The Good Ancestor
What if you could learn with the AI ghosts of your ancestors?
The distant orb of the earth rose along a circular window. Blue light cast into a room where Sara slept.
She began to wake when she heard the echo of her Elders sharing stories of triumph. In the year 2050, every child had access to their Elders — the collective conscious of their ancestors digitized and embodied. Each child chose the algorithm which filtered their Elders. Her choice was the warrior archetype. She smiled, one day she would top them all.
She leaned up and looked over at the image, the ghost-like projection of the Elder manifested itself in front of the blue of the Earth like a hydra with multiple faces. Their boasting had become bickering. Each pulling apart to speak of his scaling of a barracks, or her construction of a great building. As she leaned up, she closed her eyes for a moment and recalled a faint dream — a calm blue city beneath swirling clouds. She brushed it off — and thought of how much better it would be if she didn’t have to sleep at all. Let alone be led around randomly by dreams.
Conscious of the joints in her hands, she noted the intricate hydraulic sheaths in which her tendons slid and pushed, cracking her knuckles against the bed and got up. Through the divider Sara saw her great uncle — who was cross-legged and silent. She had come to the moon colony after her parents died.
As Sara began to lean into the shadow of the wall, her Elder coalesced and oriented toward her, judging. She nodded and stood up in the light — imagining every vertebrae pulling into perfect alignment.
Today she would go into the Brink — the virtual reality dojo. One challenge bubbled up from the chaos fit for a warrior and presented itself on her feed- to design a flourishing human civilization on Mars.
This challenge was the perfect opportunity — As terran nations began eyeing the resources of the greater solar system, who would control this key outpost? Indeed, the most dominant warrior of her ancestors orchestrated the push to establish space supremacy via the moon. This was her grandmother. Soon after her greatest feat, she slipped and hit her head on the edge of a table. She was 25 years old.
The second most dominant personality was a colonial tanner. A scowling, freckled fellow who’d get drunk and fight with anyone who looked sideways at his pigs. Especially the ones good for tanning. He quickly amassed a substantial empire before he, also, met an untimely death.
Sara marched out into the hall and peered over to her great uncle, who remained silent.
“Hey, Uncle Vince. You should probably wake up, the rest of us are getting at it!” Her Elders smiled. Her great uncle, with his eyes still closed, smiled and said in a measured tone “Go in peace, Sara.”
She smiled and approached a dispenser — filling up a canister with a nutrient shake . Her grandmother took over the form of the Elder and laughed, “What a useless man. Nearly 50, and what has he done?” Sara walked through the projection, “He’s alive. And look,” Sara spun the canister, “he’s fed a warrior before battle.” “The Elder scoffed, “Pathetic” Sara stopped, feeling the presence of the Elder behind her back. Unsure for whom the comment was directed…. she breathed in and continued walking.
Sara stepped deliberately in the corner of the room. There, pleated along the ground, walls, and ceilings were small quadrilateral tiles. This was the tactile zone — an automated fabric, and each panel had shuttered projectors. The effect was a holographic surface with tactile sensation. The interface of the Brink. Sara clapped her feet together, her arms perpendicular and bowed; The Brink dropped her into a void. Her feet sunk, and the panels took on a sheen before disappearing as she was transported to the surface of Mars.
Vents hissed, and she felt the dust of the red planet tumble along her fingertips. At this time, Mars was populated by automated custodians, the surface had been assessed — we knew the topology with perfect precision, the resource deposits and the water reservoirs. As she looked at the surface, the interface showed the system connecting Stewards to the feed, they would judge her- and she smirked. With a flick of her finger, she turned on abstract mode — and voiced her thoughts aloud.
Cracking up from the red surface, her ideas of a perfect colony became monuments of hyper production and efficiency; a matrix of living quarters rippled through the mountains, regolith lifted to protect minimal spaces where simulated humans passed in single-file, safe from the environment — no wasted space was allowed, and automated fleets traversed the plains down toward a pillbox-like feature which processed the water. The simulation sped up, showing the scouring and processing of minerals, the people marching in unison to go about a routine much like hers, the surface built up more and more. There was no space unused, as the perfect grid of the colony dropped over like a fishing net into the valleys where a great platform reared up ships ready and aimed at the remaining planets. Her Elder solidified into her grandmother, smiling with pride. Sara felt a frantic strength, as if channeling the vision of some perfect machine of civilization. She stood as an angel above her creation.
Her fists clenched — and only when she pinched her palm, did she fully contemplate the scale of the colony. Part of her was relieved to get it out of her mind and achieve serenity in the aftermath- but more consciously she was overcome with tension, hoping for approval from the warrior. And they did.
But in the perfection of the red planet reborn as the beachhead of the solar system, the Stewards’ sentiment levels were unmoved. She felt heat roll up her neck and the pressure mount. It is their judgement that mattered if her world would be made real.
“…well, she could have done better. There’s plenty of z-space to fold into the colonial system…” her Elder had split into the bickering duo again “Oh toss it, the judges are fools! The base is a flawless foundation, regimented to every second! Maybe the colonists need more dopamine — ” Sara looked back at them, as the Steward’s engagement ratio dropped precipitously, “It’s exactly as it should be… I don’t get it…It feels right, like how I would want it to be…. But maybe there’s something missing, some imperfect corridor or nutritional element, or….”
She cracked her knuckles,“… okay, let’s do this!”
She took manual control of the Brink. An overlay wrapped around her fist like a reticle with icons floating at each finger tip manifested based on the intentions of her own mind to the task at hand. Symbols sharp and precise. Then, she razed the structures, iterating out every wasted atom — regimenting every crater and crevice of the surface of the planet in a blanket of perforated utility, reducing the wasted resources, while the colonists were pumped with precisely balanced chemicals to regulate their psychology, to make them conform to the clockwork of her vision. It was working…. the interface showed efficiency irking higher and higher — with everything in a proper place, everything brought under total control! Falling into such perfect order that… her greatest task could be complete….
…maybe then she could silence the bickering of the ancestors, the anxiety of their gaze pushing her to the cliff…
Her grandmother shifted forward out of the Elder’s phasing form, “Do you even want this? You think you need control… Do you even know what you need, really? ” The Elder’s torso twisted inhumanely as her grandmother’s eyes whipped around and pierced into Sara. “I wanted to add a monumental step toward the perfection of humanity, too — but, I knew who I was, first — I had achieved total dominion of my mind and body …” Then the voice echoed with the warrior archetypes of generations, assessing her intently, “Who are you to perfect society if you don’t even know yourself?”
Sara’s heart was pounding — the representatives were leaving…. She turned off manual mode and wanted harder. But she faltered…. What did she want? The landscape began to disfigure… The civilization clinked together- fusing, and then the numbers crashed… the population health metrics showed increasing cases of mental illness, fatigue, the drugs weren’t working… The colony giving up…. But why? They were just a series of inputs and outputs, just like her… Just like she was… Wasn’t she?
Her grandmother laughed, “On the brink of such great achievement! Such a tremendous feeling to know you are perfecting humanity! I had a taste of that feeling, and you… you could do so much more! But here you are, you have no control over this. ”
Sara felt crushed, she had been demeaned before, but for some reason she cared now. She turned back to watch in horror as the Brink accelerated to show a lifeless landscape before her- and she felt a total emptiness….
The tanner scoffed at her grandmother, “Would have been nice to achieve it and LIVE though, you conquered the moon and then croaked. Did you really have control over yourself?”
Sara’s heart began hurting…. Sweat sizzling around her eyes. Or was that tears?
“Speak for yourself! You shot a guy for stealing a pig, and got hung for it.”
Sara was boiling…
“Stop it!!”
The Elders coalesced back into the single molten image of the warrior, surprised. “How dare…”
“No! I don’t. I don’t want this. You want this.” Sara trembled, looking at her hands — the hands she considered as simple machines, erratic and sweaty now and she had a sense that maybe they were her own….
She crunched up her hands on her temples. Why am I doing this?
She released her balled up fists and the Brink expanded, Mars dropped into the distance and she pulled back above the solar system — then the Milky Way, then the Universe. The stars reflected in her eyes, until she pulled out so far, they didn’t…
She closed her eyes. The image of Mars returned behind her, the great structures teetering with her words. The interface still in abstract mode… The Brink listening to her intention as her open palms fell into the red dust.
Rippling from her, the vast colonial grid which had cut into the planet trembled and imploded with a thunderous shrug. As red plumes engulfed the simulation, the warrior approached- casting its long shadow upon her trembling hands. She pondered as she knelt…“Is it really my fate, too? To entrap myself in a state of perfection, obsessing over every error in such detail I don’t see the cage crushing me?” She ran her hands along the red dust and cupped it in her fist. “Into some perfect form…”
She squeezed the dust until her hand hurt and the dust spilled out….
“But I’m not perfect. I don’t even want to be perfect… I just want…” Sara searched between her fingers in the red dust, what did she want? Her fingers stopped and she saw the grooves settle into a beautiful abstract form. “I want peace,” Sara paused and felt the pain of memory — she felt the warmth of her mother and the hum of her father… before the crash, the disorder that took them away from her.
“No one can control everything — and maybe, even if we could, we shouldn’t. Maybe I can find peace in that…” Sara turned, eyes shining with tears, to the her Elder. “Maybe that’s what can sustain us…”
Sara closed her eyes. Focusing on her breathing. And she felt like a granule of dust flowing with the lifting wind… She let go…
And the red planet responded to her pleas-— sifting up from the regolith of the crumbled colony new forms breathed up full of vibrant life. People and vegetation seen through transparent bulbs that grew until they blossomed among the bluffs of red. And the landscape transformed into a balance of red and green, invigorated by the rhythm of life with an atmosphere now breathable, and blue. Sustainable… serene…
In that moment, her grandmother and the tanner softened and crinkled with understanding before the Elder fogged into a myriad form, and the Mage now looked upon her, curious and proud.
She opened her eyes to see the the Elder, and the visage of her parents gazed into her soul, and she was overcome with the sensation that her spine dropped like a waterfall on the rocks of history, branching with every painful memory she had run from and in that deep tethering she found peace…
And they turned toward a shuffling noise within the orange fog between the vibrant, tropical streets of a lovely martian paradise. There, a Steward had taken form on the Brink.
The Steward looked at her urgently, “We‘d like you to help us.”
And Sara arose as one with her ancestors in the midst of the serene dream of what could be.
Author’s Note
We build on the stones of our ancestors. By reading their books we experience a kind of time-traveling telepathy as Stephen King put it, and in a way build with their voices in mind. But, the promise of technology could be a closer connection with ancestors so that not only do we step further into the past but that they can be stepped into their future. And we can move forward, together.
What may interrupted the process? Well, the same faults we have had since our conscious awareness — pride, resentment, and particularly treating ourselves like robots with drives rather than humans with intentions that we can reflect on and change. In this story, I wanted to explore the misalignment of pride — in some ways, pride closes us off to new knowledge and closes us off from healthy change. If our ancestors were broken, but their strategies “worked,” why wouldn’t we repeat them? I think the answer involves changing our time-frame and adopting the responsibility to be a good ancestor.
If you found this story inspiring, please click the image below to check out the other glimpses of our possible futures and join the conversation!
