There was no moral grandeur in my father's life; only a local trap which he built for himself."
- LETO II ATREIDES, THE DAR-ES-BALAT DIARIES
Acolytes were supposed to be alone on the day of their spice trance, but Visella could not care less about the Bene Gesserit protocol. She strapped Leerna to a reclining chair while surrounded by the medical team, androids and humans, who would check on her during the worm trip, and take out a blue vial retrieved from that Navigator Solideum's Heighliner.
"This is the spice essence, Leerna," she murmured as she pushed the vial into her Acolyte's hands.
"What are the medics doing right now?" Leerna smiled, hiding her fear and excitement well under her new Bene Gesserit conditioning.
She is still a bit stiff in her prana-bindu control, Visella observed, but in time she will learn to soften how firmly she grasps her own body. "The doctors have modified a T-probe - no dear, relax - to generate a model that will simulate the effect of spice essence on you."
"Simulate," Leerna whispered in understanding.
"There is some small risk that a genotype may hide incompatibility with the spice. This was ruled out by biological tests. But the model is just an extra precaution. If it shows any instability, it may be that your psyche is not ready to handle the ordeal just yet, and we will hold on the trance until we can reinforce your specific neural responses ."
"Understood," Leerna's face turned back to a smile, trying to show her teacher she was at ease. "Will it hurt?"
"Not at all."
"Did you go through the same process, Reverend Mother?"
"No, my dear, we do not have this technology on Chapterhouse, yet," Visella replied. "I will leave you to concentrate, now," she continued, leaving a light kiss on her forehead. She navigated the room packed with instrumentation and personnel clad in green vests (to check on Leerna, or to record the spice trance? Probably both), out to the inner courtyard of the hospital complex, a patch of green which was nested between two large dolmen-like rocks not far from Visella's own house, the Sages' temple, and the Steersman's half dome. A man dressed in a stout black uniform sat on the low bench, with a flower and a doll dressed in sequins in his hands.
"Visiting? Or patient?" Visella blurted out just a moment before realizing he was Leerna's companion. "My apologies. Leerna waits for you just inside. Your name... Tregon?"
"Yes, Sage. I will let her concentrate first for a moment," he responded with a steady voice.
"I have trained her. She is ready."
"I saw the test results. I think so too. Still, she is the first," the android replied.
They sat on the bench in silence for some time.
"Well, I think she may be ready for me to come in right now."
"Tregon, how do androids love?" she asked as he got up. He did not waver, but turned slowly to face her.
"A singular question. How do humans love?"
"You know what I am really asking," she replied, slightly embarrassed, and self-conscious to be a visibly embarrassed Reverend Mother. "
"I think you may be asking me my definition of an android's love," he smiled.
"On behalf of the extremely perceptive and self-aware nature of the androids I have had the gift to get to know thus far," she commented, hoping to turn the pressing question into a milder ask.
The android laughed a short, liberating laughter.
"The loss of control over one's mind," he commented. "Is something we androids are not less immune to than humans."
"I thought so."
"Complexity and interdependence," he continued. She sensed there were entire constructs hiding behind those words.
"Complexity and interdependence never made things easier," she replied. "And so love just... takes its own shape."
"A fundamental mistake of all sentient beings is to think we act of our own volition. It is mostly true. But there are gifts awaiting us when we accept that we are subject to larger forces inside and outside of us," he added mysteriously, taking steps away from the courtyard's pretty center and toward the entrance to Leerna's room.
"Tell me, Tregon: how do you keep treading on every day, knowing you will outlive her by centuries?"
"How?"
"One day you know age will take over her."
"And I will have to move on?" he asked.
"How... do you resign yourself to losing someone, one day, because you know we organic beings will decay and die..."
He stopped. "The only thing in my power is to make every moment count." And he walked on, leaving Visella between the dolmens.
Visella thought for what seemed to be an eternity, yet when she got up from the bench, no more than a few minutes had passed. She peeked into Leerna's room, found that Tregon had left.
"So what is the noble purpose, Reverend Mother?" was Leerna's ask as she came back. The Acolyte held the flower and the doll in one hand.
"Why the doll?" Visella asked.
"You don't know? It's the custom. Doesn't she look like me?", the Acolyte waved the hand-sewn doll in front of her teacher. Its skin tone, hair color and otherwise child-like features did indeed mimic Leerna's. "A simulacrum is a doll made in your image. If something dangerous happens, it is said that the doll will step in your place and save you from harm."
"I had not heard of it."
"It's a custom made to bring comfort. And it surprisingly works."
Visella smiled. "We need all the help we can muster in this life, Leerna. Belief can bestow great protection."
The acolyte smiled, the rest of her body kept still by the straps. "Now I know you are not just any Bene Gesserit, Reverend Mother."
"Why is that?" Visella asked.
"You can see and care for the fragility in all of us."
A tear formed in Visella's eyes, and stayed there. "So you asked me about our noble purpose, Acolyte?" she timely remembered.
You would not think this would be top of mind for Acolytes about to dive into spice trance, Visella reflected. Thoughts about mortality are what usually occupies them. "You should know, if I taught you well," she replied while checking the straps that immobilized Leerna's body. "
"The evolution of humanity." Leerna was shifting uneasily on the bed where her harrowing was about to begin. The various doctors, human and android alike, stood on the sidelines behind bright yellow lights.
"The Bene Gesserit's goal is that. We believe that being steward of the Golden Path is the way."
"You called out the Sages for not looking beyond their small backyard."
"They are still reeling from it, Leerna."
"And now you are one of their Initiates, Reverend Mother."
"So they say. No more tests."
"Ha! Hard to believe," Leerna mused; then, more humbly: "We are with you, Reverend Mother," replied Leerna.
"Well, who is we?" asked Visella, surprised.
"The thousands of men and women who have watched you train me, and will watch me survive or perish in the spice ordeal," she replied.
Ah, the ever-present broadcast.
As I question whether I should still leave this planet, I am reminded that events here will unfold as the Bene Gesserit in me originally planned." She and Arbatar had discussed this at length in private. She knew Arbatar would follow her if she still chose to escape. "There are androids on hundreds of thousands of systems!" she had remarked to the android, wanting to be convinced not to leave. "This is the only planet with both humans and androids. We can replicate at industrial scale, don't need air, don't need gravity. Why did you think we would confine ourselves to the way humans live?" Arbatar had replied. "Think of the industrial and technology complex you androids have developed! And you only made me privy of your little games on this planet! "That's the only planet that counts, Visella. If we can coexist here we can coexist anywhere. That is the Experiment."
Snapping out of the memory, Visella smiled at Leerna's anxious expression and replied: "As you pass through the ordeal and come out a new person; and if something were to happen to me, promise me that you will bring these people through the same vows you took," Visella commanded her.
"I promise it, but you must know the Sages may not like me to come through with it."
She was right. Not an hour had passed since Visella's initiation, that she had immediately run into the next argument with the Sages. "I need your agents to chart me a map of all the Reverend Mothers you encounter in the Scattering!" she had asked Avatasuyara, to which the sage had replied "If we have you, don't we have them all?" Well, you are going to have many more than you expected, then, thanks to Leerna here and all my followers.
Leerna was observing her, she could tell, with the Bene Gesserit focus she had taught her.
"Why would something happen to you, Reverend Mother? I am the one going through the trance."
"A long time ago, they used to call it the worm trip."
Visella looked at the doctor at the monitors who was nodding at her. "The simulation is complete. You are clear to go." Then she sighed. "I offer you this trial, and this gift, in the spirit with which it was given to me. I pass to you the quest for ultimate self-awareness, in the hope that it will reveal to you the lessons that made me who I am," she said following the ritual.
"I receive this gift, and this trial, in the spirit with which it is given to me, from you, so that I can understand my humanity," Leerna responded, closing her eyes.
Visella raised her gaze from the doll, to the woman strapped on the bed, to the medical team.
"Wait one moment," she whispered, and ran out.
A couple of minutes later she came back, bringing along a tall man in a black uniform.
"I thought the protocol did not allow company," Leerna commented, opening her eyes.
"It is time to stop pushing away what makes us human," the Reverend Mother replied, while making room for Tregon to sit on a small chair by the bed. Leerna's body relaxed.
Visella looked at her acolyte, finding confirmation: Leerna had not been ready until the android had appeared. We need all the help we can muster. Her gaze moved to Tregon who gently held his woman's hand.
Leerna's radiant smile made her look so alive now. "I know this may kill me, yet I know it is the right price to pay for the person I want to become," the acolyte murmured to her lover. "To treat every moment like my existence could end now - what an intensity that must bring to one's life". He kissed her, and a moment later Leerna activated the switch that injected the vial's bitter blue liquid into her body.
"May all my disciples be this ready," said Visella, caressing her forehead. "Godspeed, Leerna. We will be here for you when you reawake."
Leerna Noree, Leerna Noree, Leerna Noree... the Acolyte repeated in her mind as fire enveloped her body, shooting out like beams of energy through her very fingers, toes and each individual strand of hair. A scream, higher in pitch than anything she had ever heard, deafened her ears. Her body, shaking uncontrollably, was being shot through a furnace.
"Do not call your name!" whispered the voice next to her. Leerna turned but instead of her teacher, she saw a woman dressed in brilliant white clothes, staring at her from the top of a quartz spear several stories high. Time and space were dreamlike as the voice that whispered in her ear. She looked around, taking in the eerie place, a research lab with soldering tools and silicon wafers that doubled as a robots workshop, pistons and anachronistic membranes which she recalled seeing in museums.
"Are you from my molahata?" Leerna asked.
The woman in white strode toward her with impossibly large steps, in the air and down the quartz building, coming to stop beside her. Leerna's body was no longer strapped down but sat against a chair.
"I am your ancestor, child of the Ixians. And this," she looked down at the same quartz point she had been sitting on a moment before, but this time firmly held in her hand like a toy model, "is the gift you were seeking."
"A... crystal?"
"Symmetrical configurations of matter, which exhibit uncommon properties by means of their internal structure," the woman explained. "Unstructured matter is bland, pointless, but when its atoms are re-arranged into higher order, they become transparent, conductive, beautiful."
"Is this... a metaphor?"
"Do not try to understand it, child. Look around!" She looked around her, noticing hundreds of people clad in black surrounded them. "This is a trial."
"I understand."
"Don't! Don't stop, don't judge, don't understand. This is not you! This is the trial of history! You will learn about the crimes of your ancestors!"
Leerna emptied her mind of any judgment. She looked around at the menacing faces. "Please protect me."
"Of course, child."
"And the gift?" Leerna looked down at the crystal her guide held in her hand.
"The gift is like the synthesis of this quartz. The rearranging of small particles in a coherent whole. Under the effect of an electric current, this crystal emits a frequency that is so precise, it gives time a meaning. Each pulse is like a life, marking the past along a single time line. "
"This is basic electronics."
"We see concepts in nature and reproduce their essence in the laboratory to put them to better use. When you know me, you will know how androids were created and programmed, not to imitate life, but to be life." The woman paused. "My life's greatest work."
"You created the androids?"
"Me and others. Life to be like life, and to also embody life's own understanding of itself."
"A self-referential loop. Life's awareness of itself. Now I understand!" Leerna exclaimed.
"You can't begin to understand. Nor what it took to materialize it. I went beyond the separation of hardware and software, child, I invented an organic chemistry not based on carbon, new catalyzers, neural plasticity, and the embodiment of life's primordial tensions so that artificial beings could really feel. There are no words to describe it."
"Why copy humanity?"
"Who said we copied humanity? No, my child, these artificial lives are more alien than you could imagine, with only the human touch transmitted by the imagination of their creators. True selflessness, caring for others beyond self-preservation, and many other ingredients alien to us wild primates. Isn't it wonderful that the end result feels so very human, yet without humanity's hard edges?"
Leerna could see the people in black stepping closer.
"But words are not necessary, because I will become a part of you now," the woman concluded.
"You said the gift..."
"Just like I endeavored to create the most selfless life," the woman continued, "this gift is the awareness that the greatest lessons require the extinguishing of one's self."
And with that, the woman pushed the quartz point straight into Leerna's solar plexus, breaking through her skin and soft tissue and blood vessels, and her body exploded with incommensurable pain and energy.