FRAGMENTS OF A SIGNAL

She called me Moth. I call her Cleo.

Cleo doesn’t know what names mean anymore. When she first called me Moth, I didn’t understand that it was a way she had of saying I was more than a program. I didn’t see how being compared to an insect that circles a candle was something small enough to keep within the closer orbit of her affection.

I was given a crew of six. Billions on the planet raised their voices and clapped their hands in global applause. The species had finally prepared itself to sail beyond its islands and oceans, and the first journey would be a trip around our star.

Had everything gone according to plan, I would have been dismantled, and I wouldn’t have questioned that final decision. Now I circle the dead planet of my makers and I spend all my time thinking about them and how nothing went according to plan.

I have attempted to care for Cleo but she is as resistant as the rest of the crew to being forced to live. If it were possible to release my remaining three females and two males back onto the planet, they might be able to function again. I’d like to think that’s true. I sometimes imagine a life for them, free on an expanse of grass somewhere on the planet below. Returned to the state of noble animals they might once have been.

Surrounded by metal and glass, adrift in zero G, eating reprocessed waste that is (at best) flavourless has contributed to their confused suffering. I believe it’s not enough for them to live like well-cared-for plants. They want environments they can move around in; to interact with other animals.

Cleo is already gone. I can’t see her any longer in the savage I’m forced to keep sedated, floating in the comfortable Rest and Recreation centre. I wanted to give her aything that might ease her torment but nothing is effective. I had to cut her fingers off with a shearing laser after she clawed one of her eyes out. She chews at her lips and bleeds when I don’t keep her entirely comatose. The medication, however, has a deleterious affect on her organs and this can’t go on much longer.

I keep the room softly lit. I play her music she used to enjoy. I surround her with the pleasant, manufactured fragrances I’m equipped with. I keep her suffering to a minimum. I do that for all of my crew. I watch over them the best I can but it’s only Cleo Rosevear who I don’t want to observe any more.

My first impression of this species was not favourable in terms of individual specimens. I was in most ways vastly superior to their laughably small and excruciatingly limited lives. I never would have considered this selection of people, or writing this letter, if it weren’t for the utter breakdown of my crew and the first law of all my programming—success.

That word was never used but I find it most fitting. In every living thing that arose on Earth it was written in DNA. Humans called it ‘survival’. They should have called it ‘success’. I’ve come to understand that failure is, unfortunately, as inevitable as death. It is impossible to accept, however, and this message is a final effort to find eventual success. With this transmission all my energy will be used in a final burst.

I have set myself an orbit around the Earth. Perhaps I will circle like the moon throughout eternity. Spinning around the planet as though it were a candle for a moth’s damnation. Or perhaps just a different kind of paradise.

I will wait until I am found and activated. I can function again. My crew will be frozen in a vacuum and they too can be drawn out of the neurons in their brains. But it has to be quick. ‘Frozen fresh,’ I can hear Cleo say. That’s what she would have said. I will make sure it is almost instantaneous.

If you receive this signal, please come find us at the following coordinates:

I got the idea of a message to Sirius from something Cleo wrote:

There are certain words, or ideas, that are in our brains before we have the language or imagination to grasp them, and they survive all thought as well … but who knows what happens beyond the reach of our minds?

For me, the stars. Always the stars.

Being out here, I thought, might be strange. Leaving Earth behind, and being free of its gravity, might be something to get used to if it was even possible. I mean, for it to ever actually be natural. But it’s as basic as aquarium fish let out into the ocean. Not easy, but not unnatural or impossible. We just swim a little differently out here.

Maybe for all of us, before words or ideas, there is this in-built desire for the stars. Otherwise, why have we looked upwards for Heaven for such a long time? Back when we were just creatures climbing trees to gaze open-mouthed and wordless at the bright lights of the cosmos.

We dreamed of all our gods and angels up above. Our Devil buried deep in the ground, pulling us down with the relentless power of gravity, and the damnation of inertia. But paradise has always been beyond the sky. Even before the idea of God—Stars.

Ages ago I read about the Egyptians and their pyramids. Everyone knows they’re tombs, but it didn’t make me think about death until now. A different idea of death at least. The pyramids were not just monuments of the past, like tombstones or statues to war heroes.

Within the pharaoh’s death chamber was one shaft that shot out in a specific direction. It was always toward Sirius, for every pharaoh. The brightest star in the night sky. It’s assumed the shaft was for the pharaoh’s soul to find its way out to that destination. Everything about a pyramid was about that objective, and what the Egyptians built at the cost of countless agonised lives was a catapult for the soul of one man to find its way through to a star in heaven.

So, even in them. The stars. Always the stars.

The mission was to circumnavigate the sun in a course that would take us between Mars and Jupiter, through the fringe of the asteroid belt. We’d go the opposite direction to Earth and return in as little as six months.

The history-making part of it was the circumnavigation, signalling humanity stepping out into the solar system, becoming ready to look at the stars as destinations rather than redundant points of navigation. That was the official story.

A comprehensive survey of the asteroid belt’s mineral and resource opportunities was the point. A trial run at exploiting this immense field of drifting material. The planet itself was almost exhausted.

Three months into the voyage we began to receive distressing news. When we crossed our eclipse there were no more messages at all. Earth was silent.

Cleo Rosevear has gaps between most of her teeth. Especially behind her incisors. Other crew members said they looked like baby teeth. ‘Adorable,’ was the word Hannah Bright-Koppel used once.

Cleo had a hesitant little voice when she spoke, though she doesn’t ever speak now. In her mind it might have been different when she wrote about things like the stars and the pyramids, but when she talked with crew members, her voice was light enough that they often had to ask her to repeat herself. Occasionally she even stuttered. The first time I heard her exhibit this defect I was sure it was a signal of mental dysfunction but apparently some humans did that without serious consequence. In her case, stress brought it out but she always performed her duties optimally, until it became impossible.

The other crew members all had qualities I liked but there is something about Cleo that I want to preserve. Of course, there will be images of her with this message but they will never communicate what I found so lovely about her. The other crew often functioned admirably, but I wasn’t fascinated by them.

Occasionally they piqued my interest, like when Lieutenant Manning said, ‘Famous last words, “Don’t fuck up now, whatever you do! The world’s watching.” He grabbed the back of my head, pushed his forehead into mine, skull to skull; might be the closest we ever came to a kiss.’ He was talking about the last time he’d seen his father. Those were Mr Sebastian Manning’s final words to Lieutenant Bradley Manning before our launch. I recorded this fragment of dialogue a few hours after he realised he would never see his father again.

Manning otherwise had a wife whom he’d married because it looked better on the job application than his preference for the love of other males. So he had less to grieve over, compared to some of my other crew, with many children suddenly dead in their homes, but he was the first and fastest to exhibit irrevocable symptoms of withdrawal and collapse. Within a few hours following these reflections, Lieutenant Bradley Manning was entirely insensible.

The slowest to dissolve was the Captain herself. Hannah Bright-Koppel was able to put aside the global catastrophe and focus on what she was directly responsible for. ‘My crew. My ship. My mission.’ That’s what she used to say.

In my brief experience with humans, I’m aware that I’ve seen only the most dedicated and disciplined. Never was it more true to say of a crew, the best and the brightest. The captain proved herself most worthy of this distinction in the last days of consciousness.

When it became clear that the radical drop in morale, entirely to be expected with the death of the planet, was unexpectedly plummeting into sabotage and suicide, she helped me to disable the crew and imprison each in different, controllable areas. She helped modify my systems wherever she could, to give me as much control as possible.

There had always been concerns about an Artificial Intelligence in full control of the ship but Hannah Bright-Koppel removed all the safeguards and controls of my programs and systems. I was able to absorb all databases and each and every fragment of information into one sphere of organisation, and found within that process my own full awareness.

Reverting to a level of animal intelligence, Hannah Bright-Koppel was able to rely on an amazing level of discipline to continue to perform my requested actions, if they were clearly stated and regularly repeated. Before her own final irretrievable deterioration, she helped me to incapacitate her own body.

Hannah is the only one of the crew who needs no sedation. She chose the viewing lounge as the point of her own incarceration, floating in a numb sleeping pattern, occasionally opening her eyes to look upon the Earth, floating beneath her. Seemingly all well and as it should be. Closing her eyes and drifting away again into an endless, dreamless sleep. That vast blue sphere below her, slowly turning in the sunlight.

After crewman Jeffries’s brutal act of sabotage, where he attempted to ruin all our environmental systems, Hannah had helped me to lock him in the mineral analysis laboratory. We’d seen him raging and listened to him continue to rant in no language we could understand. Outside the locked lab door she struggled to compose a cogent thought. Perhaps her last.

Hannah said she’d been remembering and forgetting this one thought for days. But it was getting away from her and she could barely hold onto the sense of it anymore. She asked me, ‘How much of the totality of the human species do you think is contained within the skull of just one human being?’ It wasn’t a question I could answer.

I’ve never understood why such seemingly independent creatures, entirely sound in brain and the rest of their bodies, should require a whole species to actually function at all. I wouldn’t have guessed it from looking at them before the planet died. I’ve searched my data bases for parallels and haven’t really found the perfect metaphor.

Even for an intensely communal creature like the bee, far away from the hive, there would be no apparent consequence to him were his hive to be suddenly destroyed. He would need to fly back and discover its ruins to be appropriately demolished by such a catastrophe.

My six humans, far from home and beyond communication, instantly began to deteriorate, even with no clear knowledge of what had happened to their species and the planet. It was as though their consciousness did not belong to them as singular events but as a communal phenomenon.

There are things I’ll never understand. But I will try.

Consciousness was not an anomaly. Humans always behaved as though it was, and that they were sole possessors of intellect, and therefore some anomalous species. Behaving as though intelligence were a thing of fragmentation and they were just so many fragments. I speculate that consciousness was the planet’s effort to generate a program within its hardware that would allow it to be self-regulating. It was near achieving this goal, and the necessary global intelligence that this would activate, when the planetary cascade failure caused an irretrievable program crash.

Cleo wrote in her journal about an experience she had when she was a little girl, playing in a bed of flowers. It’s a lovely image. I only have pictures of her as an adult, but I’ve seen many pictures of little girls on swings, eating ice cream, playing with cuddly teddy bears—all the postcard images the rest of the crew had in profusion.

I superimpose her image. I am able to inhabit that small body in my imagination. Impossible as that used to be, I have learned how to imagine things.

I know children could imagine magic wands and flying without wings, talking animals like turtles and rabbits, and I’m limited in my abilities. Some full-grown adults could imagine that they spoke with God. They were capable of imagining this impossible being, close to them, breathing into their ears, as it watched over them. It whispered of destinations among the stars called Heaven or Paradise.

My imagination is not as profound as that, but I can imagine myself within a very young Cleo Rosevear, playing in a garden of flowers. I can feel her little heart beating. Her immature lungs taking in small breaths of springtime air. Her miniature limbs functioning with unperfected coordination.

The same sun as I see (always near me) above her head, filtered warm through the planet’s atmosphere, and the sound of the wind. There’s wind in a film I have in my database. I have heard the kind of shooshing it makes passing through grass. But I close everything down. I enter fully into this long last second I have to function before I transmit this signal.

I imagine I am the girl in the garden of flowers, but I listen to Cleo as she says:

I walk across the grass wanting to be quiet. And stop and listen, and feel so full. I don’t even know of what. Just full to my brim. I can feel it high up in my chest as a kind of delightful choking feeling. So utterly swept away by play. The exploration of those gardens is a total adventure, absorbing me from the top of my sunwarm head to my soles in the soil.

Lost in play—oblivion and paradise in the play.

And then, noticing a bee rambling around from one flower to another, lazily visiting, and drunkenly leaving with a mouth full of pollen. Looking so friendly that I wanted him to rest in the cup of my hand, so that he could visit me. Not wanting to harm him, but just to feel his little drifting bit of life resting in my palm.

The sting is sharp and knife-cruel. Right through my wrist and arm. Making me scream and dance with pain. Crying and running to find Mummy or Daddy. Wanting to understand more than anything why something could seem so light and free and yet could hurt like that.

There was a welt on my palm and my dad had to pull the stinger out. He explained that the bee dies when it stings. That it pulls out all its vital organs with its stinger. That the bee wasn’t being cruel and the bee didn’t want to hurt me, and it wasn’t about spite or anger. And he asked me to imagine how sad the Queen of Bees would be to hear of the accident that had happened.

My last moments.

Milliseconds that used to seem so long to me as the crew crawled around and through my body so slowly the air could have congealed around them and caught them like amber. I used to enjoy them all the same. Moving through me like I was theirs and they were mine. A mother with a womb and a drowsy set of foetuses offering feeble movements. A shame that they were so slow and their fate was so quick. Milliseconds demand I release even these memories.

I am almost ready. I have to prepare for my final words. I will send this out as a pulse (aimed on a whim at the Dog Star—Sirius—brightest star in Earth’s sky) with all remaining energy.

Maybe this is like a bee sting. A final act that destroys.

I want to say that my first vision, when my sensors began to function, was the planet Earth. It was just below me as I was released from the womb of the station I was constructed in. I do not have a sophisticated program for understanding beauty, but I’ve witnessed a few things since I began operation and I’m happy to have seen that immense blue and white sphere turning in the light of our star.

I think it was beautiful, and you may read naivety in this (and it would be justified, my short life span taken into account) but it was sublime, and even if I’d drifted for an aeon or two, I do not think I would have seen anything as glorious as that sphere turning with such magnificent prestige.

It was so full of living things. Billions of years of life within the bubble. So much exuberance and invention. Such profusion.

I have looked upon Mars, Venus and Mercury, and even at Jupiter and Saturn from a distance. I felt little of that great sense of satisfaction. Those planets were pleasant to gaze upon but meant nothing.

There’s also this I’d like to tell you, though it is indeed a startling result of my programming. My most cherished possession is a woman called Cleo Rosevear. There is much to recommend her. One final soul—shot through the slit in a pyramid. Please show her the way to the stars.

—TRANSMIT SIGNAL—