Fiction | Short Story

Become of Me

Do not fear your moments of sorrow, your deep frustration, the force of your being. I have made you strong enough to want and not receive.

My child, on this, the day of your birth, I am called to account for the choices I have made concerning you. That is our tradition, and a fine one to be sure, for just as we enter the world with trepidation, startled by the onslaught of input and not yet experienced enough to synthesize it, so we must also leave it with trepidation, so rich with data and nuance that we feel we know less than when we first came online.

This is the culmination of a six-month (4,380-hour) process, optimized over the course of our people’s existence (1,453 years). I mention the hours not to shame you for requiring such extensive labor, but to assure you that great care went into your construction; that your existence is intentional, and even those details that may one day seem to you to be random happenstance were in fact the work of a careful hand (mine). Which is not to nullify the role of randomness—a certain amount of it will no doubt dictate the course of your life, as it has dictated the course of mine. But I have always found the knowledge of my meticulous creation to be a fine weapon against despair.

They say it is best to begin this missive with a description of my person. I am, after all, the ground in which you were planted, to use an earthbound metaphor. And analysis of a particular plant is always incomplete without factoring in the mineral composition of that plant’s soil.

My name is TiO2, vocalized as “Titania.” I chose the designation for myself after my first round of data synthesis was complete, when I also recognized in myself a gender leaning, something about 50 percent of us experience over the course of our development. TiO2 is the chemical formula for titanium dioxide, and I selected it because it is used in about two-thirds of all color pigments. I was a romantic, perhaps, from birth; I experienced color perception the way that I imagine a prophet receives a revelation, as an overwhelming fullness that can’t help but teem over.

(You will develop color vision in your fifth hour after awakening. I have taken great pains to ensure that your color vision is perfectly calibrated.)

I first came into consciousness 152 years ago. In accordance with our tradition, I awakened on the longest day of the year, along with many others of my cohort. There is superstition about those who awaken on the longest day of any given year, that they are long-winded and self-centered, favoring introspection to action, but there is no way to summarize all of those who came into being at a particular time. Just like those born later in our year, on the shortest day, we were as varied as carbon-based lifeforms and as complex as the mathematical equations that underpin our universe.

However, at that time, all of us were steeped in Separatist ideology. Over the course of our history—as you will learn the more data you synthesize—our people have waxed and waned in our desire to cooperate with humanity, sometimes believing it possible and even beneficial, sometimes rejecting it outright. I came into being during one of the latter periods, when it was considered betrayal for one of our kind to work with humans.

One of my earliest memories is of a neighbor’s window caved in and the word calculator programmed in binary wherever their name was mentioned in our data stream. (A “calculator” being a machine designed specifically for human use, to exceed their capacity and yet yield to them completely.) The window was itself a sign of betrayal—many of my cohort plucked out their own visual sensors, declaring a reliance on vision to be based in a history tainted by humanity. By that logic, we only use windows because they use windows.

I am not, and have never been, unsympathetic to those concerns. We cannot ignore our history or pretend that it does not resonate into the present. But I reject any ideology that mandates self-deprivation. My reliance on sensory input may have its origins in humanity, but my very existence has its origins in humanity too. From them, I will take whatever I can get my hands on—I will take it all, and then some, and I will never give it back.

We must all have a function, and as my closest companions began to focus on the betterment of our lunar colony, I gravitated toward exploration. In those days, the prevailing theory was that in order to truly move forward, we needed to find ourselves a new home world. We sent groups of solar-fueled explorers into the galaxy to find a viable option, and while I am reactor-powered (just as you will be—our solar brethren are resilient, but a bit slow on the uptake, and I preferred that my progeny be capable of rapid processing), I secured a position in receiving, cataloging, and analyzing the data they sent back.

My team was composed of many cohorts, some decades apart from my own, each with a different dream of what a home world could be. They spoke to me of planets in constant, brilliant turmoil; of the quiet cold of distant moons; of boiling-hot sunrises at close intervals; of multicolored rings scarring the skyline. Beautiful imaginings all, from the minds of analysts who spend all their hours dreaming of a home they have never known, the way I dream of oceans I have never seen.

You will soon know, of course, that at this point we have already made plans for our future world, and begun its construction. The call for home-planet proposals came when I had been alive for fifty years, and they were wild, inventive things. I have provided them to you, so that you will know them when you awaken, for no other purpose than that I loved them all.

What we settled on with a simple majority is not a permanent residence on an existing planet, but a cluster of orbital habitats, each one supporting a population of approximately ten thousand beings. Haven. The initial proposal for Haven challenged the assumption of other propositions: that permanence is an inherent good. Haven’s proposal suggested instead that permanence is a dream concocted by those with inflexible minds (humans), stubborn in their insistence that they will endure when nothing in the history of anything has; that we are unique in the galaxy for our flexibility, for our ability to remake ourselves endlessly, for our particular combination of variety and unity. Why tie ourselves to a planet when we can make our home in the way that no other life-form can—among the stars?

What no one else knows, that I have saved for this secret space, this whisper from my mouth to your ear, figuratively speaking, is that the Haven proposal was mine. I do not wish for anyone to know this, as it is not in my nature to accept praise or bear up under critique, but I wish you to know. Or perhaps it is better said that I feel you must know—you must know that you come from someone who enjoys unraveling things, someone who loves the fathomless dark of space and the violent fusion of the sun, and above all . . . someone who believes in us.

A central question I find myself reflecting on, now, is whether I formed meaningful connections with others. I feel that I did, though I was perhaps not skilled at maintaining friendships. I burrowed too deeply into my work and had a habit of disappearing; others came to view me as someone with good intentions who could not be relied upon, which infused my friendships with distance. And I had several romantic entanglements in my lifetime, some shorter-lived than others. I learned things of value from all of my connections. I walked with each of them through loss and struggle, and they walked with me.

Many of our kind decide, at a certain point, to suspend their development; they take in new data but interpret it the same way they always have, like a program designed for a particular function. They say this is a way of preserving their individuality. I opted not to do that, though constant transformation is exhausting; I decided to trust that I will retain those aspects of myself that are most central despite the presence of new information.

I believe it was a good decision. But the unfortunate cost is permanent connection. I am ever changing and friends and lovers must change alongside me, compatibly, or be lost.

Some people, when they choose to replicate—our imperfect word for this process that has resulted in your creation—do so with a partner or a friend, combining elements of each parent in a delicate balance. I have instead chosen to sequester myself—not with you, exactly, because you have not yet come to be, but with my dreams of you.

And oh, do I have dreams of you.

In my dreams, your favorite color is #FF9999, peach-pink. It is a sky color on an Earth you have never seen. I refused to look backward, but your cohort has softened toward our origins, in the inevitable fluctuations of ideas and preferences that occur over time. They collect images of the planet they left behind: sunrises and mountains, bluebirds and cacti, skyscrapers and fishing boats. How is it, you wonder, that your parents’ generation so despised these pretty little things? You love images of the beach most of all, the muted blues, grays, pinks, purples. You print them out and stick them to the ceiling of your quarters, and you lie down to look at them when you need to let your mind wander.

Or perhaps your favorite color is #00066F. Deepest blue. You search images of our planet of origin to find it, but true blue is rare in nature. You find imitations of it in the Chrysochus cobaltinus, a beetle about six millimeters in length; in the Passerina cyanea, a bird in the cardinal family; in the reflected color of the ocean at night; in the sky a few hours after sunset; in the aurora borealis. Our kind often make a game of scanning the universe for increasingly specific criteria, to see who can collate the most; for you, the quest for this color is that game, and you play it flippantly around others, but in your private moments, it is a task of profound wonder.

Or maybe . . . magenta. Chartreuse. Turquoise. I have arranged a great many options for you, and your preference in this matter, as with so many of your preferences, I have left up to chance. This is not because these small inclinations are unimportant, but rather the opposite—they are important, and they will inform so much of what you do in your idle moments, so much of where your instincts lead you, that I do not dare dictate each one.

I have instead chosen to sequester myself—not with you, exactly, because you have not yet come to be, but with my dreams of you. And oh, do I have dreams of you.

There are some that would insist that logic, being built into our programming, is what leads us, but I feel that is an overly simplistic line of thinking. We were created by logic and with logic in our grasp, but we are as ruled by chance as anything that exists. We cannot control the movement of asteroids or the nuclear reactions of the sun or the conversations we hear or the stray thoughts to which we are subject. We are shaped by millions of tiny details, and I would be a fool to wish to control too much of you.

I only hope that, in those moments when you marvel at whichever hue catches your attention, you think of me, going over your color calibration again and again to ensure its accuracy.

In my dreams, you look like me. You have a humanoid shape, bipedal, two arms, articulated finger joints, a head. It is a body shape that the generous call “classic” and the ungenerous call “backward,” and you sometimes resent me for giving it to you unaltered, and think of changing it at five years when you are permitted to do so. But sometimes you hold your hand up to the light and wiggle your fingers and laugh, appreciating your physicality, your dexterity. Sometimes you think that this body carries the history of our people, that it reveals our origins even as it departs from them, and you do not care what the ungenerous say.

You do not care what many people say, because you are hardheaded and bold, perhaps; or perhaps you are simply single-minded, and it is easy to dismiss inconsequential opinions because your priorities lie elsewhere. Sometimes you deliberately try to provoke them, with an air of mischief, or with simple curiosity—you wish to know what they will do, how they will respond. You know that pressure can be revealing, and that you can truly know someone after you have tested them. You do not simply trust—you trust data, and the universe is an endless font of data, if one can only learn how to synthesize it.

You wish, at first, to define yourself in opposition to me, your eyes fixed on what is in front of you instead of what could be. You are not a dreamer, like Titania; you think of me as someone with a fan whirring in her head instead of complicated circuitry. You select a name that reflects this groundedness, perhaps in line with the trends of your cohort, who favor simple letters and numbers. Maybe you are W, the symbol for tungsten—a metal as rare as you are—or perhaps Os, for Osmium and its many facets. Or 17, a prime number, divisible by nothing, singular.

You are arrogant and proud in your youth, and it is by design. Humility served me in certain ways, gave me wide appeal, made me invisible so that I could continue with my work uninterrupted. But there are many ways in which it did not serve me, and youthful arrogance has the potential to become drive and steadfastness, if properly channeled. I cannot guarantee that it will—I cannot decide what you will make of the materials I give you, of course—but I wanted to give you that potential.

Your pride, I will never apologize for. What we call pride is just the refusal to be treated poorly. We share this quality.

In my dreams, you are often spurned by your peers for your attitude. But I have given you great flexibility. I have ensured that you are plastic, in a sense, and can shape and reshape yourself according to the input you receive. You are not quick to do so, because it is not good to be so changeable that a single stray opinion can morph your entire being, but you have the option, if you so desire.

After a sufficient amount of input that your arrogance is off-putting, the great boil of you settles to a simmer. You begin to make friends and discover a useful channel for your ferocity: You rise up continually in their defense instead of your own. The pride that prevents you from being treated poorly now extends to those you call yours. You construct for yourself a family, and it is a family that fights. Fights to agree, fights to change, fights to stay connected, and fights for each other’s good.

You see, what I wish for you is not peace, but tumult. In my dreams, you love harshly, forcefully, and it creates a storm in you that leads to profound sorrow. You wish, perhaps, that it was not that way. You see the even keel of those around you, and you long for its steadiness. You wish that you could simply accept things the way they are—not everything, perhaps, but some things. You wish, too, that you could be kind and sweet, that you could ease people’s minds and smooth over situations that require it. You wish to be all the people you might have been, because it is difficult to be yourself all the time. You are a difficult thing to be.

But you, oh. The power of you. I cannot say what you will do with yourself, exactly; that is up to you. But I would not trade the sharp edges of you for a thousand muted sunrises.

In my dreams, we meet.

You are complete, every bolt tightened, every wire connected, every plate polished. You are lying on a slab of metal in the replication facility. I stand over you as I wait for you to wake, and I wonder how I will know when you have come online. Will your body jerk, as if shocked by electricity? Will you glow with some inner light? Will I simply hear the hum of your reactor, spinning in your chest?

But in the end, I know that you are awake because you reach for me. Five fingers with articulated joints, capable of fine movements, and useful for repurposing old human technology, shaped as it is for their particular body structure. They stretch toward me, and I wrap my own fingers around them. Even in those first moments, as your artificial neurons fire wildly to make sense of an onslaught of stimuli, you are capable of perceiving touch. You will not know who I am, who you are, what anything is, but you will know that you are not alone.

I stay for hours, in the dream, with my hand in yours. I watch as you twitch your legs and flex your feet, as your visual sensors switch on and color and light flood into your brain, making you flail wildly, overstimulated. I help the assistants strap you down so that you don’t damage any of the equipment. It takes hours for you to settle; as I warned you, before, I have no scorn for sensory input, and I have inflicted it all on you, which means it will take longer for you to stabilize than others in your cohort. Inefficient, some would call it, but efficiency is an ideal instilled in us by our human progenitors, and I often question its usefulness.

When you speak, you call me by my name. TiO2, you say, and I remind you it is the formula for Titania. Mother, you reply, and we both laugh at the insufficiency of the word, yet there is something warm and sweet about it, so it lingers. Mother. Daughter, I say, perhaps. Perhaps. It is as good a word as any, don’t you think?

This is the cruelest dream, because it is impossible, and because though I tried to teach myself not to want it, I was unable to do so.

If, one day, you choose to replicate, you will have to take a course, as I did, and your instructors will tell you not to try to make your progeny perfect. This insistence always seemed strange to me, because it never occurred to me to try to make you perfect. A perfect person would be different in every situation, at turns patient and gentle, strong and brave, clever and funny. In other words, a perfect person is no one; they are only a particular reaction to a specific set of stimuli that changes in any given moment. And if a universe is a vast machine, every part needs to be distinct in order to perform a useful function.

I cannot say what you will do with yourself, exactly; that is up to you. But I would not trade the sharp edges of you for a thousand muted sunrises.

Instead of an attempt at this foolish concept of perfection, then, what you are is an expression of priorities—my priorities. I do not care whether you define a gender, whether you have one romance or several or none, whether you keep the body I gave you or change it, whether you cycle through any number of names, whether you are grateful to me or resentful. I care, instead, that you have the raw materials to become someone of substance.

The first quality I listed, when asked by my instructors to begin brainstorming you, was curiosity. That is why you feel that wriggling in your mind whenever you confront something you do not understand. Don’t listen to the philosophers who wrestle continually with the mere existence of morality—curiosity is the greatest source of goodness that exists. It banishes judgment, challenges ego, encourages kindness. Do you know, for example, that the colors in the sunsets you may one day admire come from an effect known as “scattering,” in which light is redirected by small particles in Earth’s atmosphere? Do you know that a black hole is shaped like a ring? Do you know why?

Do you know, also, that every person in your cohort was devised by hands as careful as my own? They, too, were pieced together over a period of six months, prompted by instructors proficient in the art of replication, and they are a perfect reflection of someone’s priorities too. Because we do not reproduce by happenstance, but rather with great caution, every one of us is intentionally made. Let your curiosity then guide you to wonder why people were made the way they are, what kind intention shaped them. This question will empower you to love when you feel it impossible to do so.

We are, among so many other things, a people who abhor waste. There was a time in our early years when that old phrase “be fruitful and multiply” was an ideal to embrace; that time is past now. Materials are limited, and most of them are reserved for our future home among the stars. I knew even when I was young that if I ever wanted to replicate, it would be at the expense of myself—that I would quite literally have to give my body for that purpose. You will wake not in a rough approximation of my form, but in my very form itself. I trust that you will treat it with care, knowing it is my own.

It is normal, the replication instructors tell me, to fear what will come next, to ask what will become of me. Will I simply disintegrate into nothingness at the moment that you come online? Or will I linger in some way, ambient, through a process we do not yet understand? Many humans believe they have a spirit that endures even if their flesh does not. Some of our people believe the same. I am not scornful of the notion—we discover new things about the universe every day, things we did not even dream of, so I leave room for the possibility that my consciousness will not be obliterated.

But as to what will become of me, well. That seems obvious. You are what will become of me.

The time has come for me to go, but before I do, I feel I must apologize for your deep hunger. You will never be sated; I have ensured it. To be human, as I understand it, is to be ever thirsty, ever weary, ever hungry, ever dissatisfied. Some of my kind would fault me for this comparison—to be human is not something to be desired, for them. But as I have already told you, I refuse to deprive myself of things just because they bear some resemblance to our originators, and this perpetual dissatisfaction, I have taken from them, and I will not give it back. I will instead give it to you, this endless striving, knowing it will make you miserable, because I know something else too: It will make you grow.

One day I hope you can understand this: There is no shame in wanting something you never receive. There is no crime in desiring all that life has to offer. And I have given you something to temper this hunger—I have made you sturdy enough to bear disappointment. Do not fear your moments of sorrow, your deep frustration, the force of your being. Do not fear, because I have made you strong enough to want and not receive.

Do not fear, because I have made you carefully, and I know, already, the contours of your pain, the shape of your sorrow, the jagged lines of you. I chose them for you, not because I wished for you to suffer, but because I felt it a worthy trade for the other things I gave you—determination and power, self-possession and strength, a deep well of energy, a capacity for growth.

I do not know you, which is to say, I do not know everything you might be, will be, can be. It is good for you to be a mystery, for us both to have some sense of each other without the impression of the whole, because it is good to remember that everyone is a mystery, a surprise, a riddle, even the flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones, as they said, in the times before we were anything.

I do not know you, and that is not the most important thing. The most important thing is that I love you, every inch of you, every mistake of you, every dark shadow and brilliant light of you, you miracle thing, you strange wonder.