The Reclamation of Eve - Chapter 1

~6 Chapters: Eve (the mother of humanity) is left alone on a barren planet in a parallel universe with instructions to invent and build the world. This is a story about girl power and co-creation.

 Eve was damned if she had built an airship she could never captain. May there be mutiny. 

Eve stepped aboard the A.S. Blue and flipped the power switch to her goggles. EveSpecs lenses flashed a greeting while it loaded its operating system. 

"Snooping around Blue again without me?" Rosie's voice crackled over the speaker near Eve's ear. "Is today the day Eve—the world's best mechanic!—and her nursebot slay Adam's autopilot?" 

Eve flinched.

"Stop—text transmissions only while I'm aboard Blue."

Annoyed text flowed across Eve's lenses. 'You promised to upload me out of this broken pile of steel and wire into that ship. You know I have to be onboard for that.'

"EveSpecs, vis-draft reply," Eve said, then roved her eyes over the popup display of letters to respond. 'Next time. Have to fly to the power plant. Moving your broken pile will attract Adam’s attention. Today, we just see if the hack works.'

First thing's first, though, Eve had to act normal until they were in the air away from Adam's loader bots. She walked to the back of the ship, weaving her way between columns of cylindrical metal burner flues that rose from the deck to bellow heat into the balloon above. The supplies for today's job had already been stacked in the stern by two bots who now stood quietly, waiting to be dismissed.

Text from Rosie crowded Eve's vision—something about being left to rust after all those years feeding and bathing Eve through childhood. Eve smiled and minimized Rosie's message feed. She pulled up the equipment checklist for today's repair job, then riffled through boxes to confirm she had all the tools she'd need. The loader bots usually only missed small hand tools like hammers, but Eve always had them stowed in the bib and pockets of her coveralls. She looked up at one of the bots, wondering when they started anticipating that. 

Green pressure indicators blinked at each of the bot’s four outstretched grippers. Automatically, Eve rubbed the old scar around her right bicep. After the accident, Adam retrofitted all bots to keep them from hurting Eve. 

It must have been an accident because Adam prevented it happening again. 

But she'd vowed never to give him a reason again. At least one he knew about.

 "Loaders, dismissed. Disembark Blue." The bots trundled wordlessly down the ship's cargo ramp. 

"Blue, initiate flight," Eve commanded, and the autopilot began the liftoff sequence. Adam's autopilot was infallibly obedient to a short roster of verbal commands Eve could cue when a manifest program was active. But it never interacted with Eve. Nothing but Rosie or Adam himself ever did. That would change when she hacked and overhauled Blue. 

Blue's burner flues hissed heat into the ship's balloon which strained against its net of ropes and set them groaning. The anchor rope pedestals spun, winding their loads off the ground. Pleated steering fans unfurled gently along the hull.

 Eve took her seat at the bow as Blue rose through the soupy sky. She gazed irritably at the holes in the deck where she'd tried to mount handles she could use to control Blue's steering fans. Every time she'd installed it, it had been removed by Adam's bots overnight. If only she could do the same with the autopilot—just rip it out while she was flying alone. 

But if she was to go exploring, she'd need an intelligence like the autopilot. She'd need a navigator to help her understand where she was going and where she had been. Something that had eyes on the weather and knew how to keep flying in case the winds fought each other.

Eve sighed. She needed to be able to control the bot, not kill it. Especially while flying--if her code scrambled it instead of allowing her access...That was going to be the trick of it. 

No time like the present. 

Eve drew an 'L' with her pupils signaling EveSpecs to transfer her hack file over to Blue's computer.

The operational menu for Blue's autopilot flashed on EveSpecs lenses. She spat over the bow for good luck. 

"Blue, share and overlay navigation manifest onto EveSpecs."

No response. The menu dissolved from her lenses. 

Eve ground her teeth.

'Did it work?' Rosie messaged.

Eve had known hacking Blue was likely to require many attempts. So why was this first failure so hard? She turned to watch the mountain peaks recede behind the ship. Below, the deep, steaming canyons unfurled as Blue picked up speed. Eve leaned against a taut rope. The tension she felt in the fibers straining to keep the balloon attached to the ship echoed the sensation in her gut.

Before Blue existed, Eve hadn't felt quite this trapped. Hadn't known how large and empty the world was. How alone she was. Now she just had to get over those mountains and beyond--find out if there were other thinking things like her out there.

'Hack 1.0 failed,' she wrote Rosie. She almost added that she was glad she had Rosie to talk to, but the nursebot always ramped up health protocols when Eve seemed sad. 

Rosie asked for Eve's preliminary diagnosis and next steps, but Eve interrupted the bot's train of thought. 

'Has Adam ever built another intelligence like yours, Rosie?' 

There was a pause—long for Rosie. 

'Besides you, Eve? No. I ran a scan—"

'—We don't know Adam made me.'

Eve pulled at the collar of her coveralls. Minimized the messenger from her view.

Why was everything Adam made except Rosie a simplistic, one-directional intelligence? Adam apparently preferred to have all his machines depend on narrow user input without emergent, interactive logic. 

Surely Adam wanted more from his creations.

Why didn't he want more from Eve? He was capable of emergent and randomized interaction, like Rosie. So why did he only ever talk to her about building or fixing things?

Maybe he thought she was less than the ship's intelligence, and that's why he barely spoke to her. Why he never finished the other 'Eve c-AI' models she'd discovered.

White-out rush of clouds descended as Blue flew higher.

"Specs, toggle view to thermal mapping."

The distant power plant tower appeared on Eve's lenses as a tall, thin rod of red and orange on an empty field of green and teal.

Strangely, a small ball of yellow hovered in the sky between Blue and the plant. 

"Specs, thermal view, right lens only." 

The yellow something was as black speck far in the distance.

 She refreshed the Specs' view just in case it was some sort of processing error. Adam didn't usually dispatch the twin flyer bots—the design was clunky and they malfunctioned often. Was he sending one of them anyway because he knew about Hack 1.0? 

The something was growing larger now and speedily growing in size, coming closer. Suddenly it was right in front of the bow. 

The thing smashed into a burner flue and ricocheted off a thick rope.

It tumbled until it hit the tarp covering the repair supplies strapped down in the stern. It struggled to stand, bellowing and wriggling. It seemed to be attempting to unwind itself from black cloth.

It certainly was not one of the flyer bots. EveSpecs didn't identify the entity as on network, its AI automatically flipping through diagnostic tools, filling Eve's vision with noise. No metallic structure. Dispersed thermal signatures, cooler than bot engines. And it was wrapped in cloth, which Adam had never bothered with before. Except for her own clothes.

The something-maybe-secret-bot finally stopped struggling and stood up straight. Its black wrapping flew out behind it in the wind, fluttering as loud as Blue's steering fans. More black cloth covered it almost entirely. At the end of black sleeves, the something had two fleshy hands.  

Eve flexed her ten fingers and stared at the something's hands in wonder. It took her a moment to realize it also had a face like hers perched above all that black cloth.

"Excuse me, are you the captain of this vessel, Miss?"

Eve stared dumbstruck into the creature's face.

She took a step toward the thing.

It was a bit taller than her and it looked down a long nose at her. She could see up its nose and wondered at the spiny forest of hair. She resisted inspecting her own nostrils for such ambitious growth. 

"Miss, you have run a man over with your airship. The civilized reaction is your sincerest apolo—" 

"—A man?" 

The newcomer's eyes moved over Eve, took in her hair, knotted and tied and re-knotted with lengths of wire and string and rubber—whatever had been around—to where it finally ended in frowsy spikes at her knees.

"Well, if we're being rigorous with labels..." 

Eve stared at a neatly folded triangle of red cloth tucked in a little pocket on the man’s black shirt. A thin golden s-shape was embroidered on it with twin red dots on one end. She unconsciously pressed her hand against her own chest where the big pocket in her coveralls held her cache of tools. She wondered what the little red cloth could be for. Nothing she wore was anything like the clothes the newcomer wore.

She removed her goggles.

The man gasped. "Eve?! Eve, is that you?"

To be continued…

Author’s Note: Why I Wrote an Alternate Story for Eve

Eve was the first (in)famous woman I, and I’m sure many other women, hear about. One of my favorite quotes from Meagan E. O’Keefe’s Protectorate series goes something like “stories are emotional programming packets”. I love this quote because it’s one of those things that feels absolutely true, and summarizes the importance of the broad diversity of human experiences being representated accurately in stories. I think it applies to the big cultural stories most because it affects a huge number of people.

I remember when learning that Eve disobeyed God to seek knowledge, I 1) immediately understood and related to her, and 2) learned that God baited, then punished. Somewhere in there, I also learned maybe it was unChristian to share or pursue knowledge. To summarize: I was baffled and felt defensive about Eve, and I was pretty sure I was headed toward damnation as someone who loved learning.

Ultimately, I developed a habit of questioning authority and planning for consequences from all this. I’m fairly certain that isn’t supposed to be the lesson, but I’m ultimately glad for it. I felt a sisterhood with Eve that helped me navigate and find others like me. When I met others who regarded Eve as a bad influence, I quietly took issue and stood apart. When Eve’s story was used as a cautionary tale to illustrate that womanhood contains a core of something bad, I took quiet offense. As a kid, I didn’t have the resources or the words to express my frustration and sense of isolation that perhaps I was the only Eve fan out there.

Recently, as a writer, I felt I might have what it took to build a different emotional programming packet about Eve.

I hope you enjoy it.