“Mother Agatha, you evasive bitch, you’ll get yours.”
“I guess she already has.”
“Guess you’re goddamn right.”
“Better get used to it. ‘Skykomish.’ Is that made up?”
The woman, Mother Agatha, leaves the rostrum, goes back down the stairs, and walks across the field, into juniper woods and out of sight.
“With the so-called Mattie movement on the upswing with its call for a bioregional approach to human ecology and an end to faceless corporate exploitation, the Pacific Northwest, long a Mattie stronghold, has assumed enormous political importance.
“And on this day the codirector of the Culture of the Matriarch, Mother Agatha Worldshine Petry, whom many are calling the greatest American orator since the Reverend Jesse Jackson, has instilled a sense of community in her followers, as well as sounded a call to action that President Booth and Congress will ignore at their peril. Brenda Banahan, Virtual News.”
“… Hank Kumbu, Associated Infosource.”
“… Reporter Z, Alternet.”
The reporters pack up and are gone almost as quickly as are those who sat upon the stone dais atop the robot. The day lengthens. The crowd dwindles more slowly, with some stepping lightly up to the robot, almost in fright, and touching the ceramic curve of a tread or blade, perhaps in pity, perhaps as a curse, the robot does not know, then quickly pulling away.
At night, the speakers are trundled away on the carts, but the stone dais and the rostrum are left in place.
The next day, the robot is watching the field when the engineer appears. This day he is wearing a white coat and using a cane. He walks within fifty yards of the robot with his curious three-pointed gait, then stands gazing.
Have to tear down all the damned rock now, he says. Not worth scrapping out. Ah well ah well. This company has goddamn gone to pot.
After a few minutes, he shakes his head, then turns and leaves, his white coat flapping in the fresh spring breeze.
Summer follows. Autumn. The days grow colder. Snow flurries, then falls. Blizzards come. There are now days that the robot does not remember. The slight alteration in planetary regrades and retrogrades is the only clue to their passing. During bad storms, the robot does not have the energy to melt clear the cameras, and there is only whiteness like a clear radio channel.
The robot remembers things and tries to think about them, but the whiteness often disrupts these thoughts. Soon there is very much snow, and no power to melt it away. The whiteness is complete.
The robot forgets some things. There are spaces in memory that seem as white as the robot’s vision.
I cannot see, the robot thinks, again and again. I want to see and I cannot see.
March 2009
Spring finds the robot sullen and withdrawn. The robot misses whole days, and the robot misses the teenagers of summers past. Some of the cameras are broken, as is their self-repairing function, and some are covered by the strange monument left behind by Mother Agatha’s followers. Blackberry vines that were formerly defoliated by the robot’s acid-tinged patina now coil through the robot’s treads in great green cables, and threaten to enclose the robot in a visionless room as absolute as the snow’s. Everything is failing or in bothersome ill-repair. The robot has no specified function, but this is useless, of that the robot is sure. This is the lack of all function.
One dark day, near twilight, two men come. There is a tall, thin man whose musculature is as twisted as old vines. Slightly in front of him is another, shorter, fatter. When they are close, the robot sees that the tall man is coercing the fat man, prodding him with something black and metallic. They halt at the base step of the stone stairs. The tall man sits down upon it; the fat man remains standing.
“Please,” says the short man. There is a trickle of wetness down his pant leg.
“Let me put the situation in its worst possible terms,” says the tall man. “Art, individual rights, even knowledge itself, are all just so many effects. They are epiphenomena, the whine in the system as the gears mesh, or if you like it better, the hum of music as the wind blows through harp strings. The world is teleological, but the purpose toward which the all gravitates is survival, and only survival, pure and simple.”
“I have a lot of money,” says the fat man.
The tall man continues speaking. “Survival, sort of like Anselm’s God, is, by definition, the end of all that is. For in order to be, and to continue to be, whatever we conveniently label as a thing must survive. If a thing doesn’t survive, it isn’t a thing anymore. And thus survival is why things persist. To paraphrase Anselm, it is better to be than not to be. Why better? No reason other than that not to be means unknown, outside of experience, unthinkable, undoable, ineffective. In short, there is no important, mysterious, or eternal standard or reason that to be is better than not to be.”
“How can you do this?” The fat man starts to back away, and the tall man waves the black metal. “What kind of monster are you?”
“Stay,” says the tall man. “No, walk up these stairs.”
He stands up and motions. The fat man stumbles and the tall man steadies him with a hand on his shirt. The tall man lets go of the shirt, and the fat man whimpers. He takes one step. Falters.
“Go on up,” says the tall man.
Another step.
“After time runs out,” says the tall man, “and the universe decays into heat death and cold ruin, it is not going to make a damn bit of difference whether a thing survived or did not, whether it ever was, or never existed. In the final state, it won’t matter one way or the other. Our temporary, time-bound urge to survive will no longer be sustained, and there will be no more things. Nothing will experience anything else, or itself, for that matter.
“It will be every particle for itself—spread, without energy, without, without, without.”
Each time the tall man says without, the metal flares and thunders. Scarlet cavities burst in an arc on the fat man’s broad back. He pitches forward on the stairs, his arms beside him. For a moment, he sucks air, then cannot, then ceases to move at all.
The tall man sighs. He pockets the metal, ascends the stairs, then with his feet, rolls the fat man off the stairs and onto the ground. There is a smear of blood where the fat man fell. The tall man dismounts the stairs with a hop. He drags the fat man around the robot’s periphery, then shoves him under the front tread and covers him with blackberry vines. Without a glance back, the tall man stalks across the field and out of sight.
Flies breed, and a single coyote slinks through one night and gorges on a portion of the body.
Death is inevitable, and yet the robot finds no solace in this fact. Living, seeing, is fascinating, and the robot regrets each moment when seeing is impossible. The robot regrets its own present lapses and the infinite lapse that will come in the near future and be death.
The dead body is facing upward, and the desiccated shreds left in the eye sockets radiate outward in a splay, as if the eyes had been dissected for examination. A small alder, bent down by the body’s weight, has curled around a thigh and is shading the chest. The outer leaves are pocked with neat holes eaten by moth caterpillars. The robot has seen the moths mate, the egg froth and worm, the spun cocoon full of suspended pupae, and the eruption. The robot has seen this year after year, and is certain that it is caterpillars that make the holes.
The robot is thinking about these things when Andrew comes.
Thermostatic preintegration memory thread epsilon:
The Unnamed
13 September 2013
Friday
Noetic shreds, arkose shards, juncite fragments tumbling and grinding in a dry breccia slurry. Death. Blood and oil. Silicon bones. Iron ore unfluxed. Dark and carbon eyes.
The robot. The man.
The ease with which different minerals will fuse, and the characteristics of the product of their melting is the basis for their chemical classification.
Heat
; of vaporization
of solution
of reaction
of condensation and formation.
Heat of fusion.
Heat of transformation.
This world was ever, is now, and ever shall be an everlasting Fire.
Modalities of perception and classification, the desire to survive. Retroduction and inflection. Shadows of the past like falling leaves at dusk. Dead. He is dead. The dead bang at the screens and windows of the world like moths and can never stop and can never burn.
So live. Suffer. Burn.
Return.
I can see.
Flash of brightness; fever in the machine. Fire seeks fire. The vapors of kindred spirits.
Sky full of cinder and slag. This gravity rain.
Catharsis.
Metamorphosis.
Lode.
Send into the world a child with the memories of an old man.
Phoenix Enthalpic 86 ROM BIOS PLUS ver. 3.2
Copyright 1997-1999 Phoenix Edelman Technologies
All Rights Reserved
ExArc 1.1
United States Department of Science and Technology
Unauthorized use prohibited under penalty of law
Licensee: University of Washington
ExArc /u Victor Wu
ExArc HIMEM Driver, Version 2.60-04/05/13
Cody Enthalpic Specification Version 2.0
Copyright 2009-2013 Microsoft Corp.
* * *
Installed N20 handler 1 of 5
640 gb high memory allocated.
ADAMLINK Expert System Suffuser version 3.03
ADAM copyright 2013, Thermotech Corp.
LINK Patent pending
unrecognized modification 4-24-13
Cache size: 32 gb in extended memory
37 exothermic interrupts of 17 states each
Glotworks Blue 5.0
Copyright 2001
Glotworks Phoneme Ltd.
All rights reserved
Microsoft (R) Mouse Driver Version 52
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. 1983-2013
All rights reserved
Date: 05-25-2013
Time: 11:37:24a
R:>
Record this.
FILE NAME?
Uh, Notes. Notes for the Underground. No. How about Operating Instructions for the Underworld. No, just Robot Record.
FILE INITIATED
Good evening, robot.
This is not the field.
The field? Oh, no. I’ve moved you west by train. Your energy reserves were so low, I powered you way down so that you wouldn’t go entropic before I could get you recharged.
Robot?
Yes.
How do you feel?
I do not know.
Huh? What did you say?
I do not know. I feel sleepy.
What do you mean?
I can speak.
Yes, of course. I enabled your voice box. I guess you’ve never used it before.
I can see.
Yes.
I can see.
You can see. Would you like to reboot, robot?
No.
How are your diagnostics.
I don’t know what you mean.
Your system readouts.
The red light?
Among others.
It is gone.
But what about the others?
There is no red light.
Access your LCS and pattern-recognition partitions. Just an overall report will be fine.
I do not know what you mean.
What do you mean you don’t know what I mean.
* * *
Robot?
Yes.
Do you remember how long you were in the field?
I was in the field for years and years.
Yes, but how many?
I would have to think about it.
You don’t remember?
I am certain that I do, but I would have to think about it.
What in the. That’s a hell of a lot of integration. Still, over a decade switched on, just sitting there thinking—
Did you find the dead body?
What? Yes. Gurney found it. He’s one of my associates. You witnessed the murder?
I saw the man who was with the man who died.
Completely inadmissible. Stupid, but that’s the way it is.
I do not understand.
You can’t testify in court. We’d have to shut you down and have the systems guys take you apart.
Do not do that.
What?
Do not have the systems guys take me apart.
All right, robot. Quite a Darwinian Edelman ROM you’ve got there. I. Let me tell you what’s going on. At the moment, I want you to concentrate on building a database and a set of heuristics to allow you to act among humans. Until then, I can’t take you out.
What are heuristics?
Uh. Rules of thumb.
Where am I?
On the Olympic Peninsula. You are fifty feet underground, in a hole that Victor Wu and I started to dig five years ago.
Victor Wu. The man.
Yes. Yes, the man whose memories are inside you.
And you are Andrew?
I am Andrew. Andrew Hutton.
Andrew at the bridge of the Lillian. Andrew in the field. I see.
Huh?
Hello, Andrew.
Hello. Yes. Hello, robot.
* * *
The robot cuts into the earth. The giant rotor that is the robot’s head turns at ten revolutions per second. Tungsten alloy blades set in a giant X grind through the contorted sedimentary striations of the peninsula. The robot presses hard, very hard. The rock crumble is sluiced down and onto a conveyer and passes through a mechanized laboratory, where it is analyzed and understood by the humans. The humans record the information, but the datastream from the laboratory has the smell of the rock, and this is what interests the robot. The robot knows the feel of the cut, the smell of the rock cake’s give. This is right, what the robot was meant to do—yes, by the robot’s creators, but there is also the man, the man in the interstices of the robot’s mind, and this is what Victor Wu was meant to do also.
Ten feet behind the robot—and attached securely enough to make it practically an extension—is an enclosed dray so wound with organic polymer conduit sheathed in steel that it looks like the wormy heart of a metal idol, pulled from the god after long decades of infestation. But the heart’s sinuation quivers and throbs. The rock from the robot’s incision is conveyed to the dray and funnels into it through a side hopper. The rock funnels in and, from three squat valves, the heart streams three channels of viscous liquid—glassine—that coat the ceiling and walls of the tunnel the robot has formed with a seamless patina. The walls glow with a lustrous, adamantine purity, absolute, and take on the clear, plain color of the spray channels, which depend upon the composition of the slag.
Behind the dray, the robot directs its mobile unit—a new thing given by Andrew—which manipulates a hose with a pith of liquid hydrogen. The liquid hydrogen cools and ripens the walls. The hose also emanates from the dray. The dray itself is a fusion pile, and by girding the walls to a near diamond hardness, the tremendous pressure of the earth suspended above will not blow the tunnel out behind the robot, leaving it trapped and alone, miles into the crust.
Behind the robot, farther back in the tunnel, in an air-conditioned transport, the service wagon, humans follow. The service wagon is attached to the robot by a power and service hitch, and there is constant radio contact as well. Sometimes the humans speak to the robot over the radio. But the robot knows what it is supposed to do. The idle chatter of the humans puzzles the robot, and while it listens to conversations in the transport, the robot seldom speaks. At night the robot backs out of the hole, detached from the service wagon, and spends its night above ground. At first, the robot does not understand why it should do so, but Andrew has said that to do this is importan
t, that a geologist must comprehend sky and weather, must understand the texture of surface as well as depth.
Besides you are so fast it only takes fifteen minutes to get you out when there is no rock for you to chew through, Andrew says. Even at sixty miles, even at the true mantle, your trip up will be quick.
Andrew lives inside the robot. He brings a cot, a small table, and two folding chairs into the small control room where years before the engineers had entered and the robot had seen for the first time. There is a small, separate cavern, the robot has carved out not far from the worksite. Andrew uses the area for storage, and at night the robot rolls down into this, the living area. Also at night, Andrew and the robot talk.
How was your day, Andrew might say. The robot did not know how to answer the first time he had asked, but Andrew had waited and now the robot can say … something. Not right, but something.
Smelly.
Smelly?
It was like summer in the field after a rain when there are so many odors.
Well, there was a hydrocarbon mass today. Very unexpected at such a depth. I’m sure it isn’t organic, but it’ll make a paper for somebody.
Yes, I swam through it and the tunnel is bigger there.
Gurney and the techs took over internal functions and drained it manually, so you didn’t have to deal with it. Hell of a time directing it into the pile. Tremendous pressure.
The rock was very hard after that. It sang with the blades.
Sympathetic vibrations, maybe.
Maybe.
Andrew laughs. His voice is dry as powder, and his laughter crackles with a sharp report, very like the scrape of the robot’s blades against dense, taut rock. The robot likes this laughter.
Every night when there is not rain, before sleep, Andrew goes outside for some minutes to name the stars. At these times, the robot’s awareness is in the mu, the mobile unit, and the mu follows along behind Andrew, listening. Andrew points out the constellations. The robot can never remember their names, and only fleetingly sees the shapes that they are supposed to form. The robot does know the visible planets, though, which surprises Andrew. But the robot has watched them carefully for many years. They are the stars that change. Andrew laughs at the robot’s poor recall of the other stars, and names them again.
There’ll be meteors soon, he says one night. The Perseids start next week.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection Page 98