Unnatural

  * * * *

  “Yes, Sabrina, there is a moon after all.”

  She was suspended on a watery surface, black as the night sky, that stretched forever in all directions so far as she could see. Marshall was sitting in profile on a perfect white circle that couldn’t be the moon, for not only the obvious reason, but also because it was in the wrong phase unless she had slept for days.

  But the lingering pain precluded her from challenging him, even if that were smart to do to someone with godlike power over her.

  “You made three mistakes,” he continued without looking at her. “First, you thought of killing me, if only briefly. I don’t care how soon you dispelled the thought. That it came to you at all disturbs me greatly. It’s treason against our species.”

  She began at this remark to monitor her mind, but of course this was as hopeless an endeavor as telling oneself not to think of Dostoevsky’s polar bear. “You’re still having those thoughts, and that’s natural. I’ll only punish you when you freely put yourself in the state of mind that entertains such notions.” Freely? What does that even mean anymore?

  “Maybe there’s something to that,” he said with a stilted laugh. “Anyway, your second sin was going somewhere you ought not have gone. You weren’t to follow me, not to a place you couldn’t remember. Did you notice anything strange about the trench? Did it appear distorted the farther in you went?”

  “I wasn’t looking when I went in farther.”

  “Interesting.” Marshall dragged this word out syllable by syllable, stroking his chin as he faced Sabrina. “You weren’t looking. You need to learn, dear, that living in a world that seems harmless gives you no license to be inattentive. That our world doesn’t recognize that is why I have to train you this way at all.”

  “Train me?” Sabrina sat up, causing her to fall into the abyss. What felt like a giant hand – perhaps Marshall really was sitting on the moon – snatched her out of the fluid and laid her in her previous position. The hand was gone by the time she got her bearings.

  “You didn’t think I’d put you there like that if you weren’t supposed to stay, did you? Yes, I’m training you. Or maybe ‘reprogramming’ is the better word. Is that unsettling to you? It may be, but it will become easier to accept once you also accept that we’re all robots at heart – slaves to our passions, our genes.”

  Sabrina scoffed. “I thought you were better than this, Marshall. Now you pull this cynical malarkey.”

  “Hear me out, please. This really isn’t that revolutionary an idea. It’s just something people have denied for millennia because that’s what humans do. Not androids, though. I love them for that, Sabrina.”

  Marshall was gazing somewhere beyond the rock on which he sat, while Sabrina was trying to pinpoint what felt so odd about that statement. “They’re as honest about how deterministic their lives are as they are about anything else. As long as their slavery leads them to the satisfaction of whatever desires they may have, they don’t mind this kind of bondage.”

  “Is Jane okay with being your slave?”

  A look of loving remembrance spread across his face. “She’s as ‘okay’ with it as a being can be. Why?”

  “Because submission to you is what you designed her to desire.”

  “Exactly. When the slave likes servility, everybody wins. The problem is humans don’t want to become happy slaves, and I’m okay with that. I want us all to be happy masters, and that begins with learning to be the sorts of smart masters that can prevent Earth from becoming the wasteland I showed you before.”

  He drifted toward her in little time, as if he had been sitting on a balloon within Earth’s atmosphere the whole time. “Smart masters prepare themselves against the Singularity. They learn the hard way how to view themselves the way they truly are, just as a smart soldier learns the art of war with pain. Would you rather I planted these lessons and desires in your brain against your will?”

  “No, but I’d prefer it if you gave me a reason to think I need to learn your ‘lessons’ before you taught them with force.” Her malicious face soon turned to one of pained disappointment. “Marshall, why’d you have to do things this way? It would’ve been so much easier to persuade me into freely joining your cause if you’d just presented the idea peacefully, and if you hadn’t silenced the vast majority of humans. I think you’ll find people a lot more receptive to rational argument than you’ve given them credit for.”

  He grabbed her by the neck with both hands and thrust her into the murky water. Sabrina resisted, but it didn’t stop him from keeping her submerged for ten seconds, at the end of which she gasped and fought back tears. Her sinuses were clogged and faith itself was failing her.

  “That was for spouting idiocy – and to demonstrate my point. When was the last time you ever heard of a human changing their mind, out of pure intellectual honesty, on an issue that challenges their deepest ingrained cultural indoctrinations? You said it yourself to Uriah: people aren’t rational. Now think of the last time someone did something against what they had so far believed or valued, not because of reason, but out of fear.”

  “Fear doesn’t work either! Don’t you get it, Marshall? Humans respond best to trust!”

  He looked ready to spit something else vitriolic while further displaying his ownership of her, but he closed his eyes and lifted Sabrina to sit across from her. This left her an equal, despite dripping wet and almost cowering.

  “Sabrina, if nothing else, I hope you can learn that trust is fear. Fear of the reality of human of volatility. Fear of social ostracism because people don’t like distrustful fellows. Fear of fear.”

  “Fine!” She collected herself. “Call it what you will, but it’s still better than the kind of fear you’re using. Don’t expect me to do your bidding when I get out of here.”

  “When you get out of here, eh?” Marshall took her hand and helped her up, lying on his back when she stood. “All right. I can make that happen.” She did not look convinced. “Oh, don’t be suspicious. If you want trust, I can show you trust.”

  “No, you can’t. Even if you do let me know what you’re thinking, that might still be a lie. You say you ‘learned’ this whole philosophy, which makes it hard to believe you aren’t just hiding your thoughts in some database I can’t access.” Sabrina could not resist sending him underwater with her foot. It was wrong, she knew it, but it was all she could do to keep from cracking.

  When he surfaced, he pleaded, “Sabrina, you don’t understand. I’ve already told you something I would never tell someone I didn’t consider special. You’ll see what it is soon enough, but you have to have faith in me.”

  “Just how gullible do you think I am, Marshall? I’m in a Mindscape, but you aren’t as far as I can tell. My mind’s an open book, yours isn’t, and the only reason I have to trust you is that you’re letting me beat the pus outta you.” The hardcover book appeared in her hand, and she threw it at his face before submerging him again. “And even that could just be you trying to get me to betray my virtues.”

  Sabrina let him fake looks of agony under the surface for longer than she had intended. Emily Dickinson, eat your heart out.

  Telekinetically, she gave him some air. It was the most pathetic sight that had ever disgraced her vision, and in her fit of reptilian brain loathing, she wanted to keep seeing it. She knew she had to stop, that this was what he wanted, but her neocortex seemed to disappear. Wasn’t indulging in what she wanted the height of rationality, after all?

  Marshall’s eyes bulged as she magicked him into the air and shot him like a dart into the lunar target. His bones broke one by one in mid-flight.

  He can’t feel it, and that makes it all right. She breathed heavily, waiting for impact. So why is he letting me do this?

  At last the virtual body’s force broke the light-reflecting rock. Sabrina’s heart sank as much as the shards and Marshall did, for at that
moment she realized that her ire had destroyed the moon itself, such as it was. Her home, the lifeblood of all beauty in her past – all in pieces, now sending waves of the void-like stuff below and around her.

  Sabrina didn’t attempt to avoid them, nor did she flinch as they encompassed her. It was the only way out, not suicide, but a sacrifice. Whatever Marshall had wanted her alive for, he’d had some reason, and she refused to afford him the satisfaction.