The Meris Touch
by Aditya
Shirodkar
She spoke to me of The Meris
Touch, and it made all the difference.
In all honesty, this story is about a girl: I endlessly rewrite
this story to make it anything but the story about a girl, but no mask I
weave will cover this visage so flecked by my love for her. I often will
myself to just think of something else in this solitude, but every fibre of my
being insists on reminding me of Lyra. The stars in the sky take me to the
very brink of the galaxy where a pattern was named after her. Romanticism
is inevitable when you think of Lyra; the roar of the wind coursing its
way through the surf too aptly reminds me of her gliding hands; the dawn on
this distal rock with its translucent cirrus reminds me of the wakeful
nights and the strewn blankets. I smile when I think of when we will meet
again.
January 6, 2842
When this day began, I'd marked it as the happiest day of my life.
I was to graduate cum laude
that afternoon, and the celebrations had already begun. At seven o'clock,
Lyra woke me up with a kiss, and we each broke our fasts - me with my
usual oatmeal, toast and cheese, and she with something-or-the-other from an
exotic planet, be it the grey coffee from the Barnard's star system or
the bacon and eggs from Earth. Always unique; always something new. We
drove to college in my sedan, where I'd - finally! - get my degree in
Cybernetics, and she would get hers in Earth-era English Literature.
The graduation ceremony was grand, largely in part due to the
ridiculous and awesome phenomenon occurring above our very heads. This day
had the twin suns of Grace engage in a manoeuvre seen only once every few
thousand years - the smaller, hotter and bluer sun blocked out the larger,
colder and redder one, resulting in an apparition that was almost angelic
in its appearance and magnitude. Bright wings of light shot out from the
extremities of this compounded sphere to reach the very corners of the
viridian sky of Grace, setting it asunder. The waves rolling into the western
front of our seaside campus were rendered incandescent as they passed
through a beam of light dragoning its way through the skies; the light
struck each wave as if it were its own, like a queen knighting a thousand
men, each with a deliberation which will not allow us to label the occasion as
routine. More majestic than a thousand queens, this super-solar eclipse
knighted my dear as she rose onto a well-placed platform to deliver her
valedictorian speech.
We returned to my home beside the breakwater. The tides were still
here, but the surface of the water was lit up to seem other-dimensional.
It truly was; Lyra and I dove in and found a magical and peaceful and
beautiful world which was our own. Gasping for breath as our intertwined bodies
finally found their way to the shore; she brushed a lock of golden hair
from her face and finally narrated to me the poem which had earned her her
graduation certificate. She'd hidden it from me - from virtually everyone,
really - because she did not think it was anything spectacular. But all
cares were lost in that kaleidoscopic Eden, and her words were, to me,
more valuable than any that her Keats wrote in his fury - what could a man
from a thousand years past, singular in his suffering, know of a love such
as ours?
The
Meris Touch
The
old magister faintly asked me
"Sea
child, do you have no worries?"
I
said to him, with sand on my knees
"My
worries are washed by the seas"
The
old man, aching at his brows
Looked
at the water break on the boughs
Nervously
asked me, "does it not douse
The
fire that rages within your blouse?"
I
laughed at him then, and softly said
"Old
man, will you lie on your bed
And
regret it, when you fall dead
That
in your youth, you could not wed
"Every
wave, that beckons your heart to
Stay
still, and be one with the blue."
Slowly,
the man then took out his shoes
He
went in old and came out anew.
I can recall the twinkle in her eyes when she was done. The violet
in her eyes was complemented by the unreal sky, and as she blushed a
maiden blush, I kissed her firmly. We re-entered the waters, which,
somehow, seemed even more beautiful.
February 17, 2850
My five-year-long meditation and labour culminated in this single
creation. Designated ARYL-4, the robot I had made won every distinction
available in the fields of cybernetics galaxy-wide. The design won awards
for practicality, functionality and realism, and the AI received the praise
of scholars from Earth to Antares as being incredibly human. Nine hundred
years have passed since the making of the first artificial intelligence,
and we are still stuck with the inherent need to make something like ourselves.
I am a proponent of the singularity hypothesis, and I think it is fundamentally
stupid to create something as good as or better than ourselves. I did not want
something to think for us or to govern us with its advanced intelligence.
I did not want to get stuck in some Frankensteinian dilemma, playing God
for a new species. My reasons for this creation are far more base and
petty.
ARYL-4 was modelled to look just like her, or at least my memories of her when we were in the prime
of our youth. For sure, she'd be older and greyer, and her voice would
have a tinge of something I hadn't felt before. Far from wanting to change
civilization, I made ARYL-4 to try to replicate what it felt like to be
with her. Even its touch felt just like hers, and soon, ARYL-4 acquired female pronouns.
It feels terrible to write this down, and I vaguely remind myself of a character
by a Russian scholar named Vladimir Nabokov who Lyra often spoke of.
But there were problems. ARYL-4 was, at the end of the day, a
robot. She lacked the fey charm and the starry eyes that made Lyra my own.
Once more, I relapse into my time with Lyra. We were sitting out on the
funny mound that seemed to grow out of the soil behind my house. She told me
then of yet another one of her Keatsian factoids, this one dealing with
his concept of "negative capability." It took me weeks to figure
out what that meant, and years to truly apply it to poetry and life in general.
What could a mere robot know of negative capability? It was merely a construct;
a composition of logic. There is no logic in negative capability.
January 31, 2845
My relationship with Lyra came to an end gradually, and on this
day, I find myself looking back at the anniversary of our union. It had
been four good years, and I wouldn't regret any of them. Life, it seemed,
would carry on. I was terribly wrong, for two reasons. Firstly, even though I
had all the money a woman could need, I had a reserved and calculative
personality. It took ages for Lyra to get to know me, and such time is not
at hand, as it was back then in those blithe days of youthful love.
Secondly, I am not a particularly handsome man. In fact, most
would call me ugly at first glance. I've had people - parents, friends,
teachers and even girls who I fancied - tell me that looks do not matter
(the last variety even had the nerve to say that I was all a girl could need
before frolicking on with the members of the gravball team). But, with
personal experience, I can safely conclude that first impressions are
based on looks, and someone as reserved as me cannot possibly make a
second impression.
To say the least, in the years after Lyra, I did not do too well
in the realms of love and romance. After Lyra was this girl named Ecksabeth,
Beth for short. She was plain, stout and squalid in appearance, but, as
far as her personality goes, she was a gem. But like a jockey having to pick
a quarter horse after having owned an Arabian, I found something lacking.
We broke up months later. Elie was next. She was comely enough to look at,
but our conversations revolved around the clothes and leather extras I
would buy for her using a considerable part of my considerably large bank cheque.
Suffice to say, she didn't last either.
I attempt to keep my career at the forefront these days. I'll soon
be embarking on a project to refine contemporary AI to be more human in
its decision making. So far, Lyra's influence - or rather, her absence -
has not made its mark in any of my works. I wonder if I will ever feature
in her poetry. As far as I know, she published nothing other than those
old poems in that one magazine back in 2843. Maybe I was her muse. Maybe
I'm giving myself far too much credit.
August 11, 2851
Aryl and I visited Earth on this day, the first time for either of
us. The New York Conference was the most prestigious technological
conference held in the galaxy, and was, undoubtedly, the oldest. Indeed,
the very first conference had taken place in the antiquity of human attempts in
the fields of robotics and computing. The conference concluded with an
awards ceremony, and I was nominated, then, for the George Devol Jr. Award
for Robotics, which I won. For some reason, I'd asked Aryl to deliver my
speech of thanks. It was a cocky and not entirely original move, for every
conference since 2719, with the exception of the Great Tragedy of 2731,
had featured some engineer sitting satisfied in his seat, thinking, "Let
my creation speak for itself." But watching Aryl rise to the podium
gave me a different kind of satisfaction, which I could not quite place.
The conference, like every conference, concluded with a world tour
for all its delegates. The Earth tour was celebrated as the best tour
amongst all planetary tours, and this was certainly true because of the
rich cultural heritage that came with every city and town that dotted the face
of the planet. Humanity itself had begun on this planet; if that isn't
enough to stir something deep within you, I do not know what is. We moved
east over the Atlantic, and found ourselves in the foggy mess that was
London. I did not depart our luxurious, supersonic airplane, named the Concorde
in honour of an ancient plane with the same name and same purpose. The
lavatory was kept busy with the proceedings of our forbidden love, and I'd
decided that London could wait another day. So could Paris, Heidelberg,
Cologne and Bern; I can come back here at any time.
At Rome, however, I was strangely motivated to leave the plane.
The first place I visited was an odd cemetery, to find the symbolic grave
that she had doted on. He'd said his
name was writ on water, but it was quite firmly engraved in my mind. Why I
still gave the old poet this much thought was beyond me. Aryl could not
quite understand the situation. I told her to ignore it, for by then I
had given up on the thought of shaping her to be like the other one. Aryl, always thoughtful,
always supportive, gave me some time alone at the gravesite.
The rest of the week-long Earth tour was a sombre affair. My mind
kept drifting into territories not normally associated with a student of
science and technology - thoughts of un-enlightenment and the want to jump
into some stream that was certainly not on the agenda for this tour grew rebelliously
in my mind. Aryl did not press me to divulge what the matter was, and,
honestly, I did not quite know myself. She didn't know a thing about Lyra;
it was not in her nature to ask. The tour ended on the west coast of North
America, and then we headed back to Grace, where my home by the still
water was, indubitably, waiting for me.
November 18, 2841
On this day, I asked Lyra why exactly she fancied the sea so much.
She told me that I would soon know the answer. I didn't quite get it, but
it, perhaps, had something to do with the seas so abundant on this tiny
planet. Grace is a planet with two suns and countless seas - it is
referred to, by astronomers, as a water planet. After living so many years
on Nepenthe, the seas came as a bit of a culture-shock to me: back home,
it was wasteland after wasteland, and water bodies were confined to a few
large lakes on a planet primarily composed of land. I recall voicing my
intentions of going to Earth one day - it would be a fine balance between
both these twisted worlds. This delighted her. She was pursuing a course
in Earth-era English Literature, and always found a way to twist
everything I said or did into some ideal of an old English playwright or the
other somewhen a thousand years ago.
We then conversed about the different places we'd visit if we'd
ever end up on Earth - I too was well read on Earthly matters, as was
almost every one of the one trillion people that populated the inhabited
part of the galaxy. Every history course would inevitably allude to Earth and
its lost ways. There was, however, a slim chance that any student taking
up these courses would ever end up on Earth, due to the prohibitive costs
of interstellar travel - why, getting to Grace from Nepenthe itself cost
my family half their fortune, and also meant that I'd, probably, never see them
again. At the end of our conversations, we'd agreed to make a one-way trip
there ourselves, and visit all the famous museums and shrines left behind
by her favourite poets and authors, and finally end up retiring at this
seaside hamlet called Goa. It's a brilliant idea, really.
Lyra dove into the water beside my house. She beckoned me to
enter, and I refused, wondering how anyone could think of entering a water
body. She asked me, then, if I wanted to die without ever stepping into
the surf. After much deliberation, I finally got in. I spent many minutes
figuring out the most rudimentary way to stay afloat, and she then led me
onto the breakwater beyond which the waves dashed in all their glory. We
stood there, arm in arm, and I watched, open-mouthed, as waves three times
again as tall as I was crash into the barrier and spray us with a delightfully
subtle amount of water. I completely understood her then: her wayward ways
and her starry eyes that seemed to radiate some kind of purity whenever
she gazed out at the sea.
March 21, 2855
I was sitting with my feet dipped inside the still water outside
my house, when something totally unexpected happened. If anyone should
read this, know that this was the moment of my insanity, and of my death. Out
of the bulrushes that hid a large portion of the western horizon emerged a too-familiar
face of old. The same eyes, the same smile, the same face. It was her; the one with an Earthly
constellation named after her, the Lyra-of-the-sea. She had aged, undoubtedly,
but she was, essentially, the same girl I met one afternoon in some common
class shared by our generally non-intersecting disciplines. She was standing in
water three feet deep, and I dropped whatever I was reading and dove as
far as I could, and found my way beside her.
We laughed when we were face-to-face. Why had we broken up? I
don't know. Matters from ten years ago scarcely mattered, and we were sitting
together by a fire as we dried the clothes still stuck to our bodies. She told
me how her career had never taken off, and how, like me, all her trysts with
love had inevitably failed. She spoke with the same warmth that I'd been
so used to all those years back, and I had a feeling that something
beautiful was about to begin, when I was interrupted by the other love of my
life.
It was a mirror image of what Lyra had looked like ten years ago,
and she looked cluelessly at the woman sitting in front of her. I could
see the fibre-nerves I'd designed spasm in confusion and what I can only
interpret as despair. With a strained voice, she started saying something which
I could not quite comprehend, until I got a little closer.
She spoke of The Meris Touch,
and it made all the difference. I turned to watch Lyra's face contort with
horror as she, too, heard the words she'd once penned down come out of this
replica of herself. She fled. Her body was found, lifeless, deposited on
the shore of the breakwater built to keep waves from destroying my house.
Aryl ceased to function, shortly. It seemed that she had never
been programmed to face something like this before. I hugged my inhuman
lover and wept. I was taken away by the police shortly.
---
I was tried on four counts: indirect murder, cloning, sexual
intercourse with a non-human, and for utilizing university funds for
personal gain. My awards and nominations were stripped away, and I was cast
into a prison placed so unfortunately by the sea. I think now of John Keats -
cast away and sentenced to die, with his reasons for existence well out of
reach. Maybe, if they let me step out one last time, I could walk into the
sea and be born anew.
