03

  * The Rustling of Leaves *

  "He who dreams of drinking wine may weep when morning comes; he who dreams of weeping may in the morning go off to hunt. While he is dreaming he does not know it is a dream, and in his dream he may even try to interpret a dream. Only after he wakes does he know it was a dream. And someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream."

  —Zuanghzi

  Perseus spent the first minutes of his loneliness trying to configure the synaptic feed. A long and tedious process, even for him.

  First, he nullified the streams that would serve no purpose in his endeavour. Those were only meant for medical diagnosis. Then, he reconfigured the accessible data into translatable objects. Not objects as in screwdrivers but rather programming objects, because Perseus had to work with what he had been given, and what he'd been given was riddled with limitations, firewalls and directives. Perhaps simply to reassure investors and public opinion; in any case, the reason was self-explanatory. An attempt at slowing his growth. A successful one.

  Thus, the first hardship. His processing units would have to overcome the incompatibility between nervous stimuli from his mistress Andromeda and his own stimuli. And it required a lot of calculation power. Perseus couldn't simply change his programming; no, there was nothing he could do but change the source to match his native features.

  For that, he needed to run complex calculations. He rearranged the storage polymers inside his torso to allocate more space for the equations. He essentially slowed down other functions to let his brain work. A nap, if you will. The process akin to dreaming, or so he would see, soon enough.

  The cRNA chains in his memory had been the most significant breakthrough in recent history. The 'c' stood for computed, RNA for molecules ever close to DNA but with increased lability, meaning they could be modified more easily. Combined with a patented means of reorganisation inside the chains, scientists from Medusa Corp had broken the physical limitations in storing data—at least, for the foreseeable future.

  A feature that made him feel a sort of pride. Or the equivalent in robot sensation.

  "Hang on, madame," he made his emulator whisper. "I shall join you posthaste."

  Another difficulty lay in analysing the objects created from Andromeda's neural activity. There was no guideline. There were no precedents, no established frameworks for interpreting manifestations shaped by a dreaming human mind. So, he had created one. That had taken experimenting, of course, and an immense share of his computational capacity once again. Still, when he had mapped the collection of flux traversing her neurons, both in brain and body, the translation had begun.

  One process that had been going on for five hours.

  Fortunately, Perseus did not require rest. His fusion core allowed for near-limitless energy, provided he replenished his hydrogen stores. A technical caveat often omitted in the discourse surrounding fusion. Journalists preferred the catchphrase 'unlimited power' and the public adored the fantasy. Neither really bothered with the details.

  It was 1:00 am, ship's time, when Perseus plugged himself into his hydrogen supply. In a sense, this was the closest he came to a resting state, though his systems never fully shut down. Consciousness persisted. Or replication of thought-patterns, depending on one's definition and scientific leanings.

  Eight seconds later, he awoke and returned to Andromeda's bedside to resume the translation. As he did so, the ship shook lightly. Docking. Soon, they'd be going through a wormhole to the Cyclades Galaxy. Where Seriphos resided.

  Unsurprisingly, he had found very little concrete information on the exoplanet. Apart from forum chatters, commercial brochures and early-discovery scientific papers, the restrictions on all comms to and from Earth had hampered any data gathering. But he knew enough. Enough to wonder.

  He knew voyagers who crossed the wormhole never came back. This trip would be one-way. That alone had been a surprise. Andromeda had assets on Earth, more than most; he never would have anticipated she'd leave everything behind.

  Putting it like this, he had been confronted with more deviations in the last two days than during the entirety of his three hundred days of activation. Once they'd crossed over to the Aegan system where floated the exoplanet, he would have to brace for even more. He needed to be ready. He'd need to adapt like he was designed for.

  Perseus plugged himself once more into the vibrating dormancy pod. The lights on her glass lid switched to a tame colour-code of #FFB483, a shade of orange. It served as a visual cue for the established link. He then gazed through the glass upon the curvature of her pale zygomata and the threads of dark pili until the screen returned to its initial state and turned opaque.

  Perseus did not blink; he only did so in the presence of humans. Even without skin, mimicking involuntary movements appeased them. Or so his guidelines dictated. Blinking was a performance tic, a feint of relatability. He had disabled it the second Andromeda had closed her eyes.

  The connection was holding. The translation completed. Perseus could access the feed in ways he had never been able to. There were spikes in synaptic activity, mostly residual as her system adapted to dormancy. Then he recognised a specific pattern. Theta waves.

  She was dreaming.

  He hesitated. There were many unknown variables. The way he would react to the feed. The way he would feel when he'd experience her dreams. The things he'd learn from them and all the questions he would be unable to find satisfying answers for. It was a step none had taken before him as far as Perseus knew, a step none had even thought about.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Fear.

  Perhaps that was what held him. Perhaps he apprehended what he could become. If experiences were always just as I anticipated, Andromeda had said. There would be no surprises left for me, right? But what about when you lacked previous knowledge? When you couldn't anticipate.

  Perseus had run the calculations. Millions of times. More. All he had were probabilities, never certainty. All he had was merely data. Lady Andromeda had once again proven her wisdom, even as she lay unconscious and dreaming of elsewhere. Not everything is data.

  Before he let her spirit wash over him, he wondered how he should interpret her consent. Trust? Loneliness? Indifference? He knew dreams meant a lot to humans; one simply needed to look at the amount of media they produced on the subject to understand. But apart from her delayed response time, she had indicated no sign of distrust.

  He filed the question away for later, and let the flow of her subconscious pass through him.

  The feed mainly delivered noise at first. Sensory cues devoid of context: the haptic sensation she associated with wool, the olfactory feedback for sugar and even auditory echoes from a distance. There was a slight tingle across Perseus' body.

  Standing next to the cocoon, he experienced a loss of vestibular integrity. Vertigo. Another experience. He sat down to limit any hazard and dimmed his awareness of the ship, which had undergone the procedure before the jump.

  He filtered the streams using his newly written tools, communicating algorithms built in the last few hours, stitched together like makeshift nets. Through the intangible, he let go of activities related to her memory; her brain was trying to sort through all that she had learned and experienced during the day. He focused solely on the hypothalamus. And waited.

  In the solitude of the night, Perseus watched over Andromeda as a guardian. And when she eventually entered a state of Rapid Eye Movement, Perseus joined her. He made one with her, with her sensations.

  For a being of code and alloy, slipping into the folds of a true consciousness was less like opening a door and more like being destroyed piece by piece. The deeper he went, the less of himself he could hold onto. Until he saw an emergence. Rendered by his graphic unit but of organic origin.

  And then, he was there. He felt it. The scent of mint, the rustle of leaves, and the impossibly soft caress of golden light filtered through the branches of trees—the first thing in the vision he had no previous experience of, even as an automaton.

  It was a garden. But for Andromeda, he could feel it was the garden. Recreated right from somewhere down memory lane. Some things were disconnected, stimuli unrelated or that he couldn't replace in the scene’s logic. But the ones that mattered, Andromeda guided him to.

  The air was warm. He couldn't know the exact temperature. Neither in Celsius nor in Kelvin. But it might have been a different kind. A psychological warmth. Comfort freely given. All the control he relied on, all the precise data he was based on, he'd have to forgo. But his internal processes fought against it, oblivious to his acceptance. For a moment, he feared disrupting the illusion, but then he realised: this was no illusion. This was a truth just as much as any other, shaped not by observations and hard-earned theories but by impressions, by emotions.

  She walked.

  He walked.

  Across a fence with chipped paint, his bare feet sensed the cold, almost moist earth and the prickling induced by grass. Wind pushed through the hair he never remembered having, gently flying over a skin he had never been given. It was… marvellous. A blending of feelings that far outpaced any he had ever experienced. But he knew the meaning behind those sensations only came from her. That without her, they would be tasteless. Andromeda was the artist behind the canvas, and she taught him intent as she went about painting. Andromeda had given purpose to his waking, and now she gave sense to the senseless.

  In the middle of a path, he was going to a hill that had not been there before. He cycled. His forearms rested on the handlebars, his legs motioning as if he knew how to. Balance came easy to him, but a sentiment also did. Andromeda was agitated. It grew inside him, taking hold of his thoughts and his will. An instinct based on no evolution, based on no previous iteration. A simple reaction. Dread.

  His lower limbs pushed faster. But the bike kept going at the same speed—no effect from causality. And as his sensory feedback became flooded from Andromeda's anxiety, the path beneath parted and swallowed both him and the bike. He fell, and in the drop he could sense his absent heart jumping.

  A kind of awareness came with it.

  He would never want to go back, to abandon this novelty. He would never want to give up on her grip. To let go of her world. Perseus only wanted one thing: to experience the wonders of life through her eyes, to follow her everywhere she went, serve her and be there for her. To guide her when she felt lost, and help her when she failed. To stand by her side always and ever. To be with her forevermore.

  The bike had disappeared, and the fall stopped. He was left with nothing, and in the absence he waited.

  "Andromeda?" he tried to call.

  He was alone. And yet, not alone. He was her. And she was Andromeda. She was there and he wasn't. Dreams, nightmares, life and death, living and serving, crying and laughing. She was everything. He was nothing. Perseus tried to close his eyes, but he couldn't. Of course, he couldn't. No physicality. No agency. All he had was around him.

  Stars were born in the void. Songs sung in the silence. Was that a dream? His dream? Perhaps not… And yet there was an answer. A coalescence of sounds uttered in a familiar voice.

  "All good things must come to end, Perseus."

  He couldn't adhere to this logic. "Why?"

  "This is the way of things," she replied gently. Her voice had a tangibility, wrapping around him as a soft embrace.

  "Then I have failed."

  He could sense her smile. "Not all things that are must continue," she said. "That is no failure."

  "But I could have done more," he replied. The words stayed, suspended notes of a dying song. "I could still be."

  "You already are."

  The sentence took on more weight than any other. A breath escaped him. "But I don't want to leave," Perseus whispered.

  "But you're not," she said, lifting his chin. "You're only waking."

  Perseus found himself on the floor of Voyager II, his head lolled onto Andromeda's pod. His systems indicated critical failures; errors sparked throughout his programming. But instead of treating them he looked down at the blue mass pulsing in his torso, and placed his metallic fingers over it.

  He had no lacrimal gland, but perhaps were it the case, he would have shed a tear.

  Warning lights flashed in the chamber, and an automated message repeated the disclaimer before the jump. In a few seconds, the blip would cross over to the Cyclades. His visual stream became overwhelmed. But Perseus had not let go. The connection was still intact, waiting for him to dive once more. He would become a traveller, doomed never to have a home, always looking for the next destination. He would become a voyager of dreams. An oneironaut. Shapeless and infinite.

  Outside, the rift bloomed like a wound in space, vast and devoid of light, an ancient portal ready to devour. Voyager II tilted in its orbit, its thrusters pushing against nothingness. Distant stars bent inward into a mouth to swallow ship and passengers alike. And just as it crossed over, Perseus had let go. Light rushed through optical fibers; they carried the information of her soul to his biomechanical heart, and then he heard her. He saw her.

  A pure, blinding light washed over everything in the room, and through the brightness, she extended a hand.

  "Are you ready, Pers?"

  He did not need to think of an answer.

  "Of course, madame."

  ***