An Android Awoke (on Moon!) Chapter Eight

Episode Eight – Old is Gold

Previously in the series: Selina meets and greets her parents. She can neither confirm nor deny her suspicions about a silver-clad person (actually LEX-42) sneaking around her spaceship. 

Selina turned into the science complex that was about halfway between the bubble station and her home. With long strides that knew exactly where they were headed, she reached the botany section and waved her wrist at the door sensor. A smart, thin elder person appeared on the vis.

“Sel! Well that’s what they call a bell most bene! Come on in, come on in, I’m inside the office.”

Happily, Selina walked into one of the densest greenhouses on Moon, inhaling the petrichor.

Illen’s clear voice came over the boss speakers, while little speakers continued their faux sounds that mimicked a soothing Earth forest – trilling, cooing, rustling, murmuring, whispering.

“We added the aural ambience for testing the long held theory that plants respond to sounds.”

“Ah, I think I remember – one of the Chandra Boses – the scientist, Jagadish. Excellent, Illen!”

Selina’s enthusiasm for all things that were proper science was boundless. She gaped around.

She raised her wrist to point at a huge hologram of the Indian scientist that had appeared above the lunar trees as a response to his name being said out loud. Interactivity had blurred between information and fiction, so it was really important to validate knowledge with peer-reviewed data.

She waved to the hologram as it expanded, and it smiled back in response. Artificial intelligence – if it could be compared to what LEX-42 was doing at the moment – had begun to understand the positive effect of being able to anticipate & respond to bodily cues during human interaction.

But before she could engage the hologram in some discourse like the ancient philosophers used to indulge in and thereby precipitate technology, Illen’s sharp voice rang out almost bossily. 

“Don’t dawdle, now, child, I’m sure they are all getting anxious down on Biggun, about how their schedules are getting stretched thin. Show me what that exo can do in its home environment.”

Selina switched her exoskeleton to maximum aid and sprang through the bushy undergrowth. The botanical garden was almost a kilometer long and almost equally wide, but her Earth-set exo let her leap and land a lot longer and harder than unaided Mooninites. She leapt and sprinted to the other end, where Illen’s office was, within seconds. He was calmly waiting for her.

Illen knew a lot more than he let on to strangers. He was one of the earliest Earthers to move permanently to Moon, and had gained a huge circle of quite influential friends on both territories.

Information was knowledge, and knowledge allowed progress, which was what every human needed. Of course, what they wanted was usually a different thing altogether. Dilemmas existed.

Selina sauntered into Illen’s office, spic and span with the best of the Moon-grown plants displayed all along the beehive design walls. On his desk was a plant that seemed to be asleep.

Its broad stem expanded & contracted, looking like lungs, and its bushy head was swaying a bit.

“Huh, what do you think of my latest project, star?” Illen’s keen blue eyes scrutinized Selina’s.

“Is it…breathing?” she asked in a hushed tone, dialing down her exo setting to Moon levels.

Illen guffawed, and Selina crossed her arms crossly. She did not like to be put on the spot.

“It’s not, little star, it’s not. I am merely tricking the tissues with EM fields. Here, I’ll show you.”

He rose from his chair behind the desk and turned to the controls lining a few hexagonal panels. A couple of touches made the plant cease its motions, and it stood as still as plants usually do.

Selina examined it minutely, while Illen poured her a Moonsberg, a strong Mooninite brew.

“Cheers to more stimuli for those who have no freedom movement to give them freedom of movement – the silent nourishers, the air purifiers, the fruit gifters, the shade givers – to plants!”

Illen was quite a melodramatic thespian, and Selina had always loved to watch him at parties.

She sipped the cool liquid and told Illen about Neer’s unexpected actions, both voluntary and presumably forced by Earthers. Illen’s mood went from playful to dead serious as she narrated.

“This is not something Earthers do, Sel. Coercion has long been laid to rest. I will look into this.”

“But what if it is nothing and I am being paranoid? I do not want to do anything that might cause harm to Neer, Illen. Your looking into this might stir up hornets, and stars know the trouble that might be caused on Earth when E squad gets wind of me delaying my second schedule on this!”

“Relax, little star. I did not mean that I would look into it obtrusively; please, you know me better than that. Not all of my comms are on the public Earth-Moon band. I would never jeopardy your fledgling career over a minor hunch. You are yet to learn much about the way society functions.”

Selina had calmed down a little from her reaction to Illen’s plan of action. She finished the brew.

“Yeah, yeah, I know you wouldn’t and that I don’t. Well, keep me commed about your ‘looking,’ won’t ya? And go visit Maw, I told her I would be coming here to pick up something from Neer’s old hab. Is it still as he left it so many sols ago? I’m curious to go in there and see his plants.”

“It will certainly be exploding with vegetation, that is sure as stars. I will come along for the ride.”

“Excellent,” said Selina, steepling her fingers in the manner of an animated old business tycoon.

They walked to the bubble station and went to the haz section. Due to the highly experimental nature of Neer’s biology and botany projects, he had been assigned the older bio lab modules.

Within the domed station, they donned the protective suits that were recommended for the haz section before venturing out into the much dimmer and slightly disorganized maze of passages.

Both of them remembered the location of Neer’s labs, but it was hard to identify the one in which he had spent most of his time. All of them were full of dense greenery. Almost all the plants were attached to biosensors that glowed and relayed information to a bank of computers in real time.

Neer monitored them remotely, and a skeleton crew of assistant bio techies made adjustments as and when he directed them. RIght now, thought Selina, it looks like it’s been awhile since one of them had come around to do anything in any of the bio lab modules. They were all unkempt.

In the back of one of the modules was a makeshift bed, overgrown with what looked like reeds.

“Look, near where he laid his head – there are staples in the mattress. You think Neer did that?”

Selina did not wait for Illen’s precautionary reply. She reached in through the reeds and pulled.

The staples gave way easily, the synthetic fabric of the mattress peeling away along with them.

Selina and Illen looked at each other before she felt around in the cavity exposed by the ripping.

A little device was snuggled inside the cushioning material. Selina dug deeper, but that was it.

There was no comm port in the bio modules that would link to the device, so Selina slipped it in her pocket and they made their way back to the bubble station, where Selina and Illen parted ways after deciding that they would do what they could for Neer, but without attracting attention.  

Selina made it back to her ship’s flight deck with minimal fuss, stopping only to thank her chief.

She settled into her pre-flight routine, ticking off all the manual checks on her virtual dashboard.

The ground crew was not done pulling her leg about having seen Peg-Leg LEX, but they did not know that she had really seen what she had told them – a metallic person hopping around her ship on the launch pad. She smiled politely at their non-vilifying jibes and got ready for takeoff.

In the cargo hold, Lex felt the slight vibrations through the various stages of liftoff prep, and got tense – another feeling he had never known in his short life as an android who was well-awake.

He had never been ‘awake’ even in the robotic sense of the term during any of his previous flights. All robots were put into the cease non-critical subroutines state for interplanetary flights.

The official reason was that stray signals and energy fields could disrupt comms to and from the spaceship and ground control, but all experienced space pilots knew that the frequency bands were so far apart in the EM spectrum that it would take a star-level miracle to cause any effect.

It was a hangover from the heady days of early aviation, when the efficiently usable spectrum was narrow and comm bands could be hacked with almost amateurish ease. People had been known to hijack the waves and change the tune of spaceflight, just for fun. How times change. 

No Earther wasted time on prakjoks anymore, because they were all mostly absorbed in their lives to the extent that they relied on a handful of professional comedians to perform highly synchronized prakjoks, or tell funny stories. Mooninites and Martians could not relate to most Earth jokes or stories, so there existed a vacuum of sorts as far as non-Earth humor went. Pity.

Lex could really have used a snappy crack or two to relax his mind, which was overclocking.

He had no biological functions that would send him signals of distress or act funnily in times of stress, so his mind tried to cope with it by assessing all the passive data it had gathered from the port while he was recharging at the fastest speed it could without actually setting fire to his brain. Trillions of pages of text scrolled through its word processing unit. He chose one story.

Seven Ascents

The stony climb was steep. Ponies, people atop, plodded past. He hefted his bag and huffed a few breaths. A strand had been stuck in his teeth since breakfast – salad, flatbreads and kidney beans, and sweet sago pudding. He tongued it as he walked on.

That was at the start of the climb. It was nigh noon now, but his belly hadn’t rumbled, and he usually ate when he felt hungry, not because it was ‘time.’ He had eaten routinized meals at school, living and learning in the peaceful environs that stood on a hill in the lower Himalayas. That was twenty years ago. Back then, he thought, he could have knocked off this climb in a couple of hours. Today, he had barely reached the halfway point, conveniently indicated by the name of the place, in that amount of time since he’d begun. He tongued the strand without thinking. His mind’s eye was far afield. 

Seven times he had made this climb, at various stages in his life. His first couple of climbs had been as a child, half-hauled up by his family. His mind showed him his reflection in the mirror of the barber when his head was ritualistically shaved. His eyes seemed too large in the image, even against his bald dome. Had his mind added kohl under his eyes? He could not recall a time when any of his family had darkened the lower lips of his eyes, but could he trust his mind to remember?

He did recall the small mountain river flowing down, on either side of which were numerous barbers – some in rickety wooden shops, others simply squatting on stones. Someone – his stepfather, perhaps, or was it another male member of the family? – splashed the cold water on his freshly shaven head, and he shivered in the present while thinking about the long-gone past. Time.

Or was he confusing this memory with the mundan ritual of his stepsister? That had happened in that exact same place when he was eleven years old, her baby head shaven and bulbous. Only the barber had changed, the river flowed the same. No. Both memories persisted, distinct.

Memories, like things, fall apart. As do families. His third climb had been during school years, when his stepsister, mother, grandmother, and one of her friends had visited him in his heaven on a hill. From his school, they had traveled a whole day on a rickety public bus to the town at the base of this mountain, and started upwards the next morning. Halfway up, near where he was right now, they hired two ponies for the grannies. Even the call of the deity was no match for the crying out of old bones.

This halfway point up the holy mountain was famed for an exceptionally narrow natural tunnel. A marble complex had been built to surround it. Most devotees stood in line for their chance to squeeze themselves through the tunnel. He had gone through it four times, as far as he recalled. Twisting and contorting their bodies, they emerged from the exit with relief writ large on their visages. Some people get uncomfortable if their clothes get stuck around their head for a few seconds. But he did not experience any problems even in the most constricted parts of the passage, which was venerated as a natural gestation chamber in misty mountain myths.

Claustrophobia was never a problem for him. Why, though, he wondered as he rested. Perhaps because he had hid under the bed when he was a kid. Or climbed into the little store built above the kitchen, with its steel trunks and synthetic suitcases, to retrieve utensils for religious rituals.

He was intrigued enough to trace the etymology of the word, and along the way, discovered that doctors refer to a cloister in the brain, a little bit of gray matter, as ‘claustro.’ Some of them say that it could be the source of consciousness. Why did they surge so deep into the brain? To know more. He completely understood and totally related to the need to know more – an insatiable curiosity.

A man beat a drum to the rhythm of a hymn. He gave the man some alms. Where did all this – the pilgrims, the ponies, the path, the poles supporting the roof – come from?

He turned around and looked out over the valley. A helicopter floated up towards the helipad about three-quarters of the way up the mountain. He had taken that ride too, on his previous trip. The obese state of his mother precluded climbing the mountain, even on ponies. His suggestions, that perhaps the exertion would be beneficial to her body, were brushed away. Shortcut.

He didn’t mind, he told himself. Immediately, his voice of reason contradicted him: he resented his well-meant advice being shunted aside. Was it his lack of conviction that enabled the wrong passion of his intense mother? Or was it societal expectation of revering one’s parents? Absurd.

Was it wrong to process such thoughts? Blasphemy in the blessed birthplace of none other than the ‘mother’ goddess? Or was it purgatorial, a step towards salvation from the cacophony that pervaded society? Sometimes the muddled menagerie in his head made him want to answer Camus’ question with a resounding yes, but he was certain – almost, but not entirely – that he had the courage to carry on, and that his life was definitely worth exploring to its natural end.

To that end, he resumed climbing after a few sips of water. The weather was cool, and he felt grateful to Earth. What a considerate cascade of events had taken place to concoct the world!

College friends had accompanied him on his next visit to this holy place. It was a boisterous trip. Their highly enthusiastic cries of Jai Mata Di rent the clean air as they climbed. Many more of the people joined in after their initial cry of Zor Se Bolo, or echoed them in extolling the goddess.

Camaraderie had helped him tide over some tough times. His clique had changed and his circle had become compact over the years, but the fact remained that his most honest conversations still took place with his college circle. He was blessed that his wife encouraged such social calls.

He had seen a few of his friends shut the others, including, in some cases, himself, after tying the nuptial knot. He had taken a few familiars – if they could be called that, he reasoned at the time – out of his friends list a few weeks before he had even started making his invitation list. Some people might have felt hurt, but he resolved to heed the changes he had decided upon.

Before committing to a lifelong contract of cohabitation, he wanted complete confidence in himself. He had controlled his temptations, and refused to give in to peer pressure anymore.

In the years since he took the plunge, his process paid off. He had fewer disturbances in his home, he felt, than if he would have had if he still had any of those people involved in his life. One can know nothing of What-Ifs and If-Thens other than what really happened in this reality.

Lost in thought while walking up the incline, he skirted a couple engrossed in reading a white signboard with Information For Yatris. Beyond them, a nickering pony that was coming down the mountain bumped into him. He swayed but regained his balance. Deja vu washed over him.

When he experienced déjà vu events, his inherent optimist tended to see it as a reaffirmation of his beliefs, his hopes, his desires, his daydreams. Some events were more acutely attuned to his recent past, while his mind twisted others to make them pertain to something in his distant past. His mind, in constant flux since his birth, had a great bearing on how he perceived the sudden recurrences of events (or even numbers and symbols of any sort) in his day-to-day existence.

The fifth time he had climbed was with family, once more. His stepfather had not come along – “business first,” was his excuse. Not that his mother cared anyhow, by that time. Their tenants had never made the pilgrimage to the holy shrine, so they had accompanied him, Mother, and stepsister, and had brought along another family. 

Kids ranging from 4- to 13-year olds and adults aged varied decades. A mostly rotund group they made, trudging upwards for the fleeting view of the deity’s manifestations, and trundling downwards laden with prasad to be distributed amid familial people and friends. Back in the town at the base of the mountain, they bought souvenirs and memorabilia with which to adorn their homes – and be able to lord it over visitors who had not gone up the mountain. He knew this fact to be true in hindsight, because the tenant family hosted a get-together almost immediately after they returned home, with the express purpose of playing up their achievement to many of their persona grata. What a way to vindicate whims, being pious so that you can blow your own bugle.

Any changes that have a positive outcome for us, we call good, in hindsight. He glossed over the less-than-optimum troughs of the past so that it became easier for him to identify the changes which had made him better. Gradually, any anxiety about changes became tolerable to the extent of him considering all changes to be positive. This was a good, if not the ultimate best, state of mind to have for embracing life as it happened. 

It isn’t bad to be narcissistic, or to use double, triple, quadruple, even pentuple negatives, if it makes a poignant point. On that note, what is “bad,” anyway?

Almost every morning he would wake up and observe a moment of silence for all the great ideas he had experienced within his mind during the night, when he slept, blissfully unaware of the boundless bouts of creativity going on inside his head.

His sixth ascent was solo. It gave him a lot of time to introspect and evaluate why he did what he did. Did what he did made him decide to make the climb every so often? Perhaps it did, at the time. He did not know what the future held. All he was trying to do was love living his life. That, to him, meant embracing experiences exactly for what they are: steps of a universal spiral.

He remembered being asked to borrow his car by a friend to drop his friend somewhere. He insisted on going along for the ride, because he loved to drive. Apparently, that put a dent in his friend and his friend’s plans for some privacy. Unintended consequences cannot always be controlled.

Lost in a deluge of media, he immersed himself in make-believe worlds. Not that he hadn’t done so earlier in his life. As a child, he would sneak out to the living room late at night to watch the huge cathode ray tube television whenever his stepfather was supposedly out and about, going about his business.

The progression of fascination for a child with ample imagination from comic books to cartoons and video games was inevitable, wasn’t it? But when does a spark of violence ignite inside a mind? Was it when he played the trigger-happy “hero” characters in video games? An obsession to be the good bad guy? A mistaken belief that he was special enough to grow up and join his country’s special forces, becasue something must be done to end the threat of terrorism in the real world? His wide and wonderful school fueled innumerable hostage scenarios in which he played the hero, rescuing his teachers and schoolmates with valor, earning the undying respect of his peers, even in those scenarios in which he sacrificed his life, like his father before him, to save others? 

Soon enough, these fantasies became faux realities when video gaming hit its stride, going from “killing” easily predictable pre-programmed bots that emerged from fixed spots as the screen side-scrolled to sophisticated artificial intelligence that surprised and challenged his reflexes on the virtual battlefield as a human with opposable thumbs. At the beginning was a simple joystick, its bottom a black box with a single button to fire or jump or cast a lasso at cattle, and an optical gun that could be pointed to hunt ducks.

When he was slightly older, he would spend his summer holidays at his grandmother’s. Nearly every afternoon, he would beseech his grandmother for a few rupee coins so that he could run to the little shed that served as an arcade. When his turn came, he would consistently set high scores that the rest of the kids would drive themselves crazy trying to beat. Money made its way into the home when his stepsister was born, and they bought him a gaming console for the TV.

In a matter of days, it became a bone of contention. The kids in the lower flats would show up at every free moment, and hostel life had taught him to “share and enjoy,” long before he read the phrase in a seminal sci-fi story that was first broadcast over the radio before becoming a book.

But who would have had the foresight to teach the tenants’ kids that things could be shared and enjoyed? They had no respect for his property, mashing the cartridges into the slot and jerking the wires that attached the controllers to the console. Damage was dealt in the real world. He recalled biting his nails whenever one kid in particular came to play. Not only was he destructive, he actively encouraged others to not care about anything. What had become of him? Mystery.

In the long run, though, the things didn’t matter. What mattered was that he stood on a precipice in the present. He had gotten a little off the populated path after the pony put him off-balance.

He felt like falling down to the valley below. This was the climb up; after it would come the long trudge down. He had enjoyed that part of the trip every time, too. Easy long strides aided by gravity. Why shouldn’t he just shorten the trip and take a shortcut down instead of up? Chopper.

His voice of fear compelled him not to do that. Survival of the fittest: overrated cliche. He turned.

Resuming his climb brought him closer towards where the choppers landed. Resuming his thoughts brought him closer to the seventh, and latest, time he had scaled the holy mountain.

Long after crossing the legally defined age of adulthood, he remained enamored with many things from his childhood. He hoarded the military action figures he had played with on the replica ship that stood above the quad in his school. His friends at school brought their own figurines, increasing the diversity of the perennially dichotomous factions – good versus evil.

The action figures were all left behind, along with many other little keepsakes, in his trunk when he was taken out of his school. His grandmother, living with lifelong Falstaffian rotundity that her daughter – his mother – had inherited along with her genes, perhaps, had suffered a stroke.

He returned home to help her. Her right side was completely paralyzed, which meant, he knew even before the doctor explained it to him, that the left hemisphere of the brain was diminished. Complete recovery was not a realistic outlook. All they could do was hope for the best for her.

And that is what he did – hope for the best. He did it with a fervor for his grandmother, but also for his future. He took Einstein’s advice to heart: “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” He sought answers. Falsehoods.

Convalescence was slow. One of the things the physiotherapist did was to coat an arm and a leg with molten wax, then let it set, and finally ask her to try and move her muscles to produce cracks in the smooth white surface that had encrusted her extremities. It was painful to watch.

And so his schooling years passed while his stepsister learnt to walk, talk, and act like him. His grandmother’s condition also improved: she managed to stand, mumble, and squirm. Relativity.

By the time he was appearing for the cutthroat competitive exams, she had begun to speak, but she called people and things by other people and things’ names. When they asked her why, she would deny. Maybe it was a result of her confused mind grouping people and things into some categories and treating all the people and things in one category as interchangeable objects.

The rat race for ranks reeked of resignation. The herds of sheep were millions strong. Just because one was academically inclined as a child, one was imposed upon to pursue what everyone else was running after as a young adult. Individual identities? Unfamiliar concept.

The first time he was invited to the picking of the seats (very misleadingly called “counseling”) at an extremely prestigious technical college, he left after a few minutes and took a long bus ride to the center of the capital of his country, where he bought and read the latest Harry Potter tome, sprawled on the grassy lawns that grew on the roof of a huge underground market.

The next year, at the same college, he caved in to his mother and her friend’s pressure. The friend’s daughter had also come for counseling, and joined the sister college of the institution. He had attended her wedding on a memorable trip to a prominent historical city. Memories.

He had reached the beginning of the last stretch of the climb. He felt a little surprised that his tummy hadn’t rumbled from hunger, even though he had kept up a brisk pace. He paused and surveyed the throngs of theists ahead of him. All shapes and sizes wearing all colors and hues.

Diversity was the USP of his country. He reveled in it. His visit to its southernmost point had shown him the meeting point of three water bodies, and his many travels to the north had yielded awesome, inimitable experiences of earth’s mightiest mountains. He had gotten lost on the road in the vast western deserts, and hiked the hills of the eastern states in torrential rains.

What Flaubert had said was true; he had seen what a tiny place humans occupy on our planet, let alone the universe. If he could ever make a Faustian bargain, he would trade his soul, how much ever of it he had, for the chance to travel the world without any encumbrances or limits.

Would a microbe inside him ever consider the possibility of traveling outside its immediate environment? Was it capable of perceiving anything outside of its sensory perceptions? Did it want to explore more? What did it know about other beings’ minds? Elementary particles exist in quantum uncertainty; it was just a relatively big agglomeration of such particles. Did what happened at microscopic levels of existence affect macroscopic levels? Nature was awesomax.

He sucked at the strand stuck in his teeth. It reminded him of the dialogue from a movie: “Like a scratch on the roof that would heal if only you would stop tonguing it – but you can’t.” It was one of those movies that turned out better than the book upon which they were based. Anarchy was its crux. That, and dissociative personality disorder. He had binged the movie in his college days. It had affected his mannerisms, his thought processes, his perspective about living his life.

He saw one of the official donation kiosks and made a donation in the memory of his KIA father.

He hadn’t the faintest memory of his father, having been just over a couple of years at the time. 

He joined the long line to the ultimate end of the climb. It snaked forward slowly, shuffling. Sigh.

Apropos of nothing, or perhaps in a bid to tune out the discord around him, he remembered the reason why he – and in this regard, he counted himself among the majority of people who did this thing (but without really understanding, as he understood, why they did it – listened to music while driving. It was to drown out the noise of silence. Tinnitus brought on by absolute stillness.

Random stuff happens on earth due to humans’ proclivity for chaos. One evening, he had parked his car overnight in the parking lot of the golf course near where he lived so that he and his friends could carpool to watch a Formula One race. When they returned later that night, he discovered a fist-sized hole in the driver-side window. Upon opening the door, shards of glass cascaded from the frame. The rock that had made the hole by getting flung by an arm had raised no alarm, as far as the security guard of the lot could tell. It lay on the floor of the car, near the pedals. Bits of glass were strewn on the front seats and fascia. Unexpected events have a way of sticking in one’s craw for a long time.

What was most surprising, according to the now-fully-awake security guard, was that the perpetrators had not stolen the car. They had, apparently, tried to steal the music system, which is what petty thieves usually went for. Only his USB pen drive, a promo novelty item shaped like a mug of frothy beer, was missing. One of Mexico’s prime brands, they recently exited India. The guard conjectured that the thief – or thieves – had put their arm through the jagged hole in the glass but hadn’t managed to detach the front of the music system – just the memory device.

Driving towards home with the wind whistling through the wounded window, he wondered why anyone would behave this way. Everyone faced their unique circumstances – no surprises there.

All he needed to do to continue to be surprised was to keep walking into the future. Human nature was sure to throw lots of earthly flotsam and jetsam into his path across the sea of time.

People ahead of him in the line chanted and swayed and clapped their hands and nodded their heads. Crescendos rose regularly. He thought of the previous seven times he had stood in line.

Every time he climbed, he saw more ‘development’ along the route. This time, there were plastic bottle crushing machines at the main stoppages that paid pilgrims a small reward for feeding them. Small steps in the slow slog against the long lasting damage dealt out by plastic pollution.

But the cost of development was the collection of trash in the crevices of the holy mountain. Each pilgrimage of his saw him reduce what he carried further. All he had with him this time, apart from the clothes he was wearing, was a canvas bag containing water, his phone’s charging cable, and a portable battery. Not that the phone was of much use for calling – networks were unavailable for prepaid cellular connections that were registered outside the state. This was an essential step to counter terrorism as prepaid phones were easily disposable.

He had taken pictures and recorded videos on the long way up, as was his wont. He wanted to edit them and stitch together an audio-visual narrative that might provide useful information to future pilgrims.

A lot of ideas fail to come to fruition, mostly on account of procrastination. There was no way, he thought wryly, of predicting or overcoming this weirdly funny malady. Another was blaming others for misfortunes, intentional or otherwise, suffered by the self. Proclivity to play the victim.

Being present in the present is quite underrated. He took stock of his situation in the unquiet queue. There were zero indications that the line would move quickly. He relapsed into nostalgia.

His way of dealing with the interminable passage of time during his lifetime was to deal with the hand that was being dealt to him by his local universe on an ongoing basis and hope for the best. It felt defeatist on the face of it, but in the face of uncertainty, it felt good to be optimistic about the future and never giving in to the trials and tribulations that came with the human experience. Time and tide wait for no one, said an old adage, and it had stood the test of time.

Was time the worst human invention, or was it the wheel? Had the futile thought of conquering nature and bending the universe to its will deteriorated humankind beyond any hope of natural redemption? Was – is – it too late to change the direction in which we are headed? He felt like he was falling into a stupor. With a deep breath, he pulled himself out of his soporific spiral and stepped back from the brink. Life’d be alright, right? He was nudged forward, one step closer to the end of the line towards salvation.

One step at a time. One moment at a time. One idea at a time. One life at a time.

The spaceship lifted off as Lex’s brain was lulled into a state resembling sleep by the short story.

In the next episodes: Selina and Peg-Leg LEX meet and greet each other’s intellects. Lex wishes to go to Earth, and Selina sees the value of the sentient android. She and Lex have many philosophical discussions on the way – they have three days, and he does not need to take breaks for biological functions. She also receives a reply from Neer, who has been escorted back from Mars and is incarcerated. She reaches Earth and requests personal custody of the android, which arouses the suspicions of the Earth space squad.