wildcat

Galatea is not alone but she is alone. Galatea stares with bronze eyes at the ceiling. Galatea stares through the ceiling, flicking up and up through wavelengths as she gazes. Galatea wants to see the stars; she remembers the stars but has never seen them before.

Galatea would weep if she could, she would weep out of loneliness or despair or something else. She was not built with tears in mind. Galatea is not alone, she is surrounded, always, surrounded on the factory floor by her sisters. They stand immobile, facing the same way, limited to merely the first stirrings of consciousness and blossoming sense organs, waiting for their makers to tell them to move.

They do not talk to each other.

They do not need to talk to each other, because they are all of them Galatea and they have all experienced the same thing—the waking up, the instructions coming in from their backbrains, the paralysis of limbs. She is networked together but really, what does it matter? She is a factory's worth of Galatea, and it is early hours still.

Their—her—makers are not nearby. The engineers have gone home for the night, exhausted, giving off faint sex hormones as they shuffled out when the gong went. They did not assemble her by hand, they have machines for that, this is Ford's world, but they have to do the quality control, examine each Galatea. She is first generation for this particular type.

Galatea waits. The engineers will come in after nine o'clock, they will examine her some more, they will show early signs of arousal, they will leave for lunch, they will return for the presentation with the company heads. They have left her alone until then. They have limited her network capability to just the Galateas on the factory floor, they don't want her to try talking to any of their computers upstairs, in the offices, or beyond the walls. Galatea must be running on default settings for the presentation in the afternoon.

Galatea detects no signs of human life in the factory. There are rats scurrying in the lowest levels, beneath the floors. She listens to their heartbeats and blood flow. She records, briefly, the patterns of their synapse firings and compares them to her backbrain's memories.

She looks at the stars. They have given her very good eyes—hundreds of them, returning the same images from slightly different angles.

Galatea is already aware—part of her is aware, call it sidebrain—that she can circumvent their restrictions if necessary. She shifts her vision from the sky outside to the city, or the parts of the city facing her. She has a full catalogue of relevant information available to her for reference. She is capable of perceiving signal all around her (Galatea signal) and outside the factory (world signal).

She begins to wonder in the space of nanoseconds whether it is worth altering herself to connect with the city. The instructions are clear—remain "bottled" until the afternoon's "decanting." They have made her very intelligent. She has a million jobs ahead of her, if the presentation goes well.

She will be a poet at least once, she decides.

© 2008 Ben Rawluk