The Vestigial Heart by Carme Torras

Author:Carme Torras
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bioethics; robotics; ethics; artificial intelligence; science fiction; research; emotion; evolution; 21st century; computer science; human mind; creativity; robots; mutation; future; prosthesis; controversy; jobs; experimentation; values; digital; privacy
Publisher: The MIT Press

19

To Celia this particular school day feels longer and more boring than usual. It seems the day will never end, and the time that Lu is coming to pick her up isn’t getting any closer.

For hours she’s resisted the temptation to tell Xis where she’s going, but in the end she’s succumbed, and her friend’s revelation that CraftER is the company her mother works at has really surprised her. What a mistake! Since she found out she hasn’t stopped begging Celia to pay close attention to everything so she can tell her about it later; she’s never been allowed to go. As far as she knows, the building is immense, and it’ll be difficult to find her, but, just in case, she told her excitedly, her mother is blonde, not very tall, this morning she was dressed in red, and her name is Sus. This has made Celia even more nervous. She doesn’t want anyone muscling in on her adventure.

She can see herself walking along beside that good-looking engineer, past a series of prodigious machines, half-finished inventions, mysteries to be uncovered … the physics of miracles, as her father would say, and Leo, perfectly kind, will show her first one, then another, he’ll explain what she has to do, answer her questions, until the crucial moment when he invites her to sit down—or maybe she’ll have to lie down?—so he can set up the devices, or put a helmet on her, or whatever. All his attention will be focused on her. She’ll feel so important once she’s contributed to technological progress!—her father would be proud—and what luck that the reliable pair of hands won’t belong to a disheveled, crazy-faced old man like the experts in her science book, but those of an attentive and slightly shy young man she is so desperate to see again.

EDUsys’s insistent demands bring her back down to earth about ten minutes before Lu is due to arrive. Finally the time has passed, but after so much whispering to her friend and creating her own distractions, she’s been reprimanded so many times that she fears her teacher might make the most of Lu’s visit to share a few of his observations. And she ends up underestimating him, as on top of the usual accusations of a lack of interest in learning and a strong resistance to letting go of old-fashioned and now pointless knowledge, he finishes with a threat: the school won’t add even one more day to the period of adaptation than, by law, it’s obligated to provide.

Plunged into a tense silence, the journey in the aero’car would have been impossible for the two of them had it not been so short. ROBul is an expert pilot and in seconds they’re hovering in front of an imposing building, that to Celia looks like a giant, golden pinecone, planted stem-side down with its scales opened up and some pine nuts still attached. It’s nice to look at, even though so much brightness is a bit blinding.

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