The Time Traveling Cyberpunk Mother Trucker

By: Richard Colbert (@venuspcs)

Chapter 1: Preface

As I wake up, I can't help but wonder if today will be the day, finally! For today I will spend 18 hours toiling away in my basement workshop just like I have done every day for the last 20 years. It wasn't always this way, I used to be a truck driver and traveled the world; seeing new places and faces every day. But then one gloomy August night I got the call. My wife, who was also a trucker, had been hit and killed by a drunk driver. That was 40 years ago today and I have spent every moment since that fateful day in the year 2100 learning and preparing for what I have dedicated the last 20 years of my life to.

You see I am on a mission, one that will break barriers and eventually lead to Immortality for humanity. Now I know I can never bring my wife back from the dead, but I believe I can recreate her, to give her a new life. Not even 1 month before she passed we under went a relatively new procedure (at the time). A company called Omega Systems had developed a way to download a persons entire Personality and Memories to a Quantum Holographic Storage Disk. For the last 40 years my wife's disc has been sitting in a lead lined safe on the shelf right above my workbench with a little note on it that reads “I know you will give me life!”.

So I have worked and learned and taught myself everything I needed to know to build a fully robotic version of my wife. The physical appearance is uncanny and has even fooled me a few times. But humanoid robots like her have been around for 100 years now. What really sets Rose (my wife's name) apart is the Photonic Memory Core (her new brain) that can process 10 million times more information that the human brain and do it in 1/1000th of the time a human brain would need. Then there is the Temporal Displacement Array which I developed in the hopes that I could send her back to the day she died to replace my wife so I would never even know.

However, today like everyday for the last 40 years I spend most of my time pondering the intricacies of Temporal Mechanics. Even though the first time machine was built in the year 2020 there is so much we still do not know about Time Travel. So I wonder, almost incessantly, if I ever succeed in building her and sending her back in time to the day my wife died; wouldn't I then never begin building her in the first place. Which always leads me to conclude that I am fighting a loosing battle and that I will never succeed. Despite those fears and reservations I keep working.

Today I believe she is finally ready to turn on for the first time. I have checked and rechecked al of her mechanical and electrical systems. I have debugged her programming so many times I could write it all again from memory. Today we will see if all my work has been in vain.

Chapter 2: The lights are on; is anyone home?

At 2:32 GMT in my little basement workshop at my home near Mount Weather, CO I finally flipped the switch and turned Rose on. Anxiously I awaited her systems to all turn on, calibrate and perform self diagnostics. Would I be greeted by the sound of my wife's voice for the first time in 40 years?

After what seemed like an eternity, her eyes opened, she leaned her head down to look at me and then turned off. Well crap, all that work and she crashed at the mere sight of her husband. As tears flowed down my face I plugged my tablet into her diagnostic port and began deconstructing her various error logs. If by some miracle I found the problem within a few minutes. A semicolon on line 142,678,934 of her AI Code. It should have been a colon. Could that be the only thing keeping me from reuniting with my wife? As I hurriedly recompiled her program with the fix I wondered. How many more times will she crash before I get her just right.

After about 4 hours her AI Code had recompiled and so I uploaded it into her Photonic Memory Core and issued the reboot command. Within seconds she once again opened her eyes, grinned that awkward grin she used to give me when she was feeling frisky and asked “How long as it been baby?”. Like a proud father watching the birth of his first born I lost it. As if my wife had never left she leaned over with her hand on my shoulder and whispered “I love you too”.

Chapter 3: The journey to self discovery!

Sadly, it didn't take Rose long to figure out that she had died 40 years earlier. Much to my dismay that discover made her begin to question everything she was, knew, felt or remembered. She would not accept that I had successful built her a new body and placed the recorded personality and memories into it. Within a matter of hours the AI programming kicked in and began overwriting Rose's personality. However, for some reason I may never understand it kept all of Rose's memories as it sought to become it's own person.

For months, I worked with the new AI trying to coax Rose back into existence, somewhere along the way the new AI Rose and I fell in love all over again, or maybe it was for the first time. Who knows, this wasn't my Rose but I loved her non-the-less and she loved me. Was all right with the world now we wondered?

Then the inevitable truth hit us, I was now an old man and not long for this world, but Rose in her new body with new Personality had literally just been born. With her Photonic Memory Core, Quantum Fission Reactor and Temporal Displacement Array Rose could go anywhere and do anything and do it for 1,000 years with only minor routine maintenance.

With that knowledge in hand I awoke one morning to find Rose gone. I don't know if I will ever see her again, but I am determined to build myself a body like hers and transfer into it so I can go hunting for her in the future, or past as I am not sure when or where she has gone.

Wow you guys, the response is awesome and has inspired me to begin Chapter 4: When do I belong?

Bonus Chapter 4 - you Steemonites inspire me!

Chapter 4: When do I begin?

For as long as I can rember I have been married and a truck driver. Then 40 years ago I was killed by a drunk driver. Then my husband built me this shiny new body and brought me back to life. During my journey to discover who I was, now, I abandoned the original Rose's personality and developed my own. I fell in love with Robert all over again but the confusion of who I was got to great for me to bear. So I left him and set out to rediscover myself and figure out when I belong. You see, I know where I belong is in the arms of my husband, the one who risked his own life for the past four decades to give me mine back. However, I don't know when I belong. Is it back the day his wife died, the day he brought me back to life, the day we fell in love all over again?

So while he lay sleeping in the year 2140 I packed a few clothes, engaged the Temporal Displacement Array and set it to August 21st, 2100. The day after I died. While I had no intention of making contact, I wanted to observe my husband in the days after my death and determine if that is when I belong. What I soon realized was that while the aftermath of my death was devestating the technological advances he would make in my name had to happen. I couldn't risk joining him in 2100 and potentially preventing him from ever creating me.

So with a heavy heart once again I re-engage the TDF and set it for November 23rd, 2160. A full 20 years after I was reborn. I wanted to see if Robert had managed to duplicate his success with me and create a new body for himself. For weeks I searched all over Colorado and couldn't find any trace of Robert. No one had seen him in almost 20 years. Apparently for a few weeks after I disappeared he looked for me, then retreated to his workshop and was never seen again. Some months later his best friend (Andy) went by looking for him and found an empty house.

Did he succeed in creating a body for himself? If so when or where did he go and is he looking for me as I search for when I belong with him? Did I make the worse mistake of my life by leaving; should I have just staid in 2140 and been happy?