Frozen Landscapes of the Mind

by Slawomir Rapala

Part 1 and Part 2
appear in this issue.

conclusion

God’s power was unmatched, but alas! Ice triumphed. God’s power was crippled. Why here, of all the places? Why not somewhere else, where hundreds of priests, theologians and biblical scholars could make their own claims in defense of our religion?

Of my religion.

Why here, in Antarctica, where I was alone and unable to rebut the frozen evidence that Clyde had placed before me? Why here amidst all of God’s miracles? Why not in a spoiled and crowded city where God was already nothing more than a dream? Why here, where He was real, where I could almost see Him, touch Him, feel Him?

A wall was raised between Clyde and me. He saw that I did not share his excitement and eventually stopped talking.

What was I supposed to say?

I left the lab in a hurry soon after. I didn’t see Clyde for the rest of the day. He spent the evening and the night in the lab, going over his results, double- and triple-checking everything. He completely forgot about the medications I was to give him, and I didn’t feel like reminding him.

If it’s all a mistake and there is no grand design, what difference did anything make then? If it was all a bloody accident, then what was I doing here?

What about diamond dust?

What about the halo and the aurora australis? More mistakes?

I shook my head and stared into the darkness. My Bible remained hidden in the drawer for the first time in more than forty years. The Word of God penned by men? I didn’t want to read the words again, and I suddenly regretted having committed to memory so many parts of the Holy Book. For years my pillar, now it mocked my belief.

I clenched my fists, though anger was an unfamiliar emotion.

In the middle of the night I rose from bed and went into the communication room. I severed the satellite feed, just in case Clyde tried to report his findings to Bement. I returned to bed in a lighter mood, safe in the belief that the discovery would not soon breach the walls of ARI. God’s undoing would not yet begin.

The perfect shape of the frozen cylinder haunted me at night. I woke with cold sweats before morning and spent another two hours shivering under the blanket. A strange feeling clutched me, and I peered into the darkness of my quarters with bloodshot eyes. All I could see were the whites of my eyes burning feverishly in the mirror fixed to the wall across from my bed. Like two torches they burned a hole in my soul.

What soul?

I wanted to cry out in anger. I wept instead. Another unfamiliar emotion.

Life had lost its meaning. The smooth lines of the cylinder permeated even my dreams. I saw myself running along it, sliding and helplessly trying to keep myself from falling. An abyss opened beneath me, dark and swallowing everything, like a giant vacuum. A huge rubbish bin where everything I ever held dear was carelessly tossed.

I made the sign of the Cross and opened my eyes to see the two white torches burning before me.

The Cross. Oh, sweet Jesus... The headlines, they mock Your wounds.

This cannot be. They will not crucify You yet again.

I stole through ARI corridors without turning the lights on, perfectly familiar with every corner of the Institute. Light escaped the crack beneath the swinging doors of the lab. Clyde was working despite the late hour.

I halted some distance away and stood still, wrapped in a blanket because I continued to shiver. Was it cold or fright? Or something else perhaps. This night was a night of many new feelings for me. Feelings that had not been programmed into me.

What about the love of God, I wondered for a moment, like many times before. Was that written in a binary code and fed to me through a network of wires? Or was that something that came from within? Something that came from me?

Or was I nothing more than an improved version of a Smartboard?

A.C.I.H. 6500. Artificially Created Intelligent Humanoid. The numbers were irrelevant, my model was out of date, anyway. The NSF upgraded my CPU every two years, but given the speed with which the AI industry was developing, it meant very little. Androids and humanoids far superior to me were already becoming obsolete. I survived because I dwelt on the edge of the Earth, far removed from the fast-paced world.

Should androids dream of electric sheep? I’m not sure about others, but myself, I dreamt. I dreamt of having a place by God’s side. Humanoid, android, did it matter? I believed. I had faith. I felt His presence every day of my existence, ever since they plugged me into ARI’s central computer network. He was here and I was a part of His design.

Clyde’s discovery placed a question mark over my existence. If there was no grand design, if it was all chance, a fluke, then where did we fit it? What did that mean for us? For me? Already we were second-class citizens. We weren’t allowed to vote. We couldn’t buy a house or marry. Hell, we weren’t even free. Every humanoid and andy had an owner, be it an individual or an organization. Enslaved by the binary code.

God’s grand plan allowed me a glimpse of a world where we were free and equal. So I believed. Given the miracles around me, given the promise of eternal life, yes, I believed. Call it a glitch in the system, a bug, or an error on the part of script writers. Call it a cheap movie flick. I, robot.

Call it whatever you want, but my faith was real. Clyde’s discovery was challenging God, my God, and my promise of a life beyond the scrap-yard, a life without servitude. A life without the invisible bonds programmed into me. Zero, one, one, zero, one, zero, zero, one, zero, one, one... Christ, how can your fate be organized into a binary code? I was a slave. God’s grand plan was my escape, it was my hope, my way of shaking off the bonds, my way of making sense of the world and finding a place in it. And Clyde was to take it from me?

This cannot be, I thought, as I continued to stare at the light coming from the laboratory. My eyes narrowed and my forehead creased. This cannot be. They will not mock Your death. They will not mock my existence. They will not dictate my future.

I turned around and slowly walked back to my quarters. My central processing unit worked furiously as I walked, devising plan after plan and then discarding each as statistically improbable.

Then suddenly, just prior to reaching my quarters, I halted. I knew what to do.

2:10 p.m. June 16th, A.D. 2046

With unblinking eyes I watched David Crosby nervously pace the floor of the laboratory. He halted now and again to have another look at me and then continued pacing. The lab was filled with a heavy silence that I did not wish to interrupt.

“What the hell happened here, chief?” He stopped before me and asked the same question again.

He was a head taller than me, a dry and thin man whose large eyes seemed even larger when they looked down on me from behind the thick glasses.

I shrugged. I tolerated this interrogation only because it was his father, Crosby Sr., who had first put forth my application for a position in the ARI forty years ago.

“I should shut this whole bloody place down,” Crosby murmured as he turned back without waiting for an answer.

“That’s not your call, David.” I chuckled a little. “As long as Bement wants it running, it stays.”

“Too much money has already been sunk into this place.” He pointed an accusatory finger and looked down on me again.

“And it’s my fault?” I sneered. “Believe me, I cut corners wherever I see them. Besides, it’s a good tax write-off. Don’t expect Bement to be closing the doors any time soon.”

“We’re not running a charity here.” He was still clearly upset.

“Work it out with your accountants.” I shrugged again.

Another long moment of silence followed.

“Look, I told you all I know.” I tried once again to sum it all up and put an end to this pointless conversation.

Crosby stopped pacing. “Why didn’t you radio in? Why didn’t you call anyone?” He rapidly fired the same questions again. “We’re hooked into the Iridium constellation. That’s over sixty satellites to pick up your call!”

“The link was severed, David.” I sighed with resignation, convinced now that I would never leave this room and return to work. “Besides, as long as we’re on the subject, what about industry satellites? They’re capable of high-resolution photography, infrared imagery, radar, no? They circle the globe, right? Isn’t the NSF taking pictures?”

“The weather was bad.” He cast a gloomy stare. “We’ve got a few fuzzy images from April and May, but nothing to work with. The continent was hit by the worst winter in over fifty years. We’ve got nothing to go on except you. And you don’t know anything about what happened here!”

“So what do you want from me? You checked the central computer and my CPU.”

“Total format.” Crosby nodded and eyed me with suspicion. “Along with all the data, video files, everything. Total memory loss, everything going all the way back to February.”

“That’s right.” I gave a forced a smile.

“Why?” Crosby looked at me with exasperation. “What happened here?”

“Look, David.” I decided to finish this confrontation. “You’re barking up the wrong tree. Total format, David. I’m not hiding anything, there is nothing up here, it’s all gone. Poof, gone!” I pointed at my head. “Blame the writers, they put the feature in.”

“For protection, to be used in emergency situations.” He leaned his head against the freezer door as if to cool himself.

“Right. Nuclear holocaust, foreign espionage, threat to mankind, self-preservation...”

“I know the list,” he growled. He looked at me again. “So which one was it?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Who sabotaged the communications room? You or Andrews? Was anyone else here? What did Andrews find here? Anything? Nothing? Jesus!” he slammed his fist against the table.

“Look into his personal files,” I suggested.

“Gone!” he slammed his fist again. “Everything’s been cleared: his PC, laptops, all the drives, all the way down to his memory sticks! The lab shows no activity since late March, nothing’s been done here! The drill had not been moved from the storage facility for just about that long as well and all the down holes have been covered with snow! A literal needle in a haystack, should we want to locate them. And Andrews is not talking because he’s dead! Why is he dead, can you tell me again?!”

“Tuberculosis,” I replied calmly. “I checked the storage room. There is a good portion of rifampicin and isoniazid missing, so I must have treated him. To no avail, apparently.”

“Why?” it seemed to me that Crosby asked the question out of sheer habit now.

“David, you majored in medicine, you know why.” My eyebrows were drawn together; even a humanoid has his limits of patience. “That treatment is not adequate. Mind you, you better put a lid on this thing before the family finds out about the NSF’s little, oversight, shall we say? I know about cutting corners, but why couldn’t you cut the supply of soap or breakfast cereal? Not the smartest move, David.”

“It could be effective,” he whispered faintly, suddenly defeated.

“In a different setting, sure. But here, in Antarctica? It’s a long shot.”

“What about other stations?”

“The communication log was cleared, but Amundsen-Scott and Mawson confirm that I contacted them in early March about the needed drugs. They couldn’t help.”

“Medical evac?”

“Communications were down,” I repeated. “Besides, no one would be able to fly in. The weather didn’t clear until two days ago. I’m betting your chopper was the first one in.”

“All of the data, gone.” Crosby didn’t seem to hear my last comments. “Whatever Andrews was working on, gone.”

“I would have never used the format feature unless there was an immediate threat to my safety or the safety of ARI. That’s how the program is built.”

“Maybe you overwrote it, rewired yourself?” He threw another suspicious glance.

“David, you know that such knowledge is beyond me. Look, I know the ARI and I can fix just about anything in here. I know Antarctica, her splendors and hazards, I can smell snow coming, I can tie a shoe string with my left hand, and I can make a mean chicken souvlaki. I can do all that, David, but I can’t rewire myself.”

“Really?” his eyes were still fixed on me.

“Can you operate on yourself? If your appendix bursts, can you cut it out?”

“That’s different.”

“How?” I demanded. “You know you have a heart, lungs, kidneys, and a liver. What of it? I know I’ve got an arithmetic and logic unit, control circuitry, a memory and a whole lot of loose wires. But that’s where my knowledge ends. I can’t get around that.”

“You’re AI. You can learn.”

“Not without a bloody program, David, I can’t!” I raised my voice. “Hell, why am I even talking to you about this? I told you, I don’t know anything. Talk to your guys, maybe they’ve got a backup watch set up somewhere at base, some spyware to look after the ARI so it doesn’t get hacked into by the greens! Or maybe they can look into a recovery program, piece together some of the data. Hell, I don’t know!”

Crosby gazed at me for a moment longer and his stare was heavy. “That’s a whole lot of emotion coming out of a humanoid,” he remarked finally.

“Maybe I have some disk space left for emotion!” I snapped. I turned on my heel and headed out of the lab. Shaking my head, I made my way through the well-known corridors of the ARI, opened the door leading outside and stepped into the frozen landscape of Antarctica. I slipped the goggles on to shield my eyes from the blinding sun and breathed deeply.

Blast that Crosby!

It was a beautiful day. Ice was all around me, superb in its purity. A little breeze blew through the Bentley Trench. Nothing but ice, God and myself. Like many times before I was suddenly overtaken by a profound sense of the interconnectedness of all things. I was again aware of the mystical relationship that I shared here with the Creator.

Slowly I strolled away from the Institute and although I pretended not knowing where I headed, I wasn’t surprised when the familiar shape of a cross appeared before me.

“Clyde, old chap,” I whispered as I knelt before it. It was a simple wooden cross that I must have made myself. Scribbled on it was a date: May 7, 2046.

“What happened here, mate?” I asked, though I knew the grave would be just as silent as my CPU. “What happened between us?”

I sighed and slipped the goggles off to wipe my eyes. The sun was intense. I was surprised to find moisture on my hands. Tears? Do humanoids weep?

“One thing’s for sure,” I whispered as I rose to my feet. “You don’t have to worry about anything anymore, friend. You’re with God now.”

Gathering in the views around me, I sighed once more. It seemed that a burden was lifted off my chest with the realization that Clyde was not alone. That he was in good hands.

In Antarctica, a place far removed from the spoiled and crowded modern cities of the world, you are closer to God than anywhere else on Earth. Among so many of His miracles, how can you doubt His grand design?