Art Bébé says, 'Fade in:'
LASH IT!
From East 23rd, they make the turn onto the FDR express eway. This close to the wall and East river, the wind stronger, and the fall of pollutants heavier, they would need to take extra care. Just as well that she has relinquished control back to Miko, she better trusted to be sensible. Their goal is the Lower East Side pump station. One of her favorite stomping grounds. She smiles at the interesting reference. It is a phrase from a much earlier age. Stamping down an area to bed down. Later any area where one frequently returned to. And so she had. This would be only her third visit to the pump station, yet already a place of habit, where she is comfortable and finds meaning. She checks the map. They are almost at the eway turnoff leading to the pump station maintenance track, yet she opens fresh windows on her data goggles to resume her studies.
‘Bébé, Lower East Side pump station entry point, one minute.’
She breaks off from her current exercise in probability theory, closing the page, and opens a fresh page concerned with particle physics. Something has come to her.
‘Five seconds to the boom gate, Bébé.
‘Cloak and engage lift jets, Miko. Let’s jump this baby,’ she answers, not looking up, keeping at her studies.
The prohibited area warning sign comes into clear view. Miko cloaks, and then engages the lift jets, the rear suspension compresses, the front forks extend, and they are off. An easy jump. Once over the gate, the maintenance tract winds down to the massive pump station and parking area. The parking area is sparse and dimly lit, the pump station, largely featureless, ringed by a first story walkway and door for maintenance access. Huge, steam-driven pistons operate inside, pumping water from the flooded East River, regulating the canal flow on the island at this particular junction. A cloud of glistening steam hangs overhead, vented from the station’s many chimney stacks, they reaching as high as the concrete columned express eway overhead, and the steam only adding to the night’s humidity and general wetness. They make their way to the curb at the far side of the parking area. At a stop by the curb, Miko lowers the bike stand, simultaneously retracting the data cables from Bébé’s spine, and going on to say, ‘Bébé, you picked a fine night for this!
‘Not exactly picked, Miko,’ Bébé answers, but quickly stopping herself. She really did not want to get into this. It took her back to the garage. She had not fully explained herself to Miko then. The psychological was to complex, so much of it tied in to the existence of free will, as if it even existed, and the more she said now, the more she would open up the debate again just when much of the cortical firestorm within her has dissipated, brought on by the adrenalin rush of the ride, and just being in this place that she’d selected as so special, that she didn’t want to ignite a second storm by once more deliberating her existence as a puppet. She continues, thinking of a way to answer Miko without directly continuing on her account, and saying, ‘How long was I the last time, Miko? About 40 minutes?’ And here of course she knew the exact time, she had already retrieved it from her memory. She was just making conversation.
‘Forty-two minutes and twenty-five seconds to be exact, Bébé. But you know this!’
Never try and outsmart an AI, how many times did she have to tell herself. ‘Ok, I’ll be about thirty minutes Miko, my concession to the weather.’ She smiles to herself, proud of being able to divert the conversation from why she'd chosen to leave the tower while conceding to Miko’s point about the weather, retracts her helmet into the bulk of her armor, and dismounts.
She is then quickly off across the concrete that skirts the pump station, increasing her pace, causing the ends of her open coat to flap wildly about her. Miko will keep watch, she needlessly reminds herself, though she wonders if they are not over playing the caution. There is no reason for anyone to come here with the exception of the city’s utility workers, and never at night. The concrete skirting is lit by a series of wall lights. She keeps beneath these, until coming to the inspection pathway at the end of the skirting, the path tunneling into the dark towards the right. Now she needs to adjust her vision for the fifty meters to the wall, already clearly visible, looming high overhead silhouetted beneath the flaring sky. When she is directly in the lee of the wall, it almost windless, and in the stillness, somewhat eerie. She looks up. The wall is clearly outlined by its silhouette, and the reflected light from the sky. It towers 75-meters on a steeply tapered sloped, before ascending directly vertical for a further 10-meters. At the critical juncture of the two angle, an inspection walkway runs the entire length of wall covering this section of the river. A cage elevator provides access to the walkway and the railed path at the dam top. She moves on, reaching the elevator cage. There is an obvious security code. It hadn’t been a problem on her first visit. She touches the code in, the elevator opens, and she steps within. Very quickly she is on the walkway, steps out, and makes her way along, till for the second time staring up.
Every detail is memorized. At the wall apex, a football sized section of the concrete has chipped away, the iron reinforcement showing through, continuing to oxidize a little further each day. And she has recorded this decay from the beginning, noting it on her first unauthorized night out, her own lesson in redox potentials. And then extending out from the break there are the hairline cracks, the patterns like an Olsen artwork, lines skating away as long startled snakes. She continues to stare up while bending her knees, putting herself in a low squat, and then she leaps, making the jump to the railed pathway of the dam top, allowing herself to overshoot just a little, to descend, open coat flapping in the wind, so to land on the path in a ballerina pose, on one extended leg, toes pointed down, the knee of the other leg raised, finally to land with her boots crunching on the loose debris of the path and stare out.
The sky’s intermittent flaring Is exceptionally bad tonight. The volatile chemicals are forever adrift down from the burning north, exploding in a lottery of combinations, and leaving their afterglow through the black cloud. Across the East River, the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges lie in silhouette as tangles of concrete and steel, their suspension cables torn from their crumpled arches to float as long tresses in the dark, white-capped water, the sunken bridges nothing but navigation hazards, as in fact are all the famous bridges crossing the Hudson, East, and Harlem rivers, all succumbed to the powerful surge waters in from the North Atlantic, and the water equally surging through the sunken boroughs of Queens, Bronx, Brooklyn, and the state of New Jersey, the old land drowned, and the boroughs now an archipelago of artificial islands driving their anchors into the water world of the old streets. She faces along the path to her left.
The navigation beacon sits at the tip of a large triangle of concrete, buttressed 10-meters out over the water. The reflector dish, turning behind the toughened glass dome, bounces the light over the water in shades of yellow, the light rippling in patches, like stepping stones to be hoped across. She is almost tempted to try. She smiles at the thought, then makes her way over the path and towards the beacon.
There is a narrow gap between the dome and the meter-high iron railing skirting the concrete. She is careful to edge her way along until coming to the very tip, and there, driving her legs beneath the bottom railing to dangle over the water far below, sits, sweeping her coat behind her. It is this place that has made the pump station so special, a place where she can think and reflect in solitude, almost her favorite pastime.
She is now closer to her machine
self than she is to her biological self. The paradigm shift has been
intrinsically coded into her growing maturity. Her bio-enhancements simply
dictated it. As she has come to understand it, the bio-enhancements and the
coding are linked in a symbiotic relationship, reliant on each other, even
feeding off each other.
And if she is to be asked what
might lie at the heart of her existential crisis, this symbiosis might well be
it. Dr Syber has done this to her.
She is his experiment, and one subject to increasing
levels of synthesis and change, a self-evolving work in progress. And he has
never cared to ask how she might come to feel about this. No consent
form. So what to do? She brings up her knees, hugging
her arms around them, and leans her chin in the knee gap.
She has learned that evolution is
an irreversible process. There is
no going back. And there are two strands. Fitness for change, and stratified
stability. Bronowski has taught her this. She looks to her data goggles, loads
her evolutionary biology folder, and reads off the notes that she has
transcribed from J. Bronowski.
Fitness for change concerns itself with the
variability of living forms, and stratified stability, naturally enough, with a
living form’s stability, and linking the two processes, it is easy to
understand how biological evolution has a direction, forward, just as time
moves forward. And there is something more profound to be explained. The forward direction
of evolution gives it the appearance of a planned program. It begs the
questions; why does biological evolution not run hither and thither through
time? What is the screw that moves it forward, or at least, where is the
ratchet that keeps it from slipping back? Is it possible to have such a
mechanism which is not planned? And what is the relationship that ties
evolution to the arrow of time, that makes it a barbed arrow? ‘Lash it!’ she
exclaims, breaking off her reading. She is trapped well and truly, caught in a
type of deterministic mechanism that has billed her for the role of progenitor,
a new human for a new world, a human to better survive. And then, as if in a
type of coda to her thoughts, a spray of water hits her in the face. It has been kicked up
suddenly from the river below, the wind sweeping the spray up the dam wall, so
that she is now almost completely wet. She laughs, and makes a quick check
on her data goggles.
The weather sensors give a three knot increase in wind speed, and a sudden, ten degree drop in temperature. But this has to be a freak local event, she convinces herself, she is right over the river after all. Nevertheless, the shivering makes her uncomfortable, and she engages her thermoregulatory nanos, calculates, and stops shivering.
Art Bébé says, 'Fade out.'
Art Bébé™ ©
Art Bébé™ ©
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