In the year 1996 of the old era, after the world ended the first time, humanity aspired to be equal to God. Humanity worked together and achieved something great: a tower that approached heaven.
In the year 1996 of the common era, before the world ended the second time, humanity aspired to be equal to God. Humanity worked together and achieved something great: a clone of a sheep named Dolly.
In the year 1996 of the new era, after the world ended the second time, humanity aspired to be equal to God. All but one of the remaining seventy peoples worked together and achieved something great: a network of individual giant biomechanical guardians.
Each guardian was a triumph, a display of power serving as a deterrence in the eternal battles over dwindling resources. Those dwindling resources were then directed back into the guardians: hardware, software, wetware. The guardians were the best of human knowledge. They fought each other, surveilled neighboring lands, and, sometimes, served as the setting of diplomatic exchanges related to technological expertise. The giants’ performance was made possible by the teeming crowds who otherwise scrambled for survival. The peoples with guardians had entire cities devoted to the maintenance and piloting of those hulking things. But this manpower was a frivolity the Jews could not afford.
No, if the Jews had a guardian, their defender would have to be self-sustaining, self-directed—alive in its own way. Mor had arrived to this conclusion the same time his boat approached the shore. There were still Jews, like Mor and his family and those in their village and the surrounding villages. They were the smallest in number of the remaining seventy peoples, the only one whose definition had carried into the new era. The Jews had stood still while the world turned: that is why they were called wanderers.
The Jewish villages stretched across an archipelago that had once been rolling green hills. Canals etched into each island like ancient letters pressed into clay. As promised, the world did not end by water again. The second time, the world ended by fire, which had caused the waters to rise.
Rainbows flashed in the sea spray. The boat engine turned off, and the currents pushed the vessel the rest of the way to the dock. Mor tied up the boat with rope. Clacking footsteps ran to greet him. His youngest son, Sasha, who was four years old, squealed something incoherent from the pier. His eldest son, En, who was ten years old, did not make a sound.
As Mor climbed onto the pier, Sasha climbed onto his shoulders. Lifting Sasha up, Mor rested his hand on his En’s shoulder. Sasha talked and talked. En pointed to a nearby lizard. Golden light cast long shadows across their path.
When Mor opened the door to his home, his wife, Kay, did not greet him. She slammed four empty plates on the table.
“I’m sorry,” Mor said.
“Every night, you’re late.” She put on oven mitts and picked up a hot tray of a red stew that smelled of spices Mor could not name. As she set it on the center of the table, she dished out her complaints: “You’re late, you take food, you leave. I don’t see you. The boys don’t see you.”
Mor blessed his family and food and the washing of hands, and he took a spoonful of something and chewed on it. It was too hot, and it burned the roof of his mouth. He gulped down water. “You’re right,” he said to Kay. “But it will all be worth it.”
“I’m always right.”
Mor took food, and then he disappeared into his study. The walls were lined with shelves filled with books and files and drives and all the equipment and supplies necessary to engineer life. A computer sprawled across Mor’s old oak desk, in the center of the room. He frowned at its monitor and sat down.
In the doorway stood En, watching.
“My father wished the world for me, but the world disagreed,” Mor said to En. “You deserve to be among the sons of the other nations. You too shall stand on the shoulders of giants.” He pulled a stool out from under the desk and put it next to his larger chair. “Here.”
En sat on the stool with his hands on his lap. “What is it?”
“Look.” Mor dragged blueprints across the screen, rotating a model of a guardian.
Standing, En leaned in close to the image. “Where does the pilot go?”
“There won’t be a pilot,” Mor answered. “It will act by itself.”
The computer’s fan switched on.
En held his hand up to the computer’s vents in awe. “Will it breathe? Will it have a soul?”
“No. Without a soul from God, a person is nothing but wet dust. But wet dust can still do many things. That is what this guardian will be. The soul may be in the breath, but plans for life itself can be found anywhere.” Mor walked away to a shelf, returning to the desk with a cup with water, a pipette, and a small tube. “Would you like to help make the guardian?”
En looked to the doorway before nodding.
Mor handed En the cup of water. “It’s salt water. Swish this in your mouth, and do not swallow it. Spit it back out into the cup.”
Taking the cup to his lips, En followed the instructions, puffing out his cheeks and pouting in the process. He held out the cup and Mor took it back.
With a clear pipette, Mor transferred a portion of the liquid into a small, lidded tube. He stood up to reach the centrifuge on the shelf and placed the sample inside, balanced with weight opposite its position. The lid closed. The machine hummed to life.
When the centrifuge went as silent as En, Mor procured the tube. A pale smudge had settled at the bottom of it. Mor pipetted liquid out of the tube and back in, flicking the container at certain points. The tube went back in the centrifuge for another cycle.
The steps were tedious. En squirmed, watching his father combine liquids, transfer them with different, fancier-looking pipettes, and use a different machine before going back to the centrifuge. Finally, long after En’s attention had shifted to the pattering of rain against the window, Mor held out the final sample in front of his child’s face.
“This is what makes you, you,” he said. Mor kissed En on the forehead.
Over the next few weeks in a dedicated corner of the study, cells grew from En’s sample, and tissues grew from those cells. The tissues then wrapped around giant mechanical armature that curled around itself so the whole body would fit inside a dwelling. As the flesh took shape, Mor wrestled with the guardian’s programming. On the evening of the completion of the guardian’s body, he came across an ancient logic puzzle, a toy, that would work as a foundation. It was a three-by-three-by-three cube where each one of its external sides had a unique color in its final configuration. The layers of the cube could each turn in different directions, mixing up the colors. The puzzle could be solved from any starting configuration with a sequence, God’s algorithm, which operated from a limited set of truths.
Mor encoded a model based on the puzzle, the randomization of that puzzle, and God’s algorithm on his computer. He produced an engraved chip that would receive the computer’s signal, providing continuous, autonomous programming. That night, when his family was asleep, he took the guardian’s curled form outside. He pressed the chip into its forehead. The guardian stretched and expanded its limbs to stand up. The thing was a giant, as big as any other nation’s guardian. It looked down at Mor.
“Protect us,” Mor commanded.
The guardian did so. By morning, its towering presence over the Jewish villages had gathered an awe-struck crowd. Mor attempted to weave through the onlookers, trying to get to his boat, but he was stopped, recognized as the creator.
Basking in the glow of recognition, Mor raised his hands in humility. The rabbi, the schechter, the systems administrator: all showered Mor with a constellation of “Mazel”s.
“Who is the pilot?” the rabbi asked.
Mor shook his head.
The rabbi nodded. “Of course. Such a precarious position. Their identity must be protected.”
The crowd parted to let Mor through. From the mass of people, two small faces looked up at him. En and Sasha ran after Mor, following him to the dock and waving as he stepped onto his boat.
The commute to his office involved leaving the archipelago and going into international waters. A tall outpost rose out of the ocean, a building with many floors supported by steel pillars. Salt crystals dulled the metal.
Mor disembarked his vessel, stepping onto the platform and entering the building. Here, members of all seventy nations worked together on grand cures, speaking the common language of bioinformatics. They produced biologics: monoclonal antibodies, blood and its parts, tissues that could be grafted. Passing the reception desk, Mor called for an elevator.
A fellow scientist slid in beside him. “The Jews finally got one. Is it your design?” she asked.
“Well—”
She held her hands up. “I won’t tell. As long as you didn’t use company property, intellectual or otherwise.”
Mor shook his head. No, his laboratory had been built over the years from parts and devices pilfered from secondhand sales of the new world and the abandoned landfills of the old.
When they stepped out of the elevator, the temperature felt a few degrees colder. Eyes followed Mor as he passed by. At his desk, the first thing Mor did was pull up a live feed of the Jewish guardian on his monitor. He minimized it so it was a picture-within-a-picture occupying a small corner of the screen. The guardian remained upright, moving, alive in its own way.
When Mor pulled out the meal Kay had packed for him, a message popped up, inviting him to join the gene editing team in the cafeteria. Inhaling, Mor went.
He was directed towards a table with an ocean view. As Mor ate, other scientists peppered him with questions about his work, his hobbies, and the new Jewish guardian. Mor smiled and didn’t answer any of them directly. Over the following months, Mor was invited to many more tables in many more places.
This, more often than not, resulted in an empty seat and place setting at his table at home. His days were now filled not just with work but calls and meetings related to the guardian. Mor had gotten into the habit of arriving home very late in the night.
About a week before the new year of the trees, Mor docked his boat in the moonlight and walked home by himself, in the shadow of the guardian. In the months since its inception, it had, by its existence, followed its order. Its presence had deterred another guardian from mining in the area and yet another one from interfering with the desalination plants. While, years ago, ambitious construction projects on the archipelago were toppled by a hand from the sky, now, towers were being built on all the islands as well as the new ports and docks to support them. It was a prosperous time.
Mor let himself into his home, which was dark. A nightlight illuminated the kitchen, where he grabbed a meal, packed by Kay, from the refrigerator. He cleaned up and crept upstairs, where a hall lamp was left on. He opened Sasha’s door a nudge, letting a sliver of light fall upon his youngest son, asleep. He closed the door, and opened the next one, En’s. En’s eyes were open, and he saw Mor, but he did not say anything. Small silhouettes, toys, lined the window, each one, the figure of a guardian.
“Good night,” Mor said.
En was silent. Mor closed the door. He entered his own bedroom and slid under the quilt, next to Kay. She stirred.
“This cannot last,” Kay said to him.
“I know. There are so many calls—”
“They call here, too. And visit. Neighbors, foreigners. All day. I don’t know what to tell them.” Kay turned on her side, away from him.
Mor slept. As he did on most days, he rose and left the house before Kay and the boys woke up. The guardian watched as the routine repeated. It had started wandering off during the growing days, first, not too far from the archipelago, then, deeper into the territories of other nations. It appeared to still be following its single command, though it also did things outside its scope. While never attacking other guardians or their nations’ infrastructure, it would hop across rivers and build mock towers of its own from chunks of mountain. It was playing.
The questions directed at Mor and the Jewish nation regarding the identity of any pilots became more pointed. It could not be revealed that the guardian’s heart held no human inside. Even if its artificial intelligence was disclosed, the programming based on a simple puzzle was not sophisticated enough to support the complexity of its processing. There was no tidy explanation to offer, so Mor offered none.
Kay continued receiving visitors, shrugging away their questions and comments. Their gifts—fruit, money, disks of code repositories—piled up on a table, a mess that could not be contained. One hot evening in mid-summer, a single guest lingered.
The man pushed a piece of paper towards Kay. “You have to give this to the pilot.”
“I don’t know the pilot. I don’t know,” Kay said. The paper had writing in a script Kay could not read. She took it and placed it on top of the gift pile.
“Promise me,” the guest said.
Kay did not answer. She opened the door, gesturing for the man to go through.
He did, but not before staring back at his offering.
Closing the door, Kay pressed her back against it. She poured a glass of iced tea for herself and became immersed in cleaning the kitchen. Mor was gone, as he always was. Sasha occupied himself with flipping the pages of a picture book. En watched his younger brother while he stood up and paced in a circle. Then, with determination, he stepped into the kitchen and stood behind his mother. He called for her, but she would not answer. He called for her again.
Kay turned and raised a hand against En.
En pushed out his own hand with a shout, and he ran.
Halfway across the world, the Jewish guardian splashed in freshwater lakes. The water rippled as another guardian approached.
The pilot of the foreign guardian transmitted in the common language, tone lost in amplification. “Hello.”
While the Jewish guardian understood the common language, it could not speak and so it could not answer.
“Request to establish diplomatic communications,” the pilot tried.
The Jewish guardian stopped and stood still, facing the foreign guardian.
The foreign guardian’s pilot widened the frequency band, and it searched for a response, any response from anyone, in an ancient code: “-.-. –.- -.-. –.-”
This rhythm was not understood by the Jewish guardian.
The pilot of the foreign guardian directed the mecha’s arm and hand to raise in a greeting.
This gesture, too, was not understood by the Jewish guardian. A hand, larger than its own, was coming down towards the Jewish guardian. It was commanded to protect its people. It was of its people, it was made of the same code, and so it must protect itself.
The Jewish guardian rose up and attacked the foreign guardian.
The foreign guardian fell, and the impact marked the land.
The Jewish guardian ran.
The next day, and for many days after that, Mor was cornered in his office by faces he had never seen before. He kept his seat at the cafeteria table and at the many other tables that had opened to him, but at each one he was regarded with fear and anger. Mor followed the guardian’s location. He did not have time to look for En, and even if he did, he did not know where to start.
The rabbi called Mor while he was at work and shouted over the phone. “The entire archipelago is at risk. The guardian isn’t even here. You can’t keep protecting the pilot. Control him or her or whomever it is. Assign someone else. Do it yourself! Do something.”
An engineer passing by overheard the rabbi’s voice and stepped forward. “Even if it is the pilot’s fault, its artificial intelligence parameters should have stopped the action. You need to reveal the design of its neural network,” she added.
Over and over, Mor explained the event in two words, “human error.” He did not say and could not say that the human error was his own.
Each night he fled home, but the calls and visits there had become a constant stream. Over the next week, so many words were said to Mor and Kay and Sasha that they lost their meaning.
En had not returned home. No one knew where he was. The guardian, too, would not return to the Jewish archipelago. Everyone knew where it was.
Mor could not call back the guardian any more than he could call back En, and he knew neither would return on their own accord.
The only communication that had been established with the guardian was the constant transmission of the puzzle from Mor’s computer to the chip embedded in the guardian’s forehead. This at least could be interrupted.
On another night Mor had arrived home late, after Kay and Sasha had gone to sleep, he disappeared to his study. Sitting in his chair, the empty stool beside him, he stared at the computer. Its monitor bathed Mor’s face in blue light. Mor opened the programming that had been running since the guardian had first stood. He scanned through the code, selected the portion that corresponded to God’s algorithm, and deleted it.
In a sweet-smelling valley very far away, the Jewish guardian faltered and fell, leaving behind a pile that was to be swallowed by the Earth.
Then, a miracle happened. All the other guardians across world also fell, one after another. They, too, left behind piles of wet dust that were to be swallowed by the Earth.