by Andrew Post
I zipped down over one staircase, unhooked, clack-thumped to the next, and zipped down those. I came to the room where the cauldron waited. Like every time I shoved aside the hanging plastic ribbons to go inside, I remembered the first time Dad and I found it . . .
* * *
It waited under plastic sheets, like something ready for an autopsy. The machine, wide as it was tall and housed in sturdy red fiberglass, took up a majority of the room’s floor space. A long serial number was painted down one side. It was cracked here and there, and a few parts looked newer than others. From the top of the cauldron, hoses ran in every direction, reminding me of our car’s distributor cap that Dad had pointed out to me during pre-A mechanics lessons. My job was mostly to hold the flashlight for him, but still, I learned a few things. Mostly swear words as Dad struggled to eke a few more miles out of our old minivan.
Set into its front was a long plastic cylinder with a tray inside running its length. A see-through cylinder was set horizontally into the machine’s face, almost like a big toothless smile. On the left was a second cylinder, this one just as long but set vertically. Inside it was a three-pronged clawlike apparatus, multilensed eyes set into the steel palm.
There was no control board for the machine, no keys or buttons or switches, just a series of yawningly empty USB ports. I remembered Dad pulling off bungee cords and a greasy plastic sheet falling from the machine. He treated it carefully, as if this weren’t some piece of equipment but a beached whale rapidly dying in the hot sun, something he had to protect and save. I noticed him running his gaze all over it with quiet reverence, and I imagined it was the same way Mom had looked at Dad’s collection of tapes and CDs way back when: in awe, mind busy like a shaken carbonated drink that could rupture with the slightest nudge.
I’d shifted on my crutches, which were half as extended as they were this night. Staring at Dad’s back, keeping my distance, I asked, “What is it?”
“I have no idea.” Dad knelt, grunting, and prodded one of the USB ports that looked more used than the others, the paint scraped away around the slot, revealing the metallic gleam underneath. “Got your tablet with you?”
I dug through my backpack, pushing aside my radio, books, and water bottle, and pulled out my Hello Kitty tablet. I’d added some red-tipped vampire fangs to her friendly white face. (Also, a mouth. Why does Hello Kitty have no mouth?)
Dad began plugging in cords to connect the tablet to the slumbering red machine.
The second the machine found the tablet and the two shook hands or sniffed each other’s butts or whatever computers do, the horizontal cylinder on the machine’s face flickered to life. Next, the vertical cylinder on its side did the same. The mechanical appendage arthritically flexed its lens hand open and closed a few times. Dad’s stare guided mine back to the larger, horizontal cylinder. With the inside now lit, we could see another multitude of arms—similar to the ones in the smaller cylinder—flailing around, like a spider being electrocuted. Each spindly metal arm ended in smaller lenses that circled the tray in the middle, as if seeking a sacrifice we were supposed to leave. Finding nothing, the arms went to rest, coiling and folding back up.
I let my opinion be known. “Weird.”
“No kidding.” Dad looked at the tablet screen. A new app was installing itself, a progress bar, crawling. He set the tablet down delicately on its edge so the screen was facing us and took a step back. It went from 1 to 2 percent after ten minutes of us staring at it.
“What do you think it is?” I asked, white knuckling my crutches. I didn’t like the low thrum the machine was now making. Was it going to explode? Eat us? Both?
“Beats the heck out of me. Maybe . . . they were studying the oil somehow, looking for stuff inside it? Like amoeba or something.”
“In oil?” I asked, doubtful. This thing didn’t belong here. We had gone to the central tower of the rig a few times just to see what was down there. It was scary, standing at the top of that deep, deep hole. The guide wires running down into the pitch-black shaft would stir in the wind sometimes and make these sounds like a Slinky stretched to its limit then strummed like a guitar string: bvvananng. Sometimes in the middle of the night it did that, the sound swelling and distorting down the shaft and back up again, finding my ears in bed, making me think of a trumpeting call to arms.
Dad shrugged. “Who knows? I read there’s those sea slug things that live in volcanic vents. So hot in there it’d turn a person into dust, but they seem perfectly content calling it home.”
“You didn’t read that, Dad. It was on Discovery Channel. I was there.”
He laughed, pulled me close. “Either way, don’t worry. I’m sure this old thing is just . . . like a lot of stuff here, forgotten old junk.”
I kept looking at the two cylinders, one standing and one lying down. It looked like if you put something in one, it might come out the other, changed. Like an incredibly convoluted way of making toast.
The progress bar went up to a whopping 3 percent. “Whatever it is, looks like we’ve got some time to come up with theories,” Dad said. “Let’s just leave this thing alone for the night and see what it tells us in the morning.”
We went back to the barracks side of the rig, Dad carrying me up the stairs. I was glad to be away from the machine’s weird humming. Even in bed, I felt like I could still hear it, echoing up through my spine and in my skull. Like it’d come with me, whatever it was trying to communicate. I didn’t like leaving my tablet down there with it. My books were all on it. I had no distraction from thinking it was somehow overwriting all my stuff or that the next time I opened an app, it’d shoot weird brain-controlling signals out at me or something.
After a fitful night’s rest, I came to breakfast the next morning and saw even though breakfast was Dad’s favorite, his spot at the table was empty. I didn’t want to raise any suspicion in Mom, so I fought the urge to wolf mine. I ate nonchalantly, washed my plate, and casually said I was going to get an early start on my chores. I could tell Darya was on to me, but she didn’t follow me out across the helipad and down into the rig’s east side.
I can’t really say why keeping this from my mother and sister felt so important, but it did. It was a secret Dad and I shared. Something we hadn’t had since he let me watch The Shining. Something just between him and me that Darya couldn’t butt into, didn’t know anything about. Just ours. Maybe she understood that and just let me have it. She was always around Mom, me with Dad. I never butted in when Darya and Mom were in deep conversation about, you know, older girl stuff. Maybe isolation on an oil rig was a good way to build mutual respect between sisters. Not that any parent should take that as a suggestion. Just saying.
“Well?” I asked. “What is it?”
Dad held up the tablet. I saw the words Flashcraft Industries in a lively, red font, the F and I jagged like lightning bolts. Below them were five on-screen buttons:
Scan
Harvest
Create Recipe
Input Recipe
Execute
“All right, great. But what does it do?”
Dad took a deep breath and got to his feet. “I think I remember reading something about these, but I never thought they’d actually made any available for people to buy.” He twisted the end of his beard. It was already knotted with half a dozen rats’ nests, evidence he’d been really doing some thinking this morning.
“Made what available for people to buy?” The question got me nowhere. “Dad, are you listening to me?”
He let go of his beard. “I think it’s a molecular assembler.”
I must’ve made a face.
“It takes raw elements and follows a schematic—or recipe, as Flashcraft Industries called it, I guess—and puts it together.” He picked up the tablet again. “It doesn’t say anything else. There are no options. There’s no menu besides this one. This might be just a prototype.” Nearly whispering, he added, “Which would be weird, seeing as how on the side of thi
s thing the serial number starts with a six.”
The floor was made up of a series of grates, the machine’s hoses and various wires running into the murk far below. The hum of a whole lot of electricity could be heard, and an ozone taste was in the air. Below was the tank full of what the cauldron had been skimming from the oil rig’s extraction. After considering the machine to be kind of like a parasite feeding off the arteries of its host, I thought about what lay beyond that, farther than the skim tank. Down through the water, down through the floor of Lake Superior, down the shaft miles and miles. My imagination gave me both Cthulhu and flesh-hungry mole people.
I shook the mental pictures away. “Do you think they were using it to pull up more than oil? You said something about elements, right? Mom was just going through geology with Darya and me the other day, and she said there’s all kinds of minerals and stuff way down there in the earth’s crust.”
Dad grinned. “I always knew you were a smart cookie, Cass, but holy crap. Wow. Seriously. I think I have to sit down for a second.” Now, when he held the tablet, it was with even more care, like how someone might cradle an egg found in an abandoned nest. What was going to hatch? It could be anything.
I looked at the machine. “If that’s what it is, what were they doing with it? Here, I mean.”
“Something they found down there must’ve been interesting to them.” Dad shrugged. “I guess they figured if they could drag it up and use this thing to put it together, then they’d find out.”
I’d learned oil and dinosaurs were related, with that connection between the two a bit nebulous. Still, the notion that one could flip this thing on, punch a few buttons, and the machine might pop out a T-Rex made my blood run cold.
“Dad, maybe we shouldn’t—”
“Let’s scan something,” Dad said, eyes wide.
Somehow, don’t ask me how, we had reversed roles. I knew one of us was supposed to be the voice of reason here, the grown-up, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t me. That Jiminy Cricket top hat didn’t feel right on me.
Dad was the incurably curious sort, though. Always had been. Doing what he did for a living—strapping on scuba gear, going underwater with diamond blade saws, well, it was dangerous work. I’d heard stories from Grandma—like the time he jumped off the roof with an umbrella, expecting to pull a Mary Poppins. So it was kind of sad to see how laid-back he’d reluctantly become after a few humdrum years on the rig. The thrill-seeking side of him visibly started to wilt. No big surprise. If the rig were an aquarium and our family were orcas, all of us would have that flopped-over dorsal fin for sure. It was good to see Dad excited about something for the first time in a long time. I just wished it hadn’t been this.
I knew there’d be no living with him if he didn’t get to mess with this thing. I had to hand it to him, his enthusiasm was infectious. And apparently once you contracted it, you lost control of your eyes. Before I knew it, I was looking around the room for something to feed to the machine.
* * *
I stared at the machine with Thadius’s canister growing heavy in my hand. All the years playing around with the machine, I had taught myself its ins and outs. I knew not only what it did but what it could do. Of course, before now, I had only harvested things and reassembled them. To make a copy of something, not just break it down and put it back together, you had to have the right raw materials.
We had figured this out when Dad and I had discovered a notebook magnetically fastened to the back of a filing cabinet. It detailed the original cauldron owner’s grand plan, what the previous resident trendoid had brought it here for. They were attempting to skim the oil for silt in an attempt to make diamonds. Clearly, they hadn’t done their homework; the machine couldn’t do that. All it could do was take the silt and arrange it into shapes like tightly packed sandcastles. I’m guessing that’s why it was abandoned. A get-rich-quick scheme that proved to be, like all the others, a get-poor-quick project. The notebook’s final line: Screw it. Either the A got them or they just sailed off and left the machine behind. I don’t know.
Having a canister was something new to me. I suspected it was something the scheming trendoid never knew about because I’d never seen one around the rig. For the longest time I’d studied the front of the cauldron, wondering what the four round holes were for. Now, back from my first trip to Duluth, I knew.
I fit the canister with the yellow check mark into one of the open holes. A few catches had to be snapped before the thing was held really snug, like those jars with hinge lids. Once those were thrown around the rim of the canister, not even a sledgehammer could’ve dislodged it.
I put in the flash drive next. On my tablet’s screen, the Flashcraft Industries logo faded out and a list of folders appeared tabbed with several names I immediately, and warmly, recognized. Gary, Itchy, Tails, Jake the Dog, Michelangelo.
I found the file tagged Squishy. I’d barely double-tapped it before the machine kicked to life. I jumped. I didn’t even have to hit execute or anything. I fought to get my welding goggles on. The horizontal cylinder was already filling with flashes of light, and the room was being pounded with that deafening clangclangclangclang.
Jamming in my earplugs, I saw through tinted lenses a progress bar on the tablet. It wasn’t even at 1 percent—the estimated completion time was seventy-two hours.
Inside the cylinder, the spidery arms slung this way and that with blurry speed and precision, puncturing the air with pricks of white as they reassembled something small, something roughly Pomeranian sized, molecule cluster by molecule cluster. I figured since Thadius had asked about Squishy and that was the name of the file, most likely I was being tested on how well I—or my machine—could make a Squishy doll.
After twenty minutes, its rough shape could be discerned if you knew what to look for. Spied through the blinding flashes, a head and arms, sort of. Stubby legs. Rudimentary outline, a silhouette taking form in wisps of suspended dots. It reminded me of those drawings in school you’d make with glue and then sprinkle on sparkles. Except here, it seemed the glue wasn’t so good and it was only sticking here and there. Getting better, though, minute by minute.
It struck me as odd that it would take so long to make a stuffed animal. Especially since when Dad and I broke down and rebuilt my own Squishy it only took a few minutes. Then I remembered back to when I wrote Santa requesting a stuffed Squishy that could talk and walk around on his own. I’d gotten the regular, nontalking, nonwalking iteration instead, but I loved him all the same.
That was what Thadius was probably making me assemble, I thought, the high-end Squishy doll with all the servos and whatnot that could spout lines in a tinny voice from a little speaker on his back. Probably why it looked like he had a skeleton, ligaments, convincingly pink muscle tissue.
Sitting there, the goggles squeezing my head and the earplugs hardly diluting any of the cauldron’s noise at all, I considered how, now, my Squishy doll—that first guinea pig when Dad and I were messing around with the cauldron—was at the bottom of Lake Superior. Probably right alongside . . .
Stop, I told myself. Do not bring yourself down, especially now that you’re on a lead with something.
I didn’t let that carry on. But, still, it was in this room where all of that ugliness had begun, this initial fork of many bad turns that’d follow. It’d be impossible to sit in here for long without some of that coming up eventually.
Fine. If you want to play it like that, brain, I’ll just leave. Which was okay, since it was going to take a while to complete the Squishy doll anyway.
I set the tablet aside, yanked off the goggles, and popped out the earplugs, got on my crutches, and left the room to allow the cauldron to do its thing.
On the way up and out of this side of the rig, I thought about how Mom used to tell my sister and me about making the most of our talents. Darya could draw. I could write. Mom never forced us to collaborate, and I hate to imagine if she had. What kind of Princess Save-Me-I’m-Dumb-
and-Helpless graphic novel would Darya coerce me into plotting for her?
Mom’s thing was that whenever we had a spare moment, we should use it to sharpen our craft. She always referred to this as trimming the artist plants to prevent our creativity from rotting on the vine. Really, I think it was just a way to keep her teenage daughters from going even more stir-crazy, but it was a good practice to keep. I often found myself scribbling out short stories, picturing my fingers blackening and dropping off if I didn’t continue.
I crossed the catwalk to the helipad garden, went inside the greenhouse, and picked some tomatoes, chucking a few that’d gone bad over the railing into Lake Superior. I was feeling the same thrill I would after doing some throwaway poetry or a short story or something. I was proud of myself for actually leaving the rig. Honestly, I had doubts in myself I’d go through with it. Man, I’d been scared. But now, having gone, I felt amazing. Glowing. I could look at Duluth across the way and not feel like it was an entirely scary place anymore. I’d gone there, made a friend possibly, made progress in joining the fight. A fight with what, I still wasn’t sure, but at least it was something. I just hoped my cauldron cooperated with me and gave me what Thadius wanted. I couldn’t imagine going back to the banality of rig life after getting a taste of what could be. I saw that like the worst case of something of mine rotting on the vine. I wanted to use the cauldron, show Thadius I could, and then really do something with it.
It might sound severe, but I really felt like my life depended on this working out.