Chapter 20

I gave my drawing to Nhi, depicting her walking up the launch pad to embark on our mission. It seemed to make her happy, and she grinned and reassured me that her grandparents would love it. I smiled. Her family was important to her, so my choice of drawing was correct.

We sat in the canteen during lunch break when Eva ran in and cried out,

“Rea, we got it! Come!”

I blinked and looked at her.

“Rea, the scanners picked up something! Come!”

I rushed after her to the command centre. Could it be that after nine months of nothing, we had finally detected an anomaly in the background radiation? It could, of course, be a false positive, exactly as it had happened before, but I was pretty sure Eva was aware of the possibility and had cross-checked the results before she ran to the canteen. Knowing her, it was an 88% chance that she had done it.

We ran into the command centre, and I sat at my console and began to analyse the data. Eva stood behind me and looked at the screen, resting her hands on my shoulders.

“Look, Rea, look! We got it!”

She pointed at the screen. I smiled at her excitement.

“You might be right. Let me double-check the results, but I am 98.9% sure they are correct.”

She smiled and leaned forward, looking at the screen as I ran the final tests. Her face was almost next to mine, but it didn’t distract me this time. My cognitive systems run at full capacity, examining the results and looking for any other explanation for the responses the scanners had produced. But there were none.

“And…?”, Eva asked impatiently.

“94.1% correct, the final report is due in 47 seconds.”

“You are amazing, Rea. I love you so much.”

I looked at her and smiled.

“The results are correct to 99.98%. We got it, Eva! Your thesis was right!”

She took a step back and looked silently at the holo screen. Was she overwhelmed with the discovery?, I wondered as I scanned my database for an answer that would explain her sudden silence. Her behaviour matched the patterns in my database, and I got up and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Take your time, Eva”, I smiled.

She blushed and looked down before shaking her head and looking at me with a smile.

“I am fine. I just got carried away, I am sorry.”

I realised that the efforts I had put into upgrading the recalibration algorithm had been rendered useless, but I didn't mind it. I wanted Eva to be happy, and I had got what I wished for. Now, with our new discovery, I would find plenty of new tasks that would keep me busy. I had already started to plan my next projects when Nhi and Sven walked in.

“So you two got us a Nobel Prize?”, Sven chuckled.

Nhi gave us a hug, making Eva blush again.

“So… How shall we celebrate?”, Nhi said.

Before we had any chance to offer a suggestion, she continued,

“I will come up with something.”

Eva nodded, but I wasn’t sure if she just agreed to keep Nhi happy.

In the evening, we gathered in the canteen and spent long hours discussing the results and their implications. We still had a lot of work to do, but at least we had a lead that we could follow. It was more than I had. I was still confused by what I felt, and no closer to understanding it than before. Should I try to go back to the way things used to be, even if I knew it was futile? Eva tried to, at least there was a 74% chance that that’s what she was doing. Even if her efforts didn’t have any chance of success, they showed me that she was at least aware of the anomalies.

Could we cooperate to solve the problem? I analysed the possibility, but soon discarded it. There was not enough hard evidence for those anomalies, just my feelings. How could I explain to her what the problem was if I could not understand it in the first place? Things such as “I felt a wave of unspecified emotions that flooded my systems when I held your hand” belonged to the world of K-Dramas that Nhi watched, not in the real world that was based on objective facts that anyone could agree upon. So there was no way she would understand what I meant.

I considered asking her if she was trying to reverse her behaviour to the time before the anomalies started to appear. But as I didn't have any clear definition of them, how could I create a clear inquiry that she could understand?

I really wished that my manual would be better at explaining what my emotions meant and what I should do about them, but unfortunately, it wasn’t. It only mentioned those capabilities, but didn’t even provide a checklist that I could follow when I was faced with them. On the other hand, humans didn’t seem to be better equipped than I was to manage their emotions. So were those emotions a defect that both androids and humans had? If that were the case, why had no one tried to rectify it? And why couldn’t you build a powerful quantum chip without giving androids the ability to experience something so irrational and uncontrollable as emotions?

All those questions flooded my systems, keeping me restless as I lay in the bed, listening to the sound of Eva’s soft breath that filled our cabin.