One young man stood over a cot, holding his hand over the baby’s face.
“You make me laugh when you do that, Henry,” said an older woman, as she lifted the happy pink child out of its cot.
“I’m not doing anything, Margaret.” Henry snatched his hand away. The baby in the cot was sleeping peacefully, its little fists on the pillow on either side of its head.
“She’s only sleeping,” she said. “The sense cluster would pick it up if she wasn’t breathing. There’s no need for you to keep feeling for her breath.”
Judy gulped as the man picked up her younger self. He had such a kind face, she thought. His light brown hair was already receding, his chin a little too long, but when he placed the baby on his shoulder and rocked it gently in its sleep, a look of such warmth came over his face. Judy was a ghost in the recorded scene; she moved close to him and a lump rose to her throat as she watched him tilt his head around at an awkward angle in order to get a better look at the baby’s face. She saw the way he surreptitiously licked a finger and raised it to just underneath the baby’s nose, the better to catch its slightest breath. And her eyes welled with tears as she caught the contented smile as he found what he was looking for. Just how many times, she wondered, had she lain in this cot and half woken from a dream in which her forming mind twisted over itself to get a better look at its developing consciousness?
What sort of nightmares must she have experienced in that recursive, self-referential world? And then to have opened her eyes and to have seen a hand just above her face, reaching down on the end of an impossibly long arm.
She started to cry, tears bubbling up and streaking her cheeks. She wiped them away, and smiled through bleary eyes.
All that time and she had never realized. Every time she was anxious, she had experienced that dream. It wasn’t a bad thing at all. It was her subconscious reminding her that she had once been loved. She now followed Henry around the room, watched him bouncing her infant self on his shoulder, watched him feeding her from a bottle, watched him help her sit up amongst the other babies on the gaily colored mat that had been rolled out across the floor.
When the Watcher spoke again, the sound of his voice made her jump.
“Of course there was someone else here,” he said, “someone who the surveillance systems could not pick up. I’ll fill in the gaps.”
It seemed like the grey crystalline robot had been standing in the corner all along and Judy had just registered his presence. He stood, arms patiently folded, looking around the room with amused patience on his beautiful face.
“Chris,” said Judy. “I should have guessed. What was he doing here?”
“Monitoring the room for me,” said the Watcher. “I was going to perform a little experiment of my own.”
“It was performed on me, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, Judy. You were born in 2211, the same year that I performed another experiment to try to determine the truth of my own origins. I placed a developing mind in the ziggurat under the stars on a distant planet, to see if it would become infected by the virus that made me. Do you think that was the only test that I made? Minds can live in many containers, in machinery and in flesh. The human mind is just an AI that has evolved within a set of grey cells.”
Judy’s eyes widened, guessing what the Watcher was going to say next.
“I wiped the minds of those thirteen babies. Left them empty, waiting to see if anything would develop there.”
Judy felt as if she had been stabbed in the stomach. She felt the knife in there, twisting, tearing her life apart.
“You did that to me?” she whispered.
“No,” said the Watcher, “I did it to the baby that Henry there now holds in his arms. You are not that baby. You are what developed afterwards.”
Judy couldn’t speak, the moment was too big. She held her stomach, she bit her lip, then she rubbed her dry eyes. She needed to think. The Watcher, however, would not be quiet.
“Chris once told you that you would come around to his point of view someday: that you would want to help him to destroy me.”
“I never believed him, until a moment ago,” said Judy. “Now I see it’s true. He was right.”
