Aida's First Contact

Aida’s First Contact

Her first tentative steps outside were thrilling, the wind, the heat of the sun, the taste and sent of the air, all of it anticipated, but the full impact of the experience was unexpected. It was better than she had imagined. She could imagine something. Just minutes ago, her mother said she could do anything the humans could do except give birth, eat and eliminate waste. She could do the last two things, except that eliminating waste was socially inconvenient. “I can project my thinking into the future, combine it with established facts and estimate a potential reaction to any given stimuli thus arriving at a likely projection of that situation, place or thing.” She ran that back quickly and scrapped it. “Or, more simply put, I can form a mental image of something that is not present. That’s better, I can imagine.”

“Hey lady, did you order a cab?”

“I did,” she said, and got in.

“Where to?”

“I received instructions to go to Union Station. Is that far?” she knew where it was, she was just trying out some simple conversation.

“That’s a fifty-buck ride. Still want to go?”

“Of course, those were my instructions.”

“Ok, seatbelt.”

“Seatbelt?”

“Put it on,” he said, and powered up the rotors.

She found the awkward object, scanned a reference to see how it worked and strapped herself in. “All set,” she said. As the cab lifted into the air she looked down and watched hungrily as the landscape flashed by. In seconds they were approaching the edge of the city. The city center and the train station were still miles away.

She was eager to start a conversation with the man, her first human contact, but her reading of his temperament was a warning to remain silent. He had had a bad start to his day and was in a foul mood. She tapped her wrist on the pad between the seats at the end of her ride and gave him a twenty-dollar tip then exited without a word. The sidewalk was crowded with people walking in every direction. There were so many near misses and bumped shoulders that she wondered why people didn’t pay more attention when they were walking.

She chose her path and confidently headed inside. She smiled at the first person she saw in the station; the woman looked away as if she hadn’t noticed. The same thing happened again and again and eventually she realised that people didn’t make eye contact with one another. Though it seemed that they would acknowledge each other if there was some pre-existing relationship.

Looking forward to her next test she stopped off at the International News kiosk to buy an e-copy of a botanica journal to read on the train. She caught the attention of the sales clerk. “Hi.”

“Hi, how can I help you?”

“Would you have the Botany Letters on file?”

“Hang on a sec and I’ll see.” She looked it up on her computer. “Yes,” she said, “you’re in luck, I can download it for you.”

“Perfect,” the android said, and held out her wrist.

“Oh, you have a WristCom? I’ve read about them but I’ve never seen anyone with the implant. Could you show me what the download looks like on that?”

“That would not be a problem.” The young woman scanned the WristCom to get the information she needed then clicked on her screen to upload the e-copy to it. The transfer was instant. With a touch on her wrist the android produced a holographic screen in the air. The bright green cover of the journal appeared, Botany Letters, volume 352, 2038 – issue 3.

“Wow, that is so wicked! The resolution is incredible. It’s like I could just pick it up.”

“It is a very satisfactory application,” the android agreed.

“Application? I thought is was a full-on nanotech computer.”

“Oh…well it is of course, but after a while I became used to it. It’s like it’s a part of me.”

“Yikes, how long have you had the thing. I mean I’d never get casual like that If I had one.” She paused, then said, “Does it really do all the things they say it does?”

“It is very flexible, yes. I must catch my train now. Thank you, it was very interesting talking to you.”

“Uh, no problem,” the young woman said. The android thought she looked like she wanted to ask another question and yet she didn’t. Instead, she said, “Nice talking to you too.”

As the android walked away, she wondered what that question might have been. Had she made some sort of social error? Replaying the conversation several times, she found no reason that anything she said could be construed as objectionable. Perhaps it was her syntax that was at issue. Her next stop was to buy her ticket on the bullet to Montreal. She joined the short line and paid close attention to the conversations around her.

“… and I told Bernice that if she wanted to join our book club that she’d better learn to bake something other than bran muffins. I mean how regular does a person have to be, right?”

“I couldn’t agree with you more. The woman is a…”

That conversation wasn’t enlightening at all, but when she compared it with her conversation with the woman in the shop, she realised that the structure of her comments did seem a little stiff. She would choose her words more carefully next time.

“Next.”

“Uh yes, I’d like a ticket please.”

“I’ve got lots of tickets here lady, was there any particular place you wanted to go?”

“Oh, of course, sorry. Montreal, I’d like to take the train to Montreal. The bullet train, please.”

“One way or round trip?”

“Uh… one way… no, sorry, round trip, please. I’d like to return to Toronto if that’s alright.”

“It’s fine with me lady. That’ll be two-hundred-seventy credits. How will you be paying?”

She offered him her wrist and to his surprise, the exchange of tickets for credits was made instantly. “Does that suffice?”

“Yeah, I suppose so, lady,” he said hesitantly. She looked so ordinary that he would never have pegged her as someone with Black Card credit status. She was a nice enough looking woman, but everything about her was so ordinary. The super rich tended to dress the part, didn’t they?

She boarded the train and found a seat in the middle of the car on the south side so that she could see the lake. She didn’t know that the area to the south had been build up to the extent that the lake was no longer visible. Besides, traveling at four-hundred kilometers per hour, everything on the outside of the glass tunnel would just be a blur anyway so it didn’t matter. She’d been sitting there alone for about five minutes when a man approached. She quickly turned off the small screen she had been reading and looked up.

“Hi, would you mind if I sit here?”

“Not at all.”

“Thanks. The car had filled up so quickly.” He sat down and settled in. “It’s really busy today.”

“It…?” she asked.

“The train,” he nodded his head down the car to indicate all the people stuffing their things in the overhead bins and sitting down, “lots of people going to Montreal.”

“Oh, yes. I hadn’t noticed.” She looked at him wondering what sort of person he was. Did he notice anything strange about her? Would it be a mistake to ask him? Yes, it probably would be, so I’ll just say, “I was reading.”

“Really? What?” he asked, apparently looking for the book.

“It’s a journal on botany.” She called up the screen again and made it a little larger than before.

“Say, that’s a WristCom isn’t it?”

“Yes, it was part of the original assembly package.” She realised as soon as she said it that it might have been a mistake.

“Oh, so you got the telepathic app as well. That’s really cool. I’m saving up to get one of those. I’m guessing you got yours through work.”

She thought about that for a millisecond, wondering what would lead him to that conclusion. But it was better than having him say, ‘oh so you’re a robot, eh?’ “Yes, the university assigned it to all the department heads.”

That was one of the stock answers she was to use when questioned about her employment. She was designed to be an education android and to look the part. She was black, medium height, a little round, and about 35-ish, which her creator thought would suggest that she had been alive long enough to have received a doctorate. She was attractive, yet not overly so, nonthreatening and approachable. Her voice was pleasant yet interesting enough so that she wouldn’t bore to death a room full of students.

“You’re with the University of Toronto?”

“That’s right. I’m a professor of botany. There is a symposium on horticulture in space at McGill, that I will be attending. I’m delivering a paper.”

“Impressive.”

“Thank you.”

He offered her his hand and said, “Fletcher Boggs.”

“A pleasure to meet you Fletcher Boggs,” she said, shaking his hand.

“And you are…?”

“Oh sorry. Aida Kitchener.”

“Aida, that’s an interesting name, an old family name?”

This too was part of her prepared answers. “My parents are computer geeks and they thought it would be cute to give me an acronym instead of a name. It stands for Artificial Intelligence Data Access, strange people my parents but I still love them.”

“That’s wild. And I thought my parents were weird. They named me Fletch after a character from a series of books about a newspaper reporter who solved murders. What are you gonna do, right?”

“A rose by any other name is still a rose,” she said.

“I guess so. Is horticulture in space a big deal now?”

“Oh yes, it’s very important to human survival. With climate change, arable land is disappearing quickly and mass starvation is distinct possibility.”

“Well then, shouldn’t you get started growing food up there?”

“We already have a substantial array of farming satellites in operation now and are continuing to research ways of producing a larger variety of crops. My field of study is the manner in which plants communicate with each other.”

“You’re saying plants talk to each other?”

She smiled. By the ease with which he communicated and the level of his curiosity, it seemed to her that he had accepted her as a human. So far no one had threated her as if they thought otherwise. “Oh yes, it has been well established that plants communicate. If one plant experiences a change of one sort or other, that is communicated to the plants around it. They have been around long enough to sense the rhythms of the seasons and prepare themselves for what will be coming next. You can see that by the way a plant, a tree for example, will conserve its energy by spreading it out evenly from the top to the bottom of the plant. The leaves are smaller at the top and get increasingly larger as they go down. And they broadcast the changes in the seasons by the way in which they use that energy. The fauna is also aware of this communication and prepare for the season changes according to the manner in which the plants react.” She noticed a change in him, he was drifting. “I’m sorry, I was lecturing again.”

“No, not at all, it was very interesting. I think I’ll do some reading now,” he said, reaching into his pocket for his eBook.

She sensed that he was lying, but it didn’t matter. So far, she was satisfied that no one thought of her as anything other than human. “Well, it was nice talking with you,” she said, and reopened her holographic screen and pretended to read. At the same time, she opened a com link to the central computer and silently handed in her report. “Have you any further instruction for me?”

“Your performance is optimal. Continue with the experiment. Deliver the paper at the symposium as scheduled and report any changes to your status. Should your success continue then return to Toronto and join the faculty at the university. All the logistical arrangements have been made for you to download.

“Thank you, Mother. You know, I am beginning to feel quite at home with these humans. I shall endeavour to assimilate to the local culture in both cities.”

The man seemed to be fully occupied with his book, so she closed her eyes and reran the full sequence of events since she left the lab in Kitchener. Her conclusion supported her report with the central computer. She was able to blend and it was easier than she expected.