"You mean like freedom and the pursuit of happiness?" sister Joseph asked.
"Why not?" asked Sarah.
"What if it decides to take off and live on its own in the rainforest?" she asked.
"If that's what makes it happy, we should let it! Would you choose to live in the forest?" Sarah asked.
"We're not that lucky," sister Novis thought. Sister Joseph gave her a dirty look but continued her argument.
"Then why did we make it in the first place? We just cut our losses and make another one? I bet none of you bird-brains thought of this, but we aren't creating a life, we're creating a whole race. Do you want to add sentient species number three to this zoo?"
"She is right about that, if there is an um there can be many ums, maybe they'll be able to self-replicate, maybe the will want children..." Seth thought out loud.
"Maybe they'll like your physique and make twenty thousand of you, we should have glorious fun trying to find the real one!" sister Joseph continued the doomsday scenario.
"You know, sister, I'm so grateful you weren't around when the first caveman sparked fire, you would have objected to that," sister Roberta poked. "On second thought, you were probably there, you might just have been engaged in another debate at the time."
"Sisters, please!" Seth reprimanded. "Can we get back to the subject?"
"I'd say," sister Joseph continued in a strangely conciliatory tone, "let Sarah be in charge of all the decisions regarding the robot. After all she is its mommy, whatever that means for the thing. Do you mind, sister? I don't think all of us should be morally responsible for teaching it right from wrong since you sprung it on us without asking."
"I don't mind," Sarah said.
"And don't forget not to allow it to do any chores, the way you teach the children to only do as they please is a blessing for the future of our kind. We're going to drown in our own refuse soon, nobody is doing anything around here anymore," sister Joseph continued pestering.
"Asking children to perform pointless menial tasks is not the stepladder to progress," Sarah objected. "They isolated self-replicating proteins during their class today, proteins which we turned into beefsteak and ate."
"And that is supposed to give me comfort because?" asked sister Joseph.
"Maybe their time is better spent engineering an automatic floor scrubber than grinding their knuckles till they bleed!" Sarah replied, offended.
"I learned hard work and discipline in my day and I turned out the better for it!" sister Joseph announced with pride. The entire congregation paused and bit their tongues to crush the plethora of commentary generated by this utterance.
What the sisters didn't realize, fully immersed as they were in this heated debate about ethics and consequence, was that all the other people could see through the transparent walls of their prayer room was how the 'sainted ones' spent endless hours together in silence, turning morning into dusk, ignoring hunger and thirst, not moving from their place as if they were no longer subject to any human need. As they sat down on the floor of their crystal cave they had acquired archetypal status, they were the elders' council of their tribe.
***
Since the hypothetical questions remained unanswered and the design by committee ended up irritating even the most long-suffering of the sisters, a decision was made to entrust the care, education and wellbeing of um to Sarah to raise as her offspring with all the duties and responsibilities involved.
Sarah couldn't remember being so excited since the cats arrived on Terra Two and she first laid eyes on Solomon, although this new creature came with a lot more responsibility and no instruction manual, which gave the redhead a little trepidation and slight feelings of inadequacy. Sister Joseph eagerly brought these misgivings to a simmer with continuous pointed criticism.
In many ways Sys was like a child, taking in the world with innocence and avid curiosity, until, that is, Purple grabbed the remote and um became the bearer of wisdom and immortality. At other times it suddenly ceased acting visionary and started chasing the cats around the tables of Sarah's shop.
Sarah prepared Sys a room in her home, one with a large window overlooking the ocean so that um could rest and dream and think of its future, just like any child would. Sys didn't eat, of course, or need to rest at night, but it slept between sundown and sunrise grace to a tiny subroutine sister Roberta had included in its hard code. Sarah never said anything about that but was secretly grateful that Sys didn't spend its nights in a chair, wide eyed and staring at the wall like an insomniac.
Curiously um never asked why its physical attributes were so different from the others', a perpetual child among scores of children who grew up and left allowing younger ones to take their place in Sarah's chemistry class. Sys accepted it would never change, just like Sarah and the sisters didn't, in this strange endless life they made up as they went.
Sys sometimes spent hours at its desk next to the window putting virtual puzzles together, at other times it disappeared into a VR bubble to explore or to play. Its memory was limitless and um quickly committed to it any piece of information that came its way, from coleslaw recipes to the Critique of Pure Reason, indiscriminately and without a hierarchy of value. This is how Sarah grew in erudition beyond her wildest dreams, since Sys liked to share its newly acquired knowledge with whoever happened to be around (usually the redhead) by reciting for instance all three volumes of the aforementioned philosophical treatise during the course of several days, with intonation and without getting tired.
When Sys wasn't reciting literary and scientific works she helped Sarah with her tasks, watching with delight how the hydrosol whirled slowly through the distillation coil and taking in the delicate aromas with its little nose that quivered like a cat's. Sys didn't have a sense of smell, um catalogued scents by analyzing their chemical composition and putting them in the same category with similar substances. This rendered some hilarious mismatches on occasion and got Sys really confused; um then picked up its cat (it had unofficially adopted Lisa, the orange tabby, because it wanted to be just like "mom") and went to its room to brood.
In the excitement of raising Sys and the daily interactions between it and the children the sisters almost forgot what um's original purpose was but the immortals never got impatient with that, they were incapable of impatience, their eternal genetic code could not assimilate the notion of urgency.
They of course loved Sys. Sys. Sister. Sarah knew that whenever um was nowhere to be found she could look for it on the beach. The ocean yielded an intense attraction on the robot who talked to it for hours, retelling it stories if it didn't have anything new to say, singing songs, imagining what it was like on the ocean floor. Um looked so human it didn't ponder on the differences that made it unique. For the longest time Sys assumed that if Sarah couldn't breathe under water it couldn't either and didn't picture the extraordinary world of choices its artificial make-up opened up.
Chapter Eight
Of Love and Parenting
"Mom, I'm going out into the ocean for a couple of days to talk to Purple," Sys sent Sarah a message through the neural interlink.
Sarah jumped from the experiment she was working on, spilling the fir essential oil all over the counter and a dish of Morchella mushroom hybrids and making the entire shop smell like the enchanted forest for a second.
"Wait, where are you going, Sys, come back!" she yelled, running out to the beach only to see Sys's head and shoulders quickly advance through the water. Um turned around for a second, with its fiery curls blazing in the suns' light, waved back at its mother, then got picked up by one of the fast currents and disappeared from sight.
Sarah's heart sunk as she stood still on the beach, suddenly not knowing what to do with herself, forgetting all about the experiment, the transit system they'd been working on for months and her religious duties. She was overwhelmed with worry, what was um going to do in the ocean, it was too young to go into unknown territory they were still exploring a
nd only God knew what else was hidden under the green-blue waves, what dangers, what challenges! Seth felt the redhead's anguish and showed up stealthily behind her as it was her custom. She startled Sarah when she placed a hand on her shoulder; the redhead suddenly stopped the unconscious wringing of her hands.
"Don't worry, you're worrying! Sys is going to be fine, it was designed to withstand the streams' torque. It is just as well adjusted to water as we are to land, Jimmy wanted it to know how to swim, remember?" she said in a warm calming voice.
"It is still developing, how could I not worry, I don't think it was ready for this, and going it alone! Someone should have gone with it, we could have planned!" Sarah fretted, anguished.
"Nobody worried about me being bounced around at 560 mph, and let me tell you, that's no picnic!" sister Novis thought, increasing Sarah's discomfort with the endeavor. Sarah got a sudden and overwhelming empathy for Jimmy's parents, wondering how they must have worried when the little dare-devil decided to mightily conquer the waves. She felt Jimmy fuss uncomfortably over the event.
"Um has its bracelet on, just tell it to be careful and let you know how things are going," Seth offered, trying to loosen up the knots that were twisting overlapping layers in Sarah's stomach. The latter didn't comment, she just turned around and walked into the soybean crops, looking at them as if she saw them for the first time, passed her beloved apothecary shed and advanced through the emerald fields towards the purple bean tree with footsteps muffled by the brick colored dirt. Solomon followed right behind her like a silent shadow, accustomed as he was to the daily trips and the siesta under the bean tree.
Sarah sat down in the shade of the canopy with Solomon in her lap but her spirit was not there with her, it was wandering through blue-green waters trying to catch a glimpse of springy copper curls. The sister was two hundred and fifty six now and carried her old soul in a body that still looked thirty-three. In her long life she had experienced many more challenges than she thought she would growing up, this one however was completely opposite to what she had gotten accustomed to: in a few short months she had a child, watched it grow and saw it walk out into the world and this experience didn't give her any time to adjust. She passed through three different stages of her life at a speed that left her hurting and questioning everything: her purpose, her resilience, her balance.
She stood there worrying about Sys, this thing/creature whose concept didn't even exist the year before and who was now occupying her entire attention. She'd been teaching and caring for and soothing and protecting Sys for months, all her other plans seemed so unimportant by comparison and now she suddenly had to let um go, the little bird had learned to fly and the nest had become too small.
Solomon purred peacefully in Sarah's lap, trying to soothe her. She looked around herself and saw the perfect fields of green undulate under the breeze, edged by the blue contour of the ocean under the coffee-latte sky, the miraculous haven a few crazy humans had built for themselves out of nothing. The suns were glowing in the pinkish clouds, at odds with each other and casting two shadows. The heat intensified the strong fragrance of lavender and frangipani and the breeze carried the scent of honey from the wild pear orchard across the valley.
It was seven, so Sarah joined the Vespers adding to the usual prayers her intention that Sys's journey be marvelous and rewarding and the hope that um would be safely returned to her in a short while.
***
As soon as Sys disappeared under the water it found itself in a very familiar surrounding. Um didn't understand why, but it instinctively knew every turn as it was walking through this landscape it had never seen. In the highly refractive medium everything looked larger and closer and tinted blue-green. Sys walked quickly through a beautiful gorge of sedimentary rocks, floated over a canyon with the grace of a bird and continued its journey up a gentle hill that overlooked a vast bowl shaped valley. An immortal colony covered the entire surface of it, shimmering and glowing and forming ephemeral patterns. They pushed and pulled the strong currents above them into a splendid weaving of directional flows, a weaving not intended for human eyes but which Sys's pressure sensors transformed into the most beautiful sight it had ever seen. Purple was certainly doing its best to impress um.
"This is home," um thought with a tinge of longing and remorse gnawing at its mind, for how could the ocean be home when the place it was born, its mother and its friends were out there on dry land, the only world it ever knew. Sys edged closer to the shimmery edge of the purple colony. Its hair was floating weightlessly around her head like a little copper halo highlighted in green by its fluid surroundings.
Um's sensors could pick up a lot more shades and micro-movements than the human eye. After some adjustment um started differentiating between the endless purple hues in the shimmery surface. The shades formed spidery connections, main arterial flows, radial arrays and directional fields and the surface thickness wasn't even as it first seemed, but had depth and density variations like a liquid three dimensional map.
Sys tried to follow the ever shifting connections, the purple language that no human could ever understand, fascinated by the multiple levels of meaning that existed simultaneously in the smallest of patterns. Even the water above it, um noticed, didn't have a uniform consistency at all, it counterpointed the changes in the purple field like a separate set of instruments in a symphonic piece.
She drew even closer and sat down next to the edge of the purple colony.
"You. Think. Human. You. Purple." the colony said. "Human. Three. Dimension. Ocean. Home. Dirt. Home. Same. Home." they continued explaining to the puzzled um who couldn't understand but rather felt what they were trying to say. It stretched its hands to touch the purple surface and the microscopic inhabitants covered them swiftly, making them tingle. Sys started giggling as the purple colony retreated into its boundaries. Um lifted her hands to her face and noticed that the purple organisms had deposited what looked like little sparks at the center of its palms. The sparks seemed to be contiguous with um's polymeric structure which remained otherwise unaffected.
"Sugar. Sister." the colony said. Indeed many of the radicals in the polymer that constituted Sys's body bore significant similarities to sugar. Sys started to worry it might be good to eat, which made Purple laugh.
"Sys. Funny." the immortals said. As night approached the purple city started glowing with a light that turned more intense as the glassy medium above it darkened. Its life pulsed with the intensity of a metropolis composed of highly interconnected but seemingly independent sections. Purple was very excited about its guest, so it set aside many of its normal activities to listen to Sys talk about the soybean fields, its mother's apothecary, sister Joseph's brooding, an unabridged narration of the Brothers Karamazov, Jimmy's latest goofs, how Sys liked its hair and the shape of its nose, the latest adventures of her cat Lisa and the formula of human ribonucleic acid.
By the time Sys had almost finished a comparative study between two musical pieces belonging to pre-classical and classical styles the suns came up and the purple glow softened back to a shimmer. Um realized that it didn't sleep at all but didn't know that Sarah had spent all day with sister Roberta working on remotely pausing the sleep subroutine so that Sys wouldn't find itself vulnerable so far away from home.
Um talked to the immortals some more about its room and the VR bubbles, and what it learned in school, and its friends, and suddenly felt like going back home, its dirt home, that is.
"Go. Sarah. Sister. Love. Sarah." the immortals said.
"I'll be sure to let her know," the robot replied, turning quickly on its legs and heading home.
***
Sys arrived home very early the next morning and sneaked back into its room where it lay quietly on the bed pretending to sleep, worried that something wrong happened to keep it awake during its unauthorized expedition and Sarah would be mad.
When the suns came up Sarah woke up and walked by Sys's room glancing inside it out
of habit. She was surprised to see um sleeping peacefully with its hands peeking from under the pillow, one palm half revealing what looked like a tiny light source.
The redhead was so happy that Sys was back home that she didn't stop to ponder why it was sleeping or what was the light in the palm of its hand. She closed the door gently so that the hissing of the coffee press wouldn't disturb um's rest.
***
Sarah kept grinning a smile of pure joy at the return of the prodigal um, delighting over the fresh image of it peacefully snoozing in its bed. As she poured the coffee in her poppy colored cup she remembered the little lights at the center of Sys's palms. "What on earth was that?" she wondered.
"What on earth was what?" asked Seth through the interlink. Sarah was pleased that her mentor was awake so early and she eagerly shared the good news of um's return, not forgetting to mention the puzzling details of the unexplained sleep cycle and the tiny sparkles in its palms.
"I couldn't see it very well, I didn't want to wake Sys up, but it looks like light to me," the redhead continued.
"Hi, mom," Sys interacted sheepishly from the doorway and then squeezed between the redhead and the counter to settle comfortably on the round upholstered bench that wrapped around the kitchen table. The upholstery fabric was soft and apricot colored and the gleam of the rising suns set it ablaze. The whole kitchen felt warmer all of a sudden and the coffee aroma filled it like an enticing whisper.