Butterfly Ballet

I had never heard music before. There was a whole orchestra, many different players, most human but some in slightly different forms, in an amphitheatre of soft old wood in a fold of the forest warmed by the evening sun. You didn’t need to sit down: we just wandered the paths around the orchestra, listening to the sound through the trees and watching the butterflies dancing.

It should have been idyllic, but I still wasn’t feeling idyllic. The day long climb up the escarpment wall, the path winding through the woods, Carys fascinating about the statues and paintings and plasmaworks that we passed, Naomi and Ava walking on either side of me like guards, Darina and Rick chatting and laughing, and all I could think about was how they had become one person, made a decision, and left me out of it.

And the music was actually confusing, too. The threads of melody, the harmony, the different sounds of the orchestra – some of it sounded good, some of it dissonant and chaotic.

The ballet caught my attention though. The synchronised pulses of butterflies moving through the air, now a thousand, now just one, peeling off to dance in small segments amongst the scattered audience. I could see a story unfolding: clouds of white butterflies at the start, a huge coloured butterfly joining them, and gradually the butterflies all became a mixture of colours – red, gold, purple, swirling and mixing and sometimes colliding – but then towards the end they were all the same again, white and deep brown with a flash of orange, flying in perfect sync.

I wanted to ask Carys about the symbolism, but he was unusually quiet, even after it was over and the music had stopped.

As we walked away, I became separated from the others – probably because I wasn’t really trying to follow them. They would be gone in a couple of days, except one – Naomi or Ava? They’d asked me a couple of times and I’d said I couldn’t decide, but in fact I didn’t really care. Whichever one, they wouldn’t really want to be there. It was a duty, for a person who would rather be somewhere else.

‘Did you enjoy the performance?’ I jumped. The deep bass voice came from a copper-covered humanoid machine carrying a large matching instrument that after a few seconds I identified as a tuba.

A small white-and-buff butterfly was perched on the shoulder of the robot. It twitched its wings.

‘Ummm… I found the music a bit confusing but I liked the dancing.’

The wings twitched again. ‘You are not on the Link. Do you need help finding your friends?’

‘They’re not…’ I began, and then almost choked and started crying. And then, through sobs, I told the whole story to whoever this was, the butterfly, the robot, both, the whole ballet company for all I knew, I told them about our arrival, my blank slate, the threat of a restart, Carys and his art, Ava and her caring, Naomi and her science, Rick and his personality transplant, and then how they’d all merged themselves and decided that most of them were going home whether I liked it or not.

When my words stumbled to a halt, the deep voice said, ‘And you’re only two weeks old?’

Footsteps behind me: Naomi. ‘Yes, just two weeks,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a childright for him and he’s in our care.’ A slight frown crossed her face, and I knew she had added more information on the Link.

She steered me away, down the now quiet path, ‘The overnight’s only a few minutes away,’ she told me.

She sounded businesslike, but also a bit upset. So I didn’t say anything, just walked behind her, a little afraid to look back.

Later, sitting on my bed, I opened my phone to look at the pictures I’d taken at the ballet. On the screen were various icons: part of my Knowing was that I could use them to connect to people, talk to them at a distance using the phone. There were slightly cartoonish caricatures of my companions, an icon for the camera, and some others to extend my Knowing, most of which I hadn’t used.

But now there was a new icon in the bottom left corner of the screen:

I got up several times in the night and looked at it, wondered if I should press it. I’m not even sure if it’s a link to Knowing or just a link to the ballet company.

And today I have to decide. Is it Ava or Naomi? Or even Carys, or Rick, or Darina? Who is going to stay with me?