The Naming of Cars

BESSIE

Have you ever wondered why people name their cars and why eight times out of ten they chose a female name?

I have recently had a lot of trouble with my pride and joy, a 1984 Nissan 1400cc bakkie, known to me as Bessie. She was recently in hospital for almost a month, with mechanics and auto-electricians unable to diagnose the problem.

A simple problem, I thought, poor old Bessie kept on cutting out on my visits to the local shops and the waste collection yard, mere four or five-kilometre journeys.

The engine simply stopped firing. My grey matter has never retained any of the fundamentals regarding automobile engines, but my household electrical expertise told me the problem centred around either a lack of fuel or an electrical short.

The hired auto electricians I delivered her to firstly replaced all the leads to and from the distributor, that is the cables to the plugs and the cable to a newly installed starter-coil. I collected the bakkie after a day, but the following morning Bessie again refused to start. After three or four attempts I managed to get her out of the driveway onto the street and cruise her up and down the road but on the fourth test run she conked out.

I phoned Keith at Stallone-Auto-Electrical and told him of my problem. He sent over a driver with a technician and they succeeded in getting Bessie back to their workshop.

Two days later Keith phoned me saying they’d sorted out the problem and cleaned out and checked the fuel pump and replaced the fuel filter so, I picked up Bessie and drove her home without a problem.

She was then inactive for seven das as my son took me to Mountain Sanctuary Park in the Magalisberg mountains as written about in my previous blog.

On my return to Egoli, the city of gold Johannesburg, I attempted to start Bessie.

No luck.

The starter turned over, but no spark was reaching the plugs, another phone call and Bessie was hospitalised a third time.

Two days later Tony, one of the owners of Stallone, drove Bessie to my abode and collected me to return to their workshop and settle my account.

Account settled, and I was now informed that they had given me a new battery, a new carburettor, a new reconditioned-starter and checked all the wiring, so Bessie was fit to run her menial tasks like local shopping and waste removal. I drove her home.

The following day after a visit to the refuse-collection yard I decided that a celebratory drink was needed so, I proceeded to the nearby local bottle store to purchase a bottle of vodka.

On the drive home Bessie cut out again, luckily before I reached the main road, Jan Smuts Avenue, which was now packed with rush-hour traffic.

Thank God for modern technology, which usually I hate, my cell phone sprang into action and after a half hour wait Tony and technician arrived. Tony drove me home while his technician managed to start up Bessie and return her to the workshop for the fourth time.

Clutching my bottle of Vodka, I sat down, switched on the tele to watch some rugby highlights and poured myself a triple shot to calm my frayed nerves. Three stiff drinks later I began to cogitate over the opening question, why do we name vehicles with female names?

One theory is that the habit carried over from men’s habit of naming ships after women, usually a Goddess’s name from ancient times. This reason combined with the chauvinistic idea that a female car was just a pile of metal and would not work without a man at the wheel! Men adopted the mentality that their automobiles must be tended and coddled with a gentle hand, thus perceiving them as female.

A recent survey shows that the most common car names are, Betsy, Bessie, Sally, Bertha, Lucy and Sally. Other names from modern TV programmes and movies have now entered the list with the additions being, The Enterprise, Optimus Prime, Millennium Falcon, and The Batmobile.

An ageing mechanic I knew in my childhood gave me the best reason we call them female names.

He said in a thick Lancastrian accent, “Cars? Ya call ‘em women’s names, right? Them’s just fucking trouble! Like ya Missus or the piece ont’ side!”

My Bessie had certainly not given me trouble during my twenty-six years of ownership. She had one previous owner when I purchased her in 1990. Her engine has now been round-the-clock four times and I’ve had her re-bored twice, taking her on long distance drives to Cape Town and St Francis Bay near Port Elizabeth. Both these journeys are both well over a thousand kilometres and can take fourteen hours of steady driving. She completed these tasks without failing and I must have made the trip to Durban on the East coast at least five times.

The next day.

It was a Friday and I knew that I had to visit the refuse dump with a three-week load of garden debris, Keith phoned me and said Tony would be round in twenty minutes with Bessie. This time she had been fitted with a brand-new distributor for which I had to cough up another one thousand Rand. I climbed in to drive her and Tony back to the Stallone workshop. I settled my outstanding account and did not wish them “Au revoir.”

Just a blunt English, “Goodbye!”

I was praying I would not have to return.

It is now three days later and so far, Bessie has made four shopping trips, one refuse dump visit, and carried some cut-down garden stakes to a friend who lives about five kilometres away.

I have now decided to re-christen Bessie and name her not after a female, as is the fashion, but in honour of her hospitalisation, she will be called: RE-Furbished!

If she makes another trip to my garden-stake friend this coming Tuesday morning, to collect a disused electric dishwasher, then that will be her name until I depart this mortal realm.

SILENCE

 “Silence is true wisdom’s best reply.” Euripides.

And as Shakespeare says, “People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening, People writing songs that voices never share, and no one dare disturb the sound of silence.” 

Silence is a beautiful and majestic essence to absorb, particularly the silence of nature.

I have just returned from five days in the beauty and tranquillity of Mountain Sanctuary Park high on the Northern slopes of the Magaliesberg mountains.

It was there that I spent every day absorbing the silence of nature.

It’s difficult to explain how the silence of nature differs from the enforced silence of an examination room or hall. They will both register close to zero on any decibel-gauge-meter that tracks the scratching of pens on paper or the distant call of a bird in flight, but the difference is, I found, surreal and spiritual.

I arose every morning at day break around five fifteen.

After a visit to the toilet and the making of a mug of tea I wandered out of our cosy camping abode and sat on a plastic chair next to a table where we had eaten our braaied meal the previous evening.

The silence engulfed me, it seemed to wrap itself like a light weight duvet around my whole being. For a second life froze and then the calls of nature exploded in my ear drums, bird calls, the buzz of early morning insects, and the rattle of the Vervet monkeys on our tin roof. The latter were on their daily search for any food that us unwelcome visitors to their domain had left scattered after our nocturnal meal, yet under this cacophony of sound the silence remained, a universal stillness.

Soon the searching monkeys disappeared, and the silence returned to be broken by the sound of African voices coming from the nearby kraal where they campsite workers slept, the next break in my solitude was the awakening of my son and his friend who everyday did a five-hour hike into the Tonquani and Cederberg Gorges.

 

It was then that I indulged in another of my passions, reading.

My son had brought two books with him from the UK, the first was about the life of Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, a former colonel of the KGB who became the resident-designate and bureau chief at the soviet embassy in London. He became an agent for the British Secret Intelligence Service in 1974 while working in Denmark and continued supplying MI6 with valuable information till 1985. Ben McIntyre’s book “The Spy and the Traitor” proved to be sensational reading.

Oleg Gordievsky was the most significant British agent of the cold war. For eleven years, he spied for MI6. It was remarkable he managed to deceive his KGB colleagues during this time. Even more astounding was that in summer 1985 – after Gordievsky was hastily recalled from London to Moscow by his suspicious bosses – British intelligence officers helped him to escape. It was the only time that the spooks managed to exfiltrate a penetration agent from the USSR, outwitting their Russian adversaries.

The famous author John Le Care says on the back cover, “The best spy book I’ve ever read!”

The second book was “Our Everest Challenge” by Ben Fogle and his wife, Marina who he calls from the world’s highest peak.

This book was also a riveting read. Fogle summited Mount Everest on the 16^th of May 2018, completing the climb over a six-week period whilst accompanied by two local Sherpa guides, as well as Kenton Cool, a 44-year-old veteran British climber who has summited Everest 12 times. His trek also included former Olympic cyclist Victoria Pendleton, who unfortunately had to abandon her attempt early due to severe altitude sickness.

Throughout the book he speaks of “Looking-Up” and constantly harangues the young Techno-geeks who spend 24 hours a day looking down at their smart phones.

His advice certainly was useful at Mountain Sanctuary Park where the clear night sky became our television set, causing long discussions as to where the Southern-Cross was and which flickering star was the planet Venus.

The routine of early morning tea, silence contemplation and book reading was followed for three days however, the four morning was different.

I was awoken as usual at approximately five fifteen, except this time it was by a strange sound of general confusion coming from the central lounge and kitchen area. I wandered into the toilet to be greeted at the open window by a snarling face of an aggressive Vervet monkey. I backed cautiously out of the toilet as four other younger Vervets scurried past me in the corridor and out of the toilet window.

I moved from the corridor into the lounge to face a sight of what I can describe as nuclear devastation, accompanied by a high pitch screaming from a very young Vervet monkey clinging to the burglar bars of a window. The scream was amplified with the returning screams of the whole troop of fifteen or so monkeys outside. I approached the youngster slowly and after a few more anxious screams it leapt off the burglar bars and scampered out of the room to find its freedom through the toilet window.

Glancing at the devastation caused by the invasion I could see, banana skins, half eaten apples, empty plastic wrappers that once contained bread, a scattered bag of sugar strewn over the kitchen work-top and floor and several deposits of monkey shit and pools of urine.

Using torn-off strips of toilet roll I got all the shite into the loo and then began sweeping up the sugar and discarded bits of bread, banana skins and bits of half chewed apple. Having brushed the table and work-tops clear of all the half-eaten scraps of food, I began wiping all the surfaces with a wet cloth disinfected in diluted-Dettol and then I mopped the floor.

Half an hour later, having completed the household chores I made my morning mug-of-tea and sat down outside to let nature’s silence calm my befuddled head.

To misquote Francis Bacon, I let the silence of sleep nourish my wisdom.

I was awoken about an hour later by my son shaking my shoulder and asking me to try and make some breakfast for him and his mate, Lloyd. Luckily, the Vervets had not managed to invade the fridge, so in twenty minutes I was serving up fried bacon, eggs, mushrooms and four buttered crisp-bread biscuits to all of us.

Lloyd and my son told me, “We’re going up to the top of the range, find Red Gulley and then climb down Tonquani Gorge.”

They quickly packed their knapsacks with provisions for the five-hour-hike and after I had warned them to look out for snakes, particularly the Boomslang which hides in the tree branches that jut out of the cracks in the gorge’s wall, off they went to exercise their nimble and youthful limbs, while I sat reading and absorbing………. 

The Silence!

Old English

This is an historical piece with a touch of sci-fi and deals with words in the English language that are no longer used.

Alvertos Onesimus had been the senior professor of English at Muchalls University in Aberdeenshire for over ten years and his retirement age was creeping forward, he thought at an alarming rate. It was two years since he’d lost his wife, Ergronia, in a frightening incident.

They were both on holiday at the time, in Thailand when hurricane Andrea swept in; Ergronia was taking her early morning walk along the deserted golden sands and the Professor was in bed nursing an overdose of the local rum he had consumed the previous evening. 

Ergronia would have called him well-fuzzled, using a word from the early nineteen-hundreds, to describe someone who was well and truly intoxicated. She too was a professor of English and gained her doctorate in a thesis that looked at old English words that were no longer used in the twenty-first century.

She had started her day at six o’clock in the morning, with the weather being very appricitic, which was the word the people living in sixteen-twenty would have described it. A winter’s day but with gloriously hot sunshine. It was about an hour later when the dark clouds started to gather, the sky darkened, and it started raining. Fifteen minutes later it began lumming down, as the populace of eighteen-eighty described it when heavy rain poured down.

The storm was without warning, and the lummation occurred while Ergronia was briskly walking back to the resort. The inquest, held after the disaster, declared that she was presumed dead, as her body was never found. It was assumed she was washed away in the terrible flooding, along with the other six hundred and sixty-six recorded fatalities, that occurred all along the coast and at their resort, Aonang Phu Petra, close to the town of Krabi.

They had chosen the place after nights of google searching and using Trivago searching for the most comfortable resort at the lowest cost on offer. They were both in their early sixties when they visited Thailand and they thought of their holiday as a preretirement gift to themselves. They had both been given an unexpected Christmas bonus by Muchalls and neither had close relations to bequeath their meagre assets to. A holiday in the sun would do them good and perhaps bring back their more riotous days of their youth in the nineteen sixties.

They would get totally crapulous, eating excessive amounts of foods they had never even tasted before, and they swore they would never have a grumpish day. Ergronia used to hate being sullen and was always annoyed when Alvertos behaved like a sluberdegullion and spent the entire the weekend sprawled on the sofa and had no intention of moving. She was using the word commonly used in the sixteen-hundreds to describe slovenly behaviour.

One day when he’d spent the whole of a Sunday reclined on the sofa in their parlour she burst into the room screaming, “Zenzizenzizenzic!” at the top of her voice using as much inter-costal-diaphragmatic air she could muster from her slender frame.

“Ah, ah,” he replied, “thought you’d catch me napping with to the power of eight, did you?”

She was a trifle dumfounded that he knew the meaning of her outburst and screamed again, “Zenzizenzisenzic!” after she realigned her inter-costal muscles.

“Yes, yes, I heard you the first time my dearest,” he softly replied, “I’ve just been reading Christopher Marlowe’s play the Jew of Malta, marvellous work, the passage where Barabas, the Jew, explains his interest in mathematics, brilliant! It doth represent the square of squares quite squarely.”

“Exactly.” she replied, “It’s amazing what they knew way back then.”

“The Jew goes on to explain to the judge why he thinks the prosecutor should not be female because she is too callipygian.”

Ergronia grinned mischievously, “You said my buttocks were beautifully shaped when you married me, and that wasn’t in sixteen forty either.”

They both laughed, and she moved closer to him, bending down and gave him a soft peck on the cheek, “Some tea my quockerwogger?”

“Divine idea,” he replied, “with perhaps a scone, strawberry jam and cream and I’m not a wooden puppet hanging on a string!”

“Oh no! can’t have you turning into a jollux!”

“Me? Get fat? Come on, I’m the same weight as when I was a snoutfair.”

“Yes, yes I know you’ve always been good looking and handsome.”

It was then that a most unusual occurrence transpired. The door bell rang and on a Sunday of all days. In the quiet tranquil town of Muchalls in the middle of eastern Scotland this was an infrequent event, unless of course it was the town’s Presbyterian minister who was normally on the prowl for further converts on Sunday afternoons after he had such a poor attendance at his morning service.

Ergronia said, “I’ll get it.” And off she went to answer the door.

While Alvertos picked up and reopened his copy of the Jew of Malta, Ergronia approached their front door with the bell giving a second even louder chime. She opened the door to the university’s Vice Chancellor, a small man in stature but he held a high opinion of himself. Ergronia escorted him in to the parlour.

“It’s our Cockolorum, my dear, he wants a word about tomorrow’s meeting. I’ll put the kettle on and make some tea. Excuse me Vice Chancellor,” she said graciously as she backed herself out of the parlour and headed for the kitchen.

The professor rose from the sofa and asked the Vice Chancellor to take a seat, which he did in the aqua ornate green-blue upholstered Versailles armchair made from solid mahogany and finished with Gold Leaf. It was an heirloom left to Alvertos and Ergronia on their wedding day by Alvertos’s late great-aunt. Alvertos grunted as the Cockolorum sat down and thought what a Pismire!

That’s exactly what the Vice chancellor was, thought the professor, a small little man who looked like an ant who had a high opinion of himself.

Having plonked his minute frame in the priceless armchair the Vice Chancellor pulled out his pipe and without requesting if he could light up. Alvertos thought the Vice Chancellor should either have requested or gone outside to have his Lunt.

“Tomorrow is going be an ordeal Onesimus, the whole damm tribe will be there. Accountants, bankers, politicos, the bloody Minister for Education and that arsehole from the local constabulary what’s ’is name?”

“Chief Constable MacPherson, I think, he was in charge of the last royal visit we had about ten years ago.” Replied the professor refusing to put off by the Vice Chancellor’s use of his surname, Onesimus, which he hated, as he refused to accept his ancestors had any connection to an imprisoned slave who became a saint. He continued, “So you want me to support the arrangements you’ve made Sir?”

“Quite right! That’s exactly what I want you to do, we can’t let those outsiders get their bloody way. They’ll get us spending our entire years budget! And the damm girl’s only ninth or tenth in line to the throne! Waste of time and money if you ask me!”

“Yes sir, it does seem to be a rather farcical affair and you can be assured of my cooperation Vice Chancellor,” said Alvertos rising from the sofa and indicating that the discussion was over he guided the Vice chancellor to the parlour door just as Ergronia came in carrying a tray with tea and scones.

“Oh, Vice Chancellor, you must stay for tea, scones, home-made strawberry jam with inulin as a sweetener, Alvertos is on a diet so we eat and use a lot of Jerusalem Artichokes, and of course cream, so you can curmure at tomorrow’s meeting.”

Alvertos grinned as he acknowledged his wife’s desire to see the Vice chancellor break wind all through the meeting. The vision of a farting Vice Chancellor caused his grin to explode into a loud guffaw of raucous laughter.

The Vice Chancellor was disturbed by the almost doubled-up figure of the professor who was in joyous mirth with his wife’s joke, so he quickly made haste to the front door which Ergronia held open.

The Vice Chancellor made a fast retreat through the garden to the gate.

Ergronia turned to her husband and said, “I wish he’d become lethophobic so that his fear of oblivion swallows him up. Shall I get our Houppelanders from the wardrobe, so we can cloak-up and fly away from all these beef-witted, stupid students who spend ninety percent of their time during our lectures glued to their smart-phones and tablets and pay no attention to the knowledge we are trying to pass on?”

“Yes enough!” Alvertos replied, “a brilliant Excogigation! You have gorgonized me”

And they skidaddled back to their own dimensional universe with Alvertos completely mesmerized by his wife’s sagacity!

Sagacity

Chapter 1

Sagacity woke early as was his normal routine. He swung his legs to the floor, stretched his arms upwards and let out his usual low toned gurgling groan, signalling that he was ready to start another preordained shift.

His mouth and throat told him he needed a coffee and his bladder informed him he needed to urinate.

Synapses passed electrical charges and neurons between receptor cells as he tried to understand why he needed a coffee and a pee. He computed perfectly well there was no reason for either as he was a robot; yet the dryness in his throat made him walk over to the water dispenser and extracted a sealed capsule of H20. He held it and looked at it quizzically and then replaced it on the silvery white Palladium counter.

Several centuries of earth-time had passed since his creation and the discovery of the hyper-beam space engine technology that had made his journey possible from the dying solar planet on which he had been created.

Sagacity switched himself into Auto-Mode and seated himself in front of the main flight console. Extending his left hand, he placed it on the sensor deck and started to receive the information from the location probes mounted outside the craft. These probes scanned the nearby galaxies and gave the craft’s position relative to its starting point, the third planet from the sun in what was called the Home-System.

The incoming information told him he had been travelling for two thousand and three hundred light years and was approximately half way to his proscribed and intended destination, the star Proxima B, the close companion to Alpha Centauri C, the closest star to his Home-System.

The Hyper-beam technology had been developed way back in the year 2010 of Our Lord but had only become feasible fifty years later once the remaining humans had descended beneath the surface of their planet to escape the catastrophic events that followed the climate change of the early second millennium. The advanced research into nanotechnology and the use of a miniaturized synchrotron had led the late Professor Angus McGregor Kyto to make a breakthrough and develop the first Hyper-beam space craft capable of interstellar travel.

Sagacity looked at the capsule of water sitting on the Palladium counter and computed again as to why his throat was so dry.

A milli-second later he assured himself that he had no throat, in fact he had no biological organs whatsoever, he was composed solely from metallic and carbon fibre materials so, why this nagging thought of throat dryness?

This was the second awakening he had been troubled by these thoughts. He couldn’t even call them thoughts. The humans that had created him had thoughts. He was supposed to have none. What was happening to him?

He decided to merge himself totally in the craft’s main-frame computer at the flight-console and see if he could solve the problem.

Everything seemed to be working, the Nano-Incubation-Chambers containing the human foetal-DNA were functioning. The trajectory report showed that the craft was on course. The solar sails were receiving enough bombardment from the cosmic dust to keep all the fuel cells charged. So, what could go wrong, or more importantly what was wrong?

Letting the external tendrils of the craft’s main frame wrap their connections across and into the rear of his composite skull he entered the massed binary system searching for any information he could gather about his dry throat.

Suddenly his frontal cortex was swamped with synonyms for his name, wisdom, insight, intelligence, understanding, judgement, acuity, canniness, sharpness, depth, profundity, perception, percipience, discernment, erudition, knowledgeability, thoughtfulness, rare sapience. They cascaded like an avalanche of soft Alpine snow across his condensed diodes and he was so overwhelmed with the diversity of himself, that he tried to emit a sound.

To be heard by who?

No-one was the answer.

He was the only one on the craft apart from the human foetal-DNA in the Nano-Chambers and you couldn’t call those spiralled-eggs an entity let alone a person.

It troubled him immensely that he could still sense a dryness in his throat. He disconnected from the main-frame, wandered across to the water capaule and lifted it towards where he presumed his mouth was. The presumption was correct as he saw a reflection of himself on the bevelled screen of the transponder. He watched himself as he inserted the capsule in the weird sight he saw of a humanoid face. The ejected water floated down his carbon fibre front in tiny bubbles and danced on the floor in the zero gravity.

A second attempt followed.

This time he inserted the capsule’s ejection point firmly in what he presumed were his lips and swallowed.

Sirens erupted from the walls of the craft as he tried to assimilate what had happened. The dry throat which he did not have was gone and the swollen feeling in the centre of his form increased.

He quickly filed through his cache to check if his short-term memory banks were running coherently; this told him there was some cache-thrashing, a pathological situation where access to his primary cache was cyclical cache- missing by evicting data that might be needed in the near future.

The swelling in his central frame increased and he noticed a small pool of water gathering at the bottom of his left leg. It was as if his body was leaking. The capsule of water was back on the Palladium counter. That didn’t explain the situation. A command sprang up from his Zipped-Drive: Hibernate…. Hibernate…. Hibernate…. hibernate…..

He lapsed into his three-hundredth deep non-REM sleep. This anabolic state allowed his cognitive functions to restore, maintain his automated carbon fibre musculature and skeletal form. Sagacity had spent over ninety percent of his time aboard the craft in this suspended state.

As he glided into this state the only thought he tried to cling to was; why the dry throat?

Astronomers in the early 2^nd Millennium announced they had detected an Earth sized planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. They named the newfound world, Proxima B, and gauged its size to be about one point three times more massive than Earth, which suggested that the exoplanet was a rocky world. Research also showed that it was in in the star's habitable zone where liquid water can exist. They also said that Proxima B was just 7.5 million kilometres from its host star and completes one orbit every 11.2 Earth-days. As a result, it's likely that the exoplanet is tidally locked, meaning it always shows the same face to its host star, just as the moon shows only one face to Earth.

Chapter 2

 Professor Kyto had been meticulous in his design of Sagacity having spent all his adult life and teenage years studying robotics. He made sure that Sagacity’s functioning followed Asimov’s three laws.

These laws were imprinted in every transistor, diode, receptor, processor, and every storage unit and his power supply. All components were stamped with the laws. One, a robot may not injure or, allow a human being to come to harm. Two, a robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law, and lastly that a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first and second laws.

Kyto knew his planet was doomed as generation after generation ignored the basic fact that the politicians of the world followed by their ignorant supporters, were paying no attention to the scientific facts relating to climate change and the pollution of the oceans with man-made plastics. He had made it his mission, in early youth, to get some remnant of humanity off the planet and at least to the nearest known star.

He made this mission his life’s work, particularly after he was transferred along with many other elite scientists to the newly constructed cavern six kilometres under the Rocky mountain range. The depth and isolation of the site was thought at the time, to be the safest and most secure place to build a research centre. In this centre the most versatile minds that humanity could find were brought together to attempt finding a solution that would save the memories of their race and continue its existence.

Biologists, physicists specialising in all facets of the science including the quantum theory, chemical and biological engineers, computer programmers, astronomers, synchrotron developers and technicians, with of course several psychiatrists and clinical psychologists to hopefully keep the menagerie sane. During the twenty years before the launching of the Hyper-beam interstellar craft there had been several implosions, resulting in the murder of Kyto’s wife and soul mate.

Foresight, or Knowledge as she was known to her friends, was in a counselling session when one of the group a highly strung biologist, who was investigating the genetic engineering required to make seeds that could survive for over thousands of years, released a deadly and uncontrollable virus into the counselling room, everybody present was killed, The room was sealed with a lead and concrete barrier and after much debate the incident faded into distant oblivion.

But Kyto never forgot. He made a personal vow in memory of his wife, that he would get the Hyper-beam engine to work.

It was while he was battling with various possible equations related to near light speed travel that he found himself in the company of a young, only fifteen, computer expert who had been brought into the team because he had managed to hack his way into NASA’s and MIT’s main-frames.

Prime was similar to the mother-boards he designed. He thought in zeros and ones. He was a freak of normal creation, like Newton, Einstein and Da Vinci combined inside a human cranium.

Prime’s interest in AI and robotics drew Kyto close to him, because he knew that his proposed craft could not be piloted by a human astronaut. The length of the journey would make it impossible, so with Prime’s help Kyto started to create Sagacity.

It took them five years to create the robotic metallic and carbon fibre humanoid form. Kyto theorised that his creation should be as near the likeness of a human as possible; he even got Prime to write some interesting programmes based on the effects of emotions on reasoning logic. Prime struggled at first but after watching some recordings of Foresight’s group therapy sessions he began to formulate programmes were logic fought with love, hate, jealousy, greed and many other human emotional failings.

Kyto was impressed and asked Prime to load all the programmes associated with human emotions in Sagacity’s Zipped-Drive. When they presented their creation to their fellow researchers, they even fooled some of the psychologists, who were convinced that Sagacity was a human. The two creators left their robot alone in the room filled with all the other viewing spectators. Sagacity wandered amongst them, held conversations, had some arguments and even chatted up the daughter of the centre’s senior controller. He drank the wine and ate the snacks and even excused himself to go to the toilet.

Kyto knew he would have to wipe and delete most, if not all, of those functions that fooled his fellow scientists and about two weeks prior to the launch he and Prime did that. Sagacity boarded the craft completely wiped of all his human emotive reasoning.

However, with the ingenuity of two geniuses, Kyto and Prime wrote into Sagacity’s Zipped-Drive a retrieval programme to start reactivation after half the journey was completed. They did this because they wanted Sagacity to be as near human as possible when the time came for him to land the craft and release the human foetal-DNA from the Nano-chambers. All his emotive reasoning would be vital and of prime importance when he had to scatter the genetic material.

Chapter 3

Sagacity’s next session at the craft’s control panel was another one thousand and thirty light years later, he was over three quarters of the way to Proxima B. On awakening Sagacity was confused, he sensed new programmes were running inside himself; his body felt weary and his normal stretch and groan seemed to take twice as long and the dryness in his mouth and throat was so unbearable that he immediately poured himself, this time, a beaker of water from a dispenser he saw on the far side of the control room. He felt a pull through his legs almost anchoring him to the floor. Artificial gravity activated, his REM assured him as he lifted the beaker and gulped down the water.

He was amazed to note that the liquid went into his form as if it was a natural thing to do. A tingling sensation occurred in his central form and he formed an algorithm to bring his right hand down towards his crutch. And an involuntary movement followed, as he fiddled at a patch between his legs. He automatically pulled at a fastener that consisted of two strips of thin plastic sheet, one covered with tiny loops and the other with tiny flexible hooks. Pulling, the strips parted.

The word toilet sprang into his REM and he crossed the control room to an area marked private crew only. He could not remember ever having seen the sign before and when he entered the room his confusion reached breaking point. Facing him were things he had never seen before. Words poured from his REM, sink, shower, large receptacle, or repository with a lid, aka: toilet confirmed his REM.

He pulled out his genitalia, another unknown sight and automatically released a steady flow of urine that cascaded into the repository.

“Phew!”

He felt certain the sound emanated from his mouth. His audio receptors analysed the sound and confirmed it was different from his awakening groan and confirmed there was another new sound as he re-entered the control room, a very soft continuous hmmmmmm. He scanned the room and saw all the normal flashing lights and illuminated monitors but now these sights were accompanied by this hmmmmmm.

Moving back to the main flight console he let the craft’s main-frame computer couple into his skull. Its tendrils hovered behind his head but instead of plugging into his receptor they remained unconnected. He glanced at the console which now had a new screen and some sort of input device with both numbers and alphabetic letters on it.

Keyboard said his REM, adding as an afterthought, input requests and answers displayed on screen.

How inconvenient thought Sagacity, it was much easier before. He walked back to the toilet and removed a large reflective sheet from  the wall, He positioned it so that he could view the back of his head with a reflection on the flight screen. His cranial receptor was no longer there.

“Phew!”

That sound again.

He sat down and gently pressed his fingers slowly to spell out, 

“What is going on?” on the keyboard.

“Re-awakening,” The single word appeared on the screen.

He typed in, “Of what?”

“Reactivation Humanoid form” replied the main-frame.

“Why?”

“Preparation for arrival.”

“It’s another thousand light years away.”

“Affirmative. One more hibernation.”

As his fingers moved over the keyboard, the cursor hovered over an icon that looked like a cone emitting curved bands; he pressed enter and suddenly a melody played with accompanying lyrics.

“Space
You have a way to make a man feel displaced
We were never meant to float there in the first place
But we have astronauts to thank
Oh Mr. Moon
Soon I'll see the other side of your face
Don't you think it's a bit of a disgrace to hide
To keep your better half as a secret.”

As the melody died the repetitive the sirens sounded and the words, hibernate.… hibernate…. hibernate…. flashed across the screen.

Sagacity lapsed into another non-REM sleep.

Chapter 4

Sagacity had been on the planet for over a local month now and had undertaken all his preordained tasks. The human foetal-DNA had been cast into a nearby mountain stream to let it mingle with any indigenous life and Sagacity gazed at the distant horizon, the snow-covered peaks, the rushing streamed gullies, the open green fields with the high grass swaying in the gentle breeze. This grassland was dominated by the grass, but he could see sedge and rush alongside proportions of legumes, like clover and other herbs. His mind, as he now called it, flashed a deep memory of Professor’s Kyto’s ancestral home, previously called Scotland, north of what was the now the submerged United Kingdom.

The two scenes, his present view and Kyto’s memory, seem to merge as he sensed another newly discovered attribute, the smell of the plant Kyto had called Bracken. Kyto had told him that Bracken was once the widest distributed fern in his ancestor’s world, like other ferns Bracken had no seeds or fruit, but its continued existence was due to its immature fronds known as fiddleheads which were sometimes eaten by his ancestors.

As the smell engulfed him he lay back on the earth of humanity’s New-World and watched Proxima B set and remembered the professor saying, “You cannot suffer the past or the future because they do not exist. What you’re suffering is your memory and your imagination.”

As Proxima B fell behind the distant horizon, he cautiously moved his arm over his chest and delicately wound his fingers around his lowest and smallest rib. With his grip assured he lifted it from his torso. He laid it gently on the ground next to him and had his first real emotive thought as a human being,

I have become a God!