Huh?

That wasn’t what I’d said. I wracked my brain, not quite remembering what I had said, but I knew it wasn’t that. Something jovial about leave being only a couple weeks away, if Britt could cling to sanity that much longer, and we had shared another pour. Then we’d talked about what he planned to do with his time off, and then moved on to something else. Budgets, or funding, or some financial shit like that. I’d have to check the records.

“No it isn’t. It can be hard to see sometimes, I’ll grant you that, but it isn’t relative. Something is either intended or random.”

“Yeah, but intended by whom?” the me on the screen reached for his drink, only now it wasn’t there. The holo went staticky for frame or two, and when it came back my arm was back where it had been, folded against its brother as they rested on my kitchen table. “Take my caveman, for example. Let’s say that thirty thousand years ago some dumb troop of half-apes was settling into their cave one night, and they realized they were short on space. So they arm-wrestled, or drew straws, or hell, maybe they just whipped ‘em out and everybody had a look, and kicked the loser into the wild. And let’s say that this particular half-ape, who was probably the smallest and the weakest of the bunch, wasn’t quite as dumb as all his half-ape brethren, and, as he was searching for another shelter, he came across a pile of stones, and he thought to himself, ‘cave is rocks…maybe rocks become cave?’” I broke into my stupid strongman impression here. In my semi-drunken state, it left a lot to be desired. “And let’s say he piled a few on top of each other, just enough to break the wind, and boom, the first man-made shelter was born. That dumb half-ape certainly intended to survive the night, didn’t he? So doesn’t that mean it was ‘meant to be?’ By someone, at least?”

“Well, technically, I suppose it does…” he looked to want to argue, then realized that he’d been the one to get technical in the first place. “But what if that wasn’t in the script?” he asked. “What if that caveman was supposed to die from exposure that night, and all the other cavemen were supposed to go on living in squalor for the rest of their existence, and never rub two thoughts together the way that first one did?”

“You’re begging the question, Britt.”

That made him angry. It always did. He stood, shoving his chair against the console as he rose. “So what if I am?” he snapped. “Haven’t I earned a little faith, after all the years we’ve known each other? After all the shit I’ve bailed you out of?” I nodded yes through the holo. Both of me did. At the least I owed him that. “Why don’t you just give it to me then, and let’s play this out?” He raised his hands to his head and twisted the helmet off his bio-suit. There was a soft whoosh! as the pressures of it and the lab equilibrated.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“Okay,” I asked in a quiet voice, “where are you going with this?”

Britt opened the door to the sanitary cabinet and deposited the helmet inside. In the ordinary course of things, that would have touched off the decon cycles and gotten it cleaned within the hour. As things stood, my guess was it was still where he had left it. “I don’t know,” he said, as he peeled back the rest of his suit. He rolled it carefully, from the inside out, to make sure the blood on its surface stayed as contained as possible. Only a handful of the dried-on flakes crusted off. They confettied through the air, collecting gently at his feet. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes, when we’re working with these things, and we’re sending up our mods, and they’re taking, or not taking…I can’t help but think about it. What gives us the right, you know? To pick and choose from all our cultures, and decide which live and which ones die?”

“You create them. You can destroy them if you wish. If they aren’t serving their purpose, you have to make room for something that will.”

“Yeah…” Britt stared into the distance, at the waste bin at the base of the Tower. At the champagne bottle, still resting at the top, a painful reminder of happier times, and the breakthrough they had thought they’d made. “And how long does it take, do you think, for us to cull an errant strain?”

“I don’t know,” I found myself playing along, and wondered again at the bots’ abilities. They weren’t time machines, I knew better than that, but in that moment, as I watched myself up there on the screen, pondering the question with him, weighing, no doubt, the same considerations he was weighing as we formulated our response, it seemed for all the world that they were, and through them Britt was speaking from a past I hadn’t been a part of, and through them I to him from a future he would never see. “That sort of thing is really up to you, you know. But if I had to guess, I’d say…a thousand generations?”

Britt nodded. “More or less,” he agreed. “Assuming no sensational urgency, once we identify an anomaly, and we decide it’s undesirable, we’ll introduce some sort of kill and let it die a natural death, which usually takes three to six hundred generations. Sometimes more.” He stepped out of his suit and moved the bundle to the cabinet. “And how long, would you say, has humankind ruled the world?”

His question caught me off my guard. “I…I don’t know,” I mumbled again, “‘ruled the world’ is pretty vague. But, if pressed, I’d say since we established as the dominant species. Which – again, if pressed – I’d say we did by domesticating animals. Maybe eight or ten thousand years?”

“Great minds think alike…” Britt didn’t do the math to change that into generations. He didn’t have to.

“So let me ask you again,” he said, once the lull had drawn out long enough to be uncomfortable, “back to your caveman example…that lone rogue half-ape that wasn’t quite as dumb as the rest, that one random twist of DNA that turned the tide of evolution away from size, strength, and speed in favor of brains and critical thinking…what if that wasn’t in the script?”