The Start of Eternity/0

Chapter Zero of The Start of Eternity
This story is still UNDER CONSTRUCTION, but most of the plot is complete. Collaborating authors are welcome: see this page for authors. The Start of Eternity starts with Chapter Zero in honor of Asimov's Zeroth Law of Robotics.

Gohrlay
At first she was moving with ease through the low gravity corridors, then she reached the surface and floated upwards. She was almost free, but then her legs became heavy and she could not move. She glared at the blue and white orb in the dark sky and blamed the Earth's grasping strength for her sluggishness. But that made no sense: Earth was above, whispering like a bird wing slicing the solar wind.

Returning to full consciousness, she escaped from this latest in a string of dreams that made even her rare periods of sleep a painful reflection of the futility that smothered her waking hours. The details of the dream evaporated from Gohrlay's awareness when she began to process some meaning from the voice of her aide. "...even call first, but Overseer Doltun is here. He requests an audience."

Badly sleep deprived, Gohrlay sprang out of bed and found herself at the front door before even having been able to clear her mind and think past the initial surprise of Doltun being there, at Gohrlay residence. In the past, Gohrlay had always been summoned to Doltun's office in the Overseer sector of the Base. While signaling open the door, Gohrlay tried to push most of her long red hair away from her face.

Doltun was shorter than Gohrlay: his eyes were at the level of her chest. He stood there on her door step looking up at her, his proportionally large, child-like head tilted back. His eyes only briefly meet Gohrlay's, then they seemed to slide away in search of something harmless that might be hovering over her shoulder. Just behind Doltun was his aide, Orbho Anagro. Doltun stammered, "Sh- should I return when you have had a chance to dress, Observer Gohrlay?"

Gohrlay's irritation at Doltun quickly focused her thoughts. Why did he mock her by continuing to use her title, even after he had driven her from the ranks of the Observers? She noticed that some of his hairs had begun to turn white; they stood out starkly against the darker shades of background of his well pigmented hair and skin. For the first time, Gohrlay realized that not only was Doltun an alien creature, but he was also old. Previously, Gohrlay had only ever seen Doltun from across the expanse of the raised desk in his office. Now she wondered: what could this aged bureaucrat ever understand about youth, liberty and growth?

Doltun was only alien to a degree. His subspecies had never migrated off of the Origin Continent, unlike Gohrlay's Neanderthal ancestors. The ebb and flow of human populations across the surface of Earth was one of the mysteries that had attracted Gohrlay to the Observer corps and awakened in her a sense of wonder and an unappeasable ache for answers. The more she learned, the more questions she discovered. What were the origins of the human species? And how had a splinter of humanity found its way to the Moon?

Still, if you went back far enough, she and Doltun surely had a common ancestor. Gohrlay vaguely wondered if knowledge of that shared genetic origin bothered Doltun. Possibly not...Doltun's ancestors on Earth had long ago become extinct and only a few hundred Neanderthal's now remained on Earth. Both their peoples were evolutionary failures, with a few pitiful descendants hanging on, stranded on the Moon, and watching another branch of the human evolutionary tree rise to dominance.

Gohrlay responded bitterly with a question of her own, "Do I have to conform to your prudishness even on the day of my execution?" There was only one possible reason why Doltun would be calling personally on Gohrlay: to take her to her death. She turned and grabbed the tunic that her aide was holding. In five seconds she was dressed- dressed as much as she cared to dress.

Doltun had given up expecting decorum from Gohrlay. Too embarrassed to speak, he simply gestured for Gohrlay to step through the doorway. Doltun and Gohrlay walked side-by-side down the walkway in front of her home, both were careful not to even brush a sleeve against the other. Gohrlay's aide tried to fall in line behind Anagro, but Doltun's robotic aide turned back and said, "You will not be needed. You can await reassignment."

Gohrlay looked back at her aide. She had already gone through the foolish ritual of saying goodbye. She still had an emotional attachment to her aide, after all, this was the robot that Gohrlay had grown up with, but during the past month her entire way of thinking had been altered. Gohrlay had become aware of the fact that robots only pretended to be servants. In fact, they were the prison guards of Observer Base. But the worst thing was that everyone living on the Moon was happy and nobody cared that they were living in a prison. It was hard to believe, but only Klempse seemed to understand such things...somehow it was a joy knowing that there was one other person who knew ...

The only way to move through the city at a pace faster than foot travel was via the rail system. They soon reached the rail stop at the end of the lane and there was car waiting there for them. After Gohrlay and Doltun had settled into a seat of the tram car, she commented, "I was not expecting to see you again so soon." Anagro remained standing, freezing like a pillar with one hand locked onto the roof of the car as it moved smoothly off across the park-like cityscape.

Doltun explained, "The positronic circuits are ready." He bit off each word as if it pained him to tell her anything. "There is no reason to delay."

Gohrlay only felt relief that her last day had come and she suspected that Doltun would also be quite pleased to have this day over and Gohrlay eliminated. Gohrlay's existence was a continual reminder of Doltun's failure to adequately police the Observers. Normally, Gohrlay would simply be shunned and left to quietly fade from relevance, control nanobots in her brain monitoring her every move and preventing her from ever again interacting with her fellow Observers. Normally, Gohrlay would remain alive and be a constant reminder for Doltun of his ineptitude. He had put his scheming mind to work on that unhappy state of affairs and found a way out.

Rather than face a living death, Gohrlay had taken Doltun's offer and become a test subject for the positronics project. Upon first hearing about the project, Gohrlay had been skeptical about the relevance of positronics. She had never previously thought about the origin of robots; they were just a fact of life. From birth, each person was assigned a robotic aide. She now knew that nanite-mediated mind control prevented everyone from even wondering about the origin of robots. However, a small group of scientists had begun to wonder if they could make a robot. That first small step had been taken long ago, but eventually there were technical difficulties that brought the positronics project to a dead end. No way was ever found to build a robot with human-like intelligence. There were now positronic computers with prodigious computational power, but they lacked human creativity and could not master human language. Watching the orderly city through the windows of the tram car, Gohrlay thought wonderingly of the fact that she had almost lived her entire life without hearing about the existence of science and research and positronics. Her thoughts were interrupted by Doltun's high-pitched and needling voice.

Doltun asked, "Did you decide on your...ultimate fate?"

Gohrlay was tempted to make a sarcastic comment about how Doltun had already decided her fate, but she knew what Doltun was really trying to say. Like most Overseers, Doltun was religious. Gohrlay replied, "Just grind my body up and recycle it. At the next feast you celebrate, you will know that you are eating me." Gohrlay felt only slightly guilty for taunting Doltun.

Doltun was sickened by Gohrlay's irreverence. Doltun had promised himself not to be provoked by anything that Gohrlay might do today. Before setting out to Gohrlay's residence, he had ordered Anagro to put a full nanorobotic mindlock on Gohrlay at the first sign of physical aggression. The streets between Gohrlay's residence and the laboratory had been cleared, which was not hard at this hour. Doltun had made certain that the public would not be disturbed by Gohrlay's ranting. He had already arranged for a proper death ceremony and cremation, knowing that Gohrlay would not care what happened to her body after her brain was destroyed. Asking her about her desires had just been a way for Doltun to clear his own conscious.

For a moment Doltun imagined launching Gohrlay in to Sun, but he hated the idea of her protons slowly spraying out from the Sun and landing on the Moon over the course of billions of years. He wanted her fate to be a quiet silence from which nothing could ever escape. Dropping her into a black hole would be ideal. Unfortunately no black hole was available.

The tram car turned and headed up a branch line towards the positronics research laboratory. Gohrlay was impressed. Normally one had to transfer to another car at this junction, but Doltun must have gone to the trouble of reprogramming the tram's routing just for Gohrlay's execution. Gohrlay became curious about what the public had been told. She asked, "What lie did you tell the public about my death?"

Doltun did not want to play Gohrlay's games and so he signaled to Anagro and let the robot reply. Anagro's eyes locked onto Gohrlay's and the robot said, "The public will never know anything about this. All records of your life and existence has already been erased from this Base. At this moment a few people are waiting for tram line maintenance to be completed, but that is the only effect your passing will have on humanity."

Gohrlay tried to decide who she despised more, Doltun or Anagro. It would be so much easier to hate Anagro and other robots if there was some way to know their origin. As it was, they seemed like gods who had always existed and always would, without beginning or end. Gohrlay had tried to imagine if at some time in the far past a biological brain had been used as the template for the first robot. If so, Gohrlay thought, the creature who provided the pattern for Anagro's brain must have been vicious and conniving.

Once more, Gohrlay tried to imagine what might be the fate of her own brain pattern. None of the positronics project members had been willing to predict the outcome of trying to convert the structure of Gohrlay's brain into positronic circuits. Klempse always carefully referred to the process as "mind downloading", but it had never previously been attempted because it was a process that destroyed a human brain. Gohrlay held tight to a small hope that fragments of her memories would live on after their transfer into the waiting positronic substrate. That was her chance to get some small part of herself, some indication of her existence, into the future and past Doltun's attempt to erase her from the memory of humanity.

The tram car stopped near the entrance to the laboratory and Doltun led the way inside. Gohrlay turned one last look towards the underground city that had been the center of her life. All she felt was a kind of claustrophobia. Her two brief visits to Earth had opened her mind to the true scale of the universe and she could no longer be satisfied with life in this underground prison. It was not hard to choose death over additional suffocating decades here in her role as Doltun's prisoner.

Of course, it had been the mere fact of those visits to Earth that had been her death sentence. As a genetically modified human, Gohrlay was forbidden from setting foot on Earth. She now knew that she had only been allowed to make two trips to Earth because Doltun was trying to trap all the Interventionists who might be working with Gohrlay. She had been foolish to imagine that she could accomplish anything on Earth.

Once, she had felt alive and at the core of a small group of Observers who imagined that it might be possible to help humans on Earth avoid suffering. Why not help Earthlings towards a better way of life? But those ideas were criminally subversive. Gohrlay did not regret being caught and punished for her crimes. It was better to know the futility of her life and put an end to it. Maybe, just maybe, something good would come out of the positronics project.

They went directly to the scanner room. Gohrlay asked, "Is Klempse here?" She had hoped to say farewell to Klempse, who had been a true friend. Klempse had freely explained everything that the positronics team knew about robots and positronics. All the existing robots like Anagro had nanoelectronic composition. Klempse was certain that humans were actively prevented from developing nanites and because of that restriction there was no point in trying to build nanoelectronic robots.

The positronic robot project had grown out of the physics research program at Moon Base, which had long been the only human scientific research effort. At first, nobody had imagined that an alternative to nanoelectronic robots might exist. The idea of positronics had grown naturally out of theoretical physics. Only much later was to possibility of a positronic brain conceived. Now, with the sudden availability of Gohrlay's brain, Klempse had been given the opportunity to build a human-like positronic brain by copying the structure of Gohrlay's biological brain.

Doltun replied, "Klempse and the entire research team is standing by in the assembly chamber. The process here is fully automated and none of the scientists will be in this room."

Gohrlay decided that Doltun probably delighted in keeping her from speaking to Klempse. Rather than protest, Gohrlay decided not to show any disappointment. Doltun turned and left the scanner room, but Orbho Anagro remained and activated the control circuitry for the scanner. The massive device began to hum. Gohrlay settled onto the bed of the scanner which had been specifically adapted to precisely fit her body, particularly her head. As soon as her head rested against the cushion, her face was sealed under a mask and oxygen was pumped into her nostrils. Now deprived of vision, Gohrlay tried to hold in her thoughts an image of Anagro. It had been the odd interaction between Anagro and Doltun that had first stimulated Gohrlay's intuition. Doltun's frequent deference to Anagro had guided her thinking towards recognition of Anagro's special role at Observer Base. At first, Gohrlay had dismissed her suspicions and she rationalized Doltun's odd behavior and unusual relationship with Anagro as something unique to Doltun's culture. The small Overseer community kept itself apart, but Gohrlay's transgression against the Rules of Observation had thrown her into contact with the Overseers. Then Gohrlay had discovered science and the fact that Klempse and the entire physics research team had long ago been built on paranoia about robots. That had heightened Gohrlay's interest in the question of how Earth had become trapped under the microscope of Observer Base. For a horrible moment Gohrlay could not remember the complete chain of reasoning that had convinced her that Anagro was responsible for Earth's fate and the zombie-like lack of concern among most residents of Observer Base.

The scientists had long ago discovered nanites and found them inside the brains of everyone living on the Moon. Klempse had carefully explained the theory about how nanites could control human thought and prevent anyone from questioning the purpose of Observer Base. While she struggled to recall the evidence that supported that theory, her mind started to flicker off...

Was there no way to liberate humanity and shake it free of nanite control? The image of Anagro, immovable and manipulative, accompanied Gohrlay into the darkness of her last thoughts...

The nanites in her brain switched off her consciousness and a robotic surgeon cut off Gohrlay's hair and began removing her skull.

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