A quick write of a synopsis of a possible future book. Someday, perhaps, it will be written.
We walked on the moon in 1969.
We walked on mars in 2025.
We discovered light-speed travel in 2052.
By 2070 we were exploring planets outside our galaxy and creating new civilizations.
By 2080 we had created the perfect artificial intelligence systems.
By 2112 we touched where no one has ever touched before. Humanity, spread throughout the farthest reaches of the galaxies, going deeper and deeper and deeper until we began to lose sight of the horizon, until we began to lose ourselves in the dust of eternity. It was beautiful. It was dangerous. It was impossible. We had paths reaching so far into the cosmos that those who left earth did not come back, nor did we ever hear from them again. We could only stand on our shriveling planet in the light of a dying sun and hope with all hope that the brave men and women who launched themselves into the stars for the good of mankind survived, and continued to live out there among the spiraling light of distant planets.
Then in 2127 we created the Sojourner Project, and it changed everything.
I was lucky enough to work on it. I was young at the time—barely twenty-eight—but good at what I did. Very good. So good that NASA hired me out of many hundreds of other talented students to work on what became known as one of the most influential and groundbreaking endeavors in the history of space travel.
What I did was build things. Robots, to be more specific.
I helped build the future.
AI was a fairly unremarkable thing by the time 2127 rolled around. They came in all shapes and sizes, for many different purposes. We had robots everywhere; serving as mechanics on spaceships, bodyguards and soldiers for the army, teachers at universities, robotic animal pets, problem-solving robots, etc. etc. They were part of our lives.
But to create what we did…it was a different kind of robot. The others were still just shells. Shells with brains connected to every known database and satellite in the solar system. They did not have emotion. If they disappeared one day, all of a sudden, we could survive without them. Their purpose was solely to aid us and assist us with what we already knew.
Until Sojourner.
In February of 2127 the Sojourner Project began, and I was a part of it. When the Director of NASA gave his speech at the opening ceremony of the program he described it as ‘a feat which shall go down in history, an impossible feat which humanity made possible. Our scientists will be tasked to create a robot like none other, built from metal and wire, but with the solidity and heart of a human, capable of thought and opinion and speech, to be used as a messenger of the cosmos. Sojourner will be our herald to the stars.’
It was no easy task. Even with over three hundred scientists working on it daily our first prototypes were unsuccessful, as were many of our later ones. It wasn’t until 2132, five years later, that we began to build the final copy. In it we put the soul of mankind. We put ten thousand years of history into it. We put one million works of literature, we put war and hate and love and fear and bravery and hope into it, we poured ourselves into it. Its body was mechanical, but its mind was human. More human than some people I know.
It was not finished until 2137. By then I had come to know this robot I had built so well I would even venture to say we were friends. He knew my name, Jackson, but he always called me Jack.
Nobody ever called me Jack.
We played games. He was to be as human as possible, and once he was completed a select few of us were tasked to teach him things a mechanical brain could not. Empathy. Good and bad. How to have fun. How to fly a plane. How to give complements and bake cookies. How to tend to the sick and injured. How to live, how to die. How to love.
We played chess a lot, him and I. He let me win sometimes. We played soccer. We played cards, we told each other jokes. We raced each other down the hallway, we watched movies. We had fun. What we did astounds me even now, fifty years later. We created a human inside of a metal body, we built a soul as intricate and complex as our own. He did not look human at all, though he had attributes as such, like hands and fingers and a head and legs. There was still much about him that was mechanical. He did not understand sarcasm very well, nor irritation, he could not feel physical pain (though he understood we could) and sometimes he was quite emotionless and silent. But he had his good days and his bad, he had his friends and his rivalries, he even understood respect and ranks and order.
But I think, out of everyone, he liked me best.
In 2140 Sojourner prepared to be sent into space. His duty would be to travel, to visit every colony out there and live among them, studying the cultures and the progression of our other kind, to witness the growth of the cosmos in its entirety. We did not know if we would ever see him again, but one thing we knew. He would never die. All that information he collected, all that he saw, all that he did, it would live with him for centuries, passing on to mankind through the years. We would always have our history and our knowledge, contained in Sojourner.
I did not want him to go.
So I went with him.
It is a long story. A very long story involving a spaceship heist, a naturalist named Hannah Canaan, a secret from NASA, and a man and a robot traveling many, many miles across the face of existence. This is the story of progress, of exploration, of love, of time, and age.
This is the story of Sojourner.
Joined at the Authorship 