Fairy's Return

by Torbjorn S. Dahl

Lupi lived along with her dad.  That is, they were the only humans in their household.  There was also an assortment of pets and robots.  Lupi’s favourite was Flowers the head gardener and Harry her big and cuddly, but unfortunately quite stupid, cat.  Lupi didn't have a mum.  It didn't make her very sad, because she could not remember ever having one, but she was still curious about her and asked her dad about her regularly.  Her dad would always answer that her mother was alive, but that it was difficult and that he would explain to her when she was old enough.  Lupi was now twelve and thought she was more than old enough.  Her father, however, did not agree.  Lupi had imagined all sorts of explanations.  Her favourites involved her mother being an empress or major celebrity that once had a scandalous affair with her dad and had to leave Lupi to him in secret.  When she was older, her mum would recognise her and she would be a princess or celebrity herself and she would be known and adored by millions of people.  The major flaw in this dream was that her father was not really the kind of man that would have a scandalous affair or, more correctly, he was not the kind of man that rich and famous women would have scandalous affairs with.

Lupi’s dad was a scientist who didn't put much value on his physical appearance.  He dressed, not badly perhaps, but certainly with a lack of flair.  He didn't’ care for his hair, his skin, his teeth.  He certainly didn’t care much for parties or any kind of social occasion.  Lupi had noted the pain on his face when he attended her school plays or parent-teacher meetings.   It wasn't that he didn't want to go.  Lupi knew her dad would do almost anything for her, but he certainly didn’t like being out among other humans.  How could a person like her dad possibly have wooed someone beautiful and famous?  It was a ridiculous idea.

In fact, today was one of the rare occasions that her dad did go out at all.  They were going to the annual faire.  The faire was a celebration of everything that went on in their city, from arts to politics and sciences.  It was, of course, the scientific and technology events that brought Lupi’s dad out.  It was a chance to see the latest models of transport and housing units as well as the latest model of robots, from entertainment and household robots, to farming, manufacturing and civic administration robots.  In the olden days, Lupi knew, humans had to do most of the tasks these robots did today.  Back then, people had spent major parts of their life working with unintelligent, sometimes dangerous, machines in prison-like factories or in dirty fields to produce the goods needed for society to progress.  As a result, the quality of goods in the olden days could be shocking.  Household items often lasted no more than a handful of years before they had to be replaced, and food often contained unhealthy levels of chemicals due to the poisons, or pesticides, that were poured onto food crops in order to increase yields.  In those days, humans had even been responsible for city and country resource planning allocation, regularly getting it massively wrong and creating periods of uncontrolled economic growth and drops.  As a result people commonly lost their jobs, their homes and sometimes even had to go cold and hungry.

These days, with the robots in charge, manufacturing was efficient and flexible, producing goods that would last at least as long as any human.  Humans now could expect to live for roughly two centuries, bar any freak accidents.  Farming was done in balance with nature, with no area forced to produce more than it could do naturally.  This was quite a lot when farming robots were there to mechanically remove pests and apply water and nutrients at the right point in time.  The biggest change, however, had been in civic administration.  The robots now accurately predicted changes in society and presented the human politicians with reliable scenarios for alternative futures.  The only thing left for humans was to point out the direction in which they wanted to go and this, as it turned out, was something most people actually agreed on.  Once the uneven distribution of wealth was removed, the shallow or extreme political theories that went with it, such as capitalism and communism, also faded away.

The most exciting thing on show at the faire this year was a new transport unit that mimicked a pair of bird’s wings.  Lupi thought they made the young man demonstrating them look like a mischievous angel and she quite fancied arriving at a friend’s house wearing them.  She wondered if they had a demon version, with bat’s wings.  Maybe an innocent demon would be as cool as a mischievous angel.  When they had made the rounds among the new technologies, mostly old technologies in new guises, Lupi’s Dad asked if she wanted to go to the entertainment area.  This was the area where people went to socialise.  If Lupi wanted to meet someone her own age, the entertainment area would be the place to do it.  The square dancing was always popular.  While square dancing you could smile or show off to someone without having to get too close up and intimate.  Lupi could not understand how people had met in the olden days when dancing involved physical contact sometimes before you had even spoken to someone.  She assumed large amounts of drugs were involved.  It all seemed very wild and dangerous, and certainly not very romantic.  Luna rejected her dad’s offer.  She found the square dancing and the dancers a bit desperate and she knew she wouldn't enjoy knowing how excruciatingly uncomfortable her dad would be in the refreshment area where people felt entitled to start conversations for no particular reason and with no preamble.  She could always sign up for an organized trip to a dance at some later point in time, when her dad wouldn't have to come along.   

The only place Lupi’s dad was relaxed and happy was at their house with his robots, either working with them to make them cleverer or faster or more robust or something.  He was always making Lupi help him study some oddball scientific theory or weirdo technology that no one else had ever heard of.  When she was younger, he had even insisted that she learned science and technology subjects either from him or from Embla, their majordomo and Lupi’s personal tutor.  “Science, for Christ’s sake!” though Lupi.  No one did science anymore.  Robots were clearly better at it than humans.  They could think more clearly, more quickly, and consider more options.  There was a time when people thought humans were better at considering things in the right context, sometimes called ‘lateral thinking’, but eventually even that ground was conceded as new generations of information processing systems kept improving and human information processing stayed very much the same.  The only area in which humans were now considered superior, and where most humans worked,  was the arts, in particular art forms related to ‘expressing the human condition’ as it was called.  Sometimes it seemed robots were better even at this.  They were certainly more effective and reliable authors and artists when it came to creating emotional emotive and poignant pieces of art, but there was still something special and more real about an experience that had been genuinely felt by a human.  There was also something unique, though not always something positive, about interacting with other humans, so many people also worked in social services and the entertainment industry.  “It seems like ‘the oldest profession’ might also become be ‘the last profession’.” thought Lupi.

So, Lupi had been brought up with physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, mathematics, computing and engineering.  Her dad always said it was important that she learned science and engineering so that she would understand what the robots were up to, but Lupi suspected that the real reason was that it was the only thing that her dad felt comfortable talking about and so teaching, and later studying science with, Lupi gave them something they could do together.  As a result, Lupi was now far more knowledgeable than anyone else she knew, bar her dad obviously.  Most people didn't actually bother with science at all and were happy to leave it all to the robots.  It was practically impossible for a human to follow science to the lengths the robots had taken it anyway, so you had to trust the robots at some point, sooner or later.  As time passed, this point tended to come sooner rather than later.  Almost all farms, factories, hospitals, government offices and especially research facilities were now run exclusively by robots with humans reaping the benefits without bothering about or understanding the details.  Humans had handed the mastery of nature over to technology and were now focusing on enjoying it rather than understanding and taming it.  Each household also had a majordomo, like Embla, that kept track of the finances and generally made sure everything was in order.

When they arrived back from the fair, Lupi checked on the Boson detection experiment she and her dad had started a few weeks before.  They were replicating a famous experiment from the early 21^st century demonstrating the validity of the standard theory by showing how the Higgs boson functioned to give other particles mass.  The problem was that it didn’t.  In order to save on the required space, they were accelerating electrons through a space-time tunnel accelerator rather than a massive Euclidean space accelerator like the one they had used in the original experiment.  For the same reason, they were also making the particles collide inside a warp-compressed sensor chamber.  ‘That should not make a difference though’ thought Lupi.  They were using classical 4D to 3D space transforms that should not change the fundamental result of this experiment.  She decided to ask Embla to run though the numbers once again to make sure there wasn't some trivial mistake, before she presented the problem to her dad.

Embla got back to her half an hour later ‘Your calculations are correct according to both the standard theory and the rules for 4D-3D space-time conversion.’ she said,  ‘I also asked the local core to check them in case there was an issue too subtle for my own capabilities.’  Too subtle for Embla’s capabilities, the very idea sounded impossible to Lupi.  Embla had taken her through dimensional folding theory up to at least seven dimensions and verified the fold-unfold validity of the complete theory of relativistic physics using some pretty involved examples.  There was no way a simple calculation like 4D Higgs boson detection could even stretch her capabilities.  ‘Maybe she’s just trying to show me that she cares.’ thought Lupi.  Come to think of it, she doubted that the local core was significantly more powerful than Embla.  She had always been far more capable than any other majordomo Lupi had ever heard of.  She had always assumed that her dad had arranged this in order to have immediate support available for his experiments.  She made a mental note of asking him about it on an appropriate occasion.  Now that she was thinking about it, Embla had also always been particularly gentle and caring when it came to Lupi.  People were very careful about, and sensitive to, human-robot relationships.  This was due to the fact that people at large still found such relations unnatural and inappropriate.  ‘Maybe dad told her to look after me extra carefully because I have no mum,’ thought Lupi ‘or maybe Embla is just extra sensitive because she’s so exceptionally capable.’

Lupi decided to run the experiment one more time.  More because she wanted a recent result to take to her dad than because she had any hope that another run would in any way change the statistics of the results.  She went across the yard to the ‘barn’ which, in addition to holding all the food produced on their estate, also held a number of rooms that Lupi and her dad used for their experiments.  She wanted to watch the experiment as it happened, again, more to be able to say that she was there than because she thought her presence would make any difference.  When she was finished inspecting the accelerator and was about to have a look at the sensor chamber, she was startled by someone coughing behind her.  Lupi turned around and saw a small man with bushy hair and a pointy beard dressed in an old-fashioned suit standing just inside the door.  ‘Hello.’ said Lupi tentatively.  The little man jumped as if he was surprised that Lupi was talking to him.  After a few second he asked ‘Are you reproducing the Higgs-boson detection experiment?’.  ‘Yes.’ replied Lupi, ‘How did you know?’  ‘Just a wild guess’ said the man, ‘bet it’s not working eh?’.  ‘You’re right, it’s not.’ Said Lupi, ‘but forgive my manners.  I’m Lupi.  How can I help you?’  ‘You can’t.’ said the small man, ‘I’m just here to watch.’  The cryptic answers annoyed Lupi.  ‘Who are you?’ she asked sternly, ‘and how did you know what experiment I was doing and that it wasn’t working?’  ‘I think you’ll find that many things aren’t working.’ said the small man puzzlingly ‘The rules are changing.’  ‘What?!  The rules of physics are changing?’ answered Lupi sarcastically.  ‘Tell me who you are or I’ll raise a security alarm’.  ‘I’m Puck’ admitted the small man ‘but as for your security robots.  I don’t think they’ll find me very interesting.  In fact, I don’t think they’ll find me at all.  You, on the other hand, appear to have more to you than meets the eye.’  ‘What do you mean, more than meets the eye?’ Lupi was getting so annoyed she was raising her voice.  ‘You should ask your Dad those questions.’ answered the man.  He gave a quaint bow and started to back out the door.  Just as he was disappearing he added ‘Or your mum…’

Lupi was still reeling from the man’s comment a few seconds after he had left.  She got her phone out and called her Dad.  As soon as he answered she asked whether he had any visitors.  ‘No.’ answered her Dad, ‘Why?’  ‘A man just came into the barn and started asking me weird questions about the Higgs boson experiment’ explained Lupi, ‘Do you know who he was?’  Her dad did not have anyone visiting and did not know who the man could have been.  He was very worried about an unknown intruder and asked Embla to analyse the house visitor records and sensor logs to find out who the man could have been.  A few minutes later Embla came back.  The data did not show any other humans registered on the estate since early in the morning, but more concerningly, the sensor logs did not show any human beings or robots other than Lupi and Embla, having been in the barn all that day.

Lupi was not very happy with that answer.  It suggested she had imagined the whole thing, so she asked Embla to look into anything that could explain the odd meeting.  Again, Embla came back with nothing.  The sensory coverage of the barn had even been exceptionally detailed due to the careful monitoring of your experiment, but nothing other than Lupi’s side of the strange conversation had been registered.  ‘Because of the personal safety implications of this situation,’ Embla explained ‘I also ran a remote scan of your residual brain activity patterns.  There was clear evidence of activities matching the conversation you describe and the involvement of your lower visual and auditory cortical areas indicate that they were actual sensory impressions rather than mental fabrication.’  Due to these worrying inconsistencies I also ran a contextual search against wider civic records and though the name ‘Puck’ or the general situation did not match anything in the police or news records, there were some remarkable matches against some older cultural databases.  In particular one set elements came out with significant relevance correlation levels.’

Lupi was barely following the implications of what Embla was saying.  ‘You mean something like this happened a long time ago?’ asked Lupi.  Again Embla explained: ‘These are not matches against recorded facts, but in relation to seeing impossible things, there are many cultural references to a pre-scientific belief that looking through a stone with a hole in it allows people to see supernatural events and beings.  Such artefacts were called seeing stones.’  What does that have to do with anything?’ asked Lupi.  ‘There are two further elements in my analysis.’ Embla went on.  ‘First, the space-time accelerator arch in the barn uses a classical compressed calcium substrate.  It is, in layman’s terms, a circular stone.  Second, the man’s name, Puck, correlates very highly with an old type of supernatural creature called fairies, first reference, 1623 A.D., ‘A midsummer night’s dream’ by William Shakespeare.’    

Lupi was dumbfounded.  After a few seconds she asked in an incredulous voice.  ‘Embla, are you telling me I’ve just seen a fairy?’  ‘I’ve just given you the highest correlating references for an inconsistent set of data.’ answered Embla.  ‘I bet this is dad’s idea of a joke’ Lupi muttered before stomping across the yard to find her father, 'I know I've been dreaming of living in a fairytale, but this is ridiculous!'

This is the end of the first draft of the story 'Fairy's Return'.

Plot summary

Lupi and her father live in a future utopia controlled by advanced AIs and robots.  Recognising the superiority of these new technologies, humans have become less interested in science and technology and spend their time pursuing the hedonistic pleasures made easily available by their robotic servants. 

However, when basic scientific experiments start going mysteriously wrong and mischievous strangers start appearing, Lupi and her scientist father start following a trail that leads them deep into the rotten bowels of their superficial society.  Are the basic laws of physics really changing and who is trying to hide this from the human population.  Why can only Lupi see the rude entities calling themselves fairies and who is the strangely powerful, Emla, Lupi's robotic majordomo.

Follow Lupi as she tries to find out whether the world as we know it is changing and if the fairies that according to legend left the human world, are really coming back.

This is fundamentally a story about the relationships between people and technology, human nature, knowledge and love.  Who are we and who can we be?

Hope you like it so far.  Please feel free to provide comments and/or suggestions.