Fred Aiken Writing

The doctor that delivered Dennis said it was impossible. The doctor said he shouldn’t be able to breathe, he shouldn’t be able to function, and he definitely shouldn’t be able to think or be conscious. And yet Dennis operated perfectly fine without a brain. It was a medical mystery, but still he walked, talked and lived among the world with no distinguishing feature.

It wasn’t something, though, that Dennis openly advertised. He didn’t go around telling friends, classmates, or even colleagues later in life, that he had nothing in his head. Nonetheless, it typically was brought up in some capacity, especially whenever he happened to go on dates, at which point his date would ask him at some point in the evening what he was thinking about, and he would reply: “Nothing. I don’t have a brain.” At first his date thought that he was being self-deprecating and assumed he was just exaggerating, and so they would press him, “No, seriously, what are you thinking.” Dennis knew the date would not last much longer after his date began to press him.

Even during interviews, prospective employers asked Dennis what his thoughts were, how he would handle certain theoretical scenarios, and his usual reply was to always refer to a supervisor. Employers had a vastly different response than romantic interests. Those employers tended not to care in the slightest one way or another if Dennis had any intelligible thoughts. In fact, in a lot of cases, they admired how open he was to not knowing a single thing, and how willing he would be to take direction. 

So, on the scale between romance and work, Dennis’ choices leaned heavily towards becoming more and more of a workaholic. He mindlessly performed one task after another, never asking what his purpose or reason behind the task. All he knew was that a supervisor had asked him to do so, and so he did. 

Every afternoon, after work, though, he would go see a doctor, one of the few remaining doctors that still wanted to study how he operated without a brain, and each afternoon said doctor would only have one question for Dennis. What did you do today?

His response was typically null. He did not remember what he did, because he did not have the capacity to remember without a brain. Instead, he simply did. And so he told the doctor each night, “I don’t recall, but is there something you would like me to do?”

The signal came late on a Wednesday night, just seconds before Kathy would have gotten up to collect her things and leave the lab for the day.

“Come quick, Cassius!” she called for her lab partner whom she had an on-again-off-again relationship for the past few years. 

“What is it?”

“There’s a signal.”

“Someone’s trying to contact us?”

“Or something?”

“Either way, it has to be sentient in some manner.”

“Who do you think it is?”

“I dunno. Do you think we should respond?”

“Sure, why not? That’s the whole reason this lab was set up in the first place. I think we’d be doing a disservice to our patrons if we didn’t make contact.”

So Kathy and Cassius spent the next five hours drinking coffee and coming up with ideas on how to respond to the message. It was important they get it just right. They couldn’t just say ‘hello’. Whatever they thought of might set the tone for the rest of human history. It could be the reason foreign invaders destroy all life. They settled on sending an echo response that mimicked that of the original just in case. That way there could be no confusion.

A few thousand years later, Kathy and Cassius had died, but an armada showed up at the doorstep to their bodies’ burial site to put down flowers and say ‘hello’.