Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 9, December 2014 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bastion Publications
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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I am sitting at the bottom of the fishwell. Holding my breath. Weighted by stone as the divers of Greece. My heartbeat is heavy, hollow, deep. It is the sound of the sturgeon beating its tail against the ground as it spawns. It is the sound of a dried log, the resonant dripping of waste through thick silica pipes. A familiar flame kindles in my chest, fueled equally by a fatigued diaphragm and the primeval fear of drowning.

How do you convince an AI program that you are the messiah? No miracles are required, thankfully. Being messiah doesn’t exactly work that way, not on the Ark, in any case.

We travel 500 million kilometers every year. The Ostrich Stars are still some 200,000 years away. You can get an awful lot of potential messiahs cranked out by the germination chambers in that timespan.

Or, you could develop a culture. You could learn and change and grow. There is no telling what the many could do together, what marvels they could reveal, what secrets they could unravel. You could become something bigger, something greater.

Then finally I feel the weakness in my legs, the black dots flickering at the edges of my vision, and I kick up off the bottom, reaching up towards the light. Golem is waiting when I surface, as always. I take a moment to catch my breath before asking, floating on my back on the surface of my mikveh.

“Golem, what if you could speed up Ark Timshel? Would you do that?”

“That would depend on the consequences.” He runs his fingers through the grass that grows right up against the edge of the fishwell.

“Do you think you have a way to speed up the Ark?”

“Do you think I’m capable of finding one?” He turns and stares at me, and slumps into the strange posture he uses while accessing the ship’s memory. “Possible. You have been clever. None of the other boys ever came to the fishwells at all.”

“Exactly.” I wiped water out of my eyes. “None of us Timshel boys are the same, Golem! Think about all the clever things a whole lot of us could think up.”

“We do not have the facilities aboard to support population expansion.”

“There’s no need for new births, is there? The expansion can’t occur if all the bodies are coming out of the germination chambers.”

“The sons of Adam are in a constant state of expansion.”

“Well, that’s not true. They aren’t right now, are they?”

“I suppose not.”

“And besides, what if we found a new way to travel? Why have we forbidden progress? Why not stretch our technology and our knowledge? Why not learn and so grow closer to HaShem?”

“A man may learn for seventy years and at the end die a fool, Mendel. It is too dangerous. More than anything else, the Ark needs stability.”

“Is there any truth in dreams, Golem?” A change in tack never hurts.

He nods. “In the Berachot, it says that a person dreams at night what he thinks about by day. There are always kernels of truth in the stuff of the imagination.

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