excuse.”
It was Michael’s turn to choke up. He turned to Nicole with tears easing out of both of his eyes and placed his hands in hers. “There’s no way I can ever thank you enough for raising those two boys with such care. Especially Benjy.”
Nicole looked up at him from her wheelchair. “They are our sons, Michael,” she said. “I love them very much.”
Michael wiped his nose and eyes with a pocket handkerchief. “Simone and I want you to meet our children and grandchildren, of course,” he said, “but we both agreed that there was something we should tell you first… We didn’t know exactly how you would respond. However, it would not be fair not to tell you, because otherwise you might not understand why the children are reacting—”
“What is it, Michael?” Nicole interrupted. She smiled. “You’re certainly having a hard time coming to the point.”
“I am indeed,” he said, crossing the room and pushing the button beside Nicole’s bed twice in rapid succession. “Nicole, what I am about to say is a bit delicate… Remember last night, when we told you that both Simone and I had alien companions?”
“Yes, Michael,” Nicole said.
“Look outside,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “There’s someone I want you to see.”
Michael came over beside Nicole and took her hand. She stared out the window. A woman in her late forties, athletic, with dark copper skin, had left the house and was walking quickly toward the horse compound. Both the woman’s figure and her gait seemed familiar to Nicole. The children saw the woman, waved, and came toward her on their horses.
Nicole watched Zachary yell the woman’s name and suddenly she understood. Nicole was thunderstruck. The woman named around briefly and Nicole saw herself, exactly as she had been when she had left the Node forty years earlier. It was difficult for her to keep her emotions under control.
“It was you that Simone missed the most,” Michael said, acknowledging the look of astonished recognition on Nicole’s face. “So it was only natural that the aliens fashioned a companion for her from your image. She is a remarkable simulation. Not just her physical appearance, which you can see for yourself, but also her personality. Simone and I were amazed, especially in the beginning, at what a perfect duplication job they had done. The alien talked like you, walked like you, even thought like you. Within a week Simone was calling her ‘Mother’ and I was calling her ‘Nicole.’ She has been with us ever since.”
Nicole gazed at the simulation of herself without saying a word. The facial expressions and even the gestures are correct, she thought. She continued to stare fixedly as the woman approached the house with the three children.
“Simone thought you might be a little upset, or maybe feel displaced, when you discovered that this simulation of you had been living with the family for all these years. But I assured her that you would be fine, that it would simply take a little while for you to adjust to the idea… After all, as far as I know, no human being has ever been replaced by a robot copy of herself before.”
The alien Nicole picked up one of the girls and twirled her around in the air. Then all four of them bounded up the steps and across the threshold of the house.
They call her Granny, Nicole thought. She can run, and ride horses, and toss them in the air. She is not phthisic and confined to a wheelchair. An emotion that Nicole did not like, self-pity, began to grow inside her. Maybe Simone has not even missed me that much, she said to herself. Her ‘mother’ has been here all these years, at her beck and call, never aging, never asking for anything.
Nicole sensed that she was going to cry. She pulled herself together. “Michael,” she said, forcing a smile, “why don’t you give me a minute to prepare myself for breakfast?”
“Are you sure you don’t need any help?” he asked.
“No, no… I’ll be fine. I just want to wash my face and put on a little makeup.”
The tears came a few seconds after the door closed. There is no place for me here either, Nicole said to herself. There is already a granny, a better one than I could ever be, even if she is only a machine.
Nicole said almost nothing on the ride back to the transportation center. She was still quiet as the shuttle left the Habitation Module and pulled out into space.
“You don’t want to talk about it, do you?” the Eagle said.
“Not really,” Nicole said into the microphone in her helmet.
“Are you glad you went?” the Eagle inquired several seconds later.
“Oh, yes… absolutely,” she replied. “It was one of the most outstanding experiences of my life. Thank you very much.”
The Eagle adjusted the flight of the shuttle so that they were moving slowly backward. The huge illuminated tetrahedron dominated the view out their window.
“The replacement procedure could be performed this afternoon,” the Eagle said. “By early next week you would look younger than Big Michael.”
“No, thanks,” said Nicole.
There was another long period of silence. “You don’t seem very happy,” the Eagle then said.
Nicole turned to look at her alien companion. “I am,” she said. “And I am especially happy for Simone and Michael. It’s wonderful that their life has been so fulfilling.” Nicole took a deep breath. “Maybe I’m just tired,” she said. “So much has occurred in such a short period of time.”
“That’s probably it,” the Eagle said.
Nicole was deep in thought, methodically reviewing everything that had happened to her since she had awakened. The faces of Simone and Michael’s six children and fourteen grandchildren swept through her mind. A handsome lot, she said to herself, but without much variation.
It was another face, one she remembered clearly from her own mirror, that returned to her mind’s eye most often. She had agreed with Simone and Michael mat the other Nicole was an unbelievable likeness, an absolute triumph of advanced technology. What Nicole had not even been able to discuss with them was how strange it was meeting and carrying on a conversation with herself as a younger person. Or how peculiar she felt knowing that a machine had replaced her in the hearts and minds of her own family.
Nicole had watched silently while the other Nicole and Simone had laughed about an argument that Simone had had with her little sister Katie years before at the Node. As the alien had recalled the details of the story, Nicole’s memory too had been refreshed. Even her memory is better than mine. What a perfect solution to the whole problem of aging and dying. Capture a person in the prime of her life, with all her powers intact, and preserve her forever as a legend, at least in the eyes of her loved ones.
“How do I know for certain that the Michael and Simone that I talked with yesterday and this morning are the real humans and not just an even higher-fidelity simulation than the other Nicole?” Nicole asked the Eagle.
“Saint Michael said you asked several pointed questions about Big Michael’s early life,” the Eagle said. “Weren’t you satisfied with the answers?”
“But I realized while we were in the car an hour ago that some of that information may have been in Michael’s biographical file from the Newton, and I know that you had access to that data.”
“For what purpose would we possibly have gone to such lengths to mislead you?” the Eagle said. “And have we ever behaved in a similar fashion before?”
“How many more of Simone and Michael’s children are still alive?” Nicole asked a few minutes later, changing the subject.
“Thirty-two more are here at this Node,” the Eagle answered. “And more than a hundred in other places.”
Nicole shook her head. She remembered the Senoufo chronicles. And her progeny shall be spread among the stars… Omeh would be pleased, she thought
“Have you perfected, then, your ex-utero development of humans from fertilized eggs?” Nicole said.
“More or less,” the Eagle replied.
Again they flew in silence for a long time. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about the Prime Monitors?” Nicole asked next.
“It wasn’t permitted, at least not until you awakened. And since then the subject hasn’t come up.”
“And is everything Saint Michael said true? About God and chaos and the many universes?”
