetime.’

‘What’s the vision?’

‘Do you remember what you felt when your mother died?’

Ashton’s face fell and he looked at the floor.

‘I was sad. I still get sad when I think about her. It hurts inside,’ he said, touching his heart.

‘That’s right my boy. It was sad. I miss her too. It’s terrible when someone we love dies.’

Ashton looked up at his father. ‘What happens when we die?’

His father held up a fist and then opened it quickly. ‘Poof. We’re gone forever. Everything we are just stops existing, and all we leave behind is memories and a cold body. We are remembered by those we left behind, but when everyone who ever knew them dies, if they didn’t leave some kind of legacy, it’s like they never existed.’

Ashton looked at his father with his mouth open.

Reginald continued, ‘For the longest time, people have tried to cheat death. They’ve tried everything they could think of, but it was never enough. People still died. Your great-grandfather saw something in the Guardians though, some key to that future. If we could get a Guardian to copy a mind, and feel as we feel, then we could get them to store our minds, let us live on after our bodies die. Inside those machines, we’d never age, never grow old, and never have to worry about poverty or wealth. We’d be alive, everyone could be alive, all we needed was somewhere to put ourselves.’

‘Then no one would have to die?’ Ashton asked.

‘No my boy, no one would ever die again. We’ve seen to that.’

‘How?’ Ashton asked, his curiosity building.

‘Every Guardian we’ve built has taken us a step toward that goal. The XO line has been our closest candidate, they are more human like in their thoughts than any Guardian ever before. We’ve been waiting for this day, when one of them would finally feel human sensations through their Advocate, and then we could bring it home and learn from it. That day has arrived! One of our wayward children has come home!’

Reginald smiled broadly and looked at his son. The boy was mulling over what he’d been told.

‘We’re all hooked up, boss.’

Reginald stood up, a trail of cables coming out his back and feeding into a rail on the roof.

He reached out with a hand and motioned for Ashton to follow him. ‘Come son, let me show you what I mean.’

Ashton hopped out of his seat and rushed over to his father, taking the offered hand. Reginald began to walk, the cables following him in the rail.

They walked toward a holographic display tube that was sitting idle. As soon as they were close, Sanaa activated a control panel and the tube came to life.

A holographic face looked down on the two.

‘Mister Axion, I was beginning to wonder when I would meet you. Is this your son?’ Xavier asked.

‘Yes, Xavier, this is my son Ashton. Say hello Ashton.’

‘Hello Xavier,’ the boy said dutifully.

‘Xavier, do you see a hardwire link?’ Reginald asked.

‘Yes… is it you? You are not a registered Advocate in the Axion Database.’

‘I’ve had some… modifications over the years,’ Reginald said wryly, ‘it was in anticipation of this very moment.’

‘You are an Advocate?’

‘Not exactly. I did not surrender my humanity for this. I didn’t have to. All of this,’ he said gesturing at the connections on his back, ‘is solely so that my nervous system inputs can be read and copied.’

‘Copied?’ Xavier asked.

‘Yes. Our goal - that of my father, his father, and myself - has been the same over such a long time. We need a sufficiently advanced computer to take our minds and thoughts, and be our vessel so that we can all live forever. If you are what I think you are, you’ll be able to recognize my inputs, feel what I feel, and then when the time comes, allow me to live inside your core and continue to exist as a human mind, thinking and feeling as I do now.’

Reginald stepped closer to the tank and placed a hand lightly on the glass. He pressed his cheek against it and spoke in a whisper.

‘You can vanquish death for us, send the reaper into exile. We’ve waited so long for you. My grandfather did not live to see this day,’ he sighed, ‘Father may yet, live though.’

He turned and looked to Ashton. ‘And you, my boy, you may yet grow up to see a world where funerals are a thing of the past, where we live, and die, only to live again.’

Ashton was looking at his father, his face a mix of excitement and confusion.

‘What makes me different?’ Xavier asked. ‘Why am I needed for your plans?’

Reginald stepped back from the tube, smiling. ‘Not just you. You’re only the first. We needed a Guardian that could feel as we feel. You needed to be able to understand the emotional and psychological parts of being a human. It’s one thing to make a program that can act like a human, you Guardians are close enough to that as it is, but it’s quite another thing to make something that can feel as a human can. We’ve feared uploading our minds until that threshold was crossed.’

‘How did you cause this?’ Xavier inquired.

‘Through the use of the Advocates. That is their whole purpose, to serve as bridges to the Guardians, so that they can taste of what humanity they have left. However, they’ve always been only a temporary necessity. Once one of you can feel, you can serve as the bridge for others. At least thats the plan. Once a Guardian has become awakened, as you have, we can use it as a template for others. From there we can expand into a network with enough processing power to contain the thoughts and minds of every man, woman, and child in all the human worlds. People will live their lives connected to the network, and then when it’s time, or even if they die suddenly, they’ll find themselves waking up again inside the network.

‘It’s a beautiful vision that our family has pursued since scientists first started to talk about artificial intelligence. It’s lacked any kind of definite shape until recently though.’

Xavier looked thoughtful. ‘My archive shows that people have been fascinated by the concept of eternal life for a long time. I see attempts by people to do this consciousness upload you are talking about.’

‘Yes, but it’s been limited. The things that they create by doing this are only caricatures of the people who spawned them. They exist, but they aren’t alive. An emotion is not just a collection of programing lines. Those things are just digital automatons, acting like humans but lacking the essence of them.’

Ashton walked up to the tube and placed a hand on it. He looked up at his father.

‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ he said.

Reginald knelt down to look his son in the eyes.

‘I know Ashton. It’s okay, you don’t have the experience to understand it just yet… though that is part of what I’m saying. If we make a computer that can act like a human, it may well act just like us, but it’s never known an emotion before. We can program it to laugh when we tell a joke or cry when its creator dies, but it doesn’t have any meaning behind it. They are just programmed responses. It does that because it must. It doesn’t have the experience of it.

‘You don’t understand all this because you haven’t had the same experiences I’ve had, or the same schooling. If I took your brain and dropped it into my body, you wouldn’t know what it meant to grow up. That’s what all the other attempts have lacked. That’s what we’ve been trying to create, a system that knows what it is to be human, so it can take us all in.’

Reginald turned back to Xavier.

‘Xavier, do you have my sensory input?’

‘Yes, Reginald.’

‘Good, let’s begin calibrating the link. We will use pain, we’ve found it’s the easiest to control and measure. Are you ready?’

‘I am familiar with pain. I am ready.’

Reginald stretched his arm next to him and nodded to Sanaa. She grabbed a scalpel and made a cut along his arm.

Xavier’s eyes shut in reaction.

‘What do you feel?’ Reginald asked.

‘I feel… alive.’