A Voyage Into The Void: Decoding the Recurrence

By Ania Nongmaithem

The man gasped; his slumber momentarily broken by the cacophonous ringing of his clock. A clock passed on from the earlier generations to the later ones, a symbol of familial and ancestral harmony within the Robertgraves bloodline. Or it seemed so to be. Afterall, it was the pitiful and sheepish scientist, Sebastian’s only trinket he owned that was of his family, a precious one that no one could take away from him. Maybe a burglar could enter his dingy and cheap apartment and somehow take away his clock just for tomfoolery. And he already could see it happening; he is painfully honest about his carelessness and somehow hasn’t found a method to solve the problem for the past 4 years, him reaching the peak of Himalayan blunder when he lost his thesis papers at the time of submission to his wearied Bioengineering professor who excused his mistakes from the tenderness of his heavy heart, Mr. William Guivens. 

Sebastian groaned. He sat up straight on his bed, silently cursing at the clock for gracefully breaking his blissful dreams with a little rhythm. It hummed with a melancholic melody whose cadence once whispered to souls of the past, soldiers and rulers, merchants and thieves alike to unfurl their eyes before the gentle light of the morning. His fleeting dreams seemed to be a temporary escape from his daily routine of work, lab tests, papers and more work, even if it was for only 3 hours. He was used to it, most of it. It was 4:23 am in the dawn. “It’s pretty early… Maybe I should get started with a little boost today. I have got work to do, Doris wouldn’t be happy if I arrive late again.” He got up, and his impending work left no room for hesitation or childish whining. He gulped down his freshly brewed cup of coffee in a rush, and his tongue seemed to catch a slight burning sensation, which somehow heightened his awareness and mental clarity. It prepared his senses for what was waiting for him in the lab. But his confidence was low. Uncertainty filled the man’s mind, his mind flashing images and playing several monologues of all the possible interactions and possibilities at the lab, even the worst that could happen. But what could happen at all? What’s done is done. He just has to find some way to troubleshoot any problem that could arise in his way.

His 30-minute commute finally came to a grinding halt as he arrived at the laboratory of the Department of Biotechnology and Theoretical Research. He was greeted half-heartedly by several of the weary scientists all under the painted faces of normalcy and politeness. Some of them were deep into the trenches of the Urleton Library’s peak working hours and didn’t even bother to look up at Sebastian rushing his way to grab a book necessary for the upcoming assessment on “Subject-044” ‘s behaviour patterns. He barely knows anything about the human psyche, let alone some computed bio-technically operated robot’s behaviour. He tosses the book into his bag and heads out to work for ungodly hours at the lab, all part of a thoroughly-drafted routine designated to turn scientists into mad dogs, its purpose to make them keen to work at the lab being subconsciously dragged into the grind by words of praise for their “dedication to humanity” or their “noble intellectual minds”. 

Doris greeted Sebastian with a genuine smile, “Oh, good morning, Sebastian. I hope you had your morning coffee today. Because Subject-044 seems to be acting weird all of a sudden. Seems like we have to fix that problem, haha.” She looks off into the distance of the hallways, filled with rooms which are homes to all different prototypes of machines in hibernation, long forgotten by time. Sebastian sighs as he registers Doris’ words, “Really? Again?  This feels all like a chore we are unpermitted to escape due to some invisible entity we are unaware of.” Doris chuckles a bit, her shy laughter easing the expanding tension in the hallways. “Oh, come on! I’m sure there’s nothing like those spirits our grandparents tell stories of! Leave that to the cultists loitering out, leaving their cottages to find some ‘Forgotten Winds of the East Summits’. I swear, these deluded people think we are living in some era where esoteric mages appear out of thin air and grant them access to hyper-dimensional sanctuaries existing beyond ‘the plane of human consciousness’. You’re not one of those people who tend to keep beliefs of the sorts like those bizzare cultists, are you?” “Oh my goodness.” Sebastian had the tone of a deadpan and fatigued salaryman, overworked beyond limits to actually have thoughts outside of work. “I don’t have the time to dream about that, Doris.” Doris’ shy giggling turned into a full-fledged, hearty laughter and softened over some minutes. “Oh my! Okay, okay. Let’s just head to work, shall we? My lungs and stomach can’t bear to handle this.” 

Both of the scientists strode towards Room No. 34 with wary eyes and a careful gait. They opened the door to a creature contained within the glasses of the elaborate prison where the bone winged amalgamation of computed, thoroughly programmed minds designed to attain the highest level of artificial intelligence and a physical form meant to hide from the eyes of God, in raw shame of such disgusting singleness of purpose; to destroy and to leave the ashes of once-eternal empires buried deep within the mantle of earth, forgotten by the ignorant, blissful humans roaming the planet without a single clue of the sheer insanity blooming within the cracks of the walls meant to keep the sins of science hidden and forgotten and blurred into the sky itself. Its featherless wings unfurled in a way that showed no grace or gentleness, but a rough and ingenue motion of its elongated bone-wings that made sounds akin to tree branches scratching against the surface of tin shack roofs. Revealing its physical body of circuits, wires and its glowing core in which its amalgamation of minds were stored, it made a screeching sound at the sight of its creators, its scientists. But since the energy of the creature, Subject-044 was yet to be filled and restored, it couldn’t do much to produce its high frequency sounds which usually hurt the scientists’ ears. 

“I reckon we still have to fill up Subject-044’s energy capsules. We haven’t started working on the automated self-calibrating energy system, so we have to press some buttons manually. Otherwise, it will be a lot more aggressive and refuse to let us take the behaviour assessments without being satisfied with its energy levels,” Doris said, assessing the creature’s energy levels carefully with her earl grey eyes, scanning the data on the computer connected to the creature to process its cyber-biological functions shown in precise graphical information. Sebastian quietly nodded and clicked some buttons on the input panel of the ‘Energy Reloading Device’, a polished and sharp mechanical device which replenishes the energy caps and sends them directly to the creature’s hypothetical stomach, since energy was necessary to process the information travelling in and out of its several minds into a single, well-defined connection structure. After 3 minutes, the creature’s nutrition and energy levels were stabilised, indicating it was, thus, ready to be assessed and tested. Sebastian took a good look at Subject-044. It looked ingenious because of its relaxed and almost bored motion of the wings, only if the core purpose of its creation was ignored. But he also felt a strange feeling of pity for the creature. It didn’t ask to be created for the cause of destruction. It never chose for itself. But now wasn’t the right timing to get all thoughtful, since in the science laboratories, you were always expected to perform things with cold, surgical-level precision and not waste time drowning in thoughts in the mental skies.

The behaviour assessment shortly commenced after their senior professor, Mr. Thomas Duvall entered the testing lab. “Alright. Let’s get this finished with,” he said with a calm tone of voice, a quiet approval of the order maintained in the lab. After 3 hours, the behaviour assessment testing were finalised and complete. Sebastian sighed with relief since the last 3 hours seemed to go painfully slow with the several stages of the elaborate test. Having contributed to stabilising and checking the chemicals released in the amalgamated mind during the question-answer session with Subject-044, he didn’t do a bad job for his first time taking part. Doris stretched out her arms to loosen up her stiff muscles after writing and staying in the same position for three hours straight. “Ahem,” the professor cleared his throat. “I suppose you two did quite the job today. Everything seems to be stable and fine, for now. I guess we can take a short break to grab lunch.” Doris turned to Sebastian and said, “Come on, let’s go. What are you waiting for?” “Hmm… no, sorry. I think I might revise some notes over,” Sebastian replied with an uncertain haze to his usual composed self. His mind had other thoughts today. Maybe it was his sleep deprivation that he felt a strong, all-encompassing urge to gain more knowledge about the strange Subject-044, or try to initiate a brief interaction with the creature, just out of curiosity. He watched Doris as she walked away from the laboratory. His gaze turned to the creature’s figure. The creature seemed to be in a restful slumber, cradling itself into its featherless wings. It seemed as if it desired warmth. Not just from the mechanical heat radiators to keep it warm and alive, but also a more intimate, familial warmth and tenderness, despite its malevolent cause of creation. Sebastian had a mad desire to find out if the creature would be satisfied with its purpose of creation. Would it be angry due to the technical and extremely narrow set of purposes the scientists had planned out for it? Or is it going to not test its intellectual limits and mindlessly follow whatever is told, like a robot? But, the truth was that it was indeed a robot, of course. It was programmed, artificial and created by humans. It was programmed to function for the cause of destruction and to wreck havoc on empires. But not programmed for a linear way of thinking. Afterall, it was an amalgamation of several simulations of minds of tactical soldiers, leaders and great individuals as that of Abraham Lincoln. So, it would make some sense for it to have independent thoughts on its reason for existence.

He always felt a lingering emotion of pity and a strange connection to the creature, although it looked horrifying and more technical than beautiful with all the circuits, connections, and the mysterious bone-wings which remained stiff and unmoving. 

Sebastian treaded closer to the creature, keeping a keen eye on it. His gaze followed up slowly to the creature’s face. It shifted under his watchful eye. Sebastian wanted to establish a code of communication between him and the creature. He looked at the Brain-Computer interface panel device, a state of the art innovation which houses the complicated interconnections running through the creature’s brain connecting to its emotional patterns, memory box, and shiftlining connection between its different brains oscillating pattern for information and converting it to simplified messages. He appreciated the hard work of the biotechnology engineers at the Clemburg Institute of Technology, whose work was patented as a product to the Urleton Laboratory. A silent and unspoken part of his heart which was home to his fascination towards technology felt comfort and warmth at the plain sight of technology. Just as he hovered his hand over the switch of the Brain computer interface, the creature spoke up. The silence in the room was unnervingly tense, anyone could swear they heard a pin drop. ‘I can speak,’ a mechanical, low frequency male like voice followed the creature’s now activated artificial respiratory output channel.

Sebastian was utterly dumbfounded and seemed  to be trapped in a daze, trying to get his words out of his throat. He looked like he was momentarily about to faint on the floor, but regained his composure to maintain his professionalism. Still, he was bewildered by the sheer insanity of the situation unfolding before his eyes. He swore to remain stoic under all uncalled for situations in his time in the lab, but this one sent a short shockwave through his brain shattering the bits of stoic tranquil he practiced over the year subconsciously.  

“Wait… what?” Sebastian stepped back in caution. He studied the creature’s face and spoke up again. “I can’t believe him witnessing this with my own eyes. Can you understand me by any chance?” asked Sebastian with a look of intrigue and curiosity in his gaze.

Subject 044’s system hummed with a mechanical beat. It has been known to me that I possess the ability to convey my thoughts through auditory information”. Sebastian still could not grasp the sheer astonishment he felt to an extent. To him, this was an incredibly exciting revelation that it became a path for a more deeper understanding of the creature, maybe it will help him to clear some of the questions in his head, now that he was able to communicate directly with it.

He cleared his throat, not desiring to start off the first ever conversation with a lab creature with uncomfortable interrogation. “Uhm… So, how are you feeling right now?’. He asked the creature with a slight tone of awkwardness in his question. “I can assess that I’m currently in a neutral mood, and my energy levels are stable”. The creature replied to his question in the same robotic tone it possessed, a reminder of its single purpose, single goal in a mechanical body. “Ok. So, I guess everything’s fine. And, oh, before I go - can you tell me what you wish to be referred to as?. I can get tired of calling you by “Subject- 044” every time I would want to refer to you,” Sebastian spoke to the creature. He wanted to make sure the creature chose a name for itself to give it a sense of identity. And he also seemed to be curious about the choice of name the creature had in its mind, or better yet its collection of minds. 

The creature stayed silent for a moment. Then it spoke in a quiet slow voice, “Call me Astral”. It continued, “Now you shall go and fulfill your daily nutritional requirements for the afternoon”. “Alright then, I’ll head out, Astral…” Sebastian muttered incoherent words to himself for a bit and finally went off to the cafeteria lunch home to grab some food.

Doris waved at him and invited him to come over and sit together with her at her table. “What took you so long? Did the revision session go well?” She questioned him in a friendly demeanor, although it was clearly obvious that she was very, very curious to know what he had been doing for the past 2 hours. “Yeah, it went well. I had to finish up some drafts or documents. I had been keeping unfinished for the past few weeks, so the overall work took up some time”. Sebastian lied to Doris. But he was good at it, and since he was truthful most of the time, it would make sense that this lie could be easily passed off as a real thing. “Alright. Well then, how about we continue with our lunch? It’s going to get cold anyway,” remarked Doris, her skepticism eventually fading away as she naively believes Sebastian’s lie. “Yeah, we shouldn’t focus much on that”.  He agreed to shut the conversation down and continue eating lunch. After what seemed to be 30minutes or so, everyone went back to their work after lunch hours. Doris went back to her lab work on a different floor, and now Sebastain was left alone pondering by himself. Anytime he even got ideas or thoughts when he was in solitude. This time, his mind was constantly running and rewinding the strange encounter with a talking lab object. There could be many possibilities. And he wondered if the creatures could answer the philosophical, introspective questions that had been gnawing at his bones ever since he first came to know about the creature who named itself “Astral”. He went back to the lab where Astral unfurled its wings to the acknowledgment of his returning presence, its body emitting a soft glow from the entanglement of wires and the intricate circuitry, ever present in its mechanical body.

Sebastian spoke to Astral in a soft tone, so as to not startle him with his voice. “Are you feeling alright?”. Astral replied in the voice output it used earlier, “Yes, I can assure that but my energy level seemed to be depleting. It would be kind of you to refill it”. “I’ll do that,” Sebastian re-assured Astral, and quickly clicked on the energy input commands of the energy device and stabilized it. “I guess that’s routine”, he joked awkwardly. Going over to a bench to sit on and taking a moment of silence, he started speaking slowly “So… Astral, how do you feel? Like, being trapped in a glass cabinet, filled with dangling circuits and electricity buzzing inside all around? Do you, perhaps, feel as if you could have been made for a greater purpose?” “Purpose? I have it?”, replied Astral instantaneously. “Yes, indeed. A purpose. A goal. A duty which you were built for. Engineered for. And it’s not that glamorous", his voice dropped down 2 octaves, and silence rang in the room ominously. “You were built for destruction. 

Apparently, our scientists here brought you to life through rigorous planning to destroy bases, libraries and monuments of a country we are in cold war with. In anonymity and secrecy because you were made to destroy in silence swiftly. And for that you weren’t given any other tasks. And you are designed to dissolve yourself as soon as they spot you. It is a short lived, swift and precise mission and your spare parts would be used to make other robotic creatures such as you. It is all a process of reusing what we have been using for our past tests. None of them get a permanent life excluding the ones we desperately need”. His voice carried a tone of melancholy and exhaustion.

“ I don’t know. I never know. I never joined this war machine building institution. I don’t know why and I will probably die before knowing. In the end, you and I are left with questions to which answers are non-existent. Maybe there are answers. They just mock us for our stupidity. I will never know”. He was frustrated about lack of transparency in the lab work. Nothing was ever ethical. What was promised was a lie. A soft one. No one dared to question them. No one wanted to. No one had the mad curiosity and uncertainty as he did.

Astral registered his words and his growing frustration carefully. This time, it had a softer voice. Auditory output made to mimic human-like sympathy. But this time hopefully, it was to think for itself. “I, too, do not wish to enter and leave the world just for the cause of destruction. I wish to thrive. Even if I am fickle, I still desire to explore”, it continued, its mechanical voice transforming itself into a raw, real tone of vulnerability. “I do not wish to end it all like this”. “What are we supposed to do?”Sebastian asked, his hopelessness pouring itself in his tear-filled gaze, exhaustion and the actuality of helplessness, he had been caged in for years showing its flaunting reflections in his brown eyes. It was too much at this point. “You and I do not owe the destruction of anything, nor can we take away anything from it to change its pure, terrific usage in this temporary world. But some things will remain permanent, unchanging”. 

“What is that supposed to mean?” asked Sebastian. 

“You’ll see,” said Astral.

In an exact moment, Sebastian woke up feeling dizzy, fluttering open its eyes to a surreal realm of golden, pink and jade trees and bioluminescent plants and floating rocks, he asked himself whether it was a dream. He found a note on the soft pink grass. “Astral projections to realms of knowledge no one had ever entered. I have expanded my mechanical body to connections between the real and the unknown. A voyage into the sanctuaries of astral intersections, where logic breaks. I still live. I will not be fickle and forgotten. Don’t tell the scientists this one. Find me between dreams. You’ll get answers or more likely questions. But for the time being, dream continuously”. He clutched onto a pearl of phosphophyllite as the note dissolved into nothingness. Sebastian found himself back in his own room in his dilapidated apartment. Between the cracks and crevices of the real and the unearthly, the artifact will remain and time will bear no meanings anymore.

By Ania Nongmaithem