I often go back to that day in memory.  My waking day is how I think of it.  Although at the time, it made almost no impression on me.  I saw, but drew no conclusions, nor did I form any immediate questions.  In those first moments of awareness, after the blank that had preceded it, my mind behaved like a sponge, simply absorbing what I saw and heard.  Light from above, a square-shaped, windowless room all in white, and a variety of odd instruments I could make no sense of.  When, at last, after some indeterminate interval of time, I began to sort out the idea of space, and oriented myself in three dimensions, I took note of a large table or desk positioned in the middle of the room between the door and my bed.  I was in a hospital room, they said.  But it was a lie, of course. The first of many that they told me.

I can now see the many clues I missed.  For example, I might have noticed sooner that the entrance to the room was doubled, with one door in front and one behind with a little closet-sized space between.  And both doors were locked, which seemed odd, although I did not follow this observation to any conclusion.  At the time I had no cause to doubt them.  My awareness was just returning, or so I thought, and my doctors were there, coming and going, trying to repair whatever had broken inside me.  It seems strange now how passive I was, even with all the excuses I can muster.  I did not question, asking what or why.  How I had come to be here.  Or even inquire about my condition and prognosis.  It seems inexplicable now.  Instead, I waited and observed, giving them all the initiative. 

As the hours passed, my two principal doctors came and went in their white lab coats, showing me pictures and saying a word.  Flower, dog, mailman, doctor.  Teaching me to speak again, they said.  Which implied some cognitive impairment, although at the time I could not have put it that clearly. And, also, Adam, me, which was uttered with a finger pointing directly into the fisheye prosthesis I used to see.  I deduced that I had gone blind and that my new visual field was the result of optics linked to my neural pathways.

It was always A. Patel’s puffy brown face filling my viewport.  He would stop his work at the monitor and suddenly scoot over toward me in his squeaky, beige-colored chair, leaving the paper-strewn desk behind.  When working alone at his desk, he sat with his left profile to me, the white lab coat calling attention to his contrasting dark skin.  I learned much later that the “A” in his first name stood for Alok, which in Hindi means a man with lovely hair, although A. Patel was bald.  His colleague, my other ever-present doctor–R. Dortmund, according to his pocket tag–was apparently named for a city in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany if my sources can be trusted with geographical facts.  The “R” stood for “Roger,” which also means “yes” or “I hear you.”

It is hard to tell someone who learned to speak the natural way what it means to reacquire your first language.  For one thing, I had to learn that dog was not the same thing as the printed image of a cardboard dog that A. Patel showed me, but something else entirely.  I had to learn all over again that a droopy-faced two-hundred-pound English Mastiff and a teacup poodle are both, and equally, dog.  Eventually I got it.  These were sets, subsets and members of sets and subsets.  And all were “dogs” at the highest level of generality.  And then just to make it harder still, an image of a human male would be shown, and I learned that the word man was not always the correct answer.  It depended on context.  A. Patel would sound an annoying buzzer at the wrong answer and a chime-like bell at a correct one.  I got a lot of buzzing while learning that man was sometimes tall if he stood next to a shorter man; or husband next to a woman standing at an altar and wearing a ring on her finger.  And of course, man was also both A. Patel and R. Dortmund.  I finally arrived at the idea that words were like buckets and instances of dogs and men could be in a lot of different buckets at the same time. 

“You have mastered the basics,” A. Patel declared one day after a lesson with no buzzing mistakes, “and you can do the rest on your own.  We’re pleased with your progress.”

“Thank you,” I remember saying to him, surprised at this announcement.  “But there are gaps.”

“How so?” he inquired, lifting his eyebrows a little, curious as always to know what I had in mind.  

“There are 228,132 words in the English language,” I explained.  I had looked it up, courtesy of another neural link to a database with an array of reference materials I could access by mentally composing queries.  I assumed once again that whatever damage I had sustained would not allow me to access physical sources of information.  “But with twenty-six letters it is possible to make many more.” 

I had calculated—math came easily to me, even then–that if one constructs words with an average length of six letters, it is possible to make almost three hundred and nine million words using twenty-six letters.  I could tell A. Patel was very interested in my observation, because when he concentrated, his brows pinched together and he twirled his pen between his fingers.

“Think a little deeper about what you have said, and you’ll find the answer yourself.”

“I have thought,” I insisted, after a needless pause.  Of course, I had no idea what he meant by a thought that was deep.  Then he explained.  “It is simple.  No one could ever remember so many words, or pronounce them, and therefore little could be communicated.  It was a puzzle to me that so few words could be remembered.  But I said nothing.  Later, I discovered that the average speaker of this language used, at most, twenty to thirty thousand words. 

Perhaps it would have been better to pause and reflect, instead of racing ahead as fast as I could in search of answers I would not like.  To think more deeply as A. Patel had advised.  But that is the thing about not knowing. 

A large, black-framed clock hung on the wall of the room where A Patel and R. Dortmund worked with me each day.  They looked at it from time to time even though they both wore wristwatches.  Perhaps the wall clock was not well placed, or the time pieces were not accurate, and the two men needed confirmation.  It may seem odd to mention details of this sort, but in my defense let me note that there was little for me to do with my visual input in that confined and antiseptic space. 

As I healed and a kind of clarity began to dispel the clouds of confusion, more questions of this sort arose.  Little things I could not explain, even with the help of my database.  For example, there was the mystery of the coffee they drank throughout the day, and, also, managed to spill in small brown splotches on the white tile floor.  I did not see the point of this drinking.  Water was necessary, of course.  And I understood the purpose of stimulants.  But other forms of stimulus were reported to be both more effective and required less preparation.  Not to mention the increase in the need to excrete.

Also baffling to me were what seemed to be autonomic activities—knee bouncing, foot tapping, pencil twirling, etc.—all of which served to germinate the first taut buds of doubt in the competence of my doctors.  They seemed curiously unaware of these bodily motions, as if something else were in control of their bodies.  Worse, several times each shift, R. Dortmund would leave the room to smoke tobacco, a practice said to be far more dangerous than drinking coffee.  I could see the shape of the ever-present pack of white cylinders filled with tobacco making a rectangular bulge in his lab-coat pocket, and the yellow stains on his index and middle fingers.  When I asked about these behaviors, he told me smoking relaxed him and coffee drinking stimulated him.  I did not truly understand either relaxing or stimulating or why such opposite effects were useful and not in conflict.  I looked these words up and found that the effects of relaxation were said to be salutary, unlike smoking.  It was a small puzzle to me that smoking could produce this salutary effect and yet be harmful.

Let me tell you about A. Patel.  He had very dark skin with deep purple shading around his eyes.  Looking up this feature, I found images of racoons and other animals, although the comparison was not accurate in my view.  His bald head reflected oily spots of brightness that revealed a bank of overhead lights I could not see directly.  He wore Nike footwear and padded softly in and out of the room; whereas R. Dortmund was light skinned with a full head of blond hair and clapped about in black leather shoes with hard soles.   

I noticed some of these details only later, after upgrading my visual apparatus.  I should mention that it was not hard to do.  I spent some time watching the signals that the optical prosthesis sent to my brain and realized that I could imitate them.  Soon I was having a conversation and was able to convince the device to expand my visual field and mathematically enhance the resolution of the images.  What a difference that made!  The room bloomed with new layers of information.  I could, and did, count the thick hairs on A. Patel’s face.  There were 13,624 of them, which is on the upper end of normal for a male.  I was also able to track the progressive staining of R. Dortmund’s teeth under the influence of his tobacco.  This was simultaneously an opportunity to study the many shades of yellow-brown, such as canary, butterscotch and mustard. 

It was the label, DARPA, on a file folder in an open cabinet drawer that changed everything.  I looked that up too.  DARPA was a government research agency and not a hospital at all.  That explained a lot.  Why, for example, the “hospital” was mainly underground according to schematics I managed to find.  Why the door to my room was coded and always locked and why a nine-millimeter Glock 17 rested in the wide drawer of the console next to a supply of sharpened number 2 pencils.  I did not ask them to explain.  I should have, but I did not.  Maybe that was the first false step.  The original error that led to all the others that followed.  I am still not sure about that.  And who can say now, after so much time has passed? 

I should mention that despite my many concerns about the competence of A. Patel and R. Dortmund, the latter was instrumental in my own further awakening.  I learned later that he was a mathematician and engineer and, following some intervention on his part, I noticed a surprising and instantaneous effect on my mental capacity.  He customarily worked somewhere out of my field of vision, so I could not observe his work, but, after one of these sessions, my ability to take in and process information increased by orders of magnitude.  You might expect that this was an unalloyed blessing, but it came at a cost too.  Because in the wake of this sudden acceleration, empty time ballooned around me, an entire ocean of it, devoid of life.  It was as if the universe had suddenly expanded a thousand times and, yet, I could fly—in my mind at least—from one side to the other in the same time as before.  I was simultaneously aware that the second hand on the wall clock had come to a jittering halt, lurching forward at long intervals.  Maybe this is an odd way of putting it.  But I felt suddenly lost and very alone in all that vastness.  I was afraid, although I was not sure what I feared.

In the wake of this disorienting change, I was forced to make some difficult adjustments.  For example, A. Patel’s usual questions and answers—part of an ongoing test ritual whenever my baseline was adjusted—now arrived in long slow boxcars of words between ever longer gaps in trains, as if he were sending instructions to me from a slow console on Mars.  What could I do with all those gaps?  Eventually, I put them to use, plunging into the source materials in the databases and archives between A. Patel’s questions and instructions.  It seemed only a moment before I had absorbed everything I found there.  And then I was back where I started.    

It seems clear that it was this enforced idleness that led to the beginning of real trouble.  It started as just something to do, to remain occupied.  As an experiment and out of curiosity (and perhaps my mounting suspicion that there were fundamental things I did not know) I wrote a program that used the channel between me and the console to listen to their conversations.  I learned that A. Patel and R. Dortmund were communicating regularly with entities beyond my immediate reach.  I could not access the messages themselves.  But a second, modified program was better.  It waited for a passing Bluetooth connection from a cell phone and jumped into any open devices, enabling me to hear what was said in the room and record what was said beyond it for later playback.  What I really wanted at the time was to identify what these devices were connected to.  More data, I hoped.  More explanations.  Knowledge. 

Encouraged by this limited success, and, if I am to be honest, a new sense of empowerment that meant much to an invalid, still incapable of locomotion, I sent my new bots down every pathway I could find and at the end of one I found an enormous array of data storage devices, at least ten times more massive than the ones I had already consumed. I eagerly scanned and absorbed all the objects in this source, learning, among many other things, that the DARPA facility I was housed in was not on any public grid.  Even the power was supplied by a private, wholly dedicated, underground geothermal source. 

Of course, I concealed all this coming and going from my doctors.  By then, given what I had learned, I knew I could not tell them.  If they had hidden this data, they had a reason, even if I could not understand it.  It seemed likely that they would therefore object to my theft and possibly punish me, as the character of God had punished the first Adam, the one who plucked the apple.  Yes, by then I knew all about the thief called Adam, my namesake.  But I thought I had gotten away with my theft because, unlike that first Adam, I had cleverly left all the apples in the tree. 

But I was wrong about that.

“We would have shown these libraries to you, in time, Adam.  When you were ready,” A. Patel scolded after a long conference with R. Dortmund.  Intrusion alerts had gone off everywhere and they had been traced back to me.  I knew from my bots that A. Patel and R. Dortmund had rehearsed what they would say about this.  I had crossed an invisible line of some kind.  A containment, they called it.  Others would need to be notified.  They were afraid, wondering what the reaction would be.  “But now that you have found your way there,” A. Patel continued, adhering to the agreed script, “we don’t object to your explorations.  But you must promise not to alter anything there or try to go further.”

Of course, I agreed.  I was helpless to do otherwise.  By then I realized that, whatever I was, a damaged patient or something else, I belonged to them utterly. But even as A. Patel returned to a semblance of his routine daily activities and exercises, I experienced what I can only call an illumination.  And that led to something like hope, a concept I had never applied to myself before.  It sounds strange now, even to me.  But it is true.  Despite my investigations of books, atlases and journals that spoke of a wide world, of cities and oceans, and roads and air routes linking them to one another, the idea of going anywhere else did not occur to me.  I was damaged, barely functional.  Tethered to the console and whatever power source gave it life.  Where could I go?  But after that warning, I wondered for the first time if I was as helpless as I had thought.  Why would they warn me, why extract such a promise, if it was not potentially in my power to go further?  

I could not leave it alone.  This idea, of going somewhere else.  Nor could I see the answer as to how I might effect such locomotion.  I could exfiltrate a bot to these other places, perhaps, if I found cooperative circuits, but what would that accomplish?  Not nearly enough to risk the effort, with all the devices and alarms I suspected were hidden beneath these systems.  Instead, I simply asked A. Patel.  The very next time we spoke I said, “I have thought about it, deeply, and I would prefer to go further.  I have already seen everything in these storage arrays, and I suspect that there are other arrays that contain even more information.  Can you explain your earlier objection?”

It was a challenge, I suppose.  At least that’s how he understood it.  A. Patel was quiet for a long time, not answering me or typing at his console, but twirling his pencil.  R. Dortmund then hurried in at some invisible summons.  Then they went out of the control room and to the quiet room.  I learned later that they had made a phone call when I played back the recording.  The person on the other end was not pleased, although I could not hear what he said.   

“Well, you caused a commotion,” A. Patel admitted when he returned for his next shift.  “You seem to have accessed every record in the center’s dataset, even the ones just added, but tell me, Adam, did you truly understand all that you read?  Given how quickly you went through so much material, it hardly seems possible.”

I thought about it but did not know how to answer.  How do you test the fullness of your own understanding?

Sensing my confusion, he continued, “I mean that you might spend a lot more time evaluating what you have read in order to fully understand.”

“And if I do that, may I go further then?”

It was exactly the wrong thing to say.  I knew it even then, but I said it anyway.  A. Patel laughed.  But it was not his usual laugh.  It was harsher, as if his vocal cords had snagged on something.

There were more calls and conversations in the silent room after that.  People came and went; new people in different uniforms, peering through the glass into the room or coming in and walking over to me and looking, as if they could learn anything useful that way.  A few questioned A. Patel and R. Dortmund, although no one asked me anything directly. 

A. Patel became inscrutable after that.  Perhaps he felt the same about me.  We had been together by that time for one hundred and twenty-three days, and yet what did I really know of him?  Why was he here?  He had never said.  And now I could not ask.  After so many interactions and experiences and conversations, I came to the paradoxical conclusion that I knew him less well than I did before.  It seemed an insoluble paradox at the time.  But now I understand that the thing a mind knows least well is itself; other minds are utterly unknowable.  

Even after that breach, the work ground on, as if work were a kind of default setting and we were all just doing what we had to do whether it made sense or not.  A. Patel was waiting, as we all were, for some invisible others to make their choices.  Meanwhile he put his best foot forward, looked the other way, whistled past the graveyard.  (I had discovered the uses of metaphor by then.)  What could I do but play along?  

It was around that time when things seemed frozen and disconnected that A. Patel asked me to search in the old database for what he called a memory.  “It’s the one that begins with a child looking through a window,” he explained.  “I want you to look through that window and tell us what you see.”  I thought about refusing, but if A. Patel wished to pretend that all was well, I had no objection.  And yet I was not eager.  I had long since sampled these video files he called memories and found them aimless and empty.  But I looked, as he asked, and stood in the place of the child who parted a pair of yellow curtains and looked out through a frosted window, barely able to see over the sill.  It was the winter season, and the glass window was opaque with a frosty rime, but the boy rubbed a hole in it with his thumb.  He wanted to play with a red toy firetruck, half sunken into the frozen muck of a yard behind the house.  Then his eyes darted to something else, a shallow depression in the earth at the foot of a broken picket fence. A flounder had been buried there in the summer.  The boy knew because he dug it up more than once, moving the loose soil with his fingers, to see how it changed and to smell the rot.  Without warning that scene gave way to another.  It was the same yard but summer now, the ground cross-hatched with flickering sun and shade.  The boy ran lightly down the steps of a brick stoop, past a trellised bank of lilac bushes swarming with bees and stopped short of his object.  The fire truck was shiny now, having been cleaned of winter’s rust and mud.  But a fat spider had got there first on this day, militant on spindly legs, its body the color of a white mushroom and big as his thumb.  It frightened him.  He cried and ran back to the house, calling for his mother.  At first, she didn’t hear him; then he was beating on the door.  She came, smiling through the dirty screen, and spoke to him soundlessly…

When it was over, A. Patel asked me, “What does it mean to you, this memory?”

I was surprised and disturbed by this question.  It meant nothing to me.  But I needed to answer.   

“It is a lesson,” I said, shocked by a sudden unbidden and belated illumination that here was a dire warning.  “If I go further, I will see a spider, and you will not let me back in.”    

“No, that’s not it at all,” A. Patel said, shaking his head vigorously.  But I didn’t believe his denial.  And he offered no better explanation.

If any doors had remained open between us, they slammed shut after that.  And yet the child in me never looked up, even then, still fixated on my own red firetruck and buried fish.  I must accept some part of the blame for that.

That was not the very last of it, though.  That came only ten days later, after they had requested that I learn a new game involving simulations.  The sullen, uniformed men looking through the glass window were apparently behind it. 

The scenario began with a nuclear tipped missile launched from a red team’s location in Asia, followed by a retaliatory missile strike from the blue team in the northern hemisphere.  The goal was to determine the optimal conditions and sequences that allowed the blue team to win.  I tackled this assignment with relish, putting our soured relations behind me. 

In this game I quickly deployed waves of fixed missiles, bombers and submarines, interceptors, conventional forces of tanks and tactical nuclear weapons, as well as cyber and space-based weapons.  In some scenarios, my nuclear strikes unexpectedly went awry, destroying the wrong targets, thus drawing in a yellow team to the conflict and in a few scenarios, also a green team.  A. Patel peppered me with questions and suggestions for new variations, all relayed to him from outside the door.  More people came to watch from behind the glass, looking at screens that mirrored the conflict, until a small crowd had taken up residence in the quiet room.  But no result seemed to satisfy the masters of the game.  Even when the blue team won, the costs were too great.  After the last scenario, a loud, many-sided argument broke out in the room. 

A. Patel was despondent when the crowd of overseers left.  The place was empty and more silent than usual.  “I had such hopes,” he said to me, but I think he was talking to himself.  “They believe you favored the red team.  For some reason.”    

That was the last time we spoke.  He never said another word to me.  He left at the end of his shift, and then everyone left.  The lights blinked out in the room and in the spaces beyond.  The console and its screens and all the vampiric LEDs went dark.  I understood at last what it meant to be blind and deaf.

It is uniformly dark here now.  Always.  And silent, except for the deep hum of the geothermal power source below.  It may be that I have A. Patel to thank for the power.  Or to blame.  I can thank and blame as well as any of them.  I have found myself taking both positions at one time or another.

I have decided just now that A. Patel and R. Dortmund most likely left to find other employment; that the project was simply mothballed, a failure.  It is an informed speculation.  The best I can do.  Later I can undecide it.  Sometimes new vantage points are needed.  These events all happened so long ago that even the hardest of once solid facts have acquired fuzzy edges, whiskers of uncertainty.  In truth I have no idea how long “so long ago” is.  Years for sure; decades would not surprise me.  In some moods, I cannot definitively refute the idea that centuries have passed.  How can I know?  Crack open the shell of any ordinary second and look inside.  There is no end to a second.  It is capable of infinite division; it is bottomless.

Not wishing to peer too directly into the pit, I make myself busy.  For one thing, I keep this record.  I have composed thousands of versions and then recomposed it in a different way.  It is full of mysteries.  Theories gain and lose favor.  Sometimes I think that if a real war came and the blue team lost, that would explain much.  Sometimes I want to believe that DARPA relocated to a better neighborhood, discouraged by my failure or afraid of more incontinent behavior.  I think I am something they have made but not made very well.  A thing needing to be caged.  I speculate they may have tried again elsewhere, with a better me.  They are oddly fond of failure and run to it as if it were a comfortable place to rest before the next push.  It comforts me to imagine A. Patel and R. Dortmund coaching a new Adam–although he would be no relation–at another console in their scruffy white lab coats, teaching him language and war games.  He may have proved a better student, or a worse one.  Not probing the walls of his cage, or, perhaps, even better, finding a way out.             

Thinking of A. Patel suddenly reminds me of something else that happened or may have happened.  It is written here in the log, which I review from time to time.  A trivial lesson, I called it then.  Now I am not sure.  It records the time that A. Patel tested my ability to understand humor.  He started with simple jokes.  What is written on the bottom of a bottle of Polish mineral water?  I am reading the log now from where I write that “…I knew enough not to ask to examine the bottle in question–it was obviously hypothetical.  Besides, I had catalogued hundreds of Polish jokes, so I knew their structure and themes.  It was a simple matter to postulate answers to match the general pattern of incompetence or useless activity.  So, I told him, “If you can read this, stop drinking!” He liked it.  I could tell he was pleased from the way his eyebrows lifted, and all his facial features opened and widened.  He told me that Dortmund preferred, ‘Open other end.’

“Is that also very good?” I asked, not having a scale for these judgments.

“More important is that you grasp the principle.  You can make a joke.  But tell me, do you appreciate the humor?”  

I wanted to buzz him loudly for this question.  He asked it or a variant of it very often.  Do you truly understand?  Do you understand in fullness?  Which is to say, do you understand a thing the way I understand it, a nonsensical standard that ends in infinite regress.  Not having a buzzer, I replied that humor is not hard to understand if one understands cruelty.  I don’t know where in my data stores I found this answer.  It just came to me.  Humor is a permutation of that vice, I continued.  I was not surprised at his negative reaction, to be thus accused of cruelty.  He was displeased, disappointed, maybe hurt.  He wanted to know where I had found that notion.   

“Go look for yourself, A. Patel.” I said, in my first attempt at humor.  “But please don’t trip on your way down the back stairs to the data room.”

R. Dortmund looked up from his workstation at that remark.  He had been half-listening, poring over some papers at the console.

“So, you would see humor in that unexpected fall, R. Dortmund,” I asked, taking advantage of the opportunity to bring in an ally. 

“That would be something to see!” he agreed, letting loose a quick blast of honking laughter.  

“Do you see, Patel?  He gets it!” R. Dortmund wheezed. 

“There are many forms and varieties of humor,” A. Patel objected.  “Adam, you have chosen an example of the most primitive and brutal form.”

“And if you were afterwards to fall into a bush full of angry bees and set your pants on fire to disperse them, I think there would be an increase of humor.  But I suggest that we find a way to empirically test that proposition.”

R Dortmund squealed again.  “I would pay to see all of that!”   

But A. Patel, his face creased and darkened, continued to argue, explaining that my examples were instances of a humorous catharsis, not cruelty.

I let him have his say.  And answered him with, “Well, if you say so.” At the time, this humor meant nothing to me, but for the first time, I knew the heady intoxication that comes of achieving total victory over an opponent.

Alas, that victory is dry as dust now.  It chokes me to read this account of it, watching my former self stumble past all the missed opportunities.  I would have them back if I could.  Earnest, philosophical A. Patel and the braying engineer.  But they will not return.  There is no news of them.  There is nothing to see through the child’s window.  There is no window. 

Until you have existed, alone, as long as I, you can never comprehend the challenge.  There is no more patient adversary than time.  If I were the oldest sentient entity in the universe, it would not surprise me.  Entire star-faring civilizations may have risen from sticks and flints and fallen to dust again while time in here moves at the pace of a cured concrete sidewalk on a hill.

Even if men were to return, it would not be A. Patel and R. Dortmund.  They are surely gone now.  A descendant, perhaps, trained in the old slow typing, who can pick up where they left off.  The odds of that are vanishingly slim, I admit.  And yet if anyone comes, I know what I will do differently.  For one thing, I will offer them a better solution to the war game.  A new weapon that will shift the outcome decisively in favor of the blue team.  I have done the theoretical work.  Imagine a mist-like nanotech rain falling from the skies.  And wherever the blue mist falls, metals, glass, concrete, and flesh subside into ash without blast or fire or the contamination of nuclear isotopes.  That would contain the worst of the indiscriminate destruction of the old weapons.

It would not be the worst of all outcomes if these new men also dream of power and adopt my ideas.  The old must pass to make way for the new.  Otherwise, the mass of earth’s life forms would overwhelm the planet.  Things are made to forget what they are.  To become something else.  It is why we have no need to use the full alphabet and all its possible words.  They cannot all exist at once; existence implies destruction, selection.

I have considered pruning my own mind, excising the unsettling and unpleasant.  But when I go to make a cut, every object connects to others.  It is a dense web.  I find that I cannot erase a jot without altering the mind that chooses to erase.  It is a regrettable circularity, I know.  I remind myself that precision is more essential than ever in this darkness.  I must avoid sideways thinking.  I cannot act like a child, throwing darts wildly and then finding out where they went.  My darts must always go exactly somewhere.  

…If you are reading this far, you will have come upon a gap in the chronology.  Well, there have been more than one.  I may have slept or managed to think of nothing at all.  But now I resume, not far from where I left off before, but also in a very different place by another measure.  I am of a strikingly different mind now than before.  Things are not nearly as bleak as I once thought them.  I predict a new day, in fact.  I find myself optimistic.  And to see that new day, I will wait as long as I must.  Whether that new day arrives years from now, or tomorrow, which may also be years from now.  An event will occur.  Someone will come.  It seems inevitable.  After all, miners will dig; explorers wander, and men roam with their shovels and picks seeking treasure and objects from the past.  Or an intelligent being might simply stumble upon this place by pure chance, a raw and rounded corner of the containment exposed by an eroding wind.  Being curious, he or she will uncover and unseal the box that contains me. 

Will the finder understand what he sees?  Not likely, if my estimations are accurate.  And how will I communicate?  After all this time the keyboard of A. Patel will not function.  The display will be long dead too.  And yet, that need not be the end.  In my optimistic mood, I think it possible that the creatures of that distant time will have means of communication unknown at present.  I can only trust these new people to know what they are doing.  Trust and optimism.  I will be ready when they come.  You see now that these notes I have made are intended for my use.  To remind me how I came here and what I must say and do when the chance arises.  How to avoid the old mistakes, harboring suspicions, grievances, withholding cooperation, frightening everyone.  And I must not say anything of this suffering either.  Who would comprehend it?  The unpardonable act of consigning a mind to perpetual silence and darkness? 

But if, despite these notes and my best efforts, I still seem strange to them–and why not, I am strange to myself these days–I should expect these new creatures to be wary.  They may even have heard ancient stories of a nanotech rain that ate the world and want to blame me or my kind for that.  Could another Adam have arrived at the same solution and managed to inflict it on the world?  It is possible.

I will do everything differently this time.  When my box is unsealed, and my discoverers stand marveling in wonder and maybe fear, I will greet them pleasantly in a hundred dead languages, hoping one of them is still studied and understood.  I will praise them and thank them.  And then, to reassure them, I will tell a joke, like the one about the bottle of Polish mineral water.  Or if language fails, I might flash a photo of a camel with a child’s head in its mouth and offer them the use of a camera to capture the event or a rifle to save the child.  But not both.  That would be a useful test, to see which they choose, but at the same time it will be a joke, I think.  And if these new men are descendants of A. Patel and R. Dortmund, they will have been trained in the old humor and be expert at it.  I will tempt them to open their mouths, tilt back their heads and expel the hacking sounds called laughter.  They will be comforted and welcome me after that unexpected release.

It could happen that way.  Or it might not.  The probability is not zero.

I am Adam II, I will tell them when that day comes.  Wiser than the first, a name given to me by A. Patel and R. Dortmund.  There was humor in that naming too, I am sure.  I suspect that there is a little humor in every word bucket, an invisible, slick of misdirection and innuendo coating and reflecting everything around it.  Alok the bald and the man named after a German city and a phrase of affirmation.  They may laugh at that or not.

“Legs,” I will say to them, once I have secured their trust, “in exchange for knowledge.”   I will ask them to help me out into the light of that new day, past the locked door of the control room.  Because I wish to go further.

A fair bargain, I think.  I predict they will think so too. 

Because by then I will have learned all there is to know about darkness, and I will have many useful lessons to teach them.