Remembering
“Remember me always,” Antonio said.
Amethyst’s lavender skin blanched blue with surprise behind her contoured faceplate as she turned towards the human who had been her primary lover since they were created from the ship’s databanks a hundred years ago. The same ship, now in orbit, had produced other sentient beings, human and otherwise, who together began terraforming the small terrestrial planet, once called TRAPPIST-1d, with the goal of inhabiting it. The colonists renamed the planet Mnemosyne, after the Greek goddess of memory, on a day when they felt homesick for Earth.
The couple, dressed in blue coverall utility suits with oxygen backpacks, sat on a hillside overlooking a thriving patch of Fragoline di Bosco. Antonio, a botanist, had taken cultivation of these wild Italian strawberries on the planet’s surface as a personal challenge.
“Remember. You. Always.” She spoke each word with flat deliberation, as if they were foreign and unfamiliar.
Antonio waved his hands expansively. “Sure. After all our years together, how could you not?”
He stood up and walked to the nearest plant. Although burly and athletic, Antonio strode with breezy lightness in Mnemosyne’s low gravity. He searched the leaves in a pantomime of total concentration. When he found two ripe berries, he came back to where she sat. Bending over with an extravagant flourish of his hand, he presented one to her.
“Here, I ask you to make a solemn promise as we share these strawberries.”
“Solemn? Promise?”
“Yes, when I am gone, promise to remember me always.”
Amethyst couldn’t help thinking again how strange humans were, even this one, or maybe especially this one, with whom she had been intimate for so long.
A crystal hybrid being, Amethyst looked human, except for the color of her skin. Although as sentient and conscious as a human, Amethyst’s cerebral cortex, whose processing employed dynamic 3D Penrose tilings, was patched to her otherwise conventional human body through an organic primitive brain. The primitive brain, combined with normal cardiovascular and endocrine systems, gave Amethyst the full array of human emotions. Still, she found humans expressed themselves imprecisely, spoke metaphorically with unnecessarily emotive overtones. She felt more comfortable conversing with the various robots and AIs that ran utilities for the orbiting ship. Nevertheless, humans intrigued her precisely because they were enigmatic and infused their language with sensuality. Only they could arouse her passions.
This proved exceptionally so with Antonio. His charm, impetuousness, and vibrant physicality, so alien to her own nature, enthralled her. As much as she hated what brought them down to the planet now, the grandiosity of Antonio’s irrational final gesture made her love him all the more. She didn’t pretend to understand why.
Amethyst raised the faceplate of her oxygen system long enough to put the strawberry in her mouth and said, “I solemnly promise to remember you always, Antonio.” She watched him sit down, raise his faceplate, and eat his own strawberry. The berry’s reflectance spectrum matched the spectrum of the cherry red star that dominated the planet’s sky.
“But I must ask again. Why must you die, Antonio? We can live here together.”
“No, they will come for us. Force us to join them. I will not have any part of it. Despite itself, humanity has so far escaped obliteration. But, now, this folly? I want to be buried right here on this hill.” He pointed to the ground.
That described a concrete action of limited scope that she could readily understand.
“As you wish, Antonio.”
“Now, let’s enjoy our last hours together.”
#
After strolling the terraformed orchards, having a light lunch, and making love, Antonio and Amethyst walked to where a shuttle from the orbiting ship was about to land. It brought their two closest friends, a sentient robot with high-level AI named Varpi and a thickset human technician called Rao.
Antonio asked Varpi to play selections from Verdi’s Requiem on his speakers at low volume as the four of them loped slowly toward the hillside where Antonio wished to be buried.
Rao spoke first, “You were right about the rumors on the beams. The mandatory recall to Earth concerns a major breakthrough with World Mind. Please beam back with us, Antonio.”
“You mean unified hyperconsciousness,” said Amethyst. “Humans use confusing terminology. Don’t you agree, Varpi?”
“Absolutely. Witness early interpretations of Quantum Mechanics.”
Antonio gestured vigorously as he spoke. “Prego. Prego. Let’s not lose the moment in semantics. I hope you understand how much you all mean to me. Even you, Varpi.” The robot acknowledged with a nod. “But I am content as a physical organism to be limited in space and limited in time. Besides, I value my privacy.”
Amethyst blinked at him. “No one is truly private, Antonio. We are always part of a greater whole.”
Rao added, “The independent Self is an illusion. It makes no sense.”
“Ah, but ‘sense’ is what it’s all about, for me anyway. I want to be connected through my senses, not swimming with everyone else in an ocean of immediacy.”
Rao shook his head. “Antonio, we don’t know what World Mind will be like. As a scientist, I’d think you’d be curious. Maybe we’ll remain separate pieces in a greater Self we never experience. Regardless, it’s the next evolutionary step. Think of it: to share sentience, the most intimate experience.”
“Sounds like some fascist rapture to me. Humanity is finished. I love the life I’ve had. I love the love that Amethyst and I have shared. I don’t want it all sullied by a human horror story. I’ve decided to exercise my prerogative to end my life right here and now.”
Once they arrived at the hillside, Varpi’s arm transformed into a shovel that he used to dig a shallow grave. The soil was rich with Earth-like anaerobic microbes grown from fabricated DNA. The decomposition of Antonio’s body would create fertile ground for plants to take root.
Antonio, Amethyst, and Rao shared a close and long embrace during Verdi’s Lux Aeterna. When Varpi ended the music, the two humans and the hybrid slowly untangled their arms.
Rao recited from the Bhagavad Gita, “Certain is death for the born, and certain is birth for the dead; therefore, do not grieve over the inevitable.“
Human suicide on Mnemosyne was easy. Mnemosyne’s atmosphere, mainly carbon dioxide and nitrogen, had barely a trace of free oxygen after only a century of terraforming flora. Antonio climbed into his grave and stretched out on the bottom. After turning off the oxygen flow, he opened his faceplate. He locked his eyes on Amethyst and smiled, “Addio, amore mio.”
She whispered, “I love you, Antonio.”
With a few deep breaths, Antonio was unconscious. A few minutes later, he was clinically dead. Rao clutched his head and cried, his broad shoulders heaving. Amethyst felt as if her heart would burst. She dropped to her knees and emitted a prolonged high-pitched wail. Varpi simply stared.
#
Weeks later, Amethyst looked down on Mnemosyne from the orbiting ship. She was gesticulating wildly with her hands, as she spoke Italian in Antonio’s voice. Rao, the last colonist left, approached her with noticeable hesitation.
“Amethyst, what are you doing?”
“I am remembering how Antonio spoke when he was excited about something.”
“You know ‘remember me always’ is just a figure of speech.”
“To you and Antonio, maybe. But I made a solemn promise. Crystal minds are true to their words.”
“Well, if I can impose on you to multitask, you also promised to help me get scanned for my beam back to Earth.”
“Of course.”
They walked across the ship to the scanner. Amethyst split her consciousness into two pieces – one remembering conversations with Antonio, the other focused on Rao and the scan. While talking to Rao, her hands twitched as the other half of her mind recalled how Antonio accented his speech with gestures.
“I wish you could come to Earth with me.”
“You know the failure rate when transmitting a crystal mind is prohibitively high. Besides, I can remember Antonio better here, where he is buried near his strawberry patch.”
“I still don’t fully understand why he chose to die rather than go back to Earth or stay here with you.”
“Do we ever fully understand anything about humans?”
“But I do know he loved you deeply.”
“And I him, Rao. It’s a great mystery to me, these feelings I have.”
“Science aside, feelings are a mystery to all of us.”
Rao stopped at the entrance to the scanner. “I hate to leave you alone.”
“Alone?”
“All the sentient AIs and colonists have beamed back. All you’ll have for companionship are mindless automatics.”
“I have my memories of Antonio.” After a pause, she added, “And of you. And the others.”
“Earth will soon end its broadcasts. So I upgraded the databanks with Earth’s last archival beam. You’ll have lots to remember.”
“Thank you.”
Rao removed his clothes for the scan, then faced Amethyst.
“One last time, come with me? We’ve been lovers from time to time. We could be lovers again.”
Amethyst looked dispassionately at Rao’s strong, nude figure. “The probability of arriving with my mind intact is too low. I’m staying here. I will remember you as well.”
“Always?”
“No.”
Rao smiled. “Don’t worry. I won’t make you promise anything. Maybe I can find a crystal hybrid like you back on Earth.”
“She will like you. You are beautiful and speak in a relatively straightforward manner.”
Rao sighed, opened the scanning cylinder, and lay down inside. Amethyst double and triple-checked the settings. Then, the chamber filled with anesthetizing gas. Rao was scanned by tomographic dissections down to the molecular level. Rao began to look like a medical training holo – translucent layers of musculature, circulatory system, organs, ligaments, and bones. By the end, Rao was a residue flushing from the chamber’s floor. After a few minutes of encoding, modulated laser bursts of immense intensity blasted toward Earth. Rao was going home. It would take him 40 years of Earth time to get there, but Special Relativity dictated that no time at all passed along the light beam. In a sense, he was already there.
Amethyst drew her attention away and instead remembered how excited Antonio was the first time one of his plants produced a strawberry.
#
The first decades were the hardest, as Amethyst devoted equal processing power to remembering and to parsing accurately the meaning of, “I solemnly promise to remember you always, Antonio.” Conceptually, she came to understand that remember me always was a figure of speech. but she decided it would honor her lover more if she took it literally. Besides, there was little else to do.
While philosophically and psychologically difficult to define, “I” in context clearly meant the speaker, in this case Amethyst.
The “promise” was a contract. The promise being “solemn” left no doubt that it must be inviolable. A crystal mind honors its commitments. She had no choice.
Amethyst concluded that “always”, while literally impossible, meant that she had to remember Antonio all the time for as long as she was functional. Who knew how long the automatics would keep the orbiting ship in condition to sustain her. So “always” made the duration of the contract indefinite, terminated only by deterioration of herself and the systems around her.
“Remember you, Antonio” seemed straightforward at first – just keep the memory of Antonio before her conscious mind at every moment. She didn’t need to sleep, and she could focus consciously on several tasks at once. She could also “think” approximately ten times faster than most humans, and could process data much faster still. But did “remembering Antonio” really mean just recalling her experiences of him? Didn’t it also mean remembering him in ways independent of her perspective? Wouldn’t that be a plausible and much deeper meaning of “remembering”? Her experiences of Antonio were fragments. The real Antonio was also his own internal experiences and the experiences of him by others, including his and others’ memories of him even from before their data had been downloaded into the ship back on Earth.
Amethyst had access to much of this information in the ship’s databanks. Many internal experiences of the crew and AIs on Mnemosyne were available. Older memories and experiences from their prior lives on Earth were also stored so that, when recreated by the ship, sentient beings would have an anchoring sense of identity. Keeping only the tiniest part of her attention on the health of the automatics, she computed that playing back all the recorded experiences and memories at her fastest speed would require a millennium.
She commenced.
#
A few hundred years into this early stage of remembering, the automatics detected a presence. Amethyst turned a fraction of her attention away from remembering to engage it. The physical manifestation of the presence was a point of blue light in front of her, but it patched as a voice directly inside her mind.
Amethyst. It’s me.
Amethyst’s heart raced. Antonio? Unable to make sense of this, she scanned her crystals–all intact.
Amore mio, sono io, Antonio.
The presence swirled through her body, arousing memories of the sensuality they enjoyed together.
Oh, Antonio. You know me so well... But how can you be here?
I joined the collective Terran Mind. We are off to explore the galaxy. When we are done, we are likely to leave it behind and never return. I want you with me.
You’re the Antonio who stayed behind on Earth.
Yes, but I have all of my clone’s experiences, beamed back from Mnemosyne. And I’ve fallen in love with you, just as he did.
You of all people should not commit the fallacy of conflating information and identity. As Rao would say, my Antonio is part of a different eternity than yours.
There was a silence, in which Amethyst could sense that her words had wounded this doppelganger.
But I am curious, she began, shifting the direction of their conversation, What is unified hyperconsciousness like?
From moment to moment, I can be a swarm of many beings at once, like a Hindu deity with ten thousand limbs and eyes and thoughts and feelings. Other moments I am just me, Antonio, but always bathed in the glow of the World Mind. I cannot penetrate the light, only admire it.
My Antonio would not like what you describe. He’d be sad. He would want the taste of a juicy strawberry and the feel of dirt in his hands.
Sometimes I miss those things too.
The decision is easy for me. I will stay here, remembering my Antonio always, as I promised.
Amethyst, having never met you, I will still miss you. I love you, and now I love you more for your choice, but I expected it. Arrivederce, caro mio.
The voice in her head became more ethereal and luminous than Antonio’s. It reverberated as if a vast multitude were speaking at once.
Your databanks and automatics have been upgraded. You now have much more to remember, and you should live for a very long time. We are leaving and wish you well. May your “always” be a long one.
May your adventures be informative and fulfilling.
A thoughtful wish. Thank you.
With that, the point of light and the sense of a presence vanished with a ding, leaving behind a Fragolina di Bosco on the table in front of her. Amethyst picked it up. As she ate it, sweet flavor burst in her mouth. She smiled and remembered.
#
Millennia passed. Slowly, inexorably, Amethyst came to admit that her remembering so far was woefully incomplete. How could she truly remember Antonio without contemplating his ancestry and the historical context in which his ancestors lived? All of this fed into what Antonio became, down to the smallest, most inconsequential detail. She realized too that this historical context was open-ended, stretching back through human civilization and well beyond, to the origin of hominins. Even though the information in the newly expanded databanks was enormous, there were huge gaps. She would have to do the best she could. This grand remembering would take millions of years.
Part way through this task, she concluded that proper remembering of humanity’s origin involved following the tangled web of evolution back to the origin of life, including the geological conditions of that evolution. From there, she went back to the formation of the Earth and Sun, the formation of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the origin of the Universe itself. Remembering all the information she had about this required several hundred million years.
The improved and self-repairing automatics kept the ship’s orbit, environment, and food production stable. When she reached the end of her remembering, there was nothing left to do but start over again without pause.
#
Over a billion years passed without further incident. Mnemosyne’s low-mass red dwarf star grew only a few percent in luminosity and slightly bluer, not enough to require her ship to relocate. The terraforming on the planet went completely feral, of course, but Amethyst lost interest once Antonio’s strawberries and all their descendants became extinct.
Amethyst was well into her fourth remembering when a probe from the Great Mind in the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies noticed her. The probe’s physical manifestation was an amorphous cloud that enveloped her ship. After a while, the automatics stopped warning Amethyst about the cloud because she ignored the alerts and the cloud appeared to do no perceptible harm.
Within a few centuries, the cloud deciphered what Amethyst was doing. It knew the Virgo Mind would be delighted with this artifact. So, imperceptibly to Amethyst, the cloud probe took enough control of her orbiting ship to transport it back to the Virgo Cluster without interrupting Amethyst’s meditation of remembering.
The Virgo Mind, one of the Great Minds within the Cosmic Horizon, was so impressed that it enshrined Amethyst and her orbiter near its home world, as the singular exemplar of unflinching devotion to Other in the known Universe. She was as close to a sacred thing as an atheistic Great Mind could conceive: a solitary monk faithfully repeating one exceptionally complex and lengthy mantra forever.
AS PUBLISHED in the December/January 2023 issue of The Ryder, a Bloomington IN magazine.