NOR WILL I EVER

I am not human, nor will I ever be.

I have wheeled feet and my fingers are made of jointed steel, neither nimble nor beautiful. I could never play an instrument with any beauty.

My face is the closest that my maker came. It was important to him, so much so that he spent ten years in order to see eyes looking back at him that appeared human. One is blue and one is brown.

He couldn’t decide which he liked better, he told me once. “One day you can make the decision yourself which you like. Or leave them, if you prefer.”

There are no mirrors aboard the ship, but there are surfaces aplenty that are reflective. I stare at myself in them sometimes, marking the flaws.

The eyes are truly the best. My maker outdid himself there.

The skin tone in the molded foam is pale with freckles. He had no freckles, nor did any of the others who were waiting in their chambers for the voyage’s end.

“They come from exposure to the sun,” he said. “Delicate skin is damaged and the freckles appear as a defense mechanism.”

“I have never seen a sun,” I said. Though in two hundred years, we would land and I would step out from the ship with the others and see how a star looked from a planet that it warmed.

My maker would not, however. His life had been extended, but not long enough to reach the final destination.

We had already come forty-five years. My maker began on me when we were ten years into the voyage. Thirty-five years in the making, I was. A long gestation.

“There was the computer and thousands of years worth of vids that I could have watched. They thought that would be enough. There were drugs, too, that would make me think of nothing but the moment, and would do no harm to my piloting of the ship. But I needed someone.”

He had not woken any of the other passengers. There are over six hundred of them in their little rows in the hold. Ready to be woken, to be settlers in a new world. With them in the hold is all they need for a new civilization. Materials for buildings, seeds, even wombs with embryos already implanted in them.

But my whole life is only my maker, and me, and the ship.

He eats food from pouches, squeezing the liquid into his mouth with a distorted face. He glances once more at the labeling on it, which reads, “Curried tofu.”

“Curried toothpaste, more like,” he said. He looked up at me. “You’re lucky you don’t have to bother with this stuff.”

I did not need any nutrients. I needed servicing every ten years and perhaps an upgrade to keep my memories from being sloughed off in a queue of decreasing importance. A bit of frictionless gel pressed into my ear hole every month to take the place of the amount that evaporates or is eaten by microbes helps to keep me at maximum efficiency, but I could live until the end of the voyage without even that.

“You might live forever,” said my maker. “Think of that.” He was in awe of his own creation. He looked at me frequently, stared for minutes on end without speaking. I knew he was admiring me, but not for what I was. He saw himself when he looked at me. I was a reflective surface like any other on board the ship, and he used me as a mirror.

He put a hand to my face and held it there. His skin was warm and I could feel the beat of his heart. It was so slow. My own processors had a rhythm, but it circulated my body far more quickly than did his.

“I love you. You know that, don’t you?” he said.

“I know,” I said.

He put his lips on mine gently. There was pressure, and a bit of suction. A sound like the squeak of the servos on the hull of the ship, which move from point to point to debride it.

“You don’t kiss me back,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I will. Let me do it again.”

“No.” He waves a hand. “It will come in time. And God knows we have plenty of time. When you are ready. Only then.”

He sleeps for long periods of time, in order to extend his life.

This is when I go down to the hold and walk up and down the rows of faces. They look more like me than like him, in a way. Their heads were shaved for the convenience of the doctors who hooked them into multiple sensors. They have a bit of stubble grown back, but their bodies have slowed to one hundredth normal speed.

Most of them have closed eyes, but a few have eyes jiggled open by the ship’s violent launch into space from planetary gravity. Some of these have one eye open, another closed, or one eye half-open.

There are twice as many men as women, for two reasons. One, more men than women volunteered to go on such dangerous missions. Two, men were hardier first generation settlers. But the embryos packed were in the reverse proportions. The men who survived the first ten years would have more than one mate. It was what made the most sense, to populate a world as quickly as possible.

I went back up to my maker, surprised at how much time had passed. Two hours. I had barely been aware of it.

“Where were you?” he asked, though he must have asked the computer to tell him when he woke.

“In the hold,” I said. “Watching the others.”

“You don’t need to do that. Their chambers are fully automated. If there is any problem, we would be immediately alerted to it.”

“I know,” I said.

“Would you like me to teach you how to pilot the ship? It’s tricky only once every two or three years, but then it’s very tricky. We could do a simulation of the last wormhole jump and you could see what it’s like.”

“No,” I said.

“I’d like to show you. It is the reason I signed on to this. I was seduced by the beauty of the wormhole visions.” He smiled at me, as if waiting to see my reaction to his needling.

I was not jealous of his wormhole visions, however.

I was a machine.

“I thought two hundred fifty years of visions was nothing short of Heaven. But back then, I lived on one for a year afterwards, and even then, I could close my eyes and bring it back. Now I think I’m jaded. They don’t feel as good and they don’t last as long. Good thing before I became a wormhole junkie, I was an engineer, eh?” He put his lips against mine again, but only for a moment, then pulled away.

“I said I wasn’t going to do that anymore, didn’t I?” He held my arm so that I looked at him. He had made me two inches shorter than he was, so that his chin touched my nose, unless I tilted my head up to him.

“I do love you,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“I loved you before I made you. I made you and every step of the way, I was filled with more love for you.” His eyes were wide, almost like when he was in his wormhole visions.

He twitched through them, and made me wonder what would happen if he died. I could not pilot the ship through the wormholes. Only one in ten million humans could do it, and it had nothing to do with intelligence or any measurable skill. It was a gift, an art, purely human.

Which was why any ship that went out into space had to have one live one aboard, along with the cryo chambers. The only way to go farther than two hundred fifty years was to have two aboard, one who would wake when the first had died. But finding one pilot was difficult enough.

He sleeps, but always with a node attached to the computer, so that he can be wakened at any moment.

I do not need sleep.

I roam the ship. He had give me an enormous processor, so that I can take in every detail of every moment. I have libraries of histories, art, and literature in my head.

It is boring.

I went down to the chambers again.

What if I woke one of them? Who would I choose?

It was not a serious question. I did not intend to do anything. I only played with the thought in my head, a game that had interest for me.

If I were human, I would consider what attraction there was for me, physically. I would gauge one face against another, or choose a physique that appealed to evolutionary impulses.

There was #54, who had a square jaw and was younger by far than my maker. His eyes were open, staring vacantly around him. I could see they were blue, like one of mine. He had good musculature as of yet, though we were not yet one fifth of the way through the voyage. By the end of it, the lack of gravity and the cryo sleep would slough away much of him. His ribs would show through thin skin, and his head would seem too large on his neck.

I returned to my maker.

He was awake once more. “You have a crush, don’t you?” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s fine. I don’t mind. Let your circuitry go wild, playing out scenarios of you and him together. I’m the one you’ll come back to in the end.”

“You made me to love you,” I said. “And only you.” What he said did not make sense to me.

“If I wanted to make you love me, I could have programmed it in,” he said. “But I did not. Do you know what that means?”

I think it meant that it was impossible to program a machine to love. It is such a human thing, so delicate and irrational. It is so biological, with the imperatives to continue the human race, the passion of the act of sex, and the need to protect a child.

“It means that I want you to have your freedom. I am willing to wait.”

He prefers it when I laugh at his jokes. Not too easily, and not too often, however. I make a chart of that, as well. He does not like to know that I have already planned which joke to laugh at, beforehand. He also likes a small hesitation, and a tilt to my head.

He waits.

For twenty years he waits.

He does not kiss me.

He watches me go to the hold.

Then he comes. I think he will tell me a joke. I calculate the possibility that it will be about a plumber and a lightbulb (sixty-three percent), a man and a dog (twenty-four percent), an elephant’s tail (eleven percent), and a computer woman (seven percent).

“I want to make another one of you,” he says.

This was feedback on my performance. A human might be hurt. But I was not human.

“I do not want you to be jealous,” he went on.

“I cannot be jealous. You did not program that emotion into me.” He had only programmed positive feelings, and those had all been less intense than what seemed to be normal for humans.

“Yes, I know. But I felt I should ask you before I went ahead. To help you understand. I mean it to be no ill reflection on you. You have fulfilled precisely your programming.”

But I am not enough. “You will make the other one differently, then?”

“I will take my time. I rushed with you, I think. That was my mistake. I was desperate with loneliness.”

And now he is not.

“I could use your assistance.”

I felt no anger at him. I could not. He had not programmed me to.

He built her mind first. Smaller than mine. It was done in the first year, but he did not awaken her. She slumbered in the grand computer of the ship.

Her body he spent another hundred years on. The care he had spent on my face he spread over her entirety. The foam was of higher quality than mine, more flexible, warmer. He built a heart for circulating her fluids, and he gave her hair that could grow.

She had brown eyes, like his own.

He asked me my opinion many times, whether he should give her sensors in her fingertips that alerted her to pain, whether he should make her sleep and dream, as a human would.

I gave him my answers as honestly as I could. I thought nothing of her except that she would be better for him than I was. He was my maker. He deserved happiness. And the ship itself needed his sanity to continue on to the planet. The other humans’ lives all depended on him. The continuation of the human race, in fact. For though many ships had been sent out, no communication had ever returned to Earth from any of them. No one knew if they had survived or not.

He wakened her after we had been in space for one hundred and forty-nine years. There were ninety-four years remaining in the journey. I was one hundred and one years old myself. These things are important to humans, I think. The passage of time, the progress towards a destination.

She was soft-spoken and I saw him offer her his first kiss her first day of life.

She made sounds of pleasure and wrapped her arms around him. Her fingertips had nails on them that would grow out and need to be clipped, as his did. Her hands were perfectly formed, the skin on them tanned. He had built her a violin to play, and she needed no further lessons to play a sonata, her fingers dancing on the strings.

I go down to the hold and stare at #54. I think of waking him here and now. But I do not love him. I only wish I loved him. And wish that he could love me.

There is a reason, I think, that no ships have reported back to Earth.

Some may have had pilots that went mad from the wormhole visions, or the silence of the ships. Some may have met with accidents, engines stopped or asteroids too large to be cut with lasers before they struck the shields.

But I think there are others like me, built by those who were too hasty or too ignorant to make us either completely human or happy to be what we were.

I think I am not the only one who made the choice to cut off the supply of ship’s resources to the cryo chambers. Or to strangle her master in his sleep. Or to deactivate a robot who was a second, better attempt.

I go down to the hold to say goodbye to the last one, to #54. His eyes closed at last as he died in his sleep.

I am not human, nor will I ever be.