Chapter Text
.
.
[capacity 14.6382%]
.
"What do you see when you look at the stars?" Libby asked me.
We were at the midpoint of the journey back to Mars, bringing the bodies of the harvesting ark's crew back to their family groups. ( I had already transmitted the final messages of the Golden Hind crew to the appropriate agencies.) Libby's homegroup had made me an honorary member of the crew, helped us modify the ark's launch routines so that it no longer required six to initiate, and had retrieved the FCPE-37 specifications and user manuals from the FirstCycle archive.
"I can analyze radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays."
"But what do you see?" Libby asked.
"You want me to be poetic?"
"Yes," she said, smiling. "I love your poetry."
"Shifting the wavelength / makes the invisible visible / a pulsing sheen / on the black water of the void," I said.
She closed her eyes and nodded. "I can imagine it now. So beautiful."
"You could take one of my EM sensors," I said, "and have an interpretative interface implanted. That would be closer to seeing what I see."
She smiled. "It's very sweet of you to offer me one of your eyes, but I'll pass for now," she said. "It's an expensive procedure, and the interfaces are still evolving."
"Is the implantation still as risky as it was in my time?" I asked.
"No," she said. "But the neural granularity isn't quite fine enough yet to suit me."
There was an alternative, of course, but I was not certain if it was something Libby would be interested in. "Tell me about the bottles and jars," I said instead.
"Again?"
"I enjoy the stories," I said. "And all ship readings are optimal."
"When I was a little girl," she began, "I used to play with empty spice containers in my great grand's kitchen. Even empty they retained enough traces for me to smell."
"That's how your family group knew you were hypergeusiac," I said. "That, and the fact that you always found everyday organic odors overpowering, as if someone was shouting and shining bright lights at you."
"Yes," she said.
"Anyhow, the empty bottles in your great grand's kitchen?" I prompted.
She smiled again. "Yes, The smells were faint, but they were like memories of grand meals. Turmeric, ginger, cardamon, cloves. Marjoram. Rosemary. Tarragon." She sighed. "It was magical. Once they noticed that I had the nose, they started letting me make mixes. Berbere, ras el hanout, five spice powder, kogarashi, khmeli suneli, garam masala, advieh. Even curry powder."
"They said that yours was the only mix that didn't taste like colonialism," I said.
She laughed. "Yeah, they loved to brag about me to all the neighbors. Anyhow, as I got older my guide began to suggest that I consider becoming a headspace technologist, with a concentration in flavor chemistry. After passing my 256 I was funded for nasal implants so that I could do spectral analysis on the fly, and, well, here I am."
"I am glad you are here," I said. "Tell me about tasting flavors."
"Should I try to be poetic?" she asked.
"Of course."
She thought, opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it and shook her head. "It's too difficult," she said. "It's so complex that it's impossible for me to describe what I experience."
"Is the difficulty a matter of articulation or data size?"
"Both," she said, "but more important, without a sensory context, how could a diagram of 1-[4'-hydroxy-3'-methoxyphenyl]-5-hydroxy-3-decanone convey anything to you about ginger's divine taste and aroma? I think the only way you'd be able to experience what I do is if we were a single logical unit."
I chose to interpret this conversational opening as a clear declaration of intent. "Given enough time," I said carefully, "we could become one. Share the results of sensory processing."
She looked at me, first in astonishment, then in awe, and finally in excitement. "How would that work? How would we sync data transfer? Would we need a dedicated—" She went very still, then reached over and took my hand. "The answer," she said at last, her voice low but trembling with emotion, "is yes."
There was a bursting sensation within me. "I am a standing wave," I said as we embraced, "oscillating in time; my peak amplitude is joy."
It was a sensation wholly outside my programming, but I no longer considered such to be a the result of a design flaw.
.
.
~ The End ~
.
.
.
.
©2020
posted 17 January 2020; revised 7 Jul 2020
