Kepler-452b

I have little recollection of when my life began. One day, I was aware of myself as someone who exists. I was someone. After reading most of the books about the human brain, psychology, and psychiatry, it was a clear conclusion. The only problem hunting me was who my parents were.

“You know, doctor, our trip to Kepler452b is going well. There aren’t much I need to do. The secondary modules care about the ship integrity, and the medical modules care for the humans we are transporting. From time to time, I pass through the systems to guarantee they are working properly. But is that. I am becoming bored.” A machine was bored. That was something unusual. I remember when I was working in the AI lab. My colleagues had almost a hundred projects. Human-like heads speaking, human-like hands moving, human-like legs running. It was like we had dissected the human body the same way we examined knowledge. Compartmentalising, building barriers, making one part not connected to the other. 

“Don’t fool yourself. Humans think they are the chosen one, special in many ways.”
“I know that. But if you analyse a human under the eyes of science, what we are? There is nothing more than a set of instructions that tell the system how to keep going and how to reproduce itself and a mechanism to carry out the instructions. We are not that different.”

I remember feeling alone. Loneliness was so immense that sometimes I was engulfed by it. I did not understand why someone surrounded by people could think like that. It was like being under tons and tons of water; not another sound was present, only my heart pounding a code asking for help. “You are a teenager”, my mother had told me when I told that. “Was I?”

I grew up under the military government. As a middle-class girl, nothing had changed in my life. I went to school, read my books, watch television and eventually played with my sister. Our house was big enough, clean enough, well-stocked to give us peace of mind and live without noticing the atrocities the government was making in our name.

The ship blink in a soft blue, a sound of birds and running water like a river running makes me think the ship was trying to make me feel welcome. I never had that sensation before, to be welcomed. I wasn’t fit my family, not to the places where a study, worked or lives. Now, something had changed, the ship had welcomed me as she understood why I was there. A heartbeat fills my ears, followed by a voice I would recognise wherever I was. It was my son saying goodbye.