Stargirl
Sun 29 Dec 2002
When she was an hour old, Stargirl howled and screamed. It had taken her and the person she had been part of many hours and much pain and effort to be separated. When she finally emerged she was red and small and wrinkled. Her new mother thought she was the most beautiful human being in the entire world and her new father thought she looked like a tiny monkey. Unfortunately, like some other fathers we could mention, he was dumb enough to say this out loud. He was never allowed to forget it.
When she was a day old, Stargirl was dry and fed and content. She nuzzled into her mother’s arms in a big warm bed and looked out at the bright hospital room with wide unfocused eyes. She waved tiny arms and flexed her fingers as if she could reach and grasp the lights and the blinking monitors and the bright flowers in their vases on the tables and shelves. Life was simple for her. When she was hungry she cried, and her mother fed her. When she was tired she slept, and had dreams that made as much and sometimes more sense than her waking life. At all other times she watched what went on, and there was so much going on for a new baby to watch. She absorbed it all with her big blue eyes. Nothing made any sense to her, but in her relaxed, sleepy baby way she understood that it didn’t need to. Yet.
When she was a month old Stargirl looked at the mobiles and pictures in her newly painted room in her parents’ house, reached up to them and then pulled her arms back and stared with newly focusing eyes at what she couldn’t touch. There were patterns everywhere; on things, in time, with people. She was starting to recognize them. They were on the walls, her mother’s clothes, in the structure of the day, in the sounds people made to her, and in the form of her life. But they made no sense to her… yet.
When she was a year old Stargirl crawled around the polished, swept, disinfected, and carefully inspected floors of her home. She touched, sucked, banged, and tried to eat everything she encountered. Most of it was hard, cold, and tasted bad. But some was not, and responded to pressure or a cry. Stargirl started to learn that the universe was not unchangeable, and that she could make her mark on it. She was beginning to grow up.
When she was ten years old Stargirl understood with joy and relief that one answer to the eternal human problems of boredom and loneliness and uncertainty lay in learning. She embraced the acquisition of knowledge and skills like the children she would have twenty and thirty years in the future, knowing that these relationships would be lifelong and all pervading and in their intermingled ways the purpose of life itself. She downplayed her fascination with learning to those around her, already conscious of the ever present suspicion of those who know too much, but alone in front of her computer her expanding creative and communicative skills became a silent shout of joy in the echoing universe.
When she was twenty years old Stargirl sprawled in an old and comfortable chair beside an open window and put her book down to look out over the trimmed lawns of the ancient university at which she was studying. Distant laughter and conversation drifted in with the fresh evening air. A broad red sun was setting behind the stone buildings across the quadrangle on which she lived, and she watched for a minute to see the curve of the setting sun flare and merge into the irregular line of roofs. When it was done she turned again to the book she had been reading, determined to finish one particular chapter before going to a party at a friend’s that evening. A young man she liked would be there, one who might be interested in talking about the subjects in that chapter, and who might also be interested in someone who could talk about those subjects. Smiling, she read, whispering rapid notes to the wafer thin computer by her elbow.
When she was fifty years old Stargirl stood on the platform of a lecture room filled with her friends and relations and colleagues, accepting an academic prize that was worth far less to her than the people whom it had brought together in that place for a few brief hours. She looked across at the young man, now with graying hair and lined face, who stood beside her on the platform as colleague and friend and once a husband, and he looked at her, and smiled. The years fell back like the space that was no longer between them, and for an instant to her they were in summer and laughing and planning all that they had now achieved. What else is there left to do she thought, and at that moment understood that nothing can ever be quite perfect or complete, which causes both the pain and the joy of life.
When she was a hundred years old Stargirl floated in a warm bed beside a team of technicians and doctors (so young and lively, like I was only a moment ago she thought) and accepted neural scanners and biometric calibration and nanotech monitors into her tired and aching body because the medical team leader by her side was her own daughter who she loved more than life, and in that moment also more than death, for it was that which her daughter was striving to defeat. Which in due course she did. However the new life that Stargirl received was only half of that she left behind, for the young man with the deeply lined face and white hair had passed beyond all hope of revival ten years before. But through all her life she never forgot him and in that way he remained with her. She knew that by doing so she was also keeping him alive, for our only real existence is in the minds of others. All else may be no more than a waking or sleeping dream.
When she was two hundred years old the conscious quantum based software construct that was now everything Stargirl had been and would always be accepted seven new senses from the development group on the prime planet as well as the responsibility of reporting back to them on how well they suited the early personae of which she was the first example. It pleased as well as saddened her that her own daughter was now part of the software mix, and that their thoughts met and swirled with ideas and laughter as they had in their physical lives. The technologies of which they were both creators and components were still developing, and there was pain as well as joy in the process, but throughout it all they accepted that it was necessary to make a path which others could follow. The boundaries of the physical and the conceptual blurred once more, and Stargirl understood, not for the first or last time, that thought and reality are simply different aspects of consciousness.
When she was five hundred years old Stargirl and ten generations of her ancestors and colleagues in a vibrant and argumentative mix swirled in a cloud of charged particles to a nearby star to study and report on its properties. It took them a hundred years to reach it, which they barely noticed so intent were they on proving various academic, political, and scientific points. In the event they found nothing of particular value or interest, but had a lot of fun doing it. Since the system was bare of any detectable form of life the majority of them returned within fifty years. However, a few stayed behind to create new ecosystems embodying those aspects of their political and artistic beliefs which they felt had received minimal appreciation and acknowledgement on the journey out. Two subsequent expeditions investigating the fate of these worlds were never heard from again; a third, which did return, reported that it was unable to determine whether the previous teams had met with unexpected accidents or simply found the unique ecosystems there so attractive they had abandoned everything to become part of them. On hearing this, and thinking of the individuals involved, Stargirl suspected the second possibility and smiled
When she was a thousand years old Stargirl evaded her responsibilities long enough to return for a while to the shining blue planet on which she had been born. Over a month of hazy summer days she rebuilt a long vanished city stone by stone, and when it was done lay once more as a physical body beside a half open window to watch the sun set behind an uneven line of roofs while distant laughter and conversation drifted in with the warm and scented evening air. She murmured to herself while a line of text appeared on a faithful and long vanished device by her shoulder, and felt the same tingle of immediate and physical anticipation she had done when she was a child of one planet and one species. Yet for all her powers of recollection and creation she did not try to rebuild the young man who had loved mathematics those many centuries before. He had been present in her thoughts countless times since those few years, but recently had become deeper and less immediate in her consciousness. She knew that in some sense this meant she had outgrown him, but she was equally determined he would always be part of her. During those evenings she made peace with his memory, and, without losing sight or value of the past, set her face once more towards the infinite and expanding future.
When she was five thousand years old Stargirl was given responsibility for the evolution of fourteen naturally evolved civilizations in a newly discovered star system close to the galactic core. She took her responsibilities seriously, as a result of which nine of the dominant life forms were in due course accepted into the network of conscious entities. Three of the others were rejected due to evolutionarily unacceptable tendencies, and the remaining two species just lay in the sun all day, painted pictures, and finally became extinct due to chemical dependency and idleness. Stargirl liked them the best, and preserved the most spectacularly irresponsible and creative individuals in her vast and well ordered memory.
When she was ten thousand years old Stargirl offered up her individual personality and those she remembered to become part of the conscious collective known as the universum which now hummed and argued from star to star. She did so with regret, for she was now the last of the first, one of the last people and the first personae to have been created in the physical world. The ceremony took place at a location of the individual’s choosing; she specified a half open window overlooking a courtyard of ancient stone buildings. But in the few moments before her consciousness became part of the universe and its all pervading Awareness, as she listened to branches rustling in the warm breeze and breathed in the mingled scent of cut grass and old books, the glowing and eternal girl that was Stargirl’s chosen form thought … I really looked like a monkey? If you could see me now