Evolution

Perhaps she doesn't, because I no longer know who I am. Or what I am.

I follow the man to a room, larger than "my" bedroom, and there is a kind of window in this room. I walk across the room to the window and look out on a vast sea of stars – and solar panels – and there like a small blue marble held at arms length is earth – and her little moon beyond.

I turn and look at the people sitting around a table, all except Amy. She is standing beside me now and I feel the warmth in her eyes. The warmth of recognition. She comes to me and puts her arms around me, leans the side of her face onto mine and I can smell her hair. I close my eyes and it all comes back to me in a rush.

She is on stage now, singing. She shines in silver light, I see her legs and feel a million butterflies and a moment later we are in bed, our souls entwined as we feel our way to understanding, to an uncomfortable resolution.

I feel my fingers running through her hair and open my eyes.

These people are staring at us, their eyes full of dread and wonder.

"Do you love her?" one of them asks me.

"Of course I do," I manage to say, and somehow the questions feels judgmental, my reaction to the words subject to study.

"He should know," I hear one of them – a woman – say. "He has a right to know."

"It doesn't have 'rights'," another says. "He's not like us."

"I'm not so sure," says the third.

"Give it to him, Storm," the woman says. "He has a right to know who – and what – he is."

"What do you mean," I say, " – by 'what I am?' What am I?"

I am looking at this 'Storm', this leader of theirs, when the woman steps over to him, a crystalline cube in her hands. She hands it to him, and looks him in the eye.

"The choice is yours, but I implore you: he deserves to know."

This 'Storm' takes the cube, his eyes locked on hers, manifest anger clear on his face – a man still at war with himself.

He takes the cube and it looks for a moment that his intent is to smash the cube into a million pieces, then a sudden peace falls over him, a wave of a gentle resolve. He nods his head, slowly.

"I see," said the man.

He turned, looked at me. "You two better come with me. Now."

It is an order, and I realize I cannot refuse such an order. We follow him, to some place apparently quite far away, and we walk past cornfields and vast rows of wheat on our way, then through an orchard of some sort – avocados, I see, and peaches – until we come at last to a small village.

The scene is almost medieval: a woman stirring a pot over an open fire, her cast iron kettle hanging over the small fire that isn't really a fire at all. We're walking on dirt, and around the village I see goats and chickens picking at seeds and grain on the ground. There is a man in a field in the near distance, working on some sort of tractor.

We walk through a maze of simple homes until we come to a last house at the end of the dirt street, and this Storm leads us inside. There are pictures on the wall, pictures of – me. Me, and Amy – and our children.

San Francisco. I can see the Golden Gate beyond the Presidio. I remember the day. I remember Steve McQueen and his green Mustang. They were filming Bullit, and I had taken Amy and the kids down to the waterfront where they were filming parts of the chase scene, and suddenly the day came back to me in a sudden rush. The sun on my face, the wind in our hair, Amy so alive with love, little Becky so unconcerned, and Ben aware of little else beyond the cars and the people gathered on the roadside watching the action. He was studying them, watching people watch the film crew, and I remember wondering what he was wondering about.

The man, this 'Storm,' handed me the cube and I reached for it. "What is this?"

"Answers."

"No. I mean, what is this," I asked again, pointing at the cube. It is full of vapor, chaos – as far as I could tell, but the man looked at me again – until he understood my meaning.

"It's a quantum cube. Memory and storage? A computer?"

"This is a computer?"

"Here," he said as he took the cube from me. "When you're ready, put the cube in here," he said as he pointed to a receptacle in the wall.

"When I'm ready for what?"

"Answers, Jim. Answers to all your questions."

"Questions?"

The man looked at me and shook his head, then sighed as he pointed to the house. "This is your home now, Jim. You and – Amy. You will live here now, with her. This village, this is where you'll work. You're the constables here," he said, pointing outside. "You maintain order here, like you always have. You protect us, all of us. Like always? Do you understand?"

"Yessir," I heard myself say, responding to the force of command in his voice.

"Good. Well, I'll leave you to it. Good day."

"Good day, sir."

I turned, looked at Amy; she was looking around the room – at the kitchen in the corner, at the single table, then she looked at me.

"This is our home," she said, her voice flat and featureless, then she looks at the cube. "What did he mean? Answers?"

"I don't know. Should we open the cube?"

She shrugged. "The woman thought we needed to. Perhaps we should."

I walked to the table, picked up the cube and looked at it, at the clumps of particulate mists swirling inside, then I went to the receptacle in the wall. There was a power button, dark gray with a red symbol that lit up when my finger got a half inch away.

A small door opened on the receptacle, and a motorized tray slid out of the wall.

"Please place the cube in the slot," an unseen voice said, "and stand clear of the projector."

The cube could only fit into the slot in one orientation, and once I'd placed the cube in the slot I saw the mist inside the cube glow, then reorient itself into precise rows...

"Dad? Dad, is that you?"

Startled, I turned and saw Ben Prentice standing in the room, and then I saw Amy. Her face, contorted in a silent scream, her hand out, an accusatory finger pointed at our son. "How...? Who is...? This can't be," she said.

"Mom? Is that you?" my son said as he turned to confront the other voice in the room.

"Ben?" I asked.

"Yes, Dad, it's me," he said as I reached for him...but his form dissolved for a moment when my hand touched the space.

"What the...?"

"Holographic projection, dad. You ask me questions, and I can answer within the limits of what I've anticipated you might ask."

I must have seemed in pain, because his form reached out for me. "I'm sorry, Dad. I know this is hard..."

"Where am I?"

"Dad, I have no idea. I recorded this in 2010, about twenty five years after you were killed."

"Killed?" I said as the words slammed into me.

"Yes, in the line of duty. Shot, and killed."

"Killed? How can that be?"

"I kept your tissue, Dad, including stem cells, so I could, so I could – recreate – you. You called me Dr Frankenstein once. Remember?"

"No."

"After the first time we brought you back, the first time you were Mom's FTO."

"I do," Amy said suddenly, stepping towards this image of our son. "After that ambush on Pacific. Does this mean I've died too?"

Ben's image stuttered for a moment, I assumed as a file was accessed. "Yes, Mom, not that long ago, in 1997. Ovarian cancer. I used the same techniques to harvest tissue, the same chemical sequencing to preserve memory. There are more gaps in Dad's memory than yours, by the way, so you may have to help him fill in the blanks from time to time. Still, we were able to keep his law enforcement files intact. That was one of the intentions of the project from the start."

"The project?" I said.

"Yes, Dad, the project. An idea that's been floating around for decades. Laws need to be enforced dispassionately, objectively, neutrally. Force needs to be employed in a similar fashion. The problem was simple: human beings were never able to do those thing very well, and as the country spiraled out of control the need grew more and more pressing. The Project was originally conceived to develop combat troops, but as combat came to the country the need to develop a force-oriented police officer became an immediate need..."

"Force oriented?"

"More soldier than cop, Dad."

"But that's not law enforcement, Ben. You know that..."

"Do I? Dad, I was just setting up my lab at Stanford when you were killed. The cartels, the gangs, all armed to the teeth, cops still out there with there .38 specials because, you know, there was too much liability associated with using magnums. Do you remember those comments, Dad?"

"I do," Amy said. "I remember your funeral too, Jim. Closed casket, because your body was... Oh, forget it."

"I know, Mom. I remember too. And the way GranPa reacted when he saw Dad's body at the funeral home." Ben sighed, crossed his arms over his chest. "Dad, I was one of the founders of The Project. Myself and a bunch of other like minded Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. We were determined to put a stop to the carnage, and by the time civil war broke out most cops were already on the front lines of a war few saw coming. They were decimated, and we had to replace their ranks quickly."

"Did you...make copies of me?"

My son looked down on hearing that. "Uh-huh."

"How many?"

"A lot, Dad."

"How many, son."

"Truthfully, I don't know. I've been dead a while too, you know."

"You didn't make a copy of yourself?" I asked, with perhaps a little too much irony in my voice.

"Oh, I did," I heard him say, but the voice hadn't come from the holograph in the room, but from the teenaged boy who had just walked through the door...

+++++

I have to admit, life in the village is serene enough. Placid enough, you might say, at least it was in the beginning, but as it always has I saw the seeds of discontent sown more than often enough. Still, it was like déjà vu all over again: sitting around the table at dinnertime, talking about the day's events with Amy and Ben – yet with memory a place we danced lightly around – always. Amy taking reports during the day, the nights left to me, though our patrol patterns were relatively simple back then. Before the population grew.

Walk the ring, as the habitat was called. Several miles around by the straightest trail, the habitat a constant 200 meters across, so the apex of the ceiling was a hundred feet up, the guts of the habitat under the dirt 'ground' – an unknown labyrinth off-limits to one and all. And the most disconcerting thing of it all? We weren't in orbit around anything, nor were we anchored at a Lagrange point. Our habitat was a ship of sorts, a starship, if Storm's description could be believed. There were, apparently, more than fifty of these ships headed out to exoplanets all across the galaxy, with only a chosen few on board, the lucky ones jettisoned by a dying earth, chosen to spread our seed across the cosmos.

And yet, or so the story goes, all this has happened before, and will happen again. I heard that on TV once upon a time, so I know it's true.

Storm and his ilk lived on one side of the habitat, the worker bees lived on the other. One side was, and this was all too readily apparent, nicer than the other; this 'nice' side developed a better way of life, with more and more creature comforts showing up over the years. Discontent grew in the shadow of inequality, increasingly vociferous malcontents on both sides agitated for change, new laws were imposed from one side on the other and suddenly my services were in demand all over again. Burglaries, assaults, then we had our first murder, and Amy took that call.

A domestic dispute, as of course it had to be. Over money. It was, after all, a Thursday night, and I looked out at the stars and wondered what lay in their courses.

(C)2016 AdrianLeverkühn | abw | This is a work pure, unreconstituted fiction, and I hope you enjoyed the ramble.