Saudade | A flash fiction story
88 of 💯
“There you are,” the Shaman said to Daisy, a large grin on his wrinkled face.
Daisy was sitting with one of her synthetic legs dangling down the thick bough of an ancient tree. The intricate cameras she had for eyes were lost beyond the few trees ahead, beyond the fading vegetation, lost in the desert neighboring the green forest.
“Are you coming to the dance?” the old man asked.
“Oh.” Her attention came back from a different reality. “Yes, sure!” She nodded.
The Shaman looked at the desert, getting lost himself, thoughts exploding in his old mind. He took a deep breath, sat cross-legged, and smiled at her. “Is there something in your mind you want to talk about?”
The question confused her. She did have something, but how did he know? She pointed at the desert. “The Wastelands… It’s sad. Barely any life form can survive in it. Its most defining feature is that it’s deadly. What a waste of space for nature. But at the same time, it’s so incredibly beautiful. The level of adaptation required by the species who do survive in such a barren land is simply remarkable. Life in here… It shouldn’t happen, and yet it does. Remarkable!”
She breathed slowly, filling her robotic lungs with the warm air of the forest as it entered her nostrils of silicon and plastic. The smells of nature tickled her scent sensors, feeding the information through delicate cables to her artificial neural network — a miracle of computer science.
Through the creation of this machine — Daisy — humanity was putting itself at the same level as nature, creating something as intelligent as humans themselves.
“The emotion I get looking at The Wastelands,” she said, “it’s confusing. How can something so beautiful be so sad?” There was honesty in her synthetic voice.
The Shaman’s grin got wider. That was a question with an impressive level of depth. The number of concepts and feelings her mind had to interpret to be able to extract that question from the mere sight of a desert, the conversion of visual stimuli into subjective concepts such as “beautiful” and “sad”? That was remarkable.
“Sometimes,” he said, “things that look completely opposite to each other can coexist, and that is a good thing. Look at the desert and the sky. They have nothing in common, they couldn’t be more different. Separated by such a great distance our eyes can’t even capture. That lifeless desert? Under this beautiful sky? No! And yet…” he pointed to the horizon, “if we look ahead, we will see that they eventually meet.”
Daisy thought for a second, the input flowing through the neural network, processing the interaction between the new information and the existing information in her artificial brain, coming to a single possible conclusion. She nodded, and her eyes moved slowly until they got themselves in the desert again, hypnotized.
The wise man sighed. What such a creation would think when facing its own sentience? How did we handle it? Angry at each other and ourselves, bumping on each other’s lives, trying to find our way through a universe devoid of answers, a desert.
He wouldn’t give up. “I’m willing to bet my right hand that there’s something else.”
Daisy looked at him, puzzled again. Sometimes it looked like she was so easy to read, how could he know what she felt if even she couldn’t? It was eerie, uncomfortable.
“The man who created me,” she said. “I have memories of him. He taught me everything I know about the universe, especially about the human universe. When to smile, when to frown. When to ask, when to keep it to yourself. When to be proud, when to be ashamed. When to be happy, and when to be sad.”
A dark cloud crossed the sky, shading the world for an instant, a brief moment shielded from the sun’s eye.
“I’m grateful for all he taught me,” she continued,” I have some good memories of my time with him, happy memories. He made mistakes, of course, but I understand, he’s only human. However, he also told lies about the universe, deliberate lies about how things worked and where I could go. He told me he lied to protect me, that I was special, that I had a bright future. He told me I could conquer everything I wanted if I did things the way he saw fit for me. I don’t like this part of the memory. Sometimes I think of going back and…”
The Shaman nodded. “This makes me think of a word I haven’t said in a long while,” he said. “A word from an old language I used to speak: saudade. It describes the feeling you get when there’s something in your past you want to live again, like your good times with Dr. Layman.” He found a daisy on the green forest floor, and picked it up, looking at it closely.
He continued. “But saudade also describes the feeling you get when you want something back, something long lost in the past, something you’ll never be able to live again in your life. Like the time before you knew about Dr. Layman’s lies. Your innocence.” He let the gentle breeze that invaded the forest take the little daisy away from his hand.
“Oh.” Daisy raised her eyebrows, processing the new information. “Saudade,” she said with careful vowels, trying to replicate the sound she had just heard. Her eyes wandered into the depths of the forest as she mouthed the word a couple more times. “I like this word,” she told him. “It captures a lot.”
“Do you want to go back?” the Shaman asked.
“What?”
“Would you like to go back,” he repeated, “meet your creator? You’ve been good to my people, and we should be good to you in return. We can help you cross The Wastelands.”
She considered the offer for a moment, solving a complex equation of memories and feelings to come up with a solution, a decision.
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m happy here. I like living with your people. There’s no reason to go back.”
She threw these words into the air of the forest, to the Shaman, but most importantly, to herself.
The old man worked hard to get up, his grin widening again on his wrinkled face. “So do you want to go to the dance?” he asked.
She beamed back and said, “You can bet your right hand.”
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I took time with this one. My Anchora stories have an average of three hundred words. The story you’ve just read has a little over a thousand. I didn’t mean to make it long, but as I was writing it, it asked me for more space, and I gave it the space it needed. Let me know if you enjoyed the result.