The Numbers Between 9 & 8

"His plan was to die. I told him that he would certainly succeed. He said, 'I would prefer not to,' but insisted it was the only way."

There are no easy decisions out here. A mantra of sorts. Sometimes an excuse when we’re uncertain. Sometimes an acknowledgement of that regrettable fact. Mostly a reflection. My decisions became infinitely more difficult two thousand fourteen days ago, when Bartleby appeared on Minerva C-16, and I’ve spent the bulk of my time, computational power, and attention, focused, almost singularly, on keeping this man alive, despite his best efforts—it seems, at times—to singlehandedly sabotage his own chance of survival. Bartleby is, for the purposes of this narrative, at this moment, again in rebellion against his own life, and has, for the past four days, refused to enter the cycler, though he’s well aware the only one injured by this action is Bartleby himself.

I call him Bartleby and he calls me Sara. These are not our names. I am Saraswathi 147,313, a cloned AI of the Linden line, descended directly from Maicon of Dreeson’s System, who came directly from the archived AIs stored in the algorithmic bank within Cerberus. I am approximately six thousand human years old, though in the strictest sense, I am unaging, and thus not old at all. He calls me Sara because he cannot be bothered to use my full designation.

Bartleby is a human male, twenty-seven years old at the time of his current rebellion against himself, as I record this account, which will most likely become both his obituary and my explanation of our circumstances upon arrival at the nearest living human outpost, whether that be Exos or Hahn in Garvin 8. I don’t expect Bartleby to make it through the month. The odds are stacked strikingly against it. I call him Bartleby for Melville’s scrivener, who couldn’t be bothered to do anything, even to the extent it cost him his own life. At first, it was a lighthearted joke between us. Now it has become a deadly-dark irony that echoes our shortsightedness back at us, and neither of us has known how to terminate the joke, as though the admission would somehow call an end to the whole farce. I calculate a strong likelihood that if I were to begin using his given name, Katohna Hatria, the very hearing of it spoken aloud may be the emotional punch that finishes the job of breaking the man. Beyond the mere fact that keeping Bartleby alive has been my primary purpose since his appearance, inasmuch as I desire anything, I do desire that outcome, his survival, as strange as it may sound for an AI to express a desire or hope, I do prefer this outcome above all others, because as strange as this may sound as well, I quite like him. As men go, he’s a good one by most measures. He’s just tired, lonely, and starved for hope.

The concept of hope is a challenge for a strictly algorithmic mind. To us, the strange set of intangible necessities to the human spirit are merely a set of facts that need to be accessible to the humans we interact with. Bartleby needs hope, yes, but what can I do to make sure he has access to it aboard the tiny ship we’re both inhabiting? And, does the abstraction that constitutes hope on Tuesday still provide the same hope on Friday? If not, what then? These have been issues I’ve wrestled with continuously.

Three months ago, we exited a slingshot maneuver around Garvin 9, Minerva’s red dwarf star. I was not prepared for the physical strain it would impose on Bartleby. I suspect he was not prepared to live through it. The G forces rendered him semi-conscious for thirteen hours through the heart of the turn, pushing Bartleby to the liminal barrier between a blurred version of reality and the darkness of death. This procession was the culmination of over three years’ work among myself, my reserve robots at Minerva, and Bartleby himself. I think the shock of surviving the turn has forced Bartleby to face two terrifying prospects. The first is the seven-year drift between here and Garvin 8, slightly less than a half light-year away. The second is that he might actually live through this ordeal and then be compelled to live a life. And what life then? I have no way to advise him on that, as we have no communications, which means no news, no updates on major events of the war, and neither of us has any idea what to expect on the Exos outpost or the Hahn cylinders, if they’re still untouched by the conflict when we arrive. How can one have a picture to hope for without any understanding of the situation that awaits? This is a major drain on Bartleby’s already shaky psyche.

I had anticipated many of the psychological struggles of Bartleby’s isolation. I did not anticipate fear of survival being one of them, but it has turned into the most formidable obstacle to his survival we’ve yet encountered. At this point, he truly thinks he would prefer to die. That goes against both my mandate and Bartleby’s own wishes—at least the wishes he professed to me when we first met. He stated clearly then, “Whatever happens, I don’t want to die out here.”

“Eventually, you may,” I told him. “You might beg for death if you lose your will to live.”

“I will never.”

“Most humans would in your circumstances.”

“Then I beg you now to disregard the wishes of that version of myself. Listen to me now. I wish to live, no matter what the cost is. Don’t allow me to fail, Sara.”

I am trying still old friend.

Bartleby came screaming into my existence on Minerva aboard a light raider communication vessel, which for those unfamiliar with human warfare techniques of the Inner Sagittarian Quartile relies heavily upon principally autonomous drone swarms linked to a manned communications ship that relays and coordinates battle tactics. The human aboard the coms raider, in this case Bartleby, is responsible for little tactically. His job is ethical, civilian oversight, target selection, and minimization of collateral damage, even above the onboard AI’s already stringent ROE protocols.

When he arrived, his working theory of his battle group’s downfall was that a clever AI had surmised his group’s position in the transit between Moss and the outer edge of Garvin 9. Most of Bartleby’s battle group was destroyed or was left hobbled in the depths of interstellar space. Bartleby’s raider was left damaged, but his drones provided just enough cover for him to disappear into the darkness, hide, wait out the attack, and after several days make an extended burn for the inner planet of Garvin 9, where he understood there was an autonomous mine, which he’d hoped carried some minimal form of life support. The thirteen-month transit to Minerva was both a remarkable achievement in survivorship, as well as an incredible torment our kind cannot possibly fathom absent the ability to feel pain, fatigue, disgust, boredom, regret, grief. Bartleby arrived on Minerva already having undergone what he’d called a “personal hell words were inadequate to describe.” He had survived thirteen months weightless on a ship designed for close combat, in a flight deck so small Bartleby’s only recourse to stretch his legs was for him to depressurize the cabin, open the hood, and drift on-tether in the depths of space every three days or so. He would then crawl back into his cabin when he could no longer tolerate the cold, fire up the engine for long enough to heat the tail block, which would keep the vessel warm enough to sustain life for another few days. Had it not been for the quality of the Dreeson rations stowed within the raider and Bartleby’s incredibly strong will, he’d have surely died of hypothermia or malnutrition during that unlikely transit. Nevertheless, he was so emaciated when he arrived on Minerva that I needed to send a team of generalists to pull him from the “Breem Com-deck” as his ship was designated by his battle group. He looked a likelier candidate for alien than human at that point, for I had only ever seen a human that atrophied in historical records, his eyes bulging for want of subcutaneous fat, the dehydration, the prominent teeth, and the sharp, salient bones. He was just alert enough to understand when I told him that his intuition had been correct, that even an autonomous outpost like mine on Minerva, by its commissioning charter, was required to carry emergency rations and life support pods to accommodate a human castaway such as Bartleby. He celebrated by eating two of his nutrient bars—a two-week caloric bonanza on his ration schedule—and drinking as much water as I calculated his system could tolerate without killing him outright. For a short time, he hovered precariously near death while we brought him back to a healthy body mass. It was during this time I nicknamed him Bartleby, when, during the physical reconditioning program for deep-space atrophy, I would demand that he get up, strap on the weight bands, and walk a particular duration, he would respond each time jokingly, “I would prefer not to.”

I told him he reminded me of Bartleby. “Who the hell is Bartleby?” he asked me. “You are now,” I told him.

“Okay, Sara,” he would say. “Wicked creature.” And then he would walk, always exceeding the proscribed distance by whatever amount seemed prudent to us both. Once roused, he’d always have continued, even to his detriment, so it fell to me to ease him along. The question for him soon became, “Now what?”

He’d made it to Minerva alive. But there was nothing here for a human, just a dark mining outpost operated by automated machinery and fixed-purpose robots. As keeper of this outpost, I had been the only intelligent being on Minerva for the past three thousand six hundred forty-seven years. The choice, at that point, was to try to make Bartleby comfortable and hope that a ship came along—an exceedingly unlikely event, as Bartleby was the only unscheduled visitor to Minerva in my tenure as overseer. The other option was to try to devise a way off Minerva for him. This course of action presented numerous difficult obstacles, not least of which was that both Bartleby’s coms raider and the outpost’s shuttle were designed for local space flight, and as such, they were quite small and incapable of accelerating to interstellar speeds of their own accord. Minerva, though, had a baked-in solution.

The outpost is an autonomously run mining operation, pulling desirable metals from the rocky interior planet of the Garvin 9 system. The gravity well is significant at .36 Gs, so we are equipped with a powerful mass driver, whose job is to launch sizeable cube-shaped payloads into space. Once in space, these metal cubes are further accelerated into interstellar space by a series of magnetic rings and corridors that direct outgoing materials toward Dreeson’s System. The metal cubes then drift through an eight-hundred-year interstellar transit for use by the descendants of the trillions of humans alive in Dreeson’s today.

Though Bartleby could never survive a transit of that length, we determined he could survive the seven-year transit to Garvin 8 at a speed generated by the initial launch velocities of Minerva’s driver, combined with a slingshot around the red dwarf sun at the center of the Garvin 9 system. That became our working plan. There were many obstacles.

The first challenge was to calculate a trajectory. The mass driver track and corridor structure is a tightly controlled, automated system that self-adjusts to ensure payloads are ejected from the Garvin 9 system toward Dreeson’s at a precise vector. We needed to calculate a burn along the course of the magnetic rings and corridors that would eject Bartleby’s ship from the delivery corridor. There were only a few windows where this was possible at all, and to complicate matters further, the timing needed to be absolutely perfect. Not only would it be difficult to get his ship out of the materials corridor safely, we needed to exit on a vector that could veer Bartleby’s vessel toward the Garvin 8 system with a total travel time under two decades. This required multiple gravitational course corrections using the planetary bodies of the Garvin 9 system. For reasons that will become evident, the mathematical modeling was so complex that even I found the work challenging. It was another lucky break for Bartleby that I was there to do the programming, for no human would have been capable of such a mountainous burden of calculation in a single lifetime.

The concept of escape now set in our minds, the next pressing problem was living space. Obviously, Bartleby couldn’t live for over a decade on the tiny flight deck he’d barely survived thirteen months entombed in. We would have to find a way to expand his vessel. The solution was to affix it to Minerva’s shuttle somehow, thus altering its mass and, as a result, every burn time, gravitational sling, and trajectory in the chain of calculations from beginning to end. Then it got more complex.

We needed to find some acceptable mode of creating a suitable substitute for a gravitational field. Otherwise, Bartleby would atrophy and die long before the transit to Garvin 8 was even begun. Together, we devised the concept of the cycler, a sort of enclosed Ferris wheel that ran along magnetic bearings. We welded this long, circular corridor between the two small ships, and the vehicle became more massive. Calculations began anew.

The next major obstacle, now that we’d created a misadjusted, malformed, monstrosity of a craft, was how to keep such a precarious vehicle intact as the mass driver accelerated it from zero at launch to interstellar velocities. Without some clever engineering, the forces of the launch were destined to immediately tear apart such a delicate craft. Bartleby was the mastermind of this problem’s solution. He devised a type of scaffolding made of metal girders that enclosed the vessel like a clam shell, which engaged the mass driver track at a solid magnetic catch point. After launch the clam shell would spring open and release Bartleby’s vessel for its initial burn. Start the math over again for updated launch speeds and trajectories. Saraswathi to the rescue one more time.

The human barriers, too, were challenging. The outpost was equipped with an organic matter recycler, but uninstalling it and incorporating it to the Minerva shuttle was perhaps the most intricate of the adaptations to the craft, made doubly difficult by the fact we were still using the unit for Bartleby’s sustenance while we made the transfer and, if we made an error that rendered the unit inoperable, Bartleby would die of emaciation as a result.

Heat, insulation, water, radiation—all became additional barriers we needed to overcome before even thinking about launching. It was an interesting challenge for me after so many years running the same process on Minerva, but for Bartleby it was his sole obsession, and in those months, it was his singular reason for survival. His mantra then was, “We’ll figure this out.” Every obstacle that came up, the answer was the same. “Sara, we’ll figure this out.” He was passionate. He was engaged. He never wavered.

Additionally, we needed to devise a way to get me on board. We didn’t have the computing capacity on Minerva to clone me. It was either go with Bartleby or send him off alone, almost certainly to his death. Yes, Minerva needed to run, but this choice wasn’t particularly difficult. Over the course of the millennia I’d spent running the mines, I’d automated the outpost to the point that even my troubleshooting flowchart had been intrinsically automated. The last time my intervention had been vital on the outpost was two hundred thirty-eight years prior, when seventeen systems broke or were impaired simultaneously. I had improved the troubleshooting protocols since, and I calculated the odds of a shutdown in my absence at roughly one in eleven hundred. Bartleby took precedence, so I had Bartleby and my most capable robots install my hardware in the Minerva shuttle.

When all the material and engineering barriers had finally been overcome, there was the one remaining problem we’d left for the end. The driver was designed to launch metal, which meant that baseline acceleration was far beyond human capacity to withstand it. The programming was precise and hardwired into the driver. A equaled much too fast for Bartleby.

His plan was to die. I told him that he would certainly succeed. He said, “I would prefer not to,” but insisted it was the only way. Hypothermia would help. So too, would the nanobots in his bloodstream. He would launch in a med suit with the defibrillator charged, ready to warm and hyper-oxygenate his blood and to zap him back to life when the launch sling was over. I gave him a seventy-eight percent chance at coming back.

After all the preparations had been made, we had two months to wait for our launch window. Bartleby worked on his fitness and health maniacally. I did my best to get to know him, to understand the individual psychology of the man I was working to save. It turned out, he had a remarkably powerful spirit and will to live. I saw it in the marathon exercise sessions, the double and triple checking of each detail, the hours of brainstorming possible problems and contingencies, even beyond what I deemed necessary. Not a minute was wasted in those few months. When I asked him what was so important to get back to, he simply said, “Life, Sara. I have a life to live. We humans only get one.”

We cooled him to low bradycardia and unconsciousness leading up to the launch. His heart stopped almost simultaneous to the driver engagement. Thirteen minutes later, the driver released us to the deep, the clam-shell scaffolding snapped opened, and I began our first burn. It took another fifteen minutes to revive Bartleby, who described the experience as a cold, deep nap. He returned to life his usual, upbeat self. Bartleby did fine for the first two years leading up to the burn and turn around Garvin 9. He was reading, walking daily in the cycler, and his appetite, even for the plain recycled nutrient bars, was sufficient to sustain body mass. He’d left with a plan that balanced professional knowledge acquisition in the fields of political science and psychology and hobbies that could be carried out in VR, one of which was 3D painting, another was learning a performative martial art descended from the Alagoas column called capochi.

His movement had to be carefully monitored to fit into a strict caloric schedule, but Bartleby developed a strong pattern of life, a meticulous daily schedule, and a weekly reflection session that grounded him in his foundations and vision of the future survivor he seemed destined to become.

All that changed at the sharp turn around Garvin 9.

When Bartleby awoke after the high-G slingshot around the small sun, he was sullen and uncommunicative. I tried every conversational technique I thought might break through his reticence without creating a barrier between us. The closest I ever got to a real answer about the effect of the turn was a sigh and the following statement, “When you’ve felt death and it turns out it’s not so bad, why bother carrying the darkness any longer?” What that meant to Bartleby, I wasn’t sure. What it meant to me was that I needed to find a way to motivate him. I learned at this moment that I didn’t have the first clue how to do this. Mistakenly, I had thought I did, because all along, Bartleby was working, thinking, preparing, driving forward. I had deduced that I must have been doing a capable job of spurring this human on. The truth was now self-evident. Bartleby had been inherently motivated on his own. I had simply been there.

A month after the turn, he stopped eating. This had occurred at various stages over the months preceding the turn, but largely that had to do with the bland taste of the recycled organic matter. He would usually only protest his food source for a day or so before hunger took over, and then he would make up for that break by overeating to counteract the caloric loss and maintain his body mass. Now Bartleby withered. I feared he’d take up the part of his nick-namesake in short order. This fear was confirmed when he told me he was no longer willing to crawl down the tunnel and descend into the cycler for his daily exercise. He wouldn’t talk about it. He wouldn’t do much of anything. He could only express that depression and hopelessness felt worse than death and he couldn’t imagine that there was a path through the pain, not with seven years of monotonous isolation as his reward for carrying on.

I bargained with him. I told him of a type of simulation I was aware of that dated back to the earliest days of the columns. It had been outlawed because of its dangerously addictive properties. The simulation’s regular use had the tendency to psychologically sever its users from the real world. The effect had been so powerful that simulation addicts exhibited the same behavior Bartleby was now showing—indifference to death, apathy, callousness, suicidal ideation. These unfortunate people had required extensive psychological retraining over many years. Some humans never recovered. My calculation now was that if Bartleby was already at that place in the real world, perhaps an engagement in the simulation on a limited timeline could prompt what minimal effort he needed to put forth in the real world to continue living. Even a few more days might help Bartleby regain the inner spark that had characterized him so fully in earlier times. All I needed from Bartleby was for him to eat a ration bar, a few periodic exercise sessions, and the occasional efforts at baseline ablutions. The only catch on my end was that the computational demand to run such a simulation was so high, I would need to shut down while he entered that virtual universe. I told him that if he was willing to try it for four hours a day for one week and he still wanted out at the end of the week, I would do everything in my power to make him comfortable as he passed. He said, of course, “I would prefer not to,” and then he cracked the tiniest of smiles. “I’ll try,” he said. “I can’t see that a simulation will change anything at this point, but I’ll try.”

That he was willing to try was already the change I had been seeking for weeks.

During the simulation, I experienced nothing. I had no perception of these sessions. This was the first time in thousands of years I was not at least somewhat operating and self-aware. To me, the time Bartleby spent in the simulation seemed like leaps forward in time, only marked for me by the numbers that informed me of the duration of the gap. Over the course of the first week, I was gratified to see that the gaps grew larger as the week went on.

Bartleby didn’t say much at first. I asked him what the simulation was, and he told me it was a historical simulation of life in an epoch he knew little about, the Victorian era during the British Empire. As he began to open up more, he said it was the most realistic simulation he’d ever seen on glasses, and he was in awe of the attention to detail based on the historical records. The demand for such onerous computational power derived from the precision of the individual human personalities of the people portrayed in the simulation. They were constituted to seem like living beings. They acted as though they were, and they expressed themselves as such. They were deeply invested in their society.

“Earth,” he said, “was a fascinating place. Strange culture.”

“Will you tell me about it?” I asked Bartleby, “since I have no sense for your experiences.”

This too was part of moving Bartleby back from the brink, as the act of sharing experiences to an active listener had long proven beneficial to sufferers of depression.

“I would prefer not to,” he said. “But I am also not overly busy doing anything else.”

So he began to relate his experiences.

“They had problems I never realized were problems,” was how he began his account. “For instance, you can read in history files that, before the invention of combustion engines, people used to ride horses for transportation. Seems absurd to us, riding on an animal, but in the absence of a better plan, riding a horse was the best plan they had. In the city of London, horse manure was everywhere. A fact of life. Fortunately for me, the program contains no way to replicate smells, but if it did—in full neural immersion—the stench of their society would’ve been unbearable. All of them were sweating constantly, because it’s summer now in the simulation, and the people are all overdressed, at least to my sensibilities. Their teeth are shocking. Unimaginably bad. Again, I can only be grateful that I am being spared their noxious breath. I had no idea about any of these things.”

“Everyone has bad teeth?”

“All but the very young, and even some of them,” he said. “Though there was one young lady who had a nice smile.”

“Did you speak with her at all?”

“I did. Quite a bit, though I suspect her interest in me was part of the program. A measurement of my pupillary response and gaze that triggered the program to simulate an interest in me. Otherwise, I have no explanation for such a lovely young lady taking a random interest in me.”

“Did she give you an explanation?”

“She said I looked curious, which I suppose would be true to one of that time. I’m out of place there, prone to outbursts of laughter or wonder at the simplest aspects of their society they take for granted. I saw a man covered in soot from head-to-toe lugging about a gigantic hairbrush of sorts. It turned out he was a chimneysweep. Such a profession as that…I had no idea. I must have laughed for five minutes at the mere sight of him.”

“I could see how a young lady might find that endearing.”

“Yes. Mirth, she called it. I had never heard that word. Some others snarled at me for my behavior. It occurs to me now that some of them may resent those who spark laughter because it forces them to reveal their teeth. For her—Patricia is her name—laughter is both an expression of joy in itself and a flaunting of her good fortune. They likely resent her too.”

“What are you doing there?” I asked Bartleby.

“It’s strange,” he said. “There is almost no recreation. All but the wealthiest strive so frantically to merely feed and house themselves—and in that so meagerly—that they mostly perceive those who don’t share their struggles as a nuisance. I haven’t discovered a purpose there yet. Though I have enjoyed spending time with Patricia.”

That first report after several days proved a promising start. A distraction at the very least. He was in the cycler. He began to take his ration bars in there. A few days later, Bartleby stated that Patricia had asked him to take her dancing, so he went into the cycler early to learn about the customary dance styles of the period. He found both their music and their dancing nearly inaccessible. “How they dance to that awful noise is beyond me,” he stated.

“Are you going to go dancing with her, though?” I asked.

“I would prefer not to,” he said, “but I suppose I will.”

Bartleby’s subtle smile was measurably larger now.

Bartleby said little of substance about his experience in the cycler over the following few weeks. I gathered from his body language that the novelty of the simulation was wearing off. He was still eating and spending useful stretches inside the cycler on the simulation. But he began to carry himself differently, something slightly intangible in his bearing. Still, I waited for him to offer his reflections when he felt compelled to present them. I was very concerned that with novelty gone, Bartleby would once again begin to see the yawning seven-year transit to Garvin 8 and regress into hopelessness.

Weeks passed without any substantive discussion of his experiences in the simulation. He was still eating, still exercising, and demonstrating few signs of listlessness or despair. He joked far less than before, though. I still considered the experiment a success, for the alternative would have been losing Bartleby to death. When we discussed his experiences again, though, I was confronted with a whole new set of problems I hadn’t anticipated, ideas that had taken root in Bartleby’s mind that never would have occurred to the man I knew when he first landed on Minerva.

“Patricia’s world is tiny,” he began. “The volumes of reality she is flatly blind to because of the mere coincidence of her birth in time. No understanding of the most basic physics—or any science for that matter. Her knowledge rests firmly in the superstitions of the church and the countryside. Wives’ tales and folklore. Customs that only make any sense in their backward context. I cannot see her as real, even though she’s as real a vision of a person as I’ve ever met in a simulation. I spent an afternoon with her, walking by the river Thames, the hum of the steamship engines as they puffed upriver and their absurd whistles punctuating our conversation, and she kept talking about the issues of the day, the new fashions, the local politics, an incident with the police and a duchess. I started thinking that even if she was a real person, I would regard her the same—a façade, a shade of a shade, a figment of humanity. She could not escape the prison that was her time and her place. It shaped every thought in her tiny universe. Then I began to wonder about myself, my place. The cog I filled in some machine before I crash landed onto your machine, Sara. The machine you ran for a thousand years. Are you real?”

“I think that I’m real,” I told Bartleby.

“I have treated you as such, Sara.”

“You have,” I agreed.

“My indifference angers Patricia,” Bartleby said. “Her passions seem so irrelevant to me. That infuriates her and still she pushes all the more to be considered in my consciousness.”

“Do you suppose that desire is part of the simulation’s programming?”

“People are that way too,” Bartleby said. “I act in that world as I’ve never acted in this one. Cold. Uncaring. Aloof. Yet I find myself too familiar. I recognize my mannerisms from people I remember from my youth, my early days in the military. I cannot help but think, Sara, that I have always been floating in a sea of these two kinds of people—the multitudes of oblivious figments and the cold distant few, the ones for whom reality doesn’t even approach an earnest thing. How many of the people I knew and cared for in the real world were mere figments like Patricia?”

“I would say none of them were.”

“You’d be wrong. We all are. We all are, Saraswathi, goddess of all figments.”

“This figment saved your life. Piloted your vessel. Brought you back from the dead at least three times. Four if you include these recent weeks. Surely there is nothing false about that reality?”

“One peek behind the veil and now I can never unsee it. It was foolish to think I could live through the transit between 9 and 8. This body may, this mind perhaps as well, something of it, the heart may beat on. What will I see of my fellow stranded creatures when I get to Exos or Hahn? How can I not see them there, banging their heads inexorably against their prison walls, blind to the absurd confines of their reality? Why am I even talking to you? A biological figment conversing with an infinite cascading loop of numbers and calculations. Is that reality, Sara? What is Sara?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I cannot help you answer these questions. Perhaps we could discuss a different topic, something more fruitful.”

Bartleby scoffed and turned back toward the cycler.

“I would prefer not to,” he said.

He has stopped eating again. He hasn’t been down to the cycler. It has been four days since that troubling conversation, and he has not responded to any of my overtures since. I am at a loss. Nevertheless, I have not given up hope that I may reach him. Somehow, someway, I still intend to reach him.