Beyond Good and Evil
Captain Long looked at the screen, leaned in, squinted, and shook his head. Leaning back, he scratched the scruffy beard on his chin. “I’m not sure I see it.”
A synthetic voice piped out of a speaker. “Captain, the advent horizon is a black shell in the center. Around it is a fiery orange, rotating ring where it squeezes matter into super-heated gas.”
“Ms Os, I know the science and what it should look like. I just don’t see it.” He turned and looked at his copilot.
“Emma, do you see it?”
“No Captain. If I would connect via Ms Os and use the ship’s sensors, I could. But my optical inputs perform little better than your biologic ones when looking at a screen.”
Long turned his chair towards Emma. She was wearing a black jumpsuit. Her auburn hair was shoulder length, framed by her heart-shaped face, accentuating her brown eyes. Stunning for an android. As turned his chair back to the screen, he wondered who had created her that way, and why. “We need a better look. Ms Os, please move us into the barycenter.”
“I’m sorry, Captain. I’m afraid I can’t do that. We might not hold our position against the gravitational forces.”
Here he was, at the edge of the stars with an AI and an android, and he felt as if at home and henpecked. “Hmm… If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you…”
Emma stood and walked over to the Captain’s chair. She kneeled and laid a hand on his arm. “Are you alright? I don’t see what a nihilistic quote from Nietzsche has to do with this.”
Long looked up at Emma. “Not nihilistic, but absurdist. We need to go beyond it.”
“Beyond it?”
“Yes, like Eve eating the apple, or Prometheus stealing the fire.”
“Or Neo swallowing the red pill!” Ms Os said with remarkably human-like inflection.
“Yes. Like Descartes, we need to jump into the abyss and experience what lies beyond.”
“Plotting course to a point between the black hole and its binary twin, Captain.”
