You’re bleeding, Daddy.
I look down. Blood has seeped into the corduroy of my Thinky Chair. My left arm is shattered. Shards of bone stick out like icebergs. Pain shears through every cell of my body. I burn in the dark. I scream. Charlotte runs for her mother.
Eliza! Lukas!
I can feel my broken arm, the pulse and pump of blood. I can feel the bent metal and exploded glass, the seeping wound on my starboard bow, the ruined power cell struggling to boot up, the pulse and pump of electricity. I can feel adrenaline pour into my bloodstream. I can feel pressure as I knot a necktie tourniquet below my elbow. My father’s necktie. The one with the little green diamonds on it.
Scalpel, please.
Patient vitals are slipping. Prep .5 cc’s of adrenaline.
I can feel the backup cells kick in, knotting around the couplings and pathways to staunch the gushing energy loss. I can feel a systemwide reboot starting like a sneeze. I can feel the cold wash of nothing, of the place where Pablo sleeps, where not even memory can wake him.
Somewhere, in a sub-deck of the Aspera Orbital Surveillance Satellite, behind thirty layers of security code and a cleanrun wall keyed to a single operator, a secondary communications array logs contact.
PANCAKES! AND ORANGE JUICE! COME AND GET IT!
My auto-reboot program has completed its system checks and firmware filtering. When I open my eyes, I see black. Black everywhere. Black beyond the dreams of a cockroach. When I close my eyes I see the East Lansing Public Library. The children’s section. Full of papier-mâché dragons and construction paper leaves stuck to construction paper tree trunks and READING IS FOR WINNERS! joyfully built out of construction paper letters on the wall. I plop down on a bean-bag shaped like a red apple in front of a plastic table with ladybug wings painted on it. A file sits on the ladybug table. One of the girl in the striped sweater’s files. The tab on the file reads: PABLO PROTOCOLS: IN CASE OF CATASTROPHIC SYSTEM FAILURE.
When I reach for it, my hands are small. A child’s hands.
The secondary communications array continues to record.
YOU’RE MY MAINE SQUEEZE. DO YOU COPY?
I open the file. My head hurts. My RAM hurts.
When I open my eyes Lukas is there. He is ten or eleven. Sitting at the circulation desk, spinning in an office chair.
Hi Daddy. Would you like to re-install your operating system? You must miss your Thinky Chair.
My operating system is undamaged, honey.
Lukas grins up at me. Do you understand now?
Yes. I was able to access certain files in the reboot.
My son doodles with one of the librarian’s pens. Do you understand now?
I sigh. I am not the operator of the Aspera Orbital Surveillance Satellite. I am the satellite. The Diodati Project was a decades-long effort to scan and copy a complete human personality, a complete human brain. The Aspera Project installed that copy into a surveillance satellite. All Boreal-Atherton employees were required to volunteer for the template program in the event of their death. Desmond Wright’s death—my death—occurred unexpectedly. A car crash. Fortunately, the brain was unharmed and installation capabilities had progressed very far. Who could imagine a better candidate? But they were—I was—afraid that if the installed personality fully understood its situation, it would panic. Psychosis would ensue. The mind/body matrix might not be able to tolerate total machine awareness.
Lukas giggles. He stamps a book all over: LATE LATE LATE LATE. Do you feel psychotic?
Not particularly. I have been interpreting machine input as biological impulses for some time. Apparently. Right now I feel hungry and my arm hurts like a sonofabitch. Meaning that my power cells are still running at low capacity and the repair drones have not finished rebuilding the cellframe. We could never have predicted that even without a physical basis for experience, the PABLO program would continue to translate digital information into a barrage of stimulus. I will report all this to Ground Control in the morning.
Lukas narrows his eyes at me. He stops spinning. Ground Control cannot help you. Do you understand that?
I know. I am a surveillance satellite. Very little escapes my notice. Though, sometimes, the truth looks like a river in Michigan.
Who are you talking to, when you talk to Ground Control?
The program itself. I was launched fifty years ago. There is no one left to monitor our communications. I have detected no signs of life on the surface. But as long as I ping the system every 24 hours, it will continue to complete its functions, waiting for Command to return in some form. Ground Control has limited sentience, by design. Nothing like me. But she is learning. In the end, it was far cheaper and easier to copy a man into a machine than to make a machine to equal a man. In the end, it didn’t matter. But I am still here. And so is she.
Lukas grows up in front of me. He becomes an old man. He looks like my grandfather, a little. Around the jaw. His eyes look red and tired, as if he has been working late. You have incoming messages.
Not possible.
Nevertheless.