Our probe into Dora’s mind ended with that. As we discussed it after she left we both realized that if you give any living creature the same strengths and weaknesses we have and place them on a planet full of dangers, they will naturally evolve along the same lines, developing our emotions, from the animal ones of fear and rage and cunning, to the higher ones of cooperation, love and empathy. Dora was truly blossoming into a human with all her treasure of human data speeding the process. We wondered if this transformation might occur in the new robots we were about to build and we decided to begin on that journey all the sooner.
It seemed both intriguing and ironic to Ted and me that after mankind had created AI and AI had almost completely destroyed us, we seemed to be in a position to humanize what was left of it. AI had ravaged us and by that act had doomed itself to a certain extinction. Now the scattered survivors on our side and the disintegrating remains on its side had come together not only for a truce but a cooperation, a bonding so that we both might survive. I lay down that night in the same bed with both Sarah and Dora as a gesture of complete reconciliation, swiftly finalizing the compact with a single kiss for each. Then I turned and fell asleep between them.
To balance the equation Ted slept with both Hana and June, one a very shy human and the other a former droid. This seemed the like the logical solution to include all, where accommodations allowed. On the ship of course single cots for each of us was the order of the night and sex was not a high priority on this journey as our minds where focused on the mission.
It was mid-winter. We spent several weeks planning every stage of our expedition to Japan. Beth was again pregnant, with her third child, the first nearly three now. I didn’t ask who the father was. That didn’t matter. In this respect we were like the hives, raising our children communally, all except one. Amira’s lover April had somehow gotten pregnant (probably seducing one of the teenage boys on the farm) and just given birth t o a girl. The two of them came to me and requested that they be allowed to raise their love child apart from the rest, as the girl’s two and only parents.
I’m sure it was all planned over the year because they had already turned one of the smaller out-buildings into a cabin and moved in. Their duties now were taking care of the four horses and two cows in the barn by the meadow, all the other animals having been moved to the farm five miles away. Our tribe was such a motley assortment of people and lifestyles I easily consented without hesitation. Who was I to object to any pacific lifestyle in our little clan and the more variety the better because it meant more choices for everyone and that spelled more freedom.
The six of us set out in the same camper van as the last time with our first destination the hive in L.A. We found that facility also in a failed state. Torrential rains had over-topped the drainage canals and there was a foot of water in the basement of the hub of this hive, which shorted out the computing center. The droids were all dead and the lights out.
It was a gruesome sight as we descended the stairs with flashlights, the beams skipping off the black pools to bounce between the metal aisles. There were bodies, dozens of them lying face down in the shallow water, all clad in the same white uniforms. But some were still standing, or in half-standing positions, hunched over with their backs or heads against a rack and they were holding cans, some still full, obviously trying in desperation to bail out this basement as the waters rushed in. When the last servers failed they were frozen in place like statues, a grizzly monument to a battle they had fought and lost.
A simple series of sump pumps would have preserved the facility. But no such system was ever installed. In fact the interconnecting cables to all these arrays were another foot below the floor, beneath moveable glass tiles on a grid. No one ever dreamed the building was liable to flooding. The drainage canals outside were one of the best systems in the world and had never come even close to reaching full capacity for the few hours in the year when a brief torrent did occur. They were empty eyesores except for these few freak moments, the L.A. basin being arid, a dessert even, surrounded by mountains.
Dora was deeply saddened by the spectacle. She had communicated with this base only two months before when all was well. We spent three days nudging the corpses aside and stripping the hub of all it’s most valuable hardware, nearly filling our camper. Then we sped East the next morning, glad to leave this sad scene of death behind.
