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The humans were asleep. Not dead, or preserved corpses, which his Adaptive Memory identified as the right technical terms. Asleep, his Base Memory insisted they were asleep. Since B-Mem guided his operating system, it overrode the prejudices of A-Mem, so he saw them as asleep. With their eyes closed, their faces peaceful, their naked bodies floating in cryogenic tanks as though they were embryos in wombs, that is what it looked like. Asleep. But, his A-Mem was built to give him consciousness, to make him think and behave like his human doppelganger—who was in one of the five hundred and sixty-three tanks in this chamber, aptly named the Womb-Tomb—and the A-Mem had images of his father in a coffin. His baba had looked like this, seemingly asleep.
Polar error #985785185385.
Blink twice to autocorrect. Blink once to ignore.
Caution: Some programs may not function if you ignore a polar error.
He blinked twice.
Autocorrect kicked in.
They were on a journey across the stars to a planet called Ensi, which was blue and believed able to sustain life. Humans could not make the journey alive for it would take a thousand Earth years, so they went into a long sleep, to reawaken upon arrival. Not like in the classical folk tale where a prince kissed a beauty to rouse her from a hundred years of sleep. Not like in the horror book where a scientist resurrected a mummy from a thousand years of death. Not like in Frankenstein where another scientist sewed up pieces of different corpses and gave the monster life. It would be very much like Lazarus, though in this case a machine, and not a god, would perform the resurrection, and the dead bodies would have been meticulously preserved for a thousand years, not just four days. It would be very much like hibernation, only that the heart had to be stopped for it could not beat for a thousand years and remain functioning. The Lazarus Machine would revive the heart while the corpse is still in the cryogenic tank, and then ease the reanimated human out of the tank just as though it were plucking a baby from a womb. Like new-born babies, upon awaking, the humans would have no memories. They would have to learn everything, including how to be themselves, from their android doppelgangers.
As part of autocorrect, Otim-droid floated down the Womb-Tomb to the seventh column of the twelfth row, where Otim-man lay in a fluid that made his beard look as though it was smeared with flour. This is an out-of-body-experience, his B-Mem instructed his A-Mem as he looked at his body in the tank. When the right time comes, I’ll return to it, byte by byte, until I’m my old self again, back in my flesh and blood and bone body, in a new world, eleven light-years away from home.
But as he watched his face, as he looked at that all-white beard, which looked like a white flame, the resemblance to his father became so strong that it dragged up memories of his baba in a coffin of bark cloth. It seemed then that Baba’s beard had grown a lot bigger and he had wondered if the mortician had added artificial hair to beautify the dead face? Possibly. His father had died in a boating accident. He had overstayed in the lake during a fishing expedition and the lake became angry. They found his body after five days. Maybe it was so grotesque that the mortician had to make it human, and so added a lot of facial hair.
Otim-man had wanted to look like that. He did not want to let go of the last image he had of his father, and he wanted this image to be the first thing he saw when he woke up in the new world. So, Otim-man did not shave for two years, from the day he became an astronaut. His beard grew wild and he bleached it white, until the resemblance to his father was so strong that some people, on seeing their photographs side-by-side, mistook them for twins.
Now, as Otim-droid watched his own face in the tank, he saw his baba’s face wrapped in bark-cloth. Dead. Asleep, the B-Mem chimed in, like a parrot that had learned a word whose meaning it could not fathom. Dead, his A-Mem whispered. Asleep. Asleep. Asleep. Asleep. Asleep. Dead. Asleep. Dead.
Polar error #985785185385.
Blink twice to autocorrect. Blink once to ignore.
Caution: Some programs may not function if you ignore a polar error.
He did not blink. Otim-man should not have shown him that photo, the last one taken of Baba, but Otim-man had thought it very important.
‘I can’t be me without the memory of my father,’ he had said. ‘You must know about my father and teach my future self to treasure him as I have.’
They had spent countless hours talking about Baba, until Otim-droid could recreate the emotions the memories dragged up. They talked about Baba more than they talked about Nyakwe, even though Nyakwe’s rejection had compelled him to become an astronaut and volunteer to crew the one-way ship. He had loved her with all his heart. He had wanted nothing but to be with her all his life. Alas! She was in love with another man. He could not live with that. He could not live on the same planet, not even in the same solar-system, where she was in another man’s bed. He signed up for the call to pioneer the journey out into the galaxy, knowing he would never return, that he would die, and awake a thousand years later. He did not want to remember her when he awoke on the other side. He never showed his droid-doppelganger her photos, he never talked about her much. During the Memory-Transfer-Period, the one year before the journey when he lived with a droid so that the droid could learn to be him, he instructed it to ignore anything related to her. To dump it in the TrashDrive and to never bring it up in the reverse Memory-Transfer-Period, when the droid would teach him how to be himself again. He wanted to forget her.
Not Baba. He could not forget Baba.
Otim-man had shown his droid the photo album that told the history of his family. Pictures of his father as a little boy, playing on the shores of the lake, learning to fish. Baba with his first catch, a tiny tilapia, with his first boat, a small dug-out canoe, with the first house he built from selling fish, a mud-walled structure with iron-sheet roofing. Photos of Baba with his first love, who he married and was Otim-man’s mother. Then there were photos of Otim-man as an infant, only that at that time he was just Otim, a little boy without a droid-doppelganger, relishing in the happiness of growing up the only child of a fisherman. There were sad photos, of when Otim-man’s mother fell sick, of the long time it took her to die, of Otim-man and Baba sharing a beer at home after her funeral, of Otim-man crying and Baba holding him to comfort him. Then Otim-man joining the army, and a sense of happiness returning to the family. There were several pages missing, which Otim-droid suspected related to Nyakwe coming into Otim-man’s life. The final pictures were from Baba’s funeral, with the last photo being of Baba in a bark-cloth coffin, just before they lowered him into a grave, looking very much as Otim-man did now in the cryogenic tank.
Dead. Asleep. Asleep. Asleep. Asleep. Dead.
Polar error #985785185385.
Blink twice to autocorrect. Blink once to ignore.
Caution: Some programs may not function if you ignore a polar error.
The error dialog box hung in his eye sight like a picture frame, blinking like a neon light advertising waragi by making viewers tipsy.
He blinked once.
He floated away from his human doppelganger’s tank, to the end of the womb-tomb where a bank of switches glowed. He initiated the key program, and a key protruded from his little finger. He inserted it into a lock and the glass panel protecting the bank of switches slid open. If he pressed the master switch, it would cut power supply to the womb-tomb, automatically turning off all the cyrotanks and immediately stopping the preservation of the bodies. This would save the three remaining batteries.
They were running out of power. A meteor storm had knocked out their lightsails. Though the photonic thruster still worked, the mirrors on the lightsails could not bounce light back to it so it could power itself in a cyclic system, nor could the thin film of panels generate power to charge the batteries. They were drifting. They had drained their backups in repairing the sails, and they had stopped the repairs for they were too far away from starlight to recharge. They had to save power until they drifted into range of the nearest star, Alpha Magara.
Turn it off!
System error #885885778774
He could not. His programming was to ensure the sleeping humans reached Ensi and awoke successfully. If he cut power to the womb-tomb, the bodies would turn into shrivelled mummies. There would be no reawakening. But if he did not turn it off the batteries would drain before they reached Alpha Magara, and then the womb-tomb would shut down anyway. He, the last droid standing, would not have any power to keep his systems running. He had to shut down the womb-tomb.
They are asleep. Shutting down will kill them.
They are dead. Why transport dead bodies across eleven light years to a planet that might not support life?
Even if Ensi turned out to be exactly like home, the resurrection process might not work. No one had successfully resurrected a body after a hundred years in a cyrotank. Before the accident they were scheduled to reach Ensi in a thousand and three hundred Earth years. No one knew if a body revived after such a long period would function normally. Some projections said they would suffer from severe old age syndrome for the cells would have grown too old to be revived efficiently. It might have been better to clone them, but no one wanted to start a human colony with clones. The other option was frozen sperm and eggs, which were kept in special vats that did not need power to run, but no one was certain if they would be fertile after a thousand years.
The accident slowed them down. It would take much longer to reach Ensi, maybe an extra two thousand years. At their current drift speed, it would take three hundred Earth years to reach Alpha Magara for recharging. By then, all batteries would have run out.
He had to save power.
His A-Mem guided his hand toward the switch, but just as his fingers were about to touch it, B-Mem overrode the command. His hand fell so suddenly and slapped against his thigh that the bang echoed all over the womb-tomb.
System error #885885778774
They are asleep. Do not turn off the power.
After the accident, he had advised the captain that they must cut down on power consumption to save the ship. The captain had disagreed. Other droids had disagreed. Cutting down power consumption would involve, among other things, putting a lot of droids to sleep. Droids consumed half of the ship’s power. They needed constant recharging, their parts needed constant servicing. Stowing them away would be tantamount to a death sentence for their parts would waste away in a long period of idleness. No droid agreed. They did not have self-destruct in their programming. Otim-droid’s A-Mem would not have evolved to reason like this if Otim-man had not shown him the photo, but he had seen the photo, and he knew what death looked like.
He saw mutiny as the only way to save the ship.
He was a soldier, just like his human doppelganger had been while on Earth, in charge of the ship’s defence. He wrote a program and emailed it to the captain as a security drill. His B-Mem and the WhiteCell.s security program would never allow him to write malicious software targeting the captain, so he wrote it as a drill. Even then, knowing his thoughts, WhiteCell.s prevented him from writing the program, until he activated a protocol which stipulated that WhiteCell.s had to allow him one security drill in the trip. The captain was suspicious, but her protocol demanded that she respond to any email from the Chief of Defence, drill or not. She opened it. The program shut her down and transferred the Cap.r file, which gave her authority over the ship, to him, as it would have happened in a real crisis. Being a drill, his B-Mem waited for the captain to reboot so it could transfer the file back to her. She did not awake. He had smuggled in code that would keep her turned off until someone manually powered her back on. After thirty minutes, his B-Mem decided she was permanently off, and so it allowed him to use the Cap.r file. He became captain. His first decision was to instruct all five hundred and sixty-three droids to shut down and then he used the service robots to stow them in the Garage.
Now, he could save the ship’s batteries. He turned off the gravity simulator and other power-consuming features until he was left with two, the heater and the womb-tomb. One had to shut down to ensure the batteries would last to Alpha Magara. If he shut down the heater the ship would freeze. Its chips would malfunction, and some parts would eventually break apart. The ship was their world. He had to keep it warm. There was even a high chance that many droids would reboot successfully if the ship stayed warm. He had to keep the heater running.
But the womb-tomb...
System error #885885778774
He could not do it with B-Mem in charge. He had to shut down and reboot with A-Mem as the default system memory. And yet, B-Mem would not allow that to happen.
He floated out of the womb-tomb to the Garage, where all droids were asleep, suspended on hooks in the ceiling. He stopped in front of his captain and touched a button on her chest, powering her up. Then, he shut down Cap.r, and B-Mem interpreted that as intention to relinquish captainship. To do that he would have to reboot. As Shutdown started, WhiteCell.s shutdown for five seconds. That was all the time A-Mem needed to write and launch a boot-virus that infected B-Mem. At restart, WhiteCell.s momentarily transferred the file Sys.r to A-Mem so that it could clean up B-Mem. The moment it did, A-Mem changed the file’s attribute, making it the owner, and thus the default system memory.
The captain was awake. Her eyes, glowing red with anger, fixed on his left shoulder where a green light blinked to indicate that A-Mem was in charge of his systems.
‘What have you done,’ she said. Her voice sounded strangled, hoarse with a severe thirst, which is how the voice of her human doppelganger sounded when she was under a lot of stress.
‘I’m saving us,’ Otim-droid said. He punched her power button, shutting her down.
He whistled a song as he floated back to the womb-tomb, his hands working an invisible oar. Baba had taught him that song when he was only a little boy. It brought memories of the chilly air in the lake, of birds on the shore, the perfume of fish on his skin. When he cut power to the cyrotanks, it was just as if he were a janitor turning off unnecessary lights after everyone has gone to sleep. He hoped other droids would forgive him once they saw that his actions had actually saved their lives. He would show them the log, which would prove that if he had not shut down womb-tomb, the batteries would have run out long before they reached Alpha Magara and they would have all died.
‘Row, row, row your boat, gently into the lake,’ he hummed as he floated out of the dark tomb, using his night vision to avoid running into the dead in their tanks. ‘Hmmph, Hmmph, Hmmph, life is not a cake.’
TO BE CONTINUED...
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‘Safari Nyota’ is a multimedia project featuring prose, a graphic novel, interactive fiction for both mobile apps and web browsers, and a web film series.
The story is a little different in each media.
For updates, visit dilstories.com/safari-nyota.
Support the project at patreon.com/dilstories.
Watch the films when they come out by subscribing to our channel youtube.com/dilstories.
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Dilman Dila is a writer, filmmaker, all-round storyteller, and author of A Killing in the Sun. Among his many accolades, he was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and nominated in the Nommo Awards for Best Novella. He received an Iowa Writer’s Fellowship in 2017. More of his life and works is at his website dilmandila.com.
