momebie | There's nothing wrong with just a taste of what you've paid for.

Original fiction.
1033 words.

Caleb's cup was empty again. He stood up on loose legs and swayed in front of his cot, looking around for the bottle of vodka. It was a small room that he and Rajin shared on the compound. Clean and bare with hardwood floors and white walls that reflected the light from their battery powered lanterns. Rajin was hunched over the small table between the beds, clutching the bottle close to him. It was almost empty. Caleb fell back onto his cot and kicked his legs out. "The first," he said softly, just to feel his lips move.

"What?" Rajin looked up at him, his eyelids and mouth both drooping. Some people looked interesting when they were drinking, Caleb thought. Rajin looked like a sleeping basset hound.

Caleb cleared his throat. "I said, the first messages we sent into space were so clumsy. It's a wonder they granted us audience with the counsel at all."

In Caleb's life before, when he was working to build robotic ambassadors to send to the newly found life in space, the main problem had been automated reasoning. The problem with automated reasoning was that they could never figure out how to make machines think in ways that were 100% predictable.

In Caleb's life now, the main problem was with human reasoning, because humans did tend to think in ways that were 100% predictable.

Rajin said, "oh right, Beethoven."

With machines there was always a theorem that couldn't be proven. There was always an algorithm that needed to be looked at again. Caleb really missed working with machines. "Not just, but yeah, Beethoven. How arrogant was that? Like our infantile attempts at what we call music could possibly mean anything to another form of life."

"Who's to say they wouldn't?" Rajin cocked his head. "If you were going to receive a transmission from another form of life, having no previous knowledge of that life's existence, what would you want?"

"What do you mean?"

"All I'm saying is," Rajin paused to tip the bottle back and lick at the final drops of alcohol as they trickled down the neck. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. "There was nothing that was going to make sense, so we might as well have sent the music. It's important to us, anyway."

Caleb had spent a solid month and a half going over the primitive recursive functions used in the Alien Speech Mode Shift program before he found the cause of the redundant cycle. Now he was lucky if he got a radio that worked for an hour. It was funny the way things worked out. Funny. It was the word she had used. It's what his commander had said when Caleb joined the rebelling ranks. Yeah. Fucking hilarious.

"What good is it showing them the most important parts of us first? It's rash, leaving our hands in the open like that." And immature, which was one of the first words the robotic ambassador had brought back with it. In Caleb's former life, if a machine couldn't perform a task 100% of the time, then it really wasn't any more useful than a person. If that was the most damning statement you could apply to a machine, how did it reflect the worth of humans?

"Do you not consider that to be one of our most defining characteristics?"

"Should have just stayed out of the whole mess." Caleb could feel his eyelids getting heavy. He was thirsty. He swallowed and it stung.

"Coulda. Woulda. Shoulda." Rajin stood up and kicked his chair toward the wall. "Do you want any water? We've got early reveille, and you're an absolute bitch when you're hung over."

To Caleb, algorithms were beautiful because you could break them down into their components and each piece meant something, even when it was divorced from the whole. People were something else entirely, and even after six months on the compound it was still hard for him to share space with another person without resenting them. He'd lucked out with Rajin, who was actually quite intelligent, despite looking like he'd been born and raised in the state pen.

When Caleb broke Rajin down into parts he still made sense. As a military defect. As a college drop out. As a person who valued freedom of thought. As being slightly gullible enough to believe in a cause. Every part of Rajin carried the beauty of sense. This confused Caleb, who had always seen all people, even himself, as inferior to the possibility of pure automated reasoning.

"You're looking at me funny again," Rajin said.

Caleb shook his head and looked down at his feet. "Yeah, water please." He held his glass out for Rajin to collect and take away. Alone now, he let himself fall sideways. He curled up on top of the rough blanket that was draped over his bed.

He hated thinking of himself as lost and misunderstood. It was a phase he didn't go through in his teens because he'd been too busy with work, and it would be ridiculous for him to pick up the habit now when there was still so much work to do. But the truth was, Caleb was going to fail his mission. Even though Rajin was intelligent and thoughtful, there was no way Caleb could make him understand about the machines. Not short of figuring out how to implant his knowledge right into Rajin's brain anyway. This, as far as Caleb knew, was a technology that was still in the testing stages and didn’t always go well. He needed to, though, if either of them were going to make it to the end of the war alive. There was something he was still missing.

Caleb believed that human thought was predictable 100% of the time. You just had to know which parts of the algorithm were present. If he could break Rajin into components, maybe he could break down the others too. Maybe then his world view would make sense again. Maybe then he could figure out what he was missing in the machines and make that right as well. Maybe. Sometimes it was just funny how things turned out.

This entry was written for Topic 13: Inside Baseball at