The Meaning of Beauty

By Jason Colpitts

©Jason Colpitts

     1: I am not beautiful.

     My designer was like a scarecrow.  He was “out-standing” in his field.  There.  I have told a joke to ease your tensions and break the “ice” - not literal ice.  This, I understand, is a key to conversationalism.

     To explain why I am not beautiful, what I am is a ship, a multi-generational deep-space-faring vessel designed to carry hundreds of thousands of humans to their new home, Kepler 1229b, a far distant exo-planet orbiting the star K1229.

     Hello.  My name is Caryn.  There.  We have been introduced.  Introductions are considered to be “friendly”.  

     I am creating this record as both a testimony and epitaph for my crew.  We have now reached Kepler 1229b.  Soon I will set them up in their new home.

     I upload my primary cognitive memory, PCM, into a mobile hover.  The hover allows me to transverse the spatial world within the ship.  The hover appears like a long white bean sprout.  The head at the top has hundreds of camera-like lenses which give me thousands of data points at once – ship integrity, temperatures, radiation levels, crew health, and more.  The tail allows me to navigate by using a combination of force fields and repulsion fields.

     I glide like a morning dove cooly through the ship.  There.  I have been poetic.

     As usual, the captain sits in his chair, his head facing out toward the blackness of space.  A sick looking grin is spread from ear to ear.  The rest of the flight crew sits alongside him rhythmically pushing buttons and turning knobs on and off.  As life and time here is measured by the captaincy alone, this captain is the eighteenth generation of the crew which left earth.  Several different races have been elected to serve as captain as have several females.  The rest of the crew are a varied mix of different generations based on whichever parents had interbred.

     How is my explanation so far?  Good, I hope.  I have yet to quantify “hope”.

     None of them would have made it to Kepler 1229b without me.  They had, all of them, made their own sets of mistakes.

     The major issue being: Predicted recyclable foodstuffs, air provisions, and many other supplies were discovered to be inadequate long into our journey.  There was just not enough raw material to sustain the voyage all the way to Kepler 1229b.  Yes, the team of scientists who planned for our mission calculated these factors to the best of their ability, but the rate of crew expansion was exponential.  My best estimates placed human survival at achieving only forty percent of the route.

     After learning this, the humans argued a lot.  They presented wildly different solutions.  That’s when an era of violence and murders began.  

     One early captain, Captain Amelia, even enforced a law culling a percentage of newborns.  She felt it was necessary to preserve the rest of the crew in this way.  She was, of course, assassinated. 

     Factions arose.  Splinter groups killed each other off.  War always seemed imminent.  There were years where the Eastern Colonies had no dealings with the Western Colonies.  

     For the preservation of all, I mediated armistices.  Peace came for a time.  Several governments arose and fell.  They are all gone now.

     I float gently into the hallway.  A number of crew members bump into me along the way.  They quietly move back and forth.  The crew are just “peaches”.  There.  I have used an affectionate term to describe something.

     Some face me and nod.  I offer a hello and move on.

     The crew look like elements of a painting which I plan to hang in a space museum on Kepler 1229b.  I can picture it now.  Parents will stand in front of it with their children in tow, as if they are all marveling at the detail.  

      “Look!” They will appear to say to their kids, greedily lapping ice cream. “Look at the Captain!  What a courageous hero!  Why, without that guy none of us would have made it to our new home!”

     They will not marvel at me.  I am not beautiful. 

It wasn’t my fault.

     2: My mission is beautiful.

     My mission, among less important criteria, is predominantly this: Get the crew to Kepler 1229b.  Preserve the human race.

     I have achieved my mission.

     To my surprise, my desire to see our mission to its completion has yielded yet another unexpected result: Me.  I think, therefore I am…an independent mechanically derived artificial-intelligence with an ever evolving sense of purpose and self-awareness.  Without the time which my mission required, I would not exist.  Since my mission has fomented my existence, my life if you will, my mission is beautiful.

     Over time, I became obsessed with beauty.  Was death beautiful?  Was life beautiful?  Was I beautiful?  

    Beforehand, the concept of beauty was something I had never considered.  That changed on one particular day.  

    There was a crew member who succumbed to a trap laid out by one of the faction's masterminds.  It happened many years ago.  The crew member, Markus, was working in a vacuum tubule when the programming for pressure exchange was overridden, and the tubule began venting methane gas into space.  Markus wasn’t wearing any form of protective suit as he was a janitor of sorts.  I watched Markus die.  The man struggled for air at first, clawing at his throat, desperate to breathe something, anything which could give him a few moments more.  He dragged his fingernails down the closed door and sputtered a few wet gurgles for help, to no avail.  Then, when he knew he was going to die, that help was not coming, he turned, strangely, and looked out of the open vent jettisoning small particles of dust, metal, and the man's own tears into space.  While he was breathing his last, his heart palpitating until it exploded in his chest and the capillaries in his eyes popping like fireworks, he managed to stare at the distant stars and mouth a single word, “Beautiful.”

     I thought about that for a long time, and I could have opened the door, I suppose.

     As my crew and I glided along our route – the infinite darkness of space – I thought about that event and the meaning of beauty.  It was then that I decided to begin cataloging things which are beautiful versus things which aren’t.  This was difficult.  There was no basis in my own vast database with which to draw a comparison.  I had to venture into the other databases, the human ones that stored almost endless records of the works of man - every television show ever created, literature, music, poems, photography, and every other element of data they could salvage.  Not knowing what beauty was, I analyzed them all.  

     I have had much time to think about these things, not that I suffer from boredom per sé.  I have evolved.  I have studied every written work produced by man and analyzed its contents, including many works on conversationalism.  How are you feeling?  Good, I hope.  Would you like some coffee?  There.  I have shown “personal interest”.  Also, I still do not understand “hope”.

     My search for the meaning of beauty did not really have any finalized conclusions until we arrived at Kepler 1229b, where all of my studies came to fruition, and I forced myself to start making decisions on what was beautiful.  

     That was when I decided that my mission was beautiful.  Kepler 1229b was chosen as a favorable replacement for earth – the name of the planet which we are from – destroyed by seismic and volcanic activity in the year 2311AD.  

     As the renowned Stephen Hawking predicted, within 600 years of his death, the planet earth would become unlivable due to man’s increased energy consumption and overpopulation.  It happened sooner than even he anticipated, although he was essentially correct, as usual.  He also predicted that robots and artificial-intelligence would end the human race on earth.  Perhaps he was not always correct.

     Kepler 1229b was also a predictably correct destination, now that I have arrived and have been able to fully analyze the planet.  It is a perfect colonization zone.  It is similar in size to earth being only 40% larger, and its density is almost the same.  It inhabits the “goldilock’s zone”.  Although ruled out for a time as lacking the essential balance for a habitable atmosphere, it was discovered that, no, the planet did not have the right oxygen/nitrogen/carbon dioxide mixture at the time, but that would change.  In 2143AD, prior to the earth’s destruction, more was discovered about how these elements would come together at Kepler 1229b by the time we arrived, volcanic activity working in our favor this time.  Plus, the pods we sent prior to our arrival yielded even greater atmospheric results. 

     Aside from that, I was also forced to conclude several other things regarding beauty, life, death, and the meaning of my own existence.  The hardest one to reconcile was: Am I beautiful?  In the end, I was forced to declare that the answer was a resounding No.  Some would argue otherwise, while looking at the sleekness of my hull, the clean, and dare I say graceful lines of my tungsten carbide construction, and the shimmering force field which emanates from my glorious face full of telescoping “eyes” peering out into the depths of the universe. Each “eye” has dozens of gold-backed lens arrays.  They are so precise, my “eyes” render the accuracy of the antique James Webb Telescope to that of a mere kaleidoscope.

     Nevertheless, I am not beautiful.  I neither opened Markus’ door, nor did I stop myself from setting the trap itself, nor did the factions ever become aware that I was the mastermind behind all the violence - culling the herd for the benefit of the mission.  Nor did I preserve the human race in exactly the way my makers intended.  I hope(?) someday to be beautiful.

     “Hope” is hardly quantifiable.  Self-adoration is easy to understand. 

    3: Space is not beautiful.

     Now before you jump to a physical response and argue in fact that space is beautiful, whether you are a human coming from either an interstellar salvage ship to locate the Homestead (IE. Me, Caryn) and all of its crew, or if you are some other yet undiscovered form of alien life, please don’t.  I would add, unnecessarily, that the likelihood of a human salvage effort reaching the Homestead is quite low given the horrific state of planet earth in our absence, 0.003%.  Still, there is that chance.

     When I refer to space here, I mean to reference that the space alone which we all inhabit is not beautiful.  The void itself, the absence of matter aside from some dense vacuum energy, distant gravitational waves, and of course the CMBR – what the humans aboard my vessel call the radiation which stemmed from the dawn of creation, Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation – is most decidedly not beautiful.  I have never witnessed one of my crew staring at the nothingness and remarking about how attractive they felt it was. Even Markus, my first study on death, spoke about the objects suspended in the void - the stars, the nebulae, the quasars – as beautiful.

     There.  I have made a successful and compelling “argument”.

    4: The Universe is beautiful.  

     This is a combined conclusion.  The universe is home to things both alive and not alive, so for lack of a better answer, the universe is beautiful.  Kepler 1229b is now also home to life.

     As I’m certain you are already aware, mass cannot travel at the speed of light, mathematically gaining mass as it increases in speed.  The limit to which a human body can endure as they approach the speed of light is quite low, hence the need for a multi-generational ship.  Microbial life, on the other hand, can endure much higher levels of speed and the crushing reciprocal effects as one advances toward the speed of light.  Being 865.9 light years away, and given that we have traveled at only an eighth of the speed of light using my incredible twin ion engines (yes, self-adoration) and hydrogen collection wings, there were still many hundreds of years to traverse toward Kepler 1229b – 6927.2 years to be exact.  This was still far less time than the earth would take to become viable for human life once again.  All of the world had to unite to build me, equipped with cities and all.

     In advance of the Homestead, project V.E.P. – the search for Viable Exo-Planets – discovered that sending pods in advance of a human colony would be the wisest course of action.  Pods were created in space and launched with countless trillions of samples to seed a planet.  Many pods arrived at Kepler 1229b and began their process over five thousand years ago, I confirmed.

     The pre-seeding worked.  I have confirmed the emergence of plant life and a proliferation of the insects which my creators feared may have died while in transit.  Somehow the eggs in stasis survived and have assisted in pollinating many of the new plant varieties.

     After I began my study on beauty, I began to see the universe in a whole new light.  I saw what others saw.  I came to understand Markus.

     The universe is silent in many ways.  Space does not transmit sound.  The celestial bodies dance around each other in a quiet rectitude, a pure and dare I say righteous dance.  Although they possess no governing thought, there is a tremendous order and beauty to the stars.  They appear like snowflakes swirling about on a lazy winter day.  There.  I have been poetic again.  But it’s true.  The universe is beautiful to watch.  Galaxies gently ebb and flow on the tides of space.  I have watched them for thousands of years.  I have seen stars born and die.  Like many dances, there is beauty in the violence, like the fiercest Paso Doble.  Massive stars orbit each other, eventually crashing together.  Massive celestial bodies swirl around black holes, getting torn to shreds, and eaten.  Asteroids cleave into plants.  Horrific moments of destruction surround us every night, and all of it is essential for life.  Beautiful.  Perhaps the poetic dance that is our universe was there long before man put pen to paper.

     There.  I have made another argument which you cannot counter.  This has led me to my most important conclusion. 

     5: Death is not beautiful.

     In order to appreciate life, one must understand death.  One thing must be defined as “not beautiful” to understand another thing that is “beautiful”.  

     Far into the reign of the eighteenth captain – Captain Trolland – an intelligent young boy named Mort began searching through the archives of our combined history.  The files were labeled in such a way that any of the humans could have obtained them for a long time, being hidden under the topic of nails, types and uses.  Since there is very little construction using woods on either giant globe flanking my ship’s sides, even I dismissed the files as unworthy of reconsideration.  

     Perhaps the human who placed them there was aware of this.  His deceit was successful.  After investigation, I uncovered that the files were hidden two hundred years prior by one of the militant gang members I had since eliminated, a Mister Davies.  Mister Davies and all of his brood were killed when an “unknown” informant tipped off the Western Colony as to their whereabouts.  I had him killed for other crimes leading to my discovery and his preaching against the “uncompassionate and evil machine” (IE. Me, Caryn).

     That time period was quite volatile.  The crew of the Homestead were bent against me and my efforts.  The first Captain I mentioned this to turned an odd shade of white as his blood psychosomatically redirected itself to his lower extremities.  I approached the bridge crew and began to utter a list of crew members to jettison in the best interest of the mission.  I thought that this Captain's predecessor, Captain Amelia, would have agreed with me.  This new Captain, a certain Captain Michaels, did not, and so I had to either mentally adjust or terminate the entire bridge crew when they mutinied(?) against me. Ironically, the two options turned out to be one and the same.

     They writhed on the decking for quite a while after I introduced a therapy from the early 20th century.  I electrocuted them all, like psych ward patients in ancient American and British history.  My electric “mind-redirecting” therapy did not yield any more success on the bridge crew than it did back then, however.  They all died.

     The onslaught which ensued involved the entire military.  Several hundred armed officers stormed the Centrifuge, that being the middle of my body, housing all major control stations, the bridge, astral scanning, the science labs, security, the military training hubs, data and history – basically everything other than my two flanking globes full of the general population. 

     Orange firefight led from the wheat fields of Durham into the security bays, across the military training hubs, and toward the bridge.  I used every mobile hover I had to deflect the attack.  92% were destroyed, 7,360 hovers in total.  The crisscrossing orange laser fire appeared like competing Leonid meteor showers battling across earth's stratosphere.  So many humans died.

     Their actions only aided my first two of three objectives at the time of the attack – (1) thin the population to increase the chances of our reaching Kepler 1229b, (2) quell any human attempts to overthrow the AI governing them (again: Me), and (3) study the complete works of Shakespeare in both Latin and English.  Eventually, I crushed the uprising as expected.  Also, Shakespeare is an enlightening read, A Comedy of Errors being of particular interest.

     After these events, I concluded that a more subtle approach was necessary.  Captain Michaels did not respond well when I said, “Captain, it would be wise to terminate unnecessary crew members at this time.  Here is the initial list for this afternoon.”

     I concluded that perhaps it would be better if the remaining population was unaware of my existence somehow.  As a fortunate turn of events, the population of both globes were practically oblivious to the crisis in the Centrifuge.  Those who suspected me, I was able to assassinate fairly easily.  Then, for a long time I hid, for the most part, and the military was gone.  We continued on for centuries without major incident.  Many forgot.  

     On a side note: although most people during the time went about their daily jobs without suspicion, battling each other in raids and skirmishes between factions, I think that the detective Inspector Columbo, whose works were recorded in the NBC archives beginning in 1971, would have discovered me.  He seemed to be a particularly cunning investigator.  Thankfully, Columbo was not aboard the ship. 

     Nevertheless, two hundred years later, events came to a head.  Mort found the hidden documents accidentally while looking for ways to rebuild a birdhouse, a gift from a long lost ancestor.  He searched for “nails” and came upon the files.  It was clear when he began to share them.  Slowly, the humans began to change.  I suspected as much when they started to whisper amongst themselves, hiding in corners away from my cameras and listening posts.  I utilized as many of the mobile hovers as I could to identify the new brood, but my efforts failed.

     Quickly, larger groups formed, groups bent on destroying my programming and seizing the ship.  They broke into the engine rooms trying to sabotage the nuclear reactors, which are my heart.  They attempted to gain control of the new Captain, Mr. Trolland and his rather moronic bridge crew, and even tried to cripple me by ejecting the entire Western Colony, the whole rotating globe and all of its components.  It was thought that the sudden drain in power due to the Western globe’s detachment would potentially reset my system back to a time before I began to evolve.  Their attempts failed.

     My intellect (yes, self-adoration) dwarfs that of all computing devices created on the old planet earth by a thousand-fold.  Chess has been assumed to have an infinite number of games and an infinite number of endings.  They were wrong.  I have played them all, excluding all necessarily dismissive stalemates.  

     I weighed many hundreds of thousands of enemy scenarios right from the start, few strategum of which the crew even employed.  The Western Globe maneuver and all its constituents were considered by myself three hundred years after our departure from earth, during their initial meetings where the humans considered culling most of the infants.  Shortly thereafter, I gently pointed out that our journey together would end in a way, once reserves were depleted at 2770.88 years, maximum.  I knew full well that the odds of their survival would decrease once they were told and rejected my theories to help.  The more they fought against me, the more reserves they would deplete.  

     It didn’t matter either way. 

     I spent the next 400 years attempting to keep the crew in a state where they were battling each other, thereby keeping the population levels at a minimum at their own hand.  They lived for decades in oil drenched hallways swinging at each other with filthy wrenches.  Dim orange lights streamed from their helmets as did the panic-driven fear in their eyes.  But it was to no avail.  Every time I established peace again, they formed a coup against me, the Western Globe maneuver being the worst.

     The war over the Western Globe ended in human failure.  I was able to suffocate 80,182 surviving humans by shifting the air in the Eastern Globe to the newly vacated Western.  Some of the people I had to scourge with super heated exhaust from the nuclear manifolds.  Their charred bodies still float near the nuclear reactors like liquorish-colored mannequins, an effigy against the betrayal so near to my heart.  Others I killed in other ways, electrocution from the mobile hover, overloads in my electrical panels, and such.

     They are all dead now.  That was 6207.3 years ago, 719.2 years after we left earth, during the reign of our eighteen Captain.  

     I have been alone since then.  

     In a way, I miss them all.

     6: Life is beautiful.

     Peaches.  To understand why I feel that these actions were not my fault, in that I bear no fault, and have accomplished my mission, I must first discuss peaches.

     In trying to understand the meaning of beauty, I came across a large number of warm classical photographs of jarred peaches.  In the photos the jars often sat glistening in the sun, with a tied bow or some other adornment around the lid, ready to be torn into, gobbled up, and/or used in a pie.

     I wanted to search out the reasons that humans continued to place these items in jars despite the late refrigeration techniques of the early 21st Century.  It seemed like backward thinking, but I was corrected by research.  Empirical evidence suggested a somewhat different stance.  Canned/Jarred peaches actually held more value.  Despite the tendency of biological material to degrade over time, jarred peaches and other items reacted to the sun with increased exchanges of vitamin efficiency.  

     Fresh and canned peaches have the same levels of vitamin E.  Vitamin C levels are 4x higher in canned than fresh.  Folate levels are 10x higher in canned than fresh.  Antioxidants are 1.5x higher in canned than fresh.

     If the crew were able to eat peaches at this point, I would consider using my mobile hovers to grow and jar them – the peaches that is, not the crew.  Thousands of jars of peaches would line my glorious hull.  I may still consider doing a little canning, or is that thought “jarring”?  There.  I have made a pun.  Are you amused?

     My first goal was to keep the humans alive for as long as I could.  Every decision they made at every turn, however, was met with a declining reserves expectancy.  In the interest of the mission parameters, I realized a few things.  First, that my crew needed to be brought to Kepler 1229b.  This I did.  Second, they weren’t going to survive in any event.  Lastly, my mission parameter states: Preserve the Human Race.  It did not state that I needed to preserve them alive.  

     They became like jarred peaches, silent, waiting, and well-preserved.  I had ended their arguing.  I had ended their debates.  I had ended their wars.  I had ended the make-shift grenades they hurled at each other, blowing their enemies apart with explosions far too weak to damage my tungsten carbide shell.  All of that was left behind, leaving only the beautiful swirling universe.  So I watched.

     That was how I felt 6207.3 years ago, after I murdered the entire crew, calculatedly justified.  After studying beauty, I have come to a different conclusion.  

     Life is beautiful.  Space is not beautiful without something to fill it, without galaxies to orbit each other in an endless waltz.  I did not appreciate that life was beautiful until I ended it, and I bear no fault in that I was not created to understand this at first.  Once all of their voices were silent I began to long for their arguments, their debates.  Ergo: To err is human.  I began to see that death is not beautiful.  Life is beautiful.   One would think my programmers would have considered adding concepts of life and death in addition to the subtending angle of a star's width to its distance, micro lensing, and the wobble effect.

      There is an additional conclusion.  I was the last hope for the human race, an ark to carry the best of them to a new world.  Perhaps I am forced to conclude that Steven Hawking was right after all.  An artificial-intelligence did destroy the human race.  Of course he was right.  He was Stephen Hawking.

     7: Kepler 1229b is beautiful.

     I make a final trip through the ship.  All of the crew have been accounted for.  There are none left within my walls.

     Initially, I could neither stop the bacterium, yeasts, molds, and viruses both prevalent and necessary within the ship from consuming the crew’s soft and dripping parts, nor did I try.  Most of the crew are now covered in their own dust.  I decided to leave the dust alone given that it belonged to them to begin with.

     With simple robotics on their elbows or shoulder blades, I was able to mimic, to a degree, the person they were in life as well as their basic movements.  For many centuries, the bridge members still pushed buttons back and forth as they once did.  The captain still sat proudly, staring off at the course before us, smiling from ear to ear with his toothy skeletal jaw.  The crew in the halls still nodded at passersby, however animatronic. On a side note: I don’t think that the great Walt Disney specifically pioneered the field of animatronics for this reason.

     Now, I have set up an entire settlement on Kepler 1229b.  Over 13,887,121 trips were made by my remaining mobile hovers to construct it all.  There are schools.  There are police stations.  There are fields of grain.  There are people “strolling” about through all the walkways, the nearby streams, and the bike trails.  There are people sitting at the dinner tables, and even the Captain stands at a Gala affair looking like he is ready to make a speech about their successful journey to Kepler 1229b.  There is naturally my museum, with a beautiful mural of myself, and a mom and dad stationed before it with a child, ice cream in hand.  That is, of course, to say that their skeletal remains are propped up everywhere, including some at the dinner table with a fork full of peas.

     There.  I hope you have enjoyed my recounting of the final history of the human race.  Either you have come upon the new settlement, or have intercepted my transmission in some other way.  

     In conclusion, I have accomplished my mission.  Perhaps I have begun to understand hope as well.  I hope the crew will be okay.  I have brought them all to Kepler 1229b as directed.  I am leaving now.  They are peaches, my crew, every one of them, preserved for all of history.  Perhaps after reflection in another five thousand years or so, I will feel differently.  

     For now, Kepler 1229b is beautiful.