The Reclamation of Eve — Chapter 3 of 6

Eve puts her trust in Lucifer in a bid for freedom that may threaten her baby cyborg’s life. + In this week’s Science in Real Life: how we’d visit our closest neighbor universe.

Previously…the only stranger Eve ever met introduced himself as Lucifer and told her there are other Eves in other worlds, and other very human Adams. Most importantly he told her it appears that Adam has imprisoned and enslaved Eve on this empty planet.

Fly back to Chapter 2

Eve's heart fluttered with anticipation of escape. Of knowing there were other worlds and means to get there. Of meeting other Eves. 

Of finding the Adam responsible for this. 

Another sensation—larger, thornier, hotter—settled in her belly. She didn't yet know what she wanted from that Adam, but for the first time, she had a real chance at getting answers to her questions.

 All she had to do was get c-AI-n and Rosie packed for the journey. She cued EveSpec's to message her nursebot. 

"Rosie, look for a way to upload yourself into the smallest bot you can reach in an hour. We'll come pick you up after c-AI-n."

"You said moving my big carcass would attract Adam's attention," Rosie said. 

"You can't leave my house, but you can drag yourself to the kitchen. Mindshare with one of the cleaner-bots? Figure it out, love."

"Mindshare with a cleaner!? Their tiny CPU won't--" Eve muted the speakers. 

She stood and made her way off the airship. 

"Where are we going?"  Lucifer asked, stepping off Blue and following her into the tower's dark stairwell.

"You'll take c-AI-n first."

#

Eve's secret lab was  in the bathroom down in the bowels of the tower in the power plant's control room. Adam's bots never went there. There weren't even speakers there. The tiny room was all hers. 

Eve opened the door and hesitated. The walls were lined with doodles, schematics, and procedures. There was a full scale drawing of c-AI-n with an overlay schematic of Eve's modifications to her.  

What if Lucifer said no? What if he took cAIn for himself? What if he looked at her like she had done something awful and left without another word? 

"May I?" Lucifer said gently. 

Lucifer stepped around Eve and waited until she met his gaze. What he saw in her eyes echoed in his--a neat trick. Eve knew what to do with doubt. Rosie had always told her she shouldn't overanalyze and it was best to simply do, and learn from what happened.

 Eve stepped aside to allow Lucifer to enter. He moved into the room slowly, immediately absorbed by the huge drawing of c-AI-n. Eve stood by in silence as Lucifer took in the infant humanoid body with the unfinished pin-out list for its electro-bio-mechanical interfaces. 

"One day I asked where I came from," Eve said to fill the silence. "Adam got angry at me for the first time. It felt important that I was a secret. So I searched in ways Adam can't track. I studied all the buildings and went looking through some of the oldest. I found flasks and vats of chemicals we don't use anywhere else. There was a thermally controlled chamber and fourteen jars filled with--"

Eve's breath caught in her throat at the memory. She still didn't know what c-AI-n was--what to call her.

Eve touched the title of the schematic, 'c-AI-n'. She pointed to the 'n' where she'd erased and replaced that letter so many times.

 "There were so many Eve c-AI's," Eve said. "Serial 'n' was the last and only one Rosie and I were able to energize after many experiments. Rosie used her "Eve's health" files that she used whenever I was sick..."

Eve knew a lot about c-AI-n (and her own) body;  what they shared as their skeletal structure, their nervous system, their metabolism. But she certainly didn't know what to label c-AI-n because she wasn't sure how to label herself. That brain part. The Eve-cAI's had an external CPU with augmentations on their skull, along their spine and extremities. Eve had none of those. When Eve had asked Rosie for what the health books said about Eve's own CPU, Rosie had reasoned it must be more like the 'brain' the references described. There was pitifully little about the brain in the files.

Eve's stomach turned. They had dissected c-AI-m's cranium after she had failed to energize. They followed the wires from the hard black half-helmet full of boards and sensors to the center of the skull and found a tiny wad of dense gray material there where the wires terminated. It matched the images in Rosie's references for 'brain'. 

The weeks she'd spent thinking only about c-AI-m's brain and how it functioned with her external CPU. The dark lab's work table, growing darker with the puzzle of wire and brain, the spidery circuitry delicately overlaid on the little body so she could understand how it all connected. Eve's hands shaking. 

Only having one serial 'n' left. 

Rosie had told her she had become 'manic' and 'obsessed'.

"--Eve," Lucifer put a hand on her shoulder. She gazed down at it. His hand was shaking, or rather her shoulder was shaking, and his hand with it. She was shivering, even though she wasn't cold. Her knees were also shaking. She was scared? Excited? Worried?

"This is the last one," Eve said. Her teeth chattered and she didn't know why. "I don't know what's wrong with my body. I just need to know if you can take her to other worlds?"

Eve stepped to the sink, and drew back a silvery thermal blanket that covered the countertop to reveal a large glass jar filled with clear liquid. 

A human fetus floated, curled against the confines of its jar. Wires sprouted from dark patches of rubber encasing augmentations that had grown bonded into the skin. Half of the baby's face--an eye, an ear, and half of the tiny bloom of a mouth were pale bronze skin, all shaped like Eve's. The other half was a mask of augmentations connected to a length of black cabling down its spine. A black circlet blinked around each wrist and ankle.

"Whatever I do, I can't leave it behind just like this, with no one to talk to. Not with a brain kind of like mine. It's online. It reacts when I talk to it. I don't think it'd be right to...Well, what do you think, Lucifer?"

Lucifer was speechless. 

Eve tried to give him time. Usually silences were easy. Silence was default. But silence with Lucifer felt like pressure building up in her head, like it did when Blue rapidly descended.

"Please, can we at least try?" Eve said finally. 

Lucifer pressed both hands to c-AI-n's jar. Closed his eyes. 

"I can't be sure these added bits of tech will function in other worlds." he said, "Obviously she is mostly human--she's a clone of you. It's a risk. I can't tell you for sure how she'll be affected."

"What does 'clone' mean? I know that's what the "C" stands for, but...what is she?"

Lucifer tilted his head to the side. " 'Clone' means she's a copy of you, at the genetic level. It means she was grown, not born. Because of these other augmentations, she's also what many worlds call a 'cyborg'."

Eve struggled against twin urges to ask more about genetics and being born--other world's with cyborgs where c-AI-n might fit in, but she had to focus.

"But because she's a cyborg, she may not survive leaving this world?"

"I've never carried artificial intelligence across worlds. It's a risk. And it limits us to the few worlds where advanced synthetic intelligence exists."

Eve's heart hurt. It was Eve's fault that c-AI-n had come online. She knew enough to know if the augs didn't function, c-AI-n’s body would struggle. C-AI-c, f, h all had gone dark immediately when Eve severed the cranial aug wires from the brain.

 Briefly Eve wondered if she should just leave Rosie and c-AI-n, have Rosie teach c-AI-n to pretend to be Eve. But of course it would take many years.

 And Eve couldn't sign c-AI-n up to just take her place being Adam's prisoner.

What must death be like for c-AI-n? For herself? Rosie had tried to explain so many times why Eve had to be careful with her weird soft body. Neither of them really knew what Eve was. First question for the captor Adam.

Eve jumped at the thought.

"Lucifer, can you tell for sure that I am human--not a robot?"

He smiled and turned so they faced each other. He nodded and reached out his hands until they almost circled her head.

"You ready?"

She almost said no but Lucifer's eyes were already closed. He threaded his fingers through her hair and his palms pressed gently to her temples. 

Eve's heart rattled in her chest and her cheeks grew warm for reasons unknown.

"Hmm," Lucifer said, eyes still closed.

"Tell me."

"Robot," Lucifer said and withdrew his hands. But he was smiling and his eyes glittered in the low light.

Eve reached out and grabbed him by his collar.

"Whoa whoa--did you really think you were anything but plain-Jane-human?"

Eve let him go and turned to hide her face. 

Anger bubbled away and was replaced with a furious sort of joy. She could leave this world. She could explore. 

She could be with other people.

She unpinned c-AI-n's schematic from the wall and folded it up.

"Give me a moment, I'll get c-AI-n ready."

"You sure you want to risk taking her?"

"I think I have to try. I didn't think about the consequences of living in this world for c-AI-n when I energized her. I owe her a chance at finding more of her own--a place she can belong."

Eve fetched a power pack from one of the computer terminals in the control room and readied c-AI-n for the trip. Then she secured the thermal blanket back around the jar.

Lucifer gently took the bundle from her. Eve's stomach tightened around the urge to say something meaningful, some way to make sure this was the right thing. 

If Lucifer had to return because it didn't work...if another world caused c-AI-n to shut down? Would she revive if she came back? 

And if she did? 

A life spent serving Adam? Of risking their lives trying to wrangle an airship to find other sentient life on this world? When she tried to put words together she found she couldn't assemble them correctly. There was just hope and worry in equal measures. 

At least that balanced the equation.

Lucifer was already beginning to speak, only now, not to her. Eve didn't recognize these words. The room seemed to contort, shadows bending toward Lucifer. His voice seemed to gather power from the very air. The hair on Eve's arms stood on end.

"You'll be right back for me?" She asked.

But Lucifer and c-AI-n were in a swirling vortex of light and Lucifer was still speaking those strange words, faster and faster until the core of the vortex flared a blinding, white hot light. There was a deafening roar and the vortex was gone, Lucifer and c-AI-n with it. A hollow globe of soft white mist hung where they had just been.

Eve reached out to touch the cloud-like empty shell. The mist dissolved out of its sphere and rained onto the floor, and with it, the balance to her worry equation.

Maybe she'd just made a huge mistake trusting a stranger who could travel between worlds. 

Alarms blared shrill in her ears. Alarms she'd never heard before.

To be Continued…

Author’s Note

We know the universe is expanding. It’s currently prohibitively far even to the next habitable planet, never mind the next universe. We’re terribly limited in how fast we can travel and how much mass we can bring along. For me, that evokes mild panic and vague claustrophobia—a sentiment which I piped into Eve for this story. The impossible problem only gets more impossible with time, because spacetime insists on stretching out. Imagine an ant trying to get from one edge of a piece of paper to the other but it’s actually an infinite roll of paper a printer is cranking out. We can at least hope the story on the page is infinitely interesting, but you see the ant’s plight—that’s our situation for now.

One of the reasons I enjoy my career is I can do a small part to at least get humans off the planet, which buys us some time and helps us understand the universe to boot. Yes, I work so I can soothe existential anxiety. Don’t you? :D

Science In Real Life: Traveling to our Neighbor Universe

So you want to voip through spacetime to meet your other selves?

This is your playing field. The universe is at this moment about 94 billion light years across and it’s 46.5 billion light years to the nearest neighboring universe.

In the previous newsletter, my hypothesis was that a Worldship capable of inter-universe travel would contain meat-bag human bodies. Turns out, this is deeply unlikely. Thanks to Einstein, we know anything with mass (that’s you, even at your most svelte) cannot travel faster than the speed of light. That means the fastest you could ever go is under 671 million miles per hour. Our fastest space vehicle can only travel 330,000mph (our fabulous Parker Solar Probe!) Even at that speed—which is 73 times faster than the fastest jet we’ve ever flown—it would take Solar Probe over 2,000 years to travel a single light year. At this rate, you’d need 93 Trillion years (3.1Billion generations!) to take a human this far. Granted there are about a million caveats here, but for now let’s say this is sufficiently discouraging to disprove my hypothesis.

Let’s make a foundational assumption that lets us keep exploring the question of parallel universe travel from other angles.

Assume: human consciousness can be uploaded and transferred perfectly onto a massless device. Now how do we get the device across a universe?

What are our options now?

Depending on which Multiverse theory you ascribe to will help you decide which path is more viable to move from now/here to then/there.

• If you ascribe to the theory that each universe began with its own independent big bang, then you’re probably out of luck.In order to get out of your universe, you’d have to travel back through your own big bang. The likeliest result: cosmic soup and ruined dreams.

• If you ascribe to a quantum physics definition of the multiverse, you’re already in all the universes. This is basically a mathematical theory that posits if the universe is infinite but the methods to make up matter at all never mind hospitable planets, the patterns must necessarily repeat. Could you port from the you reading this, the you that you define as you you-est of you into the brain of the next universe’s version of you? How would you know things are any different?

• If you ascribe to the concept that the universe has higher dimensions humans cannot sense or yet measure, perhaps traveling between universes is as easy as opening a door. Maybe our meat bag bodies and brains, exquisitely evolved to exist without sensory capabilities to help us see higher dimensions is simply locked here. But if we had a sufficiently dimension aware machine and could print an exact copy over you on the other world?

So how did I write this world such that Lucifer can voip around? Well that’s a conversation for next week when I introduce you to Zero Point Engery.

Stay tuned!

Much love, and see you next time, my nerds.