Heroes Chap 2 I'm Scared and I'm Lonely

Walter stomped down the clear hallway, trying to keep his anger off his face so the other colonists wouldn't stop him and ask him what was wrong. The corridor was wide enough to allow five lines of traffic. The floor was metal, but the walls were clear, presenting a beautiful view of the red and green planet and the magnificent Milky Way. The walls came together into a dome.
“Good morning, Guardian Walter,” said Megan, one of their best geneticists.
He grunted a hello and pushed his way into a clear elevator. They had landed on Kepler-186f about a year ago and had been thriving ever since. Celestyn’s ship had broken apart beautifully and served as a basis for an active city. While most of the metal buildings were from the ship itself, the plastic glass came from the 3D printers they had brought on board. They were then reinforced by nanobots to ensure complete stability. While the planet’s surface left much to be desired in terms of nutrients, they had been able to overcome that challenge with Samira’s work in genetically modifying plants and sparingly using nanobots. As the elevator crawled down to the greenhouse level, Walter watched the botanists nurse their plants with the care of new parents. Samira was stalking the hallway, eying her charges. She didn’t see him, although he lovingly watched every moment she made. It had been a year since they landed and yet they still hadn’t asked for joint quarters. Every time he thought about approaching Adrian with the request, something held him back. A number of people walked off the elevator and it continued its downward journey to the third level. This was Sebastian’s level, full of flashing screens, some of the city’s perimeters, but many of the city itself. Walter had argued against the street cameras, but he had been outvoted. He had been outvoted on a great many of things.
“Good morning, Walter,” said Sebastian, his eyeless face appearing on one of the screens.
“Is he busy?” grunted Walter, stomping across the room.
“No, in fact, he’s expecting you.”
“Good.”
Walter walked through the sliding down and sharply turned right until he reach a large, grey door. It slide open as soon as Sebastian registered his presence and he marched into Adrian’s room. It was wide and spacious, giving the distinct impression that Adrian was more comfortable living in a prison cell, but needed the space for protection. It contained a desk and a chair and a single bookcase. The desk was at the end of the room, which bowed out, and was a large, clear dome, the neighboring planet Kepler-162 hanging high in the sky.
“Adrian!” he shouted, stomping towards the desk.
His friend was sitting at the interactive desk, reviewing a report on its touchscreen.
“Yes?” he asked, not looking up.
“Why did you deny me access to the 2015 Paris Attacks?”
Walter was snorting fire as he stood in front of his desk, as stiff as a steel rod. Adrian looked up and smiled.
“Good morning to you too, Walter. You seemed parched. Would you like something to drink?”
A compartment on the table opened and a clear jug containing purified water appeared.
“Answer me, Adrian.”
“What makes you think I denied you access?” he asked, pouring himself a glass of water, “That would be under Ira’s jurisdiction.”
“Sebastian knows not to tinker with our archives.”
Adrian took a sip of water and gestured the jug in Walter’s direction before placing it down.
“But I don’t?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve tried to control what I teach our colony’s children.”
Adrian thought it over before rising and walking towards his large window.
“It seems a rather bleak thing to teach them, don’t you think?”
“History is a bleak affair, Adrian.”
“Still…we wouldn’t want to give them any ideas, would we?”
“You have no right-”
“I didn’t do anything to your records, Walter,” said Adrian, looking over his shoulder at him, “It must have been a glitch. Have Ira review it and try again.”
“Sebastian.”
“Of course,” smiled Adrian.
Walter stomped towards him.
“Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“On Earth we agreed we would work together in ensuring a successful colony.”
“Yes.”
“Then why do I feel like every time I try to do something, you’re there, standing in my way?”
“Funny, because that’s how I feel whenever I present my ideas to you.”
Walter frowned as Adrian smoothly took another sip of water.
“We are supposed to work together, Walter, and yet I feel that you see me as an enemy.”
“Not an enemy.”
“What then?”
Walter took a step back and ran a hand through his hair.
“A competitor?”
“I don’t imagine what we could be competing for, you married her.”
Walter whirled around, his eyes wide.
“And you thought I didn’t know,” grinned Adrian, although it was very cold.
“Sebastian?”
“We all have access to his databanks.”
Walter’s face sharpened as Adrian went back to staring out the window.
“Have you been altering his databanks?”
Adrian kept a pleasant face, although Walter noticed his grip tightened on his glass.
“Now why would you ask that?”
“They’ve changed, Adrian.”
“That was to be expected, wasn’t it? You didn’t honestly think the transfer would have no effect on them whatsoever.”
“It’s more than that and you know it.”
“I haven’t noticed.”
“You can’t take the animal out of the man, Adrian.”
Adrian stared at him and furrowed his eyebrows.
“What are you talking about?”
“The upgrade initiative.”
This time Adrian’s face fell and for a second Walter saw real fear.
“Like you said, everyone has access to Sebastian’s databanks.”
“It’s just a funny idea I had,” said Adrian, fighting for his normal tranquility.
“You want everyone to undergo a transfer, similar to Celestyn and Sebastian.”
“No, not everyone.”
“Just the ones who you feel threatened by, right?” snapped Walter, feeling a strong, but irrational anger boiling inside him, “The ones you can’t control or manipulate.”
“You’ve always misread me, Walter, and I don’t know why,” said Adrian pulling away and walking back to his desk to refill his glass of water, “I don’t want control, I’ve never wanted it. I want progress. I’ve told you, I want to be better than what we were.”
“This isn’t the way to do it! You can’t strip a man of his humanity and expect him to be better than his ancestors.”
“I’m not stripping him of his humanity. I’m tearing the animal out of him,” said Adrian, his back turned towards Walter, “I’m releasing him from the biological trappings of fear and the desire to dominate so he can become his true self. I am returning him to his angelic form, if you will.”
“If that was true, you would have been the first one to sing up for the transformation. You wouldn’t have let Celestyn be a guinea pig.”
“Look at Turing,” said Adrian, whirling around, his temper getting the best of him despite everything, “Look at how he’s prospered. Look at what he’s created. There is no crime, no want, no greed, because of his guidance.”
“He could have done that as a man.”
“As a man,” sneered Adrian, “As a man he was a cripple, held back by his guilty and self-loathing. I liberated him from that and now he is the chief of security for a thriving off world colony. He lost his family because a man was careless, I have given him a new one. We have given him a new one. Same for Ira. We have made them better and, once I finish my initiative, we will make the others better.”
Walter stared at him, his hands spasming.
“We are to bring forth the next stage in human evolution, Walter. Now you know as well as I do, what man does whenever he is given a new technology. He utilizes it to suppress, murder, and rape any culture he thinks is beneath him. We cannot allow that to happen again.”
Adrian was standing tall now, a religious fervor in his voice that Walter had never seen before.
“For the first time in our existence as a race, we have been handed a chance to start over. We can erase all of our destructive tendencies and evolve to a higher plane of being. I don’t know if you used to read the old science fiction books of the 50s and 60s. My mother was obsessed with them. Well, one writer, Arthur C. Clarke, proposed that the best fate for man was to merge with a higher intelligence, because that intelligence would allow man to overcome his natural disadvantages. It would provide him with the wisdom and knowledge needed to overcome war, poverty, disease, etc. Now you and I know that the idea of an alien race coming down to rescue us from ourselves is preposterous, but we don’t need aliens anymore, Walter. We don’t need a higher being to save us. We can save ourselves! We got tired of waiting and men like Turing and Ira went out and created the technology we needed. Now they’ve done their part and they’ve been rewarded, but you and I must do ours. We must mentally prepare the human race for the next step and we must ensure they do not fall into the same pitfalls Earthlings fell into.”
He walked towards Walter and clasped his shoulders.
“We can lead them back into the Garden of Eden, Walter. You and me. That’s what we wanted, what we discussed on Earth. I understand it’s scary and I understand the desire to want to run away. Believe me, I do. We have a tall order before us, but I won’t let you pass on an opportunity like this because you’re afraid. We were chosen for a reason, Walter, the four of us, but we can’t do it without you. It will take all four us to see this through, to ensure we do this right. I will provide the vision and Turing and Ira will provide the technology and data, and you, you will provide the roadmap. You know where man went wrong all those years ago. Help us take the right path.”
Walter took a step away and swallowed as Adrian’s eyes flashed and he brimmed with a power often talked about, but rarely felt.
“Can I count on you, Walter?” he asked, a hint of a threat dancing across his words.
“Of course, Adrian,” Walter smiled, extending his hand, “Forgive me, I did not see. I’ve been a fool.”
“There is no need for forgiveness,” said Adrian, grasping his hand and pulling him into a hug, “I understand. When I first saw…it overwhelmed me. But together, we can do it.”
They parted and Adrian patted his shoulder before returning to his desk.
“I will finish editing the initiative and send it to you for a final review. I want to discuss it during tomorrow’s staff meeting.
“Yes, of course. Please, excuse me, I have to prepare for my next class.”
Walter quickly walked towards the exit when Adrian called his name.
“You had me worried, you know.”
“Worried?”
“Yes, I was worried you would be my Brutus.”
“You forget, Adrian, I prefer the Greeks. If anything, I’m your Themistocles.”
He shared a small grin with Adrian before walking out of the office and nearly running into Celestyn.
“Careful, Walter.”
“Yes, I’m sorry. I was distracted.”
He tried to walk away when Celestyn grabbed his arm, his metal hands feeling like pincers.
“Your expression registers as that of someone who is troubled.”
“It’s nothing.”
His brilliant, robot eyes stared him down.
“Turing, Adrian wants to see you,” said Ira, his many faces echoed down the various screens.
Celestyn nodded his head and slowly let go of Walter’s arm.
Walter was about to walk away when he stopped and called, “Celestyn.”
He held his breathe as he waited for a response, but the robot kept walking away.
Walter turned around and shouted, “Celestyn!”
The robot stopped and stared at him.
“That is a name, but I fail to see its significance in this situation.”
“It was the name of a Polish astrophysicist,” said Sebastian, checking his data files, “But I too fail to see its significance.”
Walter swallowed and his body shook. The bastard, the god damn bastard.
“Walter, you register as ill,” said Turing, taking a step towards him.
“Yes, I think I may have caught something,” forced Walter, struggling to keep his voice steady, “I will go to the medical wing. Excuse me.”

“It has to be a mistake,” said Samira, leaning against a desk, “Maybe you pronounced it wrong.”
“No, god damn it! I’m telling he doesn’t remember who he is.”
Walter, Samira, Daniel Carpenter, a half English and half Greek philosopher, and Maxwell Jones, a small and young computer programmer and drone expert, were gathered in the basement of the museum/school. The museum itself was part of Celestyn’s ship and, thus, was monitored by Ira. The basement, however, was a new addition made completely from materials created by the 3-D printer and they had not yet connected it to Ira’s system.
“I said his name and they both looked up Celestyn’s file, but neither of them realized who that was-is!” ranted Walter, pacing up and down the basement.
The room was dark, with small, portable lights placed in the corners, casting everyone in the room in shadows. There were various boxes and a few tables and chairs as well as numerous bookcases.
“How could something like that happen?” asked Daniel.
He was tall and had developed a slight belly. His black hair was rich and did as it pleased, often falling into his droopy, basset hound eyes.
"Adrian must have done it,” said Walter.
“You can’t do something like that without setting off an alert,” said Samira, “I mean, Ira would notice if someone was poking around in the backend.”
“That’s not necessarily true,” said Maxwell.
He was sitting backwards on a chair, his curly brown hair sticking out, giving him the Einstein look, and he was chewing on a stick of gum.
“Explain,” said Walter.
“Well, according to Kurzweil, Singularity was supposed to expand the human mind exponentially, giving it the capacity to do more and calculate more than we humans thought possible.”
“Right,” said Samira.
“But everything has its limits, especially if we’re talking about the human mind. There’s only so much you can expand that thing before it overloads. Now, adding the processing power of a computer will extend that limit, but even computers have processing limits, despite what Kurzweil may believe about the capabilities of nanobots.”
“Get to the point, please,” said Daniel, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“What if Ira has reached his limit?”
They stared at him uncertainly.
“Think about it, he’s running all the utilities, that electricity, water, li-fi, any kind of entertainment, he’s running all of the surveillance, he’s controlling all the drones and robots, he’s in charge of all communication, he is storing all of our data-that’s including all your historical crap, all of our medical files, our food preferences, our schedules, and whatever else Adrian has him collecting, and he is projecting his subconscious in at least a hundred, if not more, locations at once. That has to be taxing him.”
“But that barely scratches the surface of what Singularity predicted he could do,” said Walter.
“And he shares the drones and robots with Turing,” said Samira.
“I’m not saying that his capability isn’t going to grow,’ said Maxwell, “Kurzweil may be right about that. Merging the mind with the computer may give the mind the ability to grow exponentially, forever, but it’s going to hit limits during that period of growth. It’s like any operating system. It doesn’t matter how new it is, it’s going to hit a limit and then it’s going to need an upgrade. What if Ira’s at a point where he needs an upgrade.”
“What does that mean though?” asked Walter.
“I don’t know exactly. I think that means he’s going to have to expand beyond the ship’s operating system. What I would recommend is building another center of nanobots, like they did for the energy core, and have Ira transfer his conscience to that. That why he can replicate as many nanobots as he needs to keep up with his growing potential.”
‘What does that have to do with Adrian tampering with his memories?” asked Daniel.
“Maybe Ira is so overworked, he didn’t notice Adrian tampering with his data. Think about it, from what we know, it was a very small subset of data, data Ira’s not going to really examine, not with everything else he has to keep track of.”
“So you’re saying Adrian deleted his entire history of his human self as well as the history of Celestyn and Ira didn’t even notice?” asked Samira.
“Yeah.”
They stared at each other uncertainly.
“It happened all the time with computers on Earth.”
“What do you mean?” asked Daniel.
“What did you think happened when a virus infected your computer? If it was a somewhat decent virus, the computer wouldn’t notice until it was mostly infected and by then-”
“It’d be too late,” said Walter.
“Yeah, you either bought a really good anti-virus software to clean up your computer or you called it a day.”
“Walter, you said Adrian is proposing upgrading the entire colony?”
“Yes, most of it.”
“So that would give Ira access to the minds of the entire colony,” said Samira.
“And through Ira, Adrian.”
“What do we do?” asked Samira.
“What can we do?” asked Daniel, “We need Ira to ensure the survival of the colony and if we refuse to go along with the upgrades it will turn Adrian against us and with Turing and Ira on his side, there’s no telling what he will do.”
“But Adrian isn’t a bad man,” said Samira, “This has to be a mistake or a misunderstanding.”
“He sounds kind of crazy to me,” said Maxwell, blowing a bubble.
“He’s not crazy, he’s overwhelmed,” sighed Walter.
“You don’t delete your friend’s memories if you’re overwhelmed,” snapped Daniel.
“He believes we are to bring forth a new age of mankind.”
“Yes, so did the Bolsheviks, look how that turned out for them,” said Maxwell.
They stared at him uncertainly.
“What? It’s true.”
“We need to get away from him,” said Walter, thinking quickly.
“How? Ira controls the ship,” said Daniel.
“And where would we go?” asked Samira.
“When we first landed, Turing scouted five different locations we could create a colony on, remember?”
“Yes,” they said uncertainly.
“We’ll go one of those locations.”
“Again, how?” asked Samira, “Ira is the only one who can fly the ship.”
“Celestyn designed each individual piece with the capability to fly for short distances, just in case something compromised the other parts of the ship,” said Walter, “He never told Adrian and I’m not even sure if Sebastian knew.”
“So you’re saying the museum can fly?” said Maxwell.
“Yes.”
“Well that’s easy then we just block the ship from Ira and take the museum to another part of the planet.”
“How does that work?’ asked Daniel.
“I install a quick program that sends Ira’s signal somewhere else until we’ve made our escape. Then I download another program, that isn’t sentient, to power the ship once we land. As long as I keep the program up to date, Ira will never be able to track us,” said Maxwell.
“And it’s that simple?” asked Daniel skeptically.
“Well it’s a lot of work on my part.”
“But you can do it?” asked Walter, his eyes flashing.
“Yeah, I can do it.”
“How long would it take?” asked Samira.
“A month.”
“Can we wait for that long?” asked Daniel.
“Yes, I think I can stall his upgrade plan, maybe convince him to upgrade Ira’s capabilities first,” said Walter.
“I can bring a number of DNA strands and seeds with us as well,” said Samira.
“Just to clarify, it’s just us four, right?” asked Maxwell.
“Three,” said Daniel.
Walter whirled around and stared at him.
“You need someone on the inside, someone to keep you informed and to recruit.”
“It’s too dangerous,” said Samira.
“Colonizing this planet was dangerous and that didn’t stop me,” snapped Daniel.
“All right then, Daniel, you’ll stay here.”
“What about the upgrade?” asked Samira.
“We can find a way around it,” said Maxwell, “It’ll be tricky, but I think we can find a way around it.”
“Ok, then, we stay low until a month from now.”