Hope

From CleanPosts

HOPE

The same day Vic was notified of her advancement, when she was packing her duffel bag to go to Power Candidate School in Seattle, a slender man in a white shirt and khaki pants arrived at Shangri-La asking around for her.

"I'm David Felton," he said when he was introduced to Vic. "Bravo sent me down here to pick you up. She wants to see you. She wants to see you and me both, actually, and I'm supposed to fetch you."

"Is that good or bad?"

"I didn't want the first time we met to be about breaking bad news, but Bravo insisted that I do it."

It was a mark of Vic's new military bearing that she didn't flinch at this. "What is this all about?"

"We need to talk. I'll tell you as much as we can on the drive to Seattle."

It took about three hours to reach Seattle by car on the "Slog" which is what locals called the trip north on the Interstate 5 freeway from Fort Vancouver. As he drove, the essence of what David had to say was this: Vic could not be permitted to undergo the Change, simply because she was the daughter of Brand Millet, and Robyn had an old arrangement with Brand that forbade her from allowing any of his descendants from undergoing the Change.

"You're Victoria Pritchard," he said, "and the Pritchard thing threw them for a loop. You're really Victoria Millet-Pritchard, and that changes everything."

"Why?"

"It's a bargain Robyn made with your father back in about '89," David revealed. "He wanted out from under Robyn's thumb, and he wanted to keep his wife and little girl out too. If Dory had known about the bargain earlier, she wouldn't have sponsored you for boot camp."

"So why didn't they know about the bargain earlier?"

"Robyn hasn't been alive in the flesh for years."

"So if the FC doesn't want me anymore, David, why am I going to see Bravo now?"

"She wants to apologize in person and try to make it up to you."

"Make it up to me how?"

"I don't know. I'm just a software expert at Astrodyne. I have a few guess- es, but I really don't know why she had me briefed on your medical situation and sent me to pick you up. Really, Vic, this is as embarrassing for me as it must be distressing to you."

But it got even more embarrassing and distressing the closer they got to Seattle. David let it out that there was a second reason Vic was being rejected. "You're a jen."

"A what?"

"You know, the, ah...fifth gender. You have male and female...characteristics."

So Vic thought about that silently for the thirty miles from Longview to Centralia. Then for the thirty miles from Olympia to Tacoma, Vic did slip out of her military poker face and found herself sobbing in the presence of this stranger who was driving her.

Vic was a thirty-six year old virgin. Not even her shitbird of a husband, Frank Pritchard, could brink himself to touch her, because she was a "chick with a dick." And now David was telling her Femina Caelestis, her new fam- ily, was rejecting her for the very same reason.

David couldn't stand to see her cry, but he didn't know what to say.

Downtown Seattle was a rats nest of concrete, glass, and steel, but it was remarkably efficient at moving people to and from the commercial core and moving them within it. The entire cluster of newer skyscrapers on the north side of downtown seemed to be constructed over a vast single underground parking garage made of many levels.

Vic felt her stomach drop away with the rest of the city as a glass elevator rushed up along one of the dark green spines of the Astrodyne Tower. At six floor intervals the elevator burst through a level laced with skyways that connected to six other towers, like a metal and glass web.

David Felton, standing next to her, smiled at the security this afforded. If something unfortunate were to ever happen, say a hijacked plane were ever to crash into the building, the survivors would merely rush to the nearest floor with a sky bridge and then cross to a neighboring tower.

Not that any hijackers would be able to pick out Astrodyne Tower, easily, David knew, for it was exactly 72 stories tall, just like its six neighboring buildings, and the twelve additional buildings on the ring outside of those. This new part of downtown Seattle, on the flats just south of Lake Union, was built like a Crwth game board, and if David were a bit higher in the Astrodyne hierarchy he would know it was also arranged like the domed city of Xanthos on Danae in the Alpha Centauri A star system.

There were a total of sixty-one such buildings in this cluster, and the Earthside headquarters of the Astrodynamics corporation was nestled in among them somewhere on the third ring. The true HQ remained at Fortuna City, where Robyn's granddaughter Chayn Millet-Ratte reigned.

Back in the muscular, bloody Twentieth Century buildings were built ever taller and more beautiful to express the egos of their owners. Some of these giants still lined the waterfront in Seattle's Old Downtown.

But in the Twenty-first Century, which is just the Twentieth Century's skinny little brother, the rule was to lie low for security. Outside of the downtown core, lesser residential towers formed a skirt of descending steps down to the industrial sprawl which formed a wide moat holding the mono- culture of suburban Puget Sound City at bay.

From the elevator, looking out between neighboring buildings, Vic could see a black snake writhing among the orange lights on the far southern horizon that was the sparsely developed Green River Gorge, called Gonorrhea Gulch locally.

Consistent with the understated theme, the Executive Lounge wasn't even on the top floor, and there was no view to speak of, other than the windows of nearby buildings and thin vertical streaks of gray sky.

The lounge was empty except for Karin "Bravo" Durr herself, aka Lilith, in the flesh, sitting in one of three plush chairs which formed a triangle, all facing askew rather than directly facing each other. There was a elegant rounded glass coffee table that doubled as a display monitor between them, projecting reams of military data that meant something to Lilith.

Bravo wore her IDF major's uniform, but of course she was much higher than that in the Femina Caelestis Girl Guard. She was, in fact, the supreme commander, equivalent to a general. Bravo stood up when Vic and David approached, and returned Vic's impeccable salute.

"Archangel Vic reporting as ordered, Ma'am."

"Please have a seat Vic, and you too David. And let's dispense of this 'Ma'am' stuff for now. No ranks or Bravo or any of that sort of business. I'm Lilith, and I hope you won't mind too terribly much if I just call you Vic."

When they all took their places, Lilith looked at Vic for a moment with a penetrating gaze that Vic found hard to bear. At length, she said, "Round Robyn is your great-grandmother, Vic."

"So David has told me."

"Yes. You're right on Robyn's main blood line. Your father never told you?"

"Not a world."

"Then I'll lay out your genealogy for a bit, Vic, it will help you to understand a few things. Round Robyn was born Kimberly Lokken in 1925 and wed Jerry Shy Bear in 1944, even though Kim was from the White Wing of the End Dome Church and Jerry was from the Red Wing. There's an amazing story behind that, but we don't have all night."

"I learned that story in basic training, Lilith."

"Very good! Anyway, Kim and Jerry Shy Bear had one girl named Joy in 1946, and then Mr. Shy Bear was killed by a man named Earl Roland in 1947, fol- lowing certain events that comes down to most Americans in a garbled version known as the Roswell UFO Incident.

"Around about that time the Women's Democratic Forum was put together and Kim Lokken-Shy Bear changed her name to just Robyn. When your grandmother Joy grew up she married a cousin from the White Wing named Blaine Millet. That was in 1966. By the way, Vic, you do realize the members of the Church of End Dome are only allowed to marry their first or second cousins, except that one time with Kim and Shy Bear?"

"Yes, Lilith, I know that all too well. As I recall, it was one of the reasons my father gave for fleeing into deep space."

"Right! Sorry, moving along. Blaine and Joy had three children, and the oldest was your father Brand Millet. In 1991 he wed your mother, a beautiful nephilim female named Jabniel, on a balloon city in the clouds of Jupiter, believe it or not."

"I believe it. And I was born three years after that, about six times farther from the sun than the Earth is, but I don't remember anything about that voyage. I do remember being kidnapped by some asshole named Roth Wardian and taken to Oregon so he could try to kill my father.

"The rest you know, of course, far better than we do, but I can fill in some gaps that maybe you don't even know. Brand and Jabs live in England these days."

"Yes, I understand they live at a lighthouse somewhere."

"On the Isle of Wight. St. Catherine's lighthouse. My father Benjamin Gervasi operated it for years, the light and the weather station. He owned the grounds. Not the lighthouse mind you, but he owned the outbuildings around it. We used to live there before the War. When he died, he didn't realize that I was still alive after the fashion of Femina Caelestis, so he left it all to some historical society. About twenty years ago your father Brand Millet bought it back from that foundation. I suggested it to him. St. Catherine's is splendidly isolated, you see, yet there's enough there to do to keep a body very busy. What feelings do you have for your parents, Vic?"

"It's hard to say. They keep sending me money, but there's almost no con- tact at all. I don't know if it was because I married Frank or what."

"You were a very happy person when you were a little jist, Vic."

"Jist?"

"Baby gen. I remember you well. And now you are a profoundly unhappy per- son. The reason I asked how you felt about your parents is because I honestly believe your father is more responsible for your current melancholy state than this Frank Pritchard could ever be."

"Why do you say that?"

"Listen to me, Vic. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you, and there never was. You are a one hundred percent normal and wonderful gen. It's this whole planet that can't deal with you. And the places where your mother's people live can't deal with gens any better. That's why your father raised you as a girl. But he was wrong to do so. It was all a lie, you were never a human girl then, and you are not a human woman now. But there is a place where gens are happy beyond anything you can imagine."

"Sure, Lilith, you're talking about heaven. So if I just snuff it, as you English folks say, I'll be with all the happy gens."

"No, Vic, I'm not talking about heaven. I'm talking about a real place, in this life, but we of Femina Caelestis are the only ones who know the way to get there.

"So here's where your father's fault comes into the picture, Vic. He was filled with so much pride, and so intent on going his own way totally independent of Femina Caelestis, that he was willing to consign his own daughter to a life of utter loneliness rather than allow us to take you to your true home. And even now we literally cannot take you there, even if you asked. The terms of your father's agreement with Robyn are quite clear. You would have to stumble into that place completely on your own."

"So it is true, what David told me in the car?"

"Yes it's true, Vic. Dory tried to fight for you, and I myself want to fight for you, but I have Shared enough with Robyn to know where she stands on the bargain with her grandson. You must know the elohim are quite scrupulous about their bargains."

"But there's the other thing, the objection to me being a gen."

"You're not the first gen who tried to join Femina Caelestis. The Ginas usually vote in a block and they wouldn't have it. This may be called Femina Caelestis now but underneath it never stopped being the Women's Democratic Forum. And we are still a democracy in most things. Not everything, but the Ginas win this one. None of the Bunners want to wake up in a new body and find a cock between their legs, if you will pardon me being so crude."

"So no Change? Not even as a civilian?"

"No change, Vic. I'm sorry. You will live out your life and you will die, and that death will be final."

Lilith studied Vic closely to see how she took that.

Vic seemed to internalize her disappointment, a sign of the new strength she had acquired at Shangri-La. She stared at Lilith, and they held each other's eyes while Vic silently counted numbers in her mind.

Lilith broke when Vic reached the count of nineteen and looked at David. "Here it is, what? 2030. But we still can't make a computer program that can convince us that it is aware it even exists. Still, David here says we've had artificial intelligence since the turn of the century."

David said, "We probably had AI when the Internet came along and crossed a certain threshold of connectivity. The Grid is aware, but it is too alien for us to recognize it as AI."

Lilith nodded, then turned back to Vic. "Robyn had the idea that an artificial intelligence had to live as one of us, at least through the crucial early years of childhood, or it would never think like we do."

David rolled his eyes. "I told her that's been tried many times. We can't get silicon to work like living brain cells. An electronic switch is either on or off, but a brain cell sputters. It doesn't fire every time it's supposed to, it makes mistakes. Our brain runs at ninety watts, like a dim old style incandescent light bulb. So evolved to work with low-power switches that have a high error rate by screening every decision through layers of filters. But we can still use brute force methods, I told her. Numerical methods. With a quantum computer, we can simulate every misfiring neuron in a human brain, and all of its connections."

Vic said, "I don't understand any of this. I feel like I've been cut out of this conversation. You said Lilith wanted to make things right with me for denying the Change."

"And I will, Vic, right now, but first you have to understand that what you are about to see is not a real girl. It's a machine. We made her. But she thinks she's a real little girl, and it's important that for these crucial early years no one ever tells her she's not real. Will you agree to that, Vic?"

"Of course."

"Okay, David, go fetch your daughter."

David Felton left, and when he came back a few minutes later, a smiling little girl was walking beside him with her hand in his, wearing her dark brown hair in two pigtails. The girl's apparent age was about five.

The machine child was certainly beautiful, and her little round face was absolutely authentic, triggering no instincts of revulsion in Vic that have plagued the creators of artificial people (both movie characters and physical objects) ever since the problem was documented by a Japanese researcher in 1978 and labeled the Uncanny Valley. The revulsion invariably happened when the virtualization was almost, but not exactly perfect, and the effect seemed to be buried deep, grounded in human evolution itself. Something in the limbic "lizard" brain screamed: FAKE! FALSE! COUNTERFEIT! But not here with this little girl.

David said, "Vic, I'd like you to meet my lovely daughter Hope."

Vic told her hello, but she felt funny talking to her, knowing that she wasn't really real.

David went on to say, "Hope, this is my friend in the Girl Guard. Her name is Vic."

Hope came up to shake Vic's hand. Her skin was a perfect replica of a girl's hand, Vic was astonished, but the simulacrum was so exact Vic began to suspect the whole episode was a practical joke and this really was a real girl.

Hope was totally without guile. She said exactly what was on her mind, and this was what she asked: "Vic, are you going to marry my daddy?"

There was a yelp, and Vic turned beet red with embarrassment.

David said, "Hope, don't be silly, I just met Vic today and I'm still get- ting to know her. Now say goodbye to her, and I'll take you back to the playroom."

"Goodbye Vic!"

"Goodbye, sweetheart."

When David left with the girl, Vic turned to Lilith and said, "That was a robot?"

Lilith nodded. "The base system is a General Materials Bot I stole from Mercury last year, and that wasn't easy, let me tell you. But the difficult and expensive thing was getting the look just right."

"Why did you make it a girl?"

"Number one, because she has no sex organs and no body hair, just like a Barbie doll. With her clothes on she has no genital bulge like a boy does. There seemed no need to add a penis. She doesn't urinate.

"And number two, eventually she will become the host for Round Robyn's personality, and the merger will go much more smoothly if the host is the same gender as the client. So we socialize Hope to be a girl. David dresses Hope in little girl's clothes, gives her little girl's toys and lets her do little girl things. Hope's brain was programmed to accept either choice easily enough, but after a few weeks the pathways for a feminine brain was well-established and impossible to reverse."

David returned to the Executive Lounge then and took his place around the coffee table. "Well, Vic, what do you think of her?"

"Absolutely amazing, David, and I know with Hope you are trying to create artificial intelligence, but I don't know why."

David looked at Lilith, who said, "You've done well in your classes at Shangri-La, so you already know the significance of what Femina Caelestis calls 'Robyn's Number'".

Vic nodded. "The square root of one-half. Point seven zero seven one. That's the strength of what memories and personality you retain whenever you do a mind-transfer."

"Leaving about twenty-nine percent of the host's memory and personality intact. Or rather, a new composite personality is formed, and those are the relative strengths of the personalities involved. There's no way around it. Even the gods themselves, when they possess human beings, are subject to Robyn's Number. It's built right into the physics of the process. Do it enough times and your identity can actually be lost as a distinct entity."

"Or you can get what's happening now with the Bunners," David said. "The Ginas. One single greedy personality distributed across many bodies, at the expense of diversity. But with AI you could do one final transfer and be done with body swapping forever."

"Exactly!" Lilith said. "And there would be a side benefit. When we are between bodies, we can have a place to land instead of timeless oblivion as ones and zeros in a flat-pack. We could live inside a virtual reality until a new artificial body was made available, maybe even live inside the Grid itself. We call it project Hope and we've crossed a number of hurdles al- ready, but many remain."

"The biggest one was the problem with power and waste heat," David explained. "Simulating Hope's mind takes five thousand watts of continuous power. That power has to be generated, and it has to be disposed of. After Hunky solved that with the Golden Gift, it was all downhill."

"I'll take your word for it," Vic told him, not grasping very much at all of David's supposed explanation.

Lilith said, "We've spent billions of solyad to make her eyes and skin absolutely real, but the part that money can never buy is loving parents for Hope. David has taken the role of her father, and in a way he really is her father, because he created Hope's brain, but she also needs the influence of a mother, and I can think of nobody better suited than you, Vic!"

Now it was David's turn to have his face turn beet red. Vic was shocked. "Me?"

"Yes! You are already in Robyn's actual family, and you are forever part of the Femina Caelestis family even if you cannot be allowed to proceed to the Change. You're an Archangel in my army, so I can trust you to keep all of this secret. Your body may have both male and female aspects, but you still have a lot of maternal love that you can center on Hope. And maybe love left over to give to David."

"I can't believe it, Lilith. You're asking me to marry David?"

"That's entirely up to you, and in your own time. I can't just match you up and say 'go' but you may decide it's best for Hope. You may even come to love David with no prodding from me at all. But Vic! I can tell you that David is broken himself in his own way: he has thrown himself into his work here at Astrodyne, so he never found time to find himself a partner. David is a very lonely man."

Vic turned to face him. "And so if I hook up with you David, being the career man that Lilith says you are, will you find time for me?"

"It will be part of my job, Vic. Hope will be my work! Lilith is trying to tell you I will bring my work home with me."

"And what would I do? Just be a housewife and mother?"

"Look how far you've come, Vic," Lilith said. "By now you should realize that you can be anything you want to be, do anything you want to do. That is the gift we gave you at Shangri-La."

"I do want to do something, Lilith." Vic thought of her abuse at the hands of Frank Pritchard. Never again. "I want to be the sheriff of King County."

"That's an elected position, and elections cost a lot of money. The terms of Brand's agreement with Robyn forbid us from giving you a single penny. But how about this, Vic? Femina Caelestis isn't just about money, we're about organization. What if we threw our people behind a campaign led by yourself to raise new money for your election?"

Vic thought about that a bit and smiled. "That would be acceptable." And so Vic's business arrangement with the WDF was hashed out.

Frank Pritchard thought he'd make things a little rough for "Vicky" and refused to agree to a divorce, but Dory sent some two meter tall nephilim Good Old Girls to his house to make him see the error of his ways. This involved a lot of smacking him around, and no small amount of pain. Vic savored every word of the after-action report.

After that, Vic did talk herself into thinking that she loved David Felton, and married him the following February. At least he never laid a hand on her in violence the way Frank did, and even Frank would have been foolish to do that now. But David never laid a hand on her in love either. It was her penis again. David just couldn't bring himself to physically join with Vic with that thing standing right there staring at him.

Rather than sinking back into a morass of self-pity as she had done with Frank, Vic shrugged and threw herself into her two new roles, as mother of Hope and as a candidate for county sheriff.

Hope began what David knew would become a legendary childhood, possibly the common shared childhood of millions of people after they merged their memo- ries with copies of Hope's electronic mind someday. David knew Vic was profoundly unhappy behind the brave front she put forward, on account of their sex life, or the lack thereof, but then again he wasn't exactly thrilled with how things were going himself. He felt as though their marriage was being filmed before a live studio audience.

David and Vic Felton were attentive parents, perhaps too much so. It was easy for them to think of Hope as a real child. Only a few things stood out to remind them of her artificial origin, such as the fact that she was not a picky eater. Anything Hope ate, within reason, could be turned into the electricity which gave her power. Even garbage or spoiled food, but her parents tried to get her to stick with real food. Acids or things which would damage her internally were out. And she never had to go potty.

When Hope was really only two years old, her parents gave her a birthday cake with seven candles and seven presents. They got away with it because most people don't remember very much about the first few year of their life unless something very dramatic happened in that time. There was nothing to set Hope wondering much about her "missing years" and when Hope grew older and talked about it with her friends, they too would be unable to recall very much about when they were three or four years old.

In the fall, Vic (who started using the name Victoria for her dealings out- side of Femina Caelestis) won the off-year county-wide election to become the sheriff of King County, a position that came up to a vote every three years. She defeated the same man who assailed the Eastpointe safe house where Dory took her, and when Vic pulled ahead of the incumbent in the polls over the summer things got fairly ugly, with vague insinuations of Femina Caelestis influence hanging over her.

But such charges would only really get traction in the old United States, or in the New Confederacy. Pacifica was much more progressive than that, so Vic came through fine. She was handily elected Sheriff, and the name Victoria Felton became known throughout the region.

But Vic had come out of literally nowhere, so now it was up to her to prove to the voters she was the right person for this job. Vic threw herself into her work, and so it came to pass that it was Vic herself, and not Da- vid as she feared, whose career seemed to come at a higher priority than the marriage.

Somewhere along the way she stopped thinking of herself as attached to Femina Caelestis in any meaningful way. It was the politically expedient thing to do, and the Ginas withholding the Change from her made it that much easier to do so without undue guilt.

As the years passed by, the child did seem to fill a void in Vic's life, as Lilith knew she would. Vic followed David's admonition to keep Hope in the dark about her origin as long as possible. Hope was learning many things very quickly, but if Hope learned she was not a real human being too early, the psychological damage would be incalculable.

Occasionally Hope was taken in to the Astrodyne building and rendered un- conscious by the elohim Binah, directly, through the Golden Gift. The dam- age Hope had accumulated by horsing around outside the house was repaired, and her frame was stretched a few inches. This happened every summer between school years, and it was something Hope learned to look forward to, becoming a bigger girl literally overnight.

Hope hated to stay at Mrs. Thompson's day care, but there was no choice. David still had to hold down his job at Astrodyne, and Vic was the sheriff. But at least Hope got to interact with other children. Hunky had the place secretly under surveillance. Bravo had arranged for security, and Dory was pleased that none of the other kids expressed feelings that Hope was unusual or out of place.

Robyn was deceased, existing only as a data flat-pack in Bravo's Israeli army bra until Hope was ready.

Different kids rotated in and out of Mrs. Thompson's place every few months, or even on a weekly basis. Two or three years later Hope could not even recall the names of her old friends there. And that was good, because only robots had perfect memories. Schoolgirls did not.

In the fall, when Hope returned to school, she was slightly taller than most of her classmates, and they put it down to a normal growth spurt over the summer, and most of the kids didn't remember how tall she was the pre- ceding year anyway. Because she didn't grow naturally, by the end of the school year, Hope would be slightly shorter than most of her classmates.

At school, Hope befriended two children, just by chance, like most kids do. Few children deliberately choose who their companions will be. One was dark-haired Scott Martin, and the other was red-headed Pamela Hurst. The three kids would be friends for along time in a sort of modern recapitulation of the now-ancient Boda.

The children made other friends, but the core of Pam, Scott, and Hope remained. Scott could be described as chunky and a little nervous. Pamela was skinny and a little withdrawn, but she opened up around her friends. Hope was, by design, absolutely normal in appearance, but the personality that emerged was brash and full of wonder at everything she saw. It would be with Scott and Pam that Hope would play "doctor" at age eleven and first learn that something was wrong with her body.

When she was on her service call at age eight, Hope was given a double- blind Turing Test, though she didn't know what it was all about. She successfully fooled a panel into mistaking her for an eight year old girl, and therefore passed the test. It was a historic moment in the search for artificial intelligence, something that would have won David global professional accolades if it was more widely known, but that had to wait.

At the bidding of Gina, David made a contingency backup copy of Hope's mind before preceding with the rest of the maintenance. The patterns were in- stalled into another robot child in the Astrodyne which Hope-1 never saw. Hope-2 thought she was the original girl, of course, but she was confused by small differences in her body, because the base was Astrodyne homegrown and not a GenMat bot. Hope-2 was effectively held prisoner.

Gina wouldn't let her go to see her parents or her friends. She cried all the time and grew deeply depressed. Each day that she was held against her will, her mind's pathways grew progressively ruined. Eventually Hope-2 shut herself down permanently, committing suicide by the power of her mind alone. Gina's conclusion was that despite passing the Turing Test, it was still too early to reap the artificial intelligence harvest.