Central Station

by Lavie Tidhar

  It hesitated again. Robots didn’t dream, not as such. And the thrust of the argument was becoming positively Buddhist. R. Patch-It had often contemplated reincarnation. Many digitals were practicing Buddhists. The digital being born in the Breeding Grounds as a piece of specialised I-loop responsible for animating a coffee maker could, in its next cycle, become a mind calculating the diffusion of distant nebulas, or a submarine shuttle riding to and from the underwater cities of the humans, or it could even transcend, become a true Other, disembodied, constantly mutating and changing, seeking that which was truth, and therefore beautiful, in the irreal.

  But robots seldom changed, R. Brother Patch-It thought, a little sadly. Like humans, they merely became more themselves.

  “We dream a consensus of a reality,” it said now. It coughed again. It had a range of carefully selected coughs. “Imagine the world is a vast network, all living things are nodes connected together by delicate threads. Without the network we would each be alone, isolated nodes, pinpricks of light in a vast intergalactic darkness. The Way of Robot is the way of seeking to be Joined with all things. It is not an easy road. Often, it is a lonely road. The living and the ur-living both make reality. Let me guide you, now . . .”

  R. Brother Patch-It lowered its head and the congregation did likewise, the humans and the digitals who followed. “Our maker who art in the zero point field, hallowed be thy nine billion names . . .”

  The congregation murmured after the robo-priest. Then, one by one, they lined up to receive the sacrament. The digital wafer contained high-encryption Crucifixation routines. The humans put it on their tongues, where it slowly melted and was absorbed into the blood-stream and into the biological-nodal interface. The digitals received it directly. For a short moment, the small congregation of this Church of Robot node was truly Joined, forming one I-loop, agreeing on a consensus reality; however short-lived.

  The bris went well, R. Patch-It felt. It was the youngest Chong boy, Levi. R. Patch-It had known the Chongs for generations, from Zhong Weiwei, the founder of the family, down to all the cousins and nephews and nieces and aunts that spread all around Central Station. The child’s grandfather, Vlad, sat in the seat of honour, the sandak, or godfather, to the child. The old man held the baby, but his face was blank, unseeing. A sickness of memory afflicted Vlad Chong. R. Patch-It worried for him.

  But this was a time for joy. Carefully, the robot separated the foreskin from the infant’s penis with his special knife, the izmel, while making the first blessing. Then it performed the pria, the revealing of the infant’s glans by separating the inner preputial epithelium, again with the knife. The proud father made the second and third blessings. Then, watched by the attendant audience in the small synagogue, the robot performed the metzitza ba’peh, sucking at the wound until drawing blood.

  The baby was crying. Carefully pouring the wine for blessing into its cup, which the robot held in its right hand, he announced the child’s name—Levi Chong—and the name of his father, Elad. The robot drank from the wine. The child was now, by the ancient laws, a Jew. At last, R. Brother Patch-It dipped a metal finger in the wine and put it into the infant’s mouth. The boy suckled on the finger and stopped crying. Everyone cheered. Ancient Missus Chong the Elder, cyborged but sharp, cried saltwater tears.

  The ceremony ending at last, the baby admired by its relatives, the crowd moved to the next room for the breakfast spread. Pastries and breads, shakshuka—fried eggs over a thick, slowly cooked tomato and capsicum sauce—coffee from a samovar, a cheese platter, burkeas pastries filled with cheese or potatoes or mushrooms, omelettes, jams—hungry Chongs swarming over the breakfast buffet as though starved beyond belief. The robot moved amongst the family and friends, shaking hands, chatting—it held a cup of black coffee, which it sipped from time to time.

  R. Patch-It stopped a moment before a man who looked familiar. He had the Chong look, but for a moment the robot could not place him. The man seemed quiet, comfortable in his surroundings, but there was something shy, perhaps reserved, about him, too. He stood next to a woman the robo-priest knew well: Mama Jones, and her boy, Kranki.

  “Miriam,” R. Patch-It said to the woman. “It is lovely to see you, as always.”

  “You, too, R. Patch-It,” she said, smiling.

  They knew each other of old. The robot turned to look downwards. The boy’s hacked eyes stared at him, a mischievous smile turning the corners of his mouth. “Hello, Kranki,” R. Patch-It said. The boy made the robot feel clumsy, somehow. He unsettled R. Patch-It.

  “Hey, tin man,” the boy said.

  Miriam, shocked, said, “Kranki!”

  “It’s all right,” the robot said. He noticed the Chong man beside Miriam couldn’t quite hide a smile. “How are you, Kranki? Do you remember me?”

  The robo-priest had been the moyel in Kranki’s own bris, of course. The boy said, “I went to the beach yesterday with Ismail. We caught a fish!” He made a shape with his hands. “It was this big.”

  Miriam put her hand on the boy’s head. The robo-priest was about to speak when the boy said, “Let me show you!” His small hand went to the robo-priest’s own metal one, trustingly. The robot reached out automatically—

  The boy’s pointing finger touched the metal of the robot’s palm, lightly.

  What is the real?

  The words whispered in the robot’s brain. Billions of cycles, uncounted millions of branches on a quantum binary tree, shifting and merging, an aristocratic small-world network like a planet or a human brain, billions of disparate elements making up a single, precious I-loop, an illusion of being.

  What is real?

  The words whispered in the robot’s old brain, auto-translated into a dozen languages, chief amongst them Hebrew and Asteroid Pidgin: Ma amiti? Wanem ia i tru?

  The images swarmed through the robot’s mind, a high-level onslaught of data in which a single image permeated: the boy, Kranki, and a seeming twin, a boy whose eyes were a green Bose trademark for Kranki’s Armani blue. The two boys at the Jaffa beach, walking on water, fishing with their small hands, reaching into the clear blue of the Mediterranean Sea. . . .

  Which exploded into stars, galaxies swirling, planets orbiting yellow suns like baleful eyes, vast black-hulled spaceships moving like specks of dust amidst the planets, the view focuses, shifts, rings spinning in the space beyond Titan, killer drones fighting soundlessly in the Galilean Republics, intelligent mines tracking in orbit around Callisto, in the space beyond beyond, the song of spiders as they seed the Oort cloud with new nodes, on Dragon’s World, a frozen moon off Pluto, the dragon’s millions of bodies moving in the tunnels on their mysterious rounds, the whole ice-moon a vast extensive ant warren—

  Wanem ia i tru?

  On Mars, in Tong Yun City, at a wooded shrine under the great dome, the poet Bashō translating Shakespeare into Pidgin:

  Blong stap o no blong stap

  Hemi wan gudfala kwesjen ia

  And across space, away from moving Mars and its twin moons burning with human-made lights, across solwota blong spes, images dancing, solwota blong wori, the sea of worry and these slings and bunaro of outrageous fortune—

  On the Earth’s moon the vast terraforming spiders moved, dull silver metal silent, two boys standing on the surface, helmetless, laughing, as at a secret joke shared, with their hands signing:

  Wanem ia i ril?

  R. Patch-It was shocked out of the data-storm. It stood there, looking at the boy, the storm slowly receding. “Brother Patch-It?” Miriam Jones said. “Are you feeling all right?”

  The I-loop tagged R. Patch-It came back to life, or online, or into being. “I am a robot,” it said. “I seldom get sick.”

  Mama Jones smiled, politely. The man beside her said, “I don’t know if you remember me, Brother.” He extended his hand for a shake. “Boris,” he said, seeming suddenly embarrassed. “Boris Chong.”

  R. Patch-It looked at him. “ Boris Chong?” it said—marvelled. Pe
rfect images in its recall—a shy boy, tall, gangly, with a smile, he always had a smile, quiet child, before that the baby, R. Patch-It had been the moyel at that bris, too—“But you had left, it was—”

  The robot stopped, it could recite it to the day, the hour, the minute, had it wanted to. How had it not recognised him? But Boris had left a boy, returned a man, the Up and Out changed him, the robot saw.

  R. Patch-It itself had been to space, of course. Once, a century past, it had undertaken pilgrimage, the robot’s hajj, to Mars, to Tong Yun City, to the Level Three Concourse deep under the Martian sands, where the greatest of all multifaith bazaars lies, there to meet the Robo-Pope itself, in the robot’s Vatican. It had been a glorious occasion! Hundreds of robots, some former battle drones, some scrap-heap refugees, all congregating together, from every habitable moon and planet they came, from Polyport on Titan and from the deserts of the Martian kibbutzim; from Lunar Port and Moscow, Newer Delhi to the Baha’i rings in orbit around Saturn. And one from Central Station. Hajji R. Patch-It, ordained in that great communion of physicality and the digital.

  Then, too, at that meeting, some had chosen to go farther still. To accompany the Exodus ships, on their slow, one-way journeys out of the solar system. And some had chosen to remain, and in the depths of Mars to fashion new of their kind, to create children . . .

  Children!

  Perhaps it all came back to that, R. Patch-It thought, the data-surge fading, the image of these two Central Station boys on the moon, Kranki and his friend.

  Children. The robot had circumcised hundreds of children, but never had one of its own.

  “Brother?”

  The human’s voice brought it back to itself. “Boris Chong,” the robot said, marvelling. “Where have you been all these years?”

  The man shrugged. His hand, the robot noticed, went to Miriam’s, the tips of his fingers touching hers. R. Patch-It remembered them, together, the boy and the girl they had been. Love made humans shine, as though they were metal filaments heated by an electrical current.

  The human said, “I went to Mars, the Belt, I . . . I came back recently. My father—”

  Yes, R. Patch-It wanted to say. Vlad Chong sat across the room, vacant eyes staring into space. Some humans suffered a gradual loss of memory, but for Vlad, the robot thought, it was the other way around. Vlad’s mind was literally swarming with memory, perfect and enduring like diamond, memories stored since Weiwei’s time. Vladimir Chong could not see, for his gaze was turned, terribly, inside himself.

  The robot nodded, shook Boris’s hand, touched Miriam lightly on the shoulder. The boy, Kranki, had gone to play with the other kids. Boris had worked in the birthing clinics, R. Patch-It remembered. What manner of children had they made there, hacked out of rogue genomes and stolen code?

  The robot felt—if robots could be said to feel, it thought— weary. Its body was running at less than optimum capacity. Its body was old, patched, the old parts were hard to come by, no one had manufactured robots in decades. R. Patch-It wanted to simply plug itself into a current, like a human wire-head at a Louis Wu Emporium. The humans had found a way to stimulate the brain’s pleasure centres with a low current of electricity. Sometimes R. Patch-It longed for Body, for sensation. The humans were sensation-addicts.

  “Brother?”

  The coffee had turned cold in the cup. R. Patch-It deposited it on a table and went to take another. Coffee was energy, a robot could convert food and drink into energy as efficiently as any human. But could it derive pleasure from it?

  Pleasure was a difficult and bewildering concept. R. Patch-It thought it might make it the subject of next week’s sermon.

  “Brother?”

  The voice came again and this time it registered. R. Patch-It turned. The two smiling men, holding hands, stood before him. “Yan,” R. Patch-It said. “Youssou!”

  They, too, made a handsome couple, he thought. Yan was a Chong; Youssou was of the Joneses of Central Station. “Is it official?” R. Patch-It said.

  The two men beamed even more. “It is,” Youssou said.

  “We had a fight—” Yan said—shy, proud. So much like his cousin Boris, R. Patch-It thought.

  “He was going to do it that night—” from Youssou.

  “I had it all ready. We were at the Grand Lounge—”

  “I wasn’t ready,” Youssou said. “I didn’t think I was ready.”

  “He walked away, we didn’t speak for a month. But. . . .”

  “I missed him.” They both said it together, then laughed.

  “Mazal tov!” the robot said. It clasped them on the arms. So much love, both young and old, in that room. It must be spring again, R. Patch-It thought. It almost hadn’t noticed. Spring had that effect on humans.

  “We made up, I couldn’t sleep, I was living in the adaptoplant tenements,” Youssou said.

  “I was sleeping in the lab,” Yan said. “I was working all the time.”

  “We got together, and—”

  “Mazal tov,” the robot said again.

  Yan said, “Brother. We wanted to ask you something.”

  “Anything,” R. Patch-It said. Meaning it.

  “We’d like you to marry us,” Youssou said.

  They both looked at him, expectantly. The robot looked at them both. “I would be honoured,” R. Patch-It said.

  Weddings it had officiated over before. Weddings and circumcisions, and funerals, too. A robot, R. Patch-It thought, more than anything a robot needed purpose. Shaking hands all around, metal against flesh. “Thank you, Brother!” Relatives gathering around to congratulate the young couple.

  “Brother Patch-It,” a voice said. It was Missus Chong the Elder, coming over. They looked at each other. She was more than half-machine. She smiled. “It will be an honour for my family to have you officiate,” she said.

  The ceremony would be conducted in the manner of the Church of Robot. Central Station was an amalgamation of faiths. The Jewish Chongs were a mix of Chinese and Israeli Jew; the Chows were Roman Catholic; the Joneses were, well, he wasn’t sure: though Miriam Jones could often be found at the shrine for St. Cohen of the Others.

  “Thank you,” the robot said. “Thank you for asking me.”

  Could a robot feel? If you pricked a robot, it did not bleed. But if it felt, then it felt, right then—overwhelmed, it thought. Tired, elated—suddenly the room full of humans felt oppressive, it needed space, solitude, time to withdraw from the physicality. Some of the robots left the Church, they abandoned physicality entire, went into the digitality, incorporeality, the realm of Others. Some went on the Exodus ships, some transformed, reincarnated themselves into humbler vessels, one could sometimes encounter an ancient coffee maker that had once been a robot, seeking a different path to enlightenment in service.

  “Brother?”

  “Please, Missus Chong,” the robot said. “I must retire.”

  She looked at him and her eyes were inhuman, understanding. One day Missus Chong the Elder would shed the last of her humanity and become a seeker like itself. It had hopes for Missus Chong, she was the most promising of Brother Patch-It’s novices.

  She nodded, a small, barely perceptible gesture. The robopriest made its way out of the room. It was still uncertain as to what happened with the boy, Kranki. The boy was not entirely human, it realised. Perhaps, somehow, he was part-Other: and the mystery of it puzzled R. Patch-It.

  The robot made its way to the elevators and rose to Level Four where, for countless years, it had rented small accommodation for itself. Service tunnels, storage lockers, corridors leading ever deeper into the station, where warehouses vast beyond recall sat and where the station’s heart beat a steady rhythm—the robot felt it in its joints.

  R. Patch-It opened the door to his own private space: it was a small, dark closet, one in a row of identical such habitats. Here it could truly be alone.

  It was home.

  It shut itself inside and opened its mind to the Conversat
ion, the endless wash of talk moving between worlds, and the words floated again in its mind, unanswered: Wanem ia i tru?

  Brother R. Patch-It floated through space, watching multiple feeds through multiple nodes. A child was born on a Martian kibbutz, in the space around Io an ancient mine exploded itself, committing suicide, on Titan a muezzin was calling the faithful to prayer. Space was full of questions, life was a sentence always ending in an ellipsis or a question mark. You couldn’t answer everything. You could only believe there were answers at all.

  To be a robot, you needed faith, R. Patch-It thought.

  To be a human, too.

  SEVEN: Robotnik

  Motl needed faith. He needed it bad. How had he come to be at Central Station? Motl glanced around him. His body itched, one arm was rusted and the joints squeaked when he moved it. He needed vodka, to power himself, and he needed oil, to take care of the rust in the joints, but most of all, what he needed was religion. He needed a pill, something to ease back the pain. . . .

  Earlier, he had met Isobel again, under the eaves. It had been dark and quiet there. They had. . . .

  He knew she loved him.

  Love was dangerous. Love was a dark drug and it was addictive and, for a long time, forbidden to him. He was, paradoxically, both all past and without a past. Once he had a name, a body. Once he was alive.

  “I love you.”

  “I . . . I too.”

  That one word, missing. Her body was against his. She was warm, human. She smelled of rice vinegar and soy and garlic, of the sweaty faux-leather of an immersion pod, of a perfume he couldn’t put a name to, of pheromones and hormones and salt. She looked up, into his eyes. “I’m old,” he said.

  “I don’t care!”

  Fiercely. Protectively. It made him feel strange inside. Vulnerable. Ancient programming kicked in, trying to stop it. Trying to flood his body with hormone suppressants, though the equipment had run dry long before. He was free now, to feel as he liked.