The Reclamation of Eve - Chapter 2
~6 Chapters: A steam/gear/AI—punk story with Eve (the mother of humanity) at the helm. +Science in Real Life: How to Build a Worldship to explore Parallel Universes.
Previously, Eve boarded Adam’s Airship with mutinous intentions to hack the autopilot so she could commandeer the ship. She’s never met another sentience like herself, but she’s just run over a very well-dressed man in midair…
Nothing had ever not recognized Eve before, but nothing had ever looked so much like her. Nothing else had ever had hands or eyes, or a face. Except c-AI-n and the other experiments...
How phenomenal! Another thinking thing that looked like her. That was overflowing with words, and so many pitches to its voice--she wondered what that function could be for.
"Identify yourself. Did Adam make you and hide you from me?"
The man laughed. The sound whipped around the scudding clouds like thunder.
"Adam? Good one. Nah, I'm much better than Adam." It smoothed its hair, also black, away from its face. "Where is he?"
"You mean how many robots does he have energized now?"
The thing furrowed the fuzz over its eyes for some reason. Its mouth thinned. Eve stared, trying to memorize how it could look so different moment to moment by changing the tension across its face.
Blue arrived at the power plant dock with a massive shudder, bumping against the shock absorbers. "Safe to exit," Blue said.
The newcomer frowned. Eve tried on the expression without meaning to.
"Safe to exit," Blue repeated.
Eve didn't move. Wasn't sure what to do next.
The man leapt to Blue's computer box and wrenched at cords until it stopped repeating "Safe to exit". Eve was stunned--she never considered unplugging Blue for fear Adam would send bots to investigate, or that the airship would fall out of the sky. She wondered how long it would take a fuel loader bot to climb the plant's tower, or how likely one of the flyers would make it from her home workshop without mishap.
Eve reached in her coverall pocket for a wrench and handed one to the man, then she kicked off the power plant dock so Blue hovered a bit out of reach of any of the bots that worked there.
"What's this for?" the man asked, waving the wrench about.
"Robot attack," Eve said.
Eve sat in her chair at the bow and lay her hammer in her lap for fast access. There wasn't much she'd ever managed to hide from Adam, and never really had to fight any of the bots, but she'd been surprised once already today.
"Is robot attack a common occurrence? From Adam?" The man asked. He looked around Blue, the power plant, Eve's goggles perched in her hair. "Weird mix of tech you have here in this world," he muttered.
The man leaned against the railing and tested various grips on the wrench. He was staring at Eve. He started to speak several times but stopped himself.
"Stop. Cease protocol," Eve told it, "Refactor and report last sequence."
"What?"
She shrugged. "I thought maybe you were glitching."
"Eve, I'm not a machine!"
Eve flinched at the volume of the man's voice.
"Eve, something isn't quite right here, and I don't think you'll believe me until you hear a lot of unbelievable things," it said again quietly. It ran its beautiful long hands through its hair and began to tell her a story.
It told her its name was Lucifer.
It told her there were other worlds like this one, all bunched together in a snarl but never intertwining.
Lucifer told her there were other Eves. He told her in those worlds she was always given the choice between eternal bliss or laboring to create, and the choice always caused her ultimate damnation. But she always chose to create no matter the cost.
He told her that's why he loves her in every world.
Eve listened, nervous when Lucifer suddenly stopped speaking. So much she didn't understand, but she drank all the words down eagerly. She sat tangling the ends of her hair together. Her heart sprinted at the idea of other versions of herself. She longed to see what they made in their worlds, to know what they knew.
Lucifer had gone quiet but Eve kept staring, hoping he'd just begin to talk again. Finally he spoke, quietly, his eyes staring at the ship's deck.
"Usually when I tell you I love you, your reaction is quite explosive. Rarely in a good way... Usually--"
"--Can I go to the other worlds? Can you take me? Can I meet the other Eves? How many are there? Are there others like you? Other mans?"
"Well, you've certainly never wanted that before!" Lucifer jerked his head up and crossed his arms over his chest. "And I dunno exactly how many Eves there are. I'd say an Eve reincarnate is born every couple of thousand years, in maybe half the universes?"
"Can you take me? Is it possible? Answer."
"Well, yes of course! But you've never wanted to leave your children before."
"Children? Aren't children just symbols in stories about what's worth building?" Eve thought of her secret project finishing Eve-c-AI-n. Her surprise--her manifesto to Adam. Someone she hoped she could talk to. Someone she hoped would like to talk to her. But c-AI-n wasn't really an independent sentience yet. Lucifer couldn't be asking about her.
Rosie's voice roared over EveSpec's speakers. "You have to take us, too!"
"Silence, Rosie! Text only aboard Blue!"
"Who's that, then? Who's us?" Lucifer asked.
"Rosie--she's my nursebot. And c-AI-n, which is...an experiment?"
Lucifer raised one eyebrow. "Wait, Cain? Your child?"
Eve didn't have a label for cAIn. She knew c-AI-n was something secret of Adam's who was named after Eve, who had tiny versions of Eve's own body's structure. Mostly.
"She is--well, c-AI-n is hard to explain, but I can show you. Can you take the three of us to other worlds?"
Lucifer laced his fingers together and draped his arms over his knee which he jiggled, tapping his toe up and down.
"Perhaps. But traversing worlds attracts the wrong attention with the Powers That Be," he smiled to himself. "Covert is the rule to remain unnoticed, so I only ever take one at a time, and slowly. As for the bot, I've never taken an artificial intelligence to another world, so I don't know if the nursebot would operate elsewhere. As for Cain, I need more information, and the fact that you don't know if she's your child or an experiment has me a bit jumpy about your welfare. Please, tell me about this world. What is Adam like, where do you live, has he named all the animals and such yet?"
"Animals?"
"Sorry, please just describe your days together."
"Adam wakes me up from the speaker next to my bed and gives me instructions for the day. Usually I fix or upgrade the machines that build more printers. Sometimes I have to tune up the power plant--like today--that's where we are." She pointed at the entrance in the smoking tower they were parked in front of.
"Who else builds and tests and the like?"
"Some of the machines can--"
"--Eve, is there nothing else here but machines? Anything that looks at all like you? Adam?"
Eve giggled imagining Adam in a body that looked like hers--how he would hate the levels of maintenance of it! How stuck he would be, living only in one body all the time.
"What does Adam look like?"
"Whatever bot he is using?" she said. She'd never really thought of Adam as a single thing. Eve repeated for Lucifer the phrase that Adam always used to describe himself whenever Eve got brave enough to ask. The words had never made sense, but it was comforting to have them. "Adam is the proliferated consciousness that is building this world."
Lucifer stopped pacing. He knelt in front of her. She could feel heat rolling off his body, like Blue's burner flues. Hot breath fogged from both their mouths. Eve stared at the clouds of their breath as they collided, commingled. Lucifer spoke in a whisper.
"Eve, I don't believe you're supposed to be here--whatever this world is, you shouldn't be alone. It's not right. I told you I know you. Well, I also know Adam and many of his incarnations. The one that put you here, he's not a robot, he's just a man, a human. If he has you alone, imprisoned here and he pipes in remotely through bots, I'd say this is the worst thing he's ever done."
Eve's jaw clenched. It is one thing to feel like a prisoner. It is another to have it confirmed by a stranger. "You will take us to the other worlds then?"
Lucifer's mouth curved up on one side. "Well, I don't think I could possibly leave you here now."
To be continued…
Author’s Note: More than One of Me
So in preparation for this month’s Science in Real Life, I’ve been reading a lot about parallel universes.
How do you feel about other versions of you—possibly infinitely many?
Eve wanted to meet them. Would you?
I find the concept soothing. There’s more than one of me working out the problem of my consequences and experiences. I’m not going as far to say I believe this all aggregates into a body of knowledge I could ever access, but regardless it’s nice to think it’s not just me on this problem set.
Would I travel possibly one way to meet one other incarnation of myself? Depends on the Worldship.
Let’s build one together?
Science in Real Life:
How to Build a Worldship to Explore Parallel Universes
In Chapter 1, Eve was trying to hack an airship so she could explore the world beyond what she’s ever seen.
So what would it take us to travel beyond our own world?
This series of Science In Real Life essays is going to be a fun collaborative exercise to asking, “What would a Worldship that can transport humans across the multiverse be like?”.
Currently, scientists are still butting heads about things in our own universe and what space is made of, so we will be jumping right over state of the art and sailing past the third star to your right and straight on til morning.
In other words: I’m not offering real-life engineering credibility to anything approaching answers!
What I am offering is my sci-fi spunk, augmented by my university-accredited, engineering-career-cultivated process for learning big, wild things.
Our Goal: Come up with a set of rational hypotheses defining how a Worldship would have to function
What We’ll do:
• I’ll supply some guide rails and kickoff questions with some research to get your grounded—see Steps 1&2 below
• You supply the wild predictions! —see Step 3
• We cultivate the predictions together — See Steps 4-6
Sound too big for lunch break reading?
Nonsense.
We’ll take it step by step like anything else.
Tools We Need:
The hardest part of innovation is asking the right question.
To me what’s most enjoyable about scientific process is you have to predict the answer to the question—you make a hypothesis. Like a soothsayer (a scienthsayer?!), you tell your audience what you expect will happen.
Example: As you know, if you ask everyone that showed up to your impromptu K-drama party what they want for takeout, you get a lot of data and too many proverbial cooks not in the kitchen. If instead you ask “pizza or sushi?”—you predict and offer answers—you get consensus more quickly.
What’re the ingredients of a hypothesis:
A cause and effect—the cause is the independent variable, and the effect is the dependent variable
Our Process: How we Build our Hypothesis:
1. Ask a question (I’ve got this!)
Example: Will humans be able to travel in their squishy meat suits? Or will we have to send and/or upload into robots?
2. Do some preliminary research (I’ll handle this too!)
Examples:
A. Sending our vulnerable squishy bodies would require faster than light speed or a conveniently located wormhole (words that have never been put in that order)
B. The ship would have to have all the same crew-friendly qualifications a space station has, but larger to hold supplies for longer durations
C. Faster than light poses some problems. All of the problems, maybe more apt.
D. Might be a one way trip…so might be a weak turnout to the casting call
3. Formulate the Hypothesis: (Here’s where you make your prediction! Wield the tarot, shake the magic 8, whatever you’ve got to do!)
Example: Because Humans will insist on going in their meat suits (we go lots of places we shouldn’t and it’s mostly worked out. Reference anytime someone’s said “hold me beer”) the Worldship will be cylindrical—this is the best shape for a pressurized structure given the properties of our strongest lightweight metals.
4. Refine your Hypothesis: (We collaborate here) Get more specific: state the cause and effect variables and the predicted outcome that will be observable via the research
Example: The Worldship will be a cylindrical volume of 3,000m3 and be assembled in Low Earth Orbit due to its large volume—even Starship would stagger under the weight of that lift. This is minimum volume required for a trip of the anticipated duration.
5. Write your refined Hypothesis (We collaborate here)
Example: A human in a pressurized cylindrical ship of 3,000m3 with equipment simulating Earth environment which will be propelled through spacetime on a one-way trip before the turn of the next century.
6. Try to Prove Yourself Wrong with Anti-Hypothesis Questions : (We collaborate here) wherein you state what the research will reveal if you’re hypothesis is incorrect
Examples:
A. Whatif: humans can’t survive the duration of this trip? How short is the shortest method?
B. Whatif: the only way is a black hole and we can’t design anything that survives it?
That’s it! That’s the process.
Are you ready to get started?
Much love, and see you next time, my nerds.
