Nova of the Machines

Datafile Record: 001.01.1-LaForge Center: A Narrative Portrayal

Account of Aurora Douglaston

The LaForge center was my dad's baby. He'd poured decades worth of love and labor into building the research institute where he could "build the future." He watched its birth at the groundbreaking ceremony. He'd held its hand during the rough patches when it was still learning to get its feet underneath it. Years ago it came into its own and proudly stood among its peers as one of the largest and most successful research institutes in the world. As it was with all boastful parents, my dad's baby was the only thing that kept his attention. When I was only twelve I realized there was room in my father's heart for one darling, and I wasn't it.

It wasn't long after I was accepted into medical school that my father decided he wanted to see me. It'd been about six months since we had last spoken, and before that I'd done my best to brush him off. I told him I was busy with my studies, or that work was too hectic. Promises for callbacks were never fulfilled on my part. I figured he had gotten the hint and stopped trying, but like clockwork, the night after I got the acceptance via vid-mail, he sent over a bouquet of flowers with a holographic message congratulating me. Of course he couldn't simply send me flowers or congratulate me. He had to include one of his showy sci-fi gizmos.

There was good reason why I didn't want to see him. Instead of showing up to my graduation for my bachelor's degree, he took his star pupil to a symposium on quantum mechanics. Little Aurora Douglaston had stepped out of her renowned father's shadow and done something meaningful. He couldn't even show up. Now that he wanted to see me, I had no doubt that Dad wanted to take some credit for my "oversized brain" and claim whatever accomplishments I had as his own. I couldn't say no. My mother would never have let me hear the end of it otherwise.

My taxi pulled up to the front of his impossible building. It was shaped like an inverted top-heavy teardrop with a glass pyramid mounted within it. A towering radar satellite loomed next to it. It was the kind of thing that looked like it belonged in one of those old 1960s visions of what the future would be like; it had no place in the mid-twenty-first century. By all rules of proper architecture, the gleaming white-and-chrome monstrosity should have been unimaginable, and yet my Dad made it happen. I had spent a lot of time studying for exams here a few years back. I always hated the place, so it forced me to focus only on my studies while ignoring everything else. The LaForge Center was ugly, unnecessarily complex, and silly. I suppose that's what I should expect from a guy who named his greatest achievement after a fictional Star Trek character rather than after himself or a real scientist. But that was my dad to a T: unnecessarily complex and silly.

I paid my cab and walked inside. There was no main lobby or specialized reception area. Instead of a security guard, three hovering robots floated down and scanned me. These little mobile computers were what put my father on the map as an inventor. The shape of almonds and the color of polished alabaster, they winked at me with their dead, black, camera eyes. When my dad designed them, he had been the first person to create a mobile personal computer that moved on its own. He had fitted it with a basic two-dimensional projector and a miniature antigravity unit. Suddenly, every man, woman, and child had access to a pet computer that could follow the user around and adapt to anything. Though it was lauded as a revolutionary advance in personal computing, it was only a fad. It didn't have anything approaching an artificial sentience. The holograms were mostly limited to and pixelated. There was nothing particularly cutting-edge about them. They were just toys that nerds could live out their fantasies with. Dad did say he had got his inspiration from a comic book hero whose name always escaped me. Either way, the patent made him millions very quickly, and he immediately invested in any scientific research that sparked his imagination.

I'm sure the robots functioned as a security network of some kind. I ignored and walked past them. I was the boss's daughter. No one was going to harass me.