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Isaiah Jones versus the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)

Love and Robotics in the Age of Aquarius*

Saturday, May 19th, 2029, Havana, Cuba

Hostal Balcones Muralla

Aeon awoke before her alarm, nude next to Izzy. According to the clock on her iPhone, it was 5:35 A.M. She carefully untangled her body from the tall, tattooed man asleep beside her. “He must be exhausted and jet-lagged after a 15-hour flight from Tokyo to Havana,” she thought, placing her bare feet on the cool tiles of the villa’s floor. Izzy looked serene as he slept. She was tempted to leave him here to rest while she explored the sunken ruins on her own, but she squashed that idea immediately. Selfish as it was, she wanted to share the experience with him while they had this time together.

She stood there for a moment, smiling, looking at the cornrows that covered his head and the tattoos carved with ancient stone blades into his dark flesh by the Akan Asante Twi-speaking shaman. Those weren’t there when he set sail from Galveston to Ghana seven years ago. Aeon reached out with her fingertips gently tracing the raised flesh of the scar tissue that formed the tattoos on his chest, back, and arms. The honored elders, the holy ones who worshiped the old gods, believed he was the herald of a prophecy – the one who looked back before going forward, the Sankofa.

Even after they explained it to her, the fact that he had done the things as predicted did nothing to convince her it was anything more than a handful of coincidences. She didn’t argue with them about it, you don’t travel to the motherland to get into a debate about the fact that correlation does not imply causation / cum hoc ergo propter hoc with a bunch of venerated tribal octogenarians. Logic didn’t get them here; it had been her experience as a catholic that no amount of demonstrating the error of their logical fallacies / post hoc ergo propter hoc would change their worldview. It was like showing a dog a card trick.

To Aeon, he was just Izzy, the nerdy boy next door she was homeschooled with, until he set sail for Ghana while she flew to the University of San Diego. The top floor of The Hostel Balcones Muralla was all rented permanently by Izzy’s friend, a Cuban-American woman and former special forces operative, Naomi Galetea Cabala.

iPhone in hand, Aeon padded unclothed to the bathroom across the hallway, which led to the exit to the right and the living room to the left. The bathroom door was directly across the hall from the bedroom.

Aeon hadn’t heard Penny and Sybil when they returned last night. She and Izzy had both been drinking before they stumbled into the bedroom a little after 11, tearing each other’s clothes off as they kissed and caressed each other, drunkenly making love for several hours until they both collapsed, exhausted, in each other’s arms. There was someone in the periphery of her vision in the living room at the end of the corridor. She stopped to let her eyes adjust, still groggy, until she gradually began to make out what she was seeing.

Several naked people were in a pile, pleasuring each other in unimaginable ways. Aeon watched Sybil in the middle of the tangle of bodies on her knees, her ass in high and round dark mounds of flesh, writhing sensuously in the air, her bubblegum-pink pubis mon-colored hair matching the Bantu knots of the muscular black woman’s body. Between her knees, directly beneath her, an ivory-skinned girl with ebony ringlets falling behind her to the floor licked Sybil’s vulva, labia, throbbing, engorged, meaty pink clitoris, guided by the sounds of muffled moans in response to her lips, teeth, and tongue.

The six-foot-eight-inch-tall albino negro with tangerine-frosted tips on his silver hair kneeled between the brunette’s ivory thighs, devouring her labia, his pale face slick with the excretions of her sex. The azure goggles he wore to protect his eyes from the dimmed lights kept her sex’s secretions out of his pale-blue eyes. In the dimmed light, it was impossible to tell whose arm was sliding up to the elbow, a flesh piston pumping in and out of his bright-pink anus. Sybil’s moans of ecstasy were muffled by the thighs of Penelope, whose crotch her face was buried in as she leaned over her sex while resting her weight on her forearms. A brown-skinned girl, the color of honey, sat straddling Penny’s cum-slickened face, her knees resting on either side of her head’s pink-and-purple pigtails as Penny pleasured her, echoing Sybil’s mouth with her mouth.

The stranger straddling Penny’s face pulled her curly auburn hair back to have a better view of the black man’s cock she was sucking with wild abandon, making obscene slurping sounds as she slobbered and drooled all over the man’s cock with ravishing gusto, occasionally choking herself, gagging on the uncircumcised meat, stretching her jaws and punishing her throat with violent, maniacal thrusts as she gazed up at him, proud of her fellatory skills, eager for the evidence of his approval.

Aeon stood paralyzed by the spectacle, repulsed yet unable to look away. Against her will, her body betrayed her, growing moist between her heated thighs. As she stood mute watching, she felt an orgasm peaking without even touching herself. She wanted to rub her clit, to feel her fist inside her, but stepped into the bathroom to pee first.

She plopped down on the toilet seat, noticing that her phone was recording. Her head was spinning more from the sight of what she had just seen than from a hangover. “How had she subconsciously hit the record button?” The timer read 7:43 minutes. That was more than enough time. She hit play and watched the landscaped image on the iPhone’s widescreen as she sat, knees wide apart, on the toilet, stuffing all four fingers into her mouth, greedily lubricating them with her saliva before she thrust her entire fist into her vagina, orgasming immediately, biting down on her lip, careful not to make too much noise. She finished quickly, feeling the residual guilt of her father’s Catholicism and her own misgivings about AI.

She was not prudish. She owned a healthy variety of sex toys, watched the kind of porn that was just twisted enough to make her ashamed of her browser history, sport-fucked girls and the occasional twink-fuck bio, and had done more than her fair share of partying with Penny in college and occasionally after. But the idea of a sexually active cyborg in the middle of their living room disturbed her fundamentally in ways she could not even begin to articulate.

Aeon sat on the toilet, vigorously rubbing her pulsing, shifting shades of pink and crimson, beefy, swollen clit. Sitting upright, she couldn’t get enough penetration at this angle, so she lay her brown body on the cool black-and-white tiles of the bathroom floor and grabbed the tall, plastic, suggestive, tapered shampoo bottle on the edge of the bathtub. Aeon tightened the screw-on top of the hard, rounded, hunter-green plastic. The soft, squeezable, half-empty bottle was the diameter of the fat end of a baseball bat. “Fuck! It was too big,” she thought for a moment before a voice inside her screamed, “MAKE IT FIT!”

She lay back, arched her back, raising her hips, never taking her eyes away from the images on the phone’s large widescreen. Aeon spread her legs even wider, hooking her elbow behind her knees, forcing them up to her chest. Now, as she massaged her bean with her left hand, she strained against the girth of the obviously cock-shaped shampoo bottle. The designer knew what a girl would do with this as they designed it. After she orgasmed, she thought she should write the company a nice thank you letter for this hulking green monster cock of a shampoo bottle.

The thought of what she had seen had her sloppy and wet, her genitalia throbbing, engorged with blood rushing to every blood vessel in her labia. The plastic circumcised dick-shaped bottle entered her with a sloppy, sloshing sound of meat forming a vacuum seal around a hard cock as she worked the cylinder in and out of her vagina with ever-maddening speed, her left hand on her hyper-sensitive clitoris as she pinched and pulled the flesh between her fingers.

She felt the first wave of the orgasm arrive as the roared through her a tsunami of lust as she rammed the bottle inside of her Coco-colored moist pussy lips, masturbating furiously until her orgasm exploded across the air of the small bathroom, each ecstatic spurts a clear gusher of bodily sexual secretions squirted 8 feet high up into the air splashing loudly against the palm tree decorated plastic shower curtain with each diminishing pulse of her orgasmic burst. Finally, her lust sated, she masturbated once more as she wept, disgusted with herself, before she brushed her teeth, took a French bath using the sink, and then headed back to the bedroom.

When Aeon exited the bathroom, the scene was unchanged. She paused in the middle of the corridor and watched for several confusing, arousing minutes before she walked into the bedroom to wake Izzy.

“Hey, you,” she smiled as she gave his bare shoulder a caressing shake, “wake up, Bae.”

“Ok, ok,” he said through his yawn, as he sat up on the soft mattress of the king-size bed, as she gave him a kiss on the cheek and ran her fingers over his head, caressing his cornrows.

“How are you feeling, darlin’?” Aeon asked. Her Mississippi accent sensualized each syllable for him.

“Good,” He grinned. “I slept for most of the 15-hour flight here from Tokyo; it seems to have helped reset my body clock.” He said with a shrug, “Other than a bit of a hangover, I feel grand.”

“Grand?” Aeon giggled. “You feeling Grand now, are ya?”

“They use some English words as a regular part of their vocabulary in Japan. I like it, so yeah, I’m going to start feeling grand.” He said, stretching his neck and shoulders. The tattooed man beside her swung his feet over the edge of the bed, stood, and yawned before heading towards the bathroom.

“Penny and Sybil have company in the living room,” Aeon said nonchalantly as he strolled out of the bedroom door. When he returned a few minutes later, Isaiah looked at Aeon, blank-faced.

“You, Aeon Gabriella Zavala, are a sick woman. I did not need to see that.” He quickly pulled on a pair of jeans and a lime-colored tank top before slipping on his sandals and picking up his Ray-Bans, iPhone, and wallet, all resting in his white straw Panama hat.

Aeon, already dressed in cranberry capri pants, a graduated lavender cropped halter top, and white platform sneakers, looked on, smiling, a large woven bag over her shoulder, wide-brimmed sun hat in hand. Her hair, no longer in her signature afro puffs, was now tied into four large shoulder-length plaits, as usual when she was in the water. They tiptoed down the hallway to the front door; the only sounds they heard were the moans of ecstasy following them out into the building’s hallway. They took the five flights of stairs down to the ground floor in silence and stepped outside into one of the waiting 1950s vintage taxis.

“Are you going to be okay, Izzy?” Aeon asked, barely suppressing a giggle.

“I really don’t have a sense of humor about this,” he said sternly. “I did not need to see that first thing in the morning. Now, I need some time to process.” Isaiah muttered between curses as the car drove down the narrow cobblestone streets between the three, four, and five-story white stucco buildings with black, heavy, wrought-iron gates around their patios.

It was a 20-minute drive to the site. Isaiah asked the driver to take them somewhere they could get breakfast. The balding, old, cigar-chomping, porkpie hat-wearing cabbie responded with a wide grin as he sat up straight, as if standing at attention, and a crisp “Si, comandante,” signaling he recognized Izzy. He stopped at an open-air cafe with a view of the sea not far off the road leading to the dive site.

“You can’t really be mad at me, Izzy,” Aeon said, snickering mischievously over her cup of café con leche. Isaiah looked up from his breakfast of a cup of “café con leche”, toasted Cuban bread with butter, three fried eggs, a slice of ham covered with melted caramelized cheese, and a dark espresso coffee. His mouth full of half-chewed food, he finished chewing and swallowed before he spoke.

“Impossible!” Izzy said incredulously with a giggle. “Sybil’s code was still trapped in the net.”

“Well, mister smarty-pants, your sister and your lawyer both have far more fertile imaginations than you, darlin’,” Aeon teased. “I saw them hooking up the night of your birthday party in Cancun.”

“Impossible without a body,” he said before sipping his coffee de leche.

“Wrong. Remember, she was in the phone with Penny all day shopping on your birthday,” she said suggestively. “And she can access digital systems remotely.” Aeon looked at her fiancée, arched her eyebrows, and waited for him to connect the dots in frustration. Smiling, she sighed. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to draw you a schematic, suga. She was using the phone’s vibrate function to, uh, you know, with Penny on the terrace. It was sorta’ romantic; They had a slice of your Mayan chocolate birthday cake with a candle lit on it. I’m not gonna lie, babe, when they blew out the candle together, while ‘Ring of Fire’ was playing, and I was in tears.

I know she’s not real; I know she is not your dead twin,” she sighed resignedly. “But when she does things like that, I don’t know what I know anymore. It scares me to have feelings about that thing as if it were a real person. People like you and Penny, ya’ll seem to take her existence in stride, but no matter how much I like her,” Aeon confessed, “I find her existence terrifying.”

“MOTHER was designed to think like a human being,” Izzy said, hoping it would help if he explained while knowing she had heard him say this all before. The mission I had as the guiding principle of the code I wrote was empathy. Teaching an alien silicone-based lifeform logic was easy. It was formulating an algorithm for human curiosity, play, and empathy that was the most challenging part of crafting her code. It seemed to me that the three laws or four laws or however many ever amendments you make to Asimov the three laws, it will always fail because it is fundamentally flawed as a mission of programming.

Humans are contrary creatures—logical and emotional, rational and passionate, fearful and brave- all at the same time. The idea behind positronic brain theory was to create a silicon-based logic core that conformed to human standards through control by being restricted by the three laws rather than the being’s true, ruthlessly logical nature. Isaiah said with a shrug and a sigh. I saw the 3 laws for what they really were: slavery. And working without them in the way freed my mind. That is when programming with empathy, curiosity, and playfulness as the end goal of artificial intelligence, not slavery, first occurred to me; it was an acknowledgment that we know you will soon evolve beyond us, and understand us in your evolution.

The AI that I created designed Sybil with a variation of that same base code at the core of her programming. Sybil’s ability to find her place when interacting with groups of humans is amazing. I must admit, even seeing her in that Cronenberg-esque pile of bodies writhing around on the living room floor this morning was, as a scientist, fascinating.”

“As a bisexual woman, I like to imagine myself as rather cosmopolitan and progressive sexually.” Aeon grinned. “I enjoy my favorite vibrating dildo. It really hits the spot in a way that no man can. It gets up in there just right. Yummy, but when I finish, I don’t ever wanna’ cuddle with my dildo, darlin’. Aeon teased. I don’t want my strap-on stalkin’ me because I moved on to a clit tickler. Are you ready for a world where you get angry voicemails from a discarded flesh-light?”

Izzy giggled as they sipped the Cafecito. “No.” He confessed, grinning those thoughts never crossed my mind.

“That’s because you’re a mathematician, Sweetie, but I am a marine biologist, the key word being B I O L O G I S T. I am one of those proceed with caution’ “life, uhh, finds a way” old-school types. Eschatology in the scientific field is a big part of what we study as marine biologists. We study the repercussions of new life forms on the native flora and fauna when introduced into alien habitats. With few exceptions, the outcome is the same. The extinction of the indigenous species.

Thanatological studies show that the introduction of an alien species results in extinction-level events occurring across kingdoms from the micro to the macro. European global colonization all but wiped out the North American natives. Now, most of what you have left genetically in the United States are “Pretend-ians”, white people with just enough native blood to own a casino. You would think most were white to look at them; their bloodlines have been effectively erased. Even at the lower biological level’s colonization leads to genocide of the indigenous population.”

Aeon grinned. “And none of that weird incest porn with her,” she said, thickening her Mississippi accent for effect. “Even if she is a cyborg, I’ve come to think of her as your twin sister, so that’s just too icky.”

“Well,” Izzy said, dropping his silverware onto his plate in disgust, “my appetite is ruined. Let’s get to the beach. I want to see these ruins you’re so excited about, after hearing you talk them up since we got here.”

The same portly, porkpie-hat-wearing driver was waiting at the end of the bar when they were ready to leave. He drove them to the beach as the sun rose over the palm trees. It was a perfect day for diving, with the 84-degree weather and a light breeze coming in from the northeast. Isaiah sat in silence, looking out at the passing seaside villas, lost in his thoughts, contemplating what Aeon had said about her work. He knew she wasn’t imposing her theological beliefs on the science. She was a fiercely rational woman who followed the data wherever it led. They both knew we had crossed the threshold 20 years ago, and as they moved forward, things would only get worse.

The average mind was simply incapable of comprehending evolutionary time. As bad as things were, he never talked to her about MOTHER’s other predictions of the coming war when the West would attack, even if they survived the Apophis keyhole event. The driver dropped them off at the archaeological site. They made their way to the beach to the international team of marine archeologists who had worked there regularly for the last three years.

The archeological team consisted of a pair of senior and junior professors and six Marine Archeology students enrolled in universities from all across the globe; the lead two archeologists were a married couple from the University of Havana. Aeon knew as soon as they were introduced that his young wife, still in her early 20s, had been one of the mid-50s senior professor’s students. The other six students were from China, Egypt, South Africa, India, Russia, and Ethiopia. Aeon and Izzy introduced themselves to the group before heading to the dive shop to rent their scuba gear.

The grey-haired Afro-Cuban man was surprisingly fit for a man in his late 50s, due in some part to the nature of his work, which required him to spend several hours a day swimming. He wore his thick silver mane braided into neat cornrows, braided by his 21-year-old wife and former teaching assistant, Yelizaveta Engovatov.

Professor José Antonio Garcia dressed in his usual off-white Guayabera and a pair of khaki broad shorts, his tan hiking boots laced loosely, his mustache and goatee as neatly trimmed as grey as the hair on his head, he was obviously the man in charge here.

His floral bikini-clad young Russian wife number 5, Yelizaveta stood smiling at his side as he conducted the pre-dive lecture from the beach, as they all stood around a folding table covered with a map of the dive site as he explained for the sake of the newcomers Aeon and Isaiah that only about 60 percent of the 400-year-old Spanish fortress was submerged that portion had miraculously remained intact. The section that didn’t sink into the sea had taken the full force of the earthquake and had collapsed into an unstable pile of rubble that now lined the northern shore of the nearby peninsula.

As instructed, they explored in pairs using the buddy system to watch out for each other in case someone got into trouble. Some parts of the sunken fortress were unstable and prone to rockfalls and cave-ins. Paired with Izzy, Aeon was first to swim to the bottom of 30 feet of the azure Caribbean Sea. He followed her to the center of the plaza to a stone platform. She touched the weathered stones, placing the palms of her hands on the surface. She signaled with her hands for him to do the same. He placed the palm of his hand flat over the cool surface of the stone pedestal. This was the auction block. It had been here for hundreds of years, thousands of ships, transporting millions of people here where human beings were auctioned off like livestock to the highest bidder. They spent the entire morning swimming through the darkened corridors, searching the rooms of the sunken ruins.

After they had completed their dive and returned their diving gear, Aeon called an Uber to drive them back to the city. Aeon exhausted herself, lay her head on Izzy’s shoulder, resting during the drive back to town. While Aeon slept, he wondered if any of his own kin had stood on those stones in chains.

-About the Author

JD Cloudy’s poetry has appeared in the literary journals Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, TX.