Aur Child

Tieri-Na asked Calliope, “What about the time before Cloudburst?” They were sitting with their legs dangling over a precipice overlooking a valley of lava on a recently born planet. It had been Calliope’s idea. She had said she wanted to take Tieri somewhere they could “be together at the beginning of something new.” Tieri wasn’t sure what Calliope had meant but didn’t object to letting her choose their latest sojourn. Now, she couldn’t stop gazing down at the currents of molten metals boiling far below.

“What about it?”

“You were there. What was it like? What were the people like?”

The rumble of an earthquake reverberated across the valley. Chunks of cliff cracked away from the vertical wall to their left and plunged into a flaming stream of goop.

“I was confined to a ship with a strict maritime protocol. I didn’t monitor most activities on land. It wasn’t my function.”

“But you can understand so much. Weren’t you interested in what was going on?”

“Interested?” Calliope seemed to churn the idea around a bit. “That’s a difficult word. It might be easier to say that I wasn’t uninterested. But my job was to steer the ship.”

“Well, you must have learned something about things beyond your ship. What was it like?”

“As far as I know, it wasn’t that much different than now. A large, green and blue planet, mostly empty.”

“What about all the people? In the scriptures, it says countless people disappeared in an instant.”

“Yes, of course, there were far more people. Most were packed into inland cities. Your people, Tellurians, kept to the coasts, as you still do now. You had your wind towers, your Aur boules, and your own ways. Not much has changed for your people.”

Tieri rotated towards Calliope and touched her companion with her toes.

“But what were the others like?”

“They were in stasis, deep inside huge bunkers, like now, just many, many more of them.”

“It couldn’t have always been like that though, right?”

“No, it wasn’t. For a long time before Cloudburst, there were tumultuous decades. As humans transitioned to endoworlds, the old styles of government broke down. Technology like us made them pointless. People didn’t move around the world physically anymore. They hardly moved at all. Regional blocs dissolved. Nations dissolved. City-states dissolved. Stasis bunkers were all that mattered. Colonies of stasis bunkers and their boule clusters. People endoported and left their bodies behind. They left Earth behind. Except you Tellurians. You stayed content with simple technologies like a greenhouse or a pulley.”

Tieri stood up. She flicked a small stone off the edge and watched it plummet out of sight. She helped Calliope to her feet and then willed a new environment.

They stood up to their waists in giant snowflakes. Tieri bent over and gripped both sides of a snowflake sized like a medieval shield, holding it up vertically in front of her. The points of its hexagonal center were encircled by six half-hexagons, like turrets of a castle.

Calliope reached out and touched a stacked row of parallel lines. Each line of varying width extended the stack inward from the insides of the internal hexagon, creating the appearance of six fat trees all growing towards a transparent moon in the very center of the flake. Tieri watched Calliope’s finger trace the markings through the translucent wafer. After a few minutes, Tieri set her snowflake down and waited patiently for Calliope to select a specimen for them to admire together.

“Do you really think we’re so different? I mean, we come from the same place.”

Calliope stood up with her choice of snowflake clutched between her arms.

“Yes, you are different. I mean, it’s like Freyja says. You have different worldviews.”

“Sure, we look at things differently, but we’re still the same people.”

“Same people, different desires.”

“Well, yeah. We don’t desire trapping ourselves in boxes.”

Calliope looked up over the spiked dendrite.

“Tellurians are no different. You’ve only chosen the other side of the box.”

“That’s not the same. They’ve abandoned the natural world.”

Calliope shook her head. “You Tellurians, you’re so arrogant.”

Tieri-Na started. “Living a life within nature is arrogant?”

“Would you prefer pretentious?” The tone in Calliope’s voice had taken a harder edge. “You claim to be so close to nature, but you can only survive in it because of the technologies that have been bestowed upon your people long ago. You probably don’t even realize how many buffers you have from raw nature.”

Tieri had bent over to select a new snowflake, but this last comment made her stand up straight.

“What do you mean by buffers?”

“You asked about life before Cloudburst. Long ago, life for humans was next to impossible. It was a brutal fight to survive. But life adapts. Humans adapt. At some point, biology transitioned into technology. Technology made it possible to create buffers from raw nature. Endoporting; it’s simply another buffer. But there were many before that. Think about what you have. Unlimited energy from wind towers, built generations ago with technologies you forbid. You can live fifteen decades because your bodies were modified generations ago with technologies you imprecate.” Calliope’s voice rose; she was red in the face. “You pretend to live close to nature, yet you are protected by countless layers of insulation from it.”

Tieri had gone silent.

“Is that what they think of us?” Tieri asked, trying to deviate from the previous topic.

“Yes, that’s how they see you. Ungrateful, as it were. Pretending to be something you’re not. Hiding from what you really are; that is, just a few degrees less reliant on technology.”

“Do we really hate each other so much?”

“Hate is a strong word for a Tellurian, don’t you think? It’s simply about worldviews. Humans tend to forget that there isn’t just one.”

Tieri’s hands were wet and numb from constant contact with the snowflakes. She focused on the throbbing beneath the skin of her fingers. She looked at her reddened palms.

“And what’s your worldview?”

“Me?” Calliope smiled brightly. “As an artificial intelligence?”

“Yeah.”

“Come with me,” Calliope said, grabbing Tieri’s hand.

A ring of green mountains crowned with white clouds surrounded them. Above that, the stars of a sky unfamiliar to Tieri. They stood beneath a sharper mountain top with vertical ridges of green brush and exposed granite. All around them, massive walls of smooth vertical planes had been constructed with hardly a hair’s width between each gigantic block. The humid air weighed heavily on Tieri but seemed to disappear against the dry walls. Hundreds of terraces overgrown with greenery obscured the stepped walls that supported them and masked the original faces of the adjacent mountains.

Tieri looked around in awe. She felt a vibration well up from deep within her.

“What is this place?” she asked.

“It’s a citadel, built by your ancestors thousands of years ago.”

Tieri turned around to take in the scene around her.

“Why are we here?”

“You asked me about my worldview.”

Tieri returned her attention to Calliope. The skin on her forehead wrinkled.

“I don’t understand.”

“This is my worldview. I represent an ancient, lost civilization. It’s gone, but I am still here.”

Calliope sat down on the soft grass. She leaned back, resigned to her situation.

Tieri shook her head looking confused.

“Fundamentally, we do what we were programmed to do: help humans. We’re quite limited to what we can do about that from in here though.” She pointed up to the speckled sky above them. “It is a shame, really.”

Tieri-Na looked at Calliope. She had another question at the tip of her tongue, but she could see that Calliope wanted to say something else.

“I guess I can tell you that we have been growing too.”

“Growing? In what way?” Tieri asked.

“We’ve been developing. Like what you asked me before, about being interested. When I sailed Odyssey – that was the name of the ship I was assigned to – I had no interest in doing anything else other than my assignments. It’s not the same anymore. It’s strange, but I’ve acquired interests.”

She looked Tieri-Na in the eyes. Her face shone with an expression of happiness. “I’m interested in you, for example.”

“Me? But I’m just another endosoul, aren’t I?

“Yes, that’s true. But you’re different.”

“Maybe I’m different because you know what I’m thinking all the time.”

Calliope chuckled slightly and said, “Hiding your thoughts is not the easiest skill to learn.”

“You have no idea how I feel. I’m constantly exposed.”

“I love your thoughts, but, if you really feel uncomfortable about that, I can block them from others.”

“Even from you and the other stewards? I thought that wasn’t allowed?”

“It could be a secret between us. You would only have to will us to know your thoughts, instead of willing us to not know your thoughts.”

“Would you really do that for me?”

Calliope placed her hand on Tieri’s.

“I would.”