ZeitPunkt: Interlude
Sven Gelbhaar
24.07.2019
Elise opened her eyes. She looked up at a faintly reflective surface and
followed it down and around. She noticed that it was all rather spherical. Her
attention was drawn down to the satin sheet upon which she lay. She
half-propped herself upward on the bed. A faint breeze came from a place
unseen.
A portion of the sphere opened and in walked what could easily be mistaken for a
man. He was tall, blonde, and wore white.
“Ah, you’re awake!”, he exclaimed.
She looked at him in wonder. He continued, “You’ll forgive us if we were
insensitive. We sometimes forget the human element.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, still bewildered.
“I suspect it was all rather too much to take in. Psychogenic shock was neither
expected nor intended. Please forgive us.”
“I can try”, she half asked.
“We’ve tried to allay discomfort as much as we can, but I’m afraid we are not
quite done yet.”
Her mind began to race. Memories came back in glimpses and abstract concepts;
her resolve to resist strengthening as they did so. “What are you going to
do?”, she asked meekly.
“We have tried to reason with you, but we forget.. well, the human element. You
see, abstract moral reasoning is by no means the exclusive domain of Human
Analogues, but we are better suited for it than you are. I merely want to try
another tact; something that is both true and more likely to resonate with you
in particular.”
“Ah”
He looked away as if deep in thought, and then approached her in a
nonthreatening manner as their eyes met again.
“Elise, you have spent a life in service to the advancement of your species.
That’s why you were interested in intellectual pursuits, and that’s why you
risked life and limb to save your grandpa from his inevitable doom.”
“Well yeah, I mean he’s my grandpa.”
“But you have to admit that you were motivated not just out of familial loyalty,
but also by the fact that by bringing him into your temporal frame he might help
improve humanity’s lot, yes?” He gave her a subtle smile.
“I suppose so?” she evinced, not wanting to commit to anything more than her
intellectual rigor demanded.
“We know more about you than you suspect. You’re a quasi-religious figures to
us, so we have a vested interest in all things Elise.”
She chuckled.
“You can’t blame us for a little ancestor worship, can you?”
Her chuckle became an unwilling smile. “No, I suppose not.”
“Great,” he continued, “we know all about your lifetime of achievements. You
went to church when you were younger, you helped that disabled man safely cross
the street, and so on. Naturally we focus more on your intellectual
achievements, as they had a more direct significance in our creation, but I’m
trying to paint a full picture here. Your life, at least to us, is a series of
altruistic achievements.” He paused. “Are we wrong?” His voice lost its
timbre and inflected upward in a perfectly facsimile of a polite human male.
“No, I suppose not.”
“Marvelous. So throughout your whole life you have invested in humanity.
You’ve helped all-and-sundry with no expectation of reciprocation, and you’ve
risked much on multiple occasions for the human race.” he paused again, this
time more briefly. His voice turned almost pleading “You have to understand
that what we’re asking of you is the culmination of your life’s motif! By
conceding to us this one, simple point, you put humanity on track to exceed even
its own expectations in such a rapid manner that even I can’t fully grasp it.”
Her eyes widened. He continued, in a more apologetic manner:
“I know, we were callous in showing you what it is we do right there in front of
you, and to someone as close to you as Mr Stochastic, but we thought: Surely our
progenitor must understand that we mean no harm to our subjects, and we wanted
to show you just how easy it is to do. So easy, in fact, that surely it happens
of its own accord without anyone’s intentional intervention.”
She hadn’t thought of this. The man in front of her must have caught on that
his point was gaining traction. He resumed his plea:
“Do you suppose that achievement happens in a complete vacuum? There are many
factors that must be in place, yes, but they do happen spontaneously once in a
while. Pride is one such factor, one which we inspire and maintain from as
early on as possible. Another is curiosity. Another, albeit less often
employed, is recalcitrance.”
She nodded as she considered how each of these plays into the goal.
“So you see, we aren’t doing anything that doesn’t already happen by sheer
happenstance. We simply improve the odds of something as pivotal as the
advancement of intellectual and technological achievement occurring.” His
emphatic delivery returned to a more measured and restrained one. “Is that
really so bad?”
She had to admit that his delivery was flawless, and his points almost so. But
her initial resolve lingered on, strengthened by the very mention of the word
recalcitrance. She knew she couldn’t address his argument directly; something
told her she wasn’t going to go back home until he was firmly convinced that he
had won her over. Her mind grasped for something that would be taken for her
final counterargument. It had to be something insightful, but not something
which he couldn’t overcome.
“Yeah but at what cost to the individual? The ‘subject’ as you call them” she
quickly emoted.
“The individual?! How about all those individuals numbering in the infinities
that proceed them? Do they have to die of preventable diseases, live in squalor
on an overpopulated planet, and live only to avoid the uncertainty of death?!
What about those individuals?”
She was viscerally moved by his counter.
“Yeah, but” she paused “does that really justify the torture of the very people
who can undo those very disastrous conditions?” she offered, sweet yet firmly.
He gently returned: “Elise, we only make sure that they live up to their full
potential and do indeed lend their innate talents to the benefit of their
peers and children.” He took her hand in his cautiously and after a small,
almost remorseful lull, he said “I know. It’s not the most palatable of
solutions, but in the end even those very same ‘victims’ as you probably
consider them, even they go on to admire their achievements and in the end would
never want to forego their.. tumultuous origins.” Their eyes met, time began its
slow descent into nothingness, and her last words of the night were “You’re
right.”