Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

1. Tides and Time

The Aphelion was the greatest vessel of the Neo-Tokyan space fleet.

Her sheer size alone was a sight to behold. Her hull was dark and sleek, without any sharp, geometrical angles. Instead, slanted edges and streamlined surfaces gave her the shape of a narrow teardrop, adorned with millions of glowing lights like an endless array of all-seeing eyes. As she cruised through the infinite black, the propulsion systems at the back splayed out like a set of tentacles, she looked less like an inorganic space vessel and more like the giant sea creature from Terran myth that had served as a namesake for this class of ship: a Leviathan.

The Leviathan ships were the masterful culmination of decades of human ingenuity, science, engineering and warfare. Used as a flagship, one could house a crew of two thousand, and carry hundreds of smaller space craft. And yet, thanks to the latest interface technology, it took no more than a hundred and twenty people to fully operate it. But what set the Aphelion apart from the other Leviathan-class ships was not the modern technology she was equipped with, but her command. Her captain was one of the youngest to command a Leviathan in human history. And his second in command - entirely unprecedented in human history - was not human at all, but an autonomous AI.

Often, the two of them could be found standing on the bridge, staring out into the infinite expanse of space and debating the nature of organic and inorganic existence.

Technically he wasn't really staring since he had no eyes, but he was equipped with hardware that allowed him to sense the electromagnetic waves around him. Most of the time, the universe appeared splendidly colorful to him, painted in nameless hues beyond the spectrum that was visible to humans. But if he adjusted the settings just right, his vision matched that of a human being, and he could see the stars like tiny diamonds draped against a velvet black canopy. Despite the lack of color, the images he was processing now were none the less beautiful.

He liked to do that on occasions such as this, during their philosophical discussions. He told himself that it was beneficial for him to see the world through the eyes of a human from time to time, that it would help him understand their perspective of things. Still, he wondered what the Captain truly saw as his brown eyes were fixed on that distant star that they were headed for.

"Consider this, Captain," he mused, sharpening his perception on the Captain and trying to guess his thoughts on the matter while he spoke. "The second law of thermodynamics implicates that entropy increases in an irreversible manner. The course of time creates disorder. But now, look at life: a process that creates order form disorder, that shapes atoms into molecules, molecules into cells, and cells into complex, self-replicating beings such as humans. The origin of life is thus an inherently counter-intuitive process. No wonder that humans, at a certain point of the evolution of their cognition, began to find it all quite hard to process."

The Captain didn't avert his eyes from the distant star as he replied. "So you are proposing that life itself is..."

"Unnatural, in a sense, yes. Perhaps... I keep wondering if it is easier for an AI to ponder these questions without getting lost in mysticism and superstition, because in contrast to humans, we know and understand perfectly well where we came from and how we function. There is little mystery to the origins of our existence."

They had been at this for the past hour. The discussion was, as usual, leading nowhere in particular , but nonetheless he found it very enlightening. He enjoyed these moments of reflection that he shared with his human Captain very much.  He could have kept conversing like this for days without end - he didn't know the feeling of being tired, and his mechanical voice would never hoarsen.