Little Ghosts by Esos Ridley
Glenn Dungan
Glenn Dungan is currently based in Brooklyn, NYC. He exists within a Venn-diagram of urban design, sociology, and good stories. When not obsessing about one of those three, he can be found at a park drinking black coffee and listening to podcasts about murder. For more of his work, please visit his website: whereisglennnow.com, or subscribe to him on Substack, at glenndungan.substack.com.
Autotina: “I live life in through-lines. Between astro-physics and poetry, I can look back and realize this
career change wasn’t that stark of one at all.”
After a century long break, the celebrated scientist and world’s first automaton returns with
new programming and talks about life and death, art and science, and finding purpose.
By Esos Ridley, writing for LIFE
January 2184
career change wasn’t that stark of one at all.”
After a century long break, the celebrated scientist and world’s first automaton returns with
new programming and talks about life and death, art and science, and finding purpose.
By Esos Ridley, writing for LIFE
January 2184
At first glance, it appears that Dr. Autotina is more of a botanist than anything else.
She greets me in front of her workshop, buried deep within the Red Rock Mountain range in Denver, Colorado. The workshop is covered in astrological runes that glitter gold against a brutalist cement façade. This alien appearing non-alien plateau is manicured in a variety of large and beautiful flowers, some from Earth and surviving without ventilators, others in vials with precise calibration, achieved on the famous interstellar expeditions to Mars with her late husband, Dr. Ronald Folsom. There is an element of nature fused with classic science-fiction on the way to a flower laden door.
Dr. Autotina stands like a sentry at a full eight feet, her automaton body erect to a perfectly calculated geometry. She wears a lilac-colored cloak that flows in tandem with the whistling desert wind. Silicon arms extend to shake my hand and she tells me that she heated her fingertips so that her Plexiglass fingers do not feel cold in my palm. Her face is akin more to a mannequin, perfectly smooth and void of any intense definitions. Dr. Autotina says that her face was originally blank, but she felt that not only alienated her from herself but also made it hard for people to talk to her. Thus, the hollows for eyes, the impression of a nose and a closed mouth, permanently fixated into a content, almost sleepy, smile. A blue aura floats above her cranium like a crown, the latter half of which is exposed glass that contains tendrils of electricity rolling in a blue cloud. Dr. Autotina calls it her very own personal “lightning in a bottle”, which I only learn later is the total representation of her consciousness.
The workshop is just as fluid as Dr. Autotina, and it is no doubt deliberate that the interior reflects all her eccentricities. Like the Earth’s crust, there are layers of passion underneath the current form that the doctor brings me into. The workshop has tables, telescopes, large supercomputers reminiscent of the original dinosaurs IBM tucked away. The computers, while hulking in size, are the most powerful processors currently in the cosmos, and Dr. Autotina hardly pays them any mind, viewing them as part of the furniture. Holographic texts float like book sized fireflies around the workshop, and while I cannot grab the royal purple, baby blue-, and maroon-colored prisms myself, Dr. Autotina plucks them from the air as if they were floating in the ocean, tossing them over her shoulder or to the top rafters where they levitate in stasis like balloons waiting to drop. The doctor says that she doesn’t need the tomes to retrieve the information, for her advanced supercomputer mind can process multiple texts at once, but the act of flipping through pages, even holographic ones, keeps her anchored to a human psychosis.
“It was a ritual then,” she says at the start of our conversation, “and remains to be now.”
There is a myriad of plants inside as well, rivaling the quantity of the botanical parade outside. Greenery soaks up the natural light from the skylights, sometimes turning a shade orange or green when the text prisms block the rays. There are colossal alien petals next to typical garden tulips. Encased on what used to be a kitchen, complete with appliances that have long since become relics, are vials full of strange soil and minerals. Dr. Autotina brings my attention to a silver, amorphous liquid that appears to shy away from my touch. It is a mineral found in the Great Storm of Jupiter.
“Ronald found it on one of our excursions,” she tells me.
She is referring to her interplanetary travel adventures, only because her automaton body is outfitted with pressure resistant alloys created by Dr. Folsom himself. As if sensing my memories of old news articles and videos, Dr. Autotina leads me to a sun-drenched salon at the rear of the laboratory. In the connecting hallway there are a multitude of news articles featuring the power couple. It is the timeline chronicling her stratospheric ascent into the public eye. She notices me looking at this timeline, where her once flesh and blood corporal form stands in front of the MIT entrance with her not-yet husband Dr. Ronald Folsom.
“We were ‘going steady’ a little while then,” she says, her voice occasionally cracking with static and beeps. She is facing the same picture that I am, although we both know she does not have too, for her sensors are connected to the numerous cameras wired to the laboratory which functions as her abode, botanical garden, and studio. She turns to me and says with an un-emotive, but genuine, laugh, “Do people still say, ‘going steady’?”
We walk down the hall, my own boots at her plexiglass feet that have been fashioned into heels. Her purple cloak sways in the crisscross breeze. She double checks if the temperature is satisfactory, and that she can adjust the temperature per square foot for me so as not to disturb the plants which have taken up residency on every available surface. She talks with her hands a lot. There is another picture of Dr. Folsom on a podium wearing a suit, mouth mid-consonant. Tina, in her mortal form, stands with her hands perched in front of her, her eyes radiating sunshine.
“He proposed to me in the same speech that he officially named the new alloy he created, which was also named after me. Tinium. For Tina. My full name is Martina, but I’ve never liked the Marpart, so I just shortened it to Tina. Can you imagine if Ronald named the alloy Martinium? How misleading!”
The Auto-part of Autotina is a portmanteau turned moniker. Since becoming an atomized corporeal form, Dr. Autotins has since abandoned the preceding part of her name and replaced it with the first half of Automaton, which she says is an intentional nod to her and Dr. Folsom being not just the first automaton in history but the first automata couple in history. “Autotina and Autoron,” she says, “he entertained the thought for a couple weeks.”
She continues, head forward, the cameras meeting with my gaze at the next picture, “We had a tremendous life, him and I. Our breakthroughs on automata robotics helped a lot of people and advanced other fields of science. Science was the new rock ‘n roll. Everyone wanted to know what the two ‘robo-docts’ were up to.”
But the fame of their professional life took a toll on their personal lives, as well as their subjective lives. The marriage was incredibly scrutinized, both by the public and the scientific community. Dr. Autotina and Dr. Folsom were subject to numerous tests to gauge the efficiency of transporting a human consciousness into a nigh-indestructible robotic platform.
“The tests,” she says, “were the hardest part. Laws were written to allow Ronald and our rights to exist against the laws which made our bodies property. Yes, our bodies were built in a lab, but our souls were not, and Tinium was Ronald’s discovery anyway. Sometimes I wonder how different our trajectories would be if Ronald hadn’t owned the patent to Tinium.”
There were times when the stress was too great for both of them, and like any work-weary couple, took holidays to reset. Although most work-weary couples go to resorts beaches, Dr. Autotina and Dr. Folsom much preferred more esoteric locations such as the bottom of the Martina Trench, or on some asteroid near the edge of the galaxy. Dr. Ronald Folsom’s brother, renowned rocket scientist Henry Folsom, lived at the first International Space Station as the active director. He allowed clearance for Autotina and Dr. Ronald to enter and exit the atmosphere on the condition that they stop at the ISS first.
“We’d bring the astronauts their favorite treats. They sent us holiday cards, each in their own language,” Dr. Autotina recalls fondly.
She shows me another relic, one which heartily defines her past. A collection of “Get Well Soon!” cards are encased behind a glass wall. A hodgepodge of sources occupy the white rectangles: crayon writing of school children, each with their names written in similarly childish script, admirers in the scientific community that saw Autotina as the most prestigious in her field (as humble as Autotina is, she was ranked the most popular robotics engineer in the past decade, the recipient of numerous scientific awards, and eventually a Pulitzer prize winner for her award winning memoir Trans-humanism: Does this unit have a soul?), and college robotic engineers who have heralded Dr. Folsom’s experimental procedures as the next step to evolution. In the center of this positive nebula is a crinkled picture of Autotina’s last days in her human body, a withered corpus, cocooned in hospital bed sheets and tangled in marionette strings and attached to large computers. She is holding Dr. Folsom’s hand, or rather, he is holding hers.
This picture is an ambered moment in Dr. Autotina’s life, a snapshot of her past but then uncertain future. She stills maintains that getting her doctorate in astrophysics is the highlight of her career, but for all of Dr. Autotina’s existence in academia, even she cannot deny the importance of her transition into the automata.
“It was a rough time. Physically, mentally, emotionally, even spiritually,” Dr. Autotina says, head perfectly straight, lips unmoving. She absently fiddles with a plucked rose nestling in a vase, her fingers unable to feel the thorns crushing under her impenetrable fingers, her mastery of working with hands that no longer feel tactile pressure to not crush the damp stem. “Not only did I experience an explosion in my MIT laboratory, but my consciousness was literally ripped from my body, which existed without any electrical charges for a full two minutes. I would be lying to you and your readers if I said that was not hard for me. I thought my life was meaningless. I could not be a scientist anymore, could not go on walks or read books, was constantly under the care of doctors and Ronald, who never once complained, ever. This is all on top of the press trying to get into the door of the hospital, hoping to catch me on the rare chance of my awakening from my coma so they could get the first scoop of what it was like, and I quote the New York Times here, ‘to see god’. I feel the ‘engine of creation’ is more apt.”
“[The incident] felt like I was a balloon, and the rest of the world was the string. Once I got atomized,
I was living in this dual reality, shifting in and out. Now with my new Tinium body, I can finally settle into one place.”
I was living in this dual reality, shifting in and out. Now with my new Tinium body, I can finally settle into one place.”
Bringing me into her parlor, Dr. Autotina serves me freshly grown black tea leaves, served on a robotic tea tray no larger than a shiatzu. With a perfectly engineered lilt in her voice that suggests a bashful wink, she explains that she has never tasted the tea that she grows in one of the biomes out back, only that she is confident that they have been reared and dried to mathematical perfection. She is not wrong.
Dr. Autotina’s transition from her human body to the robotic one in which she resides required an almost Herculean feat of willpower and psychological adjustment. The light blue aura emanating from her “lightning in a bottle” arcs over her like a corona. She tells me more of her time in what the scientific community has adopted as the “atom realm”.
“It was strange, like floating in mist, or Jell-o,” she laughs, referring to the once popular gelatinous treat made of protein extracted from animal bones and has since been discontinued after the Kraft / Heinz Sleeper Agent fiasco in 2055. “It’s a world of light blues and purple, sort of like the color of my body, my lightning, and my cloak, which is all merely a coincidence. It’s a world where time is inconceivable, where the fabric of all our creation, you know, atoms as building blocks, are both tangible and intangible. A realm of absolutely incomprehensible power. How can you ever go back to normal life after having your body atomized? Do you think Icarus, in his free fall, ever prided himself that at least he got closer to the sun than anyone else? Icarus is not at fault for getting too close to the sun, it’s Daedalus for making the wings so poorly. How do you give a child a gift of flight and tell them they have limits? Ronald is not Daedalus. He does not build with clay that becomes waterlogged or melts. He builds with Tinium, an alloy that can withstand the pressures of Jupiter’s Great Spot of 130,000 miles an hour and then some.”
Dr. Autotina tells me that the decision to consent the transferring of her consciousness in this experimental automaton (which now sits before me, body erect in geometric perfection, plexiglass fingers steepled over a lilac cloaked lap), was not only her own, but at her own insistence.
She accesses her data files and speaks to herself as much as me, “Ronald was so frightened, and he was always so afraid of anything he didn’t understand. My body was failing me. The [atom] realm had given me a sort of atomically volatile cancer. I was atomically unwinding like spool every nanosecond. I had no life left. Of course, I would see the automata in the corner of the workshop as a buoy in the strange and scary sea of corporeal mortality.”
Asked to show me the advantages of her automata body’s interface with the laboratory, Dr. Autotina is nothing short of giddy. She is entirely interfaced with the digital / physical infrastructure of the workshop / living quarters, and she tells me that it takes considerable effort not to think of her and the house as one of the same. Looking into the divots of her eyes are naught, and she knows this. Her eyes are cameras throughout the house, her tactile senses now a series of automated clicks and levers that send data as I step even so far as the front lawn. She can regulate temperature per square foot, access the skylights with a thought, even put on the coffee machine the second her optic sensors see sunrise.
“I don’t sleep,” she laughs, “and I don’t drink coffee anymore. But the house recognizes the smell.”
She tells me that interfacing with the house is as far as she is comfortable.
“I don’t actually need this automaton form,” she says, “I can exist just fine in the digital sphere, like some sort of ghost. That’s actually what Ronald used to call me, Little Ghost, because I can float so seamlessly between interests and subjects, often anchoring in them before wisping away to something else. But I choose to keep this form, and not because it allows me to take this vehicle to the deepest depths and the highest stratospheres. I was raised a human and I am, in essence, a human. I can access and absorb all the literature of any subject in a matter of seconds, but at what point do I become a computer, more robot than human?”
Aside from the obvious mental and emotional strain of Dr. Folsom’s experimental procedure, I ask her of any quagmires she encountered when transitioning bodies. Without hesitation she says, “Losing my sense of touch was surprisingly easy. Perhaps it is the loss of smell and taste. It’s a funny question because I still remember those senses. Like someone who was not born blind. They can still recall colors. The lack of sleep was the most disorienting, but thankfully I had Ronald to keep me company and we took many trips.”
I ask her if there is anything that she misses.
“Steak,” Dr. Autotina says, “rare steak and garlic mashed potatoes. Oh, and green beans with garlic and lemon.” And that was the end of that question.
Rituals, anchors, whatever you want to call them…people need them. I need my morning coffee. I need to make the conscious
decision to read my chosen literature. I need to appreciate the sunrise. WE need to
decision to read my chosen literature. I need to appreciate the sunrise. WE need to
Dr. Ronald Folsom passed away about 60 years ago. His story is equally as fascinating, having spawned numerous biographies (The Atomic Adventure, Autotomata Genesis, and The Robot Guy being the most popular) and several made-for-streaming movies. But the most impressionable narrative is not just Dr. Folsom’s and Dr. Autotina’s individual journeys, but their true-blue love story and the heart break which inevitably followed.
She shows me a picture above the fireplace. It is a physical copy, rare to see in this age, and gives the impression that it is just as much a memento as the alien plants and minerals, if not more. It shows Dr. Autotina as she is now, clad in a sundress just a little too short for her (“it took me months to get used to the fact that I was now two-and-a-half feet taller”, she says), and Dr. Folsom, outfitted in a new Tinium body, wearing a Hawaiian button up. A sunset is frozen behind them, and even though their mouths convey apathy, it is evident from their body language that they are on vacation. His red corona fuses with her blue corona, creating a joint Venn-diagram of purple between the two of them which hangs above their head like a little star.
“The success of my procedure inspired Ronald. He wanted to replicate it, and did so quite successfully, on himself. I always suspected that he underwent the change to keep me company, that his endeavor for subjectively experiencing trans-humanism was fueled to help me get through my own transitions.”
She recalls to me how eerily similar it was living with another automata as an automata as opposed to living with a human as a human, and that the transition was really only the first couple of months when Dr. Folsom was getting used to the platform’s new abilities. Dr. Autotina places her chin on a cradled palm, resting it on an armchair, the hollows of her eyes looking out to the green houses beyond the porch. “He built me this new body about seven months before he embarked on the change himself. I had a leg up on the emotional, physical, and mental transformations, so it was only fair I be patient with him as he adjusted.”
Still speaking with a dreamy, wistful tone, Dr. Autotina’s shoulders slack, her head tilts. The purple cloak shimmers in the sunlight. It was not all dandy living as two robots with complete access to all recorded knowledge, she recalls.
“It was fine for a couple of decades, but eventually the access to the wireless networks of the worlds became too much of a pull for Ronald. He would say to me, ‘Little ghost, we have all the knowledge available to us, only limited by our imagination.’ He would read the entire pantheon of a country’s classical literature in the span of one morning. Ronald was always, always learning. He could never ‘turn off’. Eventually he ran out of things to learn. We would be off planet or in the ocean depths and he would still be trying to learn everything he could about anything else.”
Dr. Autotina is a firm believer that because of his limitless, all-encompassing knowledge her husband lost the ability to wonder, to dream.
She tells me that even today she is particularly conscious of not learning all documented knowledge, why she chooses to go through the perceptively counter-intuitive motions of reading one book at a time. She has intentionally slowed her information processors to absorb information at a slightly higher rate than the average human (“I’m allowed to cheat a little,” she says, her voice suggestive of a smile.)
It’s the knowledge plateauing, she says, her plexiglass face dotted by lines of the midafternoon sun, that eventually set Dr. Folsom on his path. “He leaned into the computer element of the brain. He might be the only person to ever have arrived at the ‘present’ of human knowledge. Sure, the RAM in our automata bodies can processes the information, but can our own limitations of human endeavor? Dr. Folsom became bored and scattered simultaneously. He was developing what I could only describe as some sort of robotic Parkinson’s. Those years were very hard.”
Years later, Dr. Autotina’s hunch of robotic Parkinson’s disease proved correct. This combined with his depression created the scaffolding of Dr. Folsom’s tragic decision to end his own life.
“He got everything he wanted out of life too fast,” Dr. Autotina tells me, “It haunts me to think about what thoughts ran through his own lightning in a bottle in those final days. Apart of me always knew that he was heading toward oblivion, having over-learned his way into apathy. Looking back, I see why I became so obsessed with botany.”
In a way, I was happy to have [botany] because it meant that I could still grieve. There is a human under all this metal and wires. As horrible as those years were, I’m happy that I had them. Without my plants, I don’ t know if I would have found poetry.
Dr. Autotina, the perfect host, brings me to her private study. It is tucked away in the back of the laboratory. The study is bathed in sunlight from the Southern wall; the view is of great rust-colored spires lording over a bare clearing like totems of nature. The room is in the shape of a perfect oval; I know this because Dr. Autotina constructed it herself. Large bookshelves house worn tomes of physical books, scaling upwards of twelve feet to accommodate for Dr. Autotina’s stature and complete with a rolling fireman’s ladder to reach the upper most shelves. I am dwarfed by the scale of the study in relationship to myself, wondering where a cake will appear beckoning to “eat me”. Crumpled papers are scattered along the floor like sleeping tumbleweeds. Plants occupy every foot of real estate that they can; verdant vines winding over desks, petals bloom in the face of the stained glass shielded sun in a kaleidoscopic nebula.
Dr. Autotina calls it her “solarium”, then quickly retracts and says it is no more than a private study. She casually waters some plants, brings tea to a boil for me to try her homegrown ginseng. She rummages through a hastily open mahogany desk drawer and reveals a ream of paper bursting from the gut of a manilla folder. She sets this aside next to several journals and, hands on her cloaked hips, admires them like works of art.
Her body language changes into what would be considered the most mathematically precise impression of humility; shoulders arced just so, neck braced to a certain degree. These books have weight to them. Dr. Autotina explains to me that the advent of her twilight years has reoriented her creative energies, and then quickly laughs away that as long as there is Wifi, she is immortal. The books contain poetry. Stanzas of all pentameters, rhymes and rhythms, shapes and forms. I cannot help but thinking that perhaps this is where Dr. Autotina needs to be all along.
She flips through the pages and invites me to read her favorites. She says, “After Ronald passed I fell into a horrible depression. I was afraid of exploring the atom realm further because it felt too personal, like revisiting a favorite restaurant we used to share. Call me weak, I don’t care. Then I went into botany, which near replaced my astrological practice.”
In some ways, Dr. Autotina feels that she has lost more than just her career.
“It took me many years… I mean, I love my plants, but I was merely supplementing one love to replace the loss of another one. I’ve lost my body, my urge to practice, my husband…but not my mind, and after so many years, not my purpose.”
It’s poetry, Dr. Autotina says. The written word.
“I’ve seen the ice storms on Neptune, the birth of far away galaxies, the horrible beauty of a black hole. How can I validate those experiences and remember them? Through mathematics and cosmological principles?” She shows me more poems, enough to fill a library. “How can I appreciate all that I have seen and gone through? It is here, in poetry, that my purpose shines like a radiant sun. It is how I express myself, through the one fragment that is uniquely my own: my very own personal lightning in a bottle.”
She means, of course, her soul.
But simply announcing a new passion does not equate for the rewarding that follows from putting in the time, which is precisely a trial that Dr. Autotina struggles with. “I can simply download and integrate all the best poets and literature geniuses in recorded history, even add in all the literature dissertations with flairs of anthropology. Within seconds I can have the most mathematically perfect poem written simultaneously in every language. But then I’m ‘logicking’ the poem into manifestation. Where is the victory in that? The expression?”
The strategies that Dr. Autotina has long employed through both her time as a human form and her impenetrable Tinium body have always been one of logic and research, of synthesizing data to unearth new hypotheses and provide basis for more theories.
“But those approaches don’t work with art,” Dr. Autotina says, folding one long leg over the other and resting into an armchair fit to her proportions. I sit in a velvet chair across, the exterior peagreen and adorned with art-nouveau style, insectile embroidery. She puts together the second cup of tea and, even though this is her interview, asks me how the cup compares to others whose aromatics are grown in a less controlled environment. After giving my approval, Dr. Autotina leans back in her chair, joints relaxed, her light blue corona crown creating an aquarium like glow above her head. She continues, “Perfect does not mean correct. Every artist pulls from their own inspirations and heroes. Sure, you can argue that the Renaissance painters were inspired by nature and the individualist perceptions of man and that the other ancillary factors of the Age of Enlightenment create helped to create a dopamine cocktail. Of course, most modern bands will cite The Beatles as why their fingers even touched a guitar or a piano. But ultimately, art comes entirely from within, a subjective experience manifested and codified in a language genuine and one’s own. My entire life I dedicated myself to math and science. I pursued knowledge of the highest discourse, becoming so entrenched in the field that I could close my eyes and see theories on notebook paper, models of Ronald’s prototypes on chalkboards.”
And Dr. Autotina isn’t finished. While her intricate and beautiful gardens have taken a backseat in the passion department, she claims that it was only a steppingstone to remove her from the “old” version of her.
“People still refer to my human body as the ‘old’ Autotina, even though my Tinium platform is much older! However, I do not feel this is an accurate representation of time for me. While I am satisfied with my life as an astrologist and my supremely unique experiences as an automaton, I am content tucking this vortex of spinning numbers and calculations into what I would define as ‘old’. Now, I have a new passion, one which does not rely on numbers or math or angles.” She taps the back of her cranium. I get the impression of a smile from the slight tilt in her voice. “I get to use my lightning in a bottle and it helps me use this.”
Dr. Autotina taps a plexiglass finger to her chest, where a series of powerful microchips and processors and wires have replaced where her heart used to be.
It is poetry, Dr. Autotina tells me, that keeps her alive beyond all else. “Science is how we live. Art is why we live.”
Nowadays. Dr. Autotina can still be found watering her plants and digging for strange minerals. At night she’ll be the observatory, staring into the nebula from her giant eye that is her telescope, surrounding by prismatic tomes as if she herself commands gravity. In a way, she does. Dr. Autotina is a force of undying optimism, her passion and empathy not carried away by the large orbital currents of despair and loss. She keeps herself afloat, tethering a line between human-automata, careful not to submit to the persistent inertia of computational super-sentience by means of poetry.
If you have time, she suggests attending open mic poetry sessions at your local café. On weekdays, you can find Dr. Autotina on stage, but good luck getting a front row seat. She tells me that it shouldn’t be a problem, though, being eight feet tall. Dr. Autotina plans to get enough confidence to go on weekend circuits and eventually publish a book of poetry. She already has a title: Little Ghosts.
When this happens, good luck finding any seat in what will undoubtably be a packed audience.