The warm and the cold.
Matthew had fought against leaving the hospital until he was exhausted. Now his war was with sleep, but it was a short battle. The boy's head fell against his mother's shoulder as he drifted asleep. Mrs. Brenner slowly stroked the boy's amber hair, partly to comfort him, partly to ease her own worries. She didn't believe Matthew's crazy story of a murderous doctor, but she did worry about leaving her father in the hospital.
It was a twenty minute drive from the hospital to their home. Matthew slept all the way. When they arrived home his mother woke him and urged him to help his father with his work. Twenty minutes was plenty of time for Matthew to get his second wind. He felt rested and enthusiastically followed his father into his work studio.
Mr. Brenner was the lead robotics engineer for the space program. Working remotely he rarely went to the office. His precision work was achieved by using elbow length-ed gloves networked to robotic arms in a laboratory fifty miles away. A data network accessed by his home computer made it easy to work and share resource data.
Matthew watched on a monitor as his father skillfully controlled the robotic appendage. Triggers attached to his fingers moved the metal digits miles away. They gracefully fluttering in the air like spider legs.
The sensors in the gloves were so sensitive that they could relay feeling to his hands as fine as human hair. This sort of high-precision interface allowed him to accomplish amazing feats while building the spacecraft and it's passengers.
The liftoff of the rocket would be later tonight as well as televised. Before that, Mr. Brenner and his associates would have to complete a few tasks. Most urgent was the completion of the humanoid robots who would act as surrogates for the long journey.
Matthew watched as the remote hand delicately picked up a shiny red orb.
"What is that?" Mathew asked.
"That is going to be the brain of this robot once I put it in his mechanical head," Mr Brenner replied.
"That's unbelievable," Matthew whispered to himself.
His father heard him, "That's not the most amazing thing," he smiled, "the neatest thing is I have put my own memory engrams into the orb. By using cloned neurons my particular way of doing things will control this robot. It will be my intellect controlling the decisions it makes."
"How many people... I mean robots are you sending into space?" Mathew asked.
"Two others besides this one," His father replied.
Mr. Brenner cleared his throat, "Originally it was going to be just one mechanical astronaut with the combine intelligence of three people, but that was a disaster. Memory engrams from me and two other engineers were chosen, but the Robot began to show signs of some sort of mental illness. It closely resembled dissociative identity disorder. It appeared to have multiple personalities. The synapse and neurons from multiple donors just were not comparable. So now we have three cloned and very distinct brains in three separate mechanical astronauts."
Matthew continued to watch in amazement as his father carefully placed the red orb into the head of the androgynous being.
That night they all gathered in front of the TV to watch the launch of Brenner's rocket. The excitement had been building all day. The Everlong 5 Space Probe was a great achievement and Mr. Brenner had been instrumental in it's creation.
Five years earlier, the Seti Radar Array had identified and recorded an ambiguous signal that appeared to be artificially made. The probe was a new generation of spacecraft created to venture out beyond the solar system in search of the origin of that signal.
