Robogenesis

by Daniel H. Wilson

  “Wait,” calls a thin voice. It’s the boy. Timmy.

  Up close, I estimate that he is probably ten or twelve, but physically he looks about eight years old. Looking down at him, my gaze goes straight to where his eyes aren’t. I glance away automatically, then force myself to stare directly back at his deformity. I never did meet Mathilda Perez in person—I only listened to her intelligence reports over the radio—but I doubly appreciate what she did now that I see the metal rooted in the skin above this little boy’s freckled cheeks.

  It looks like it hurts.

  The boy walks confidently toward us. Stops at Houdini’s scorched foreleg. Fearlessly, he puts a palm flat against the polymer-muscled slab. Looking Houdini up and down, he cocks his head to the side sort of funny. His thin little lips are moving.

  This kid isn’t blind. Far from it.

  “What can I do for you?” I call down. He ignores me for another few seconds. Still talking to the voice in his head. Finally, he stops and points his face at me.

  “Houdini is smart, you know,” he says. “He wants to protect you.”

  “Serious? You can really talk to the tank?” asks Cherrah.

  “Yeah, but only when he’s close,” says the boy.

  “Ask Houdini how he was repaired,” she says.

  Timmy bows his head. After a moment, he looks up apologetically.

  “He says that he doesn’t know.”

  A thought occurs to me. Mathilda said she was in New York City, watching from satellites as she guided Gray Horse Army through the arctic woods toward that unmarked hole in the ground. She said she used an antenna to reach us. A big one.

  “Tim, have you ever touched an antenna?”

  “Antenna?” asks the kid.

  “Any kind of big piece of metal. I think you’ll be able to . . . talk to people farther away. If you find an antenna.”

  “I can try . . . ,” he says, nodding solemnly.

  “If you do find one,” I say, “look for a girl named Mathilda. Mathilda Perez of Gray Horse Army. She’s one of the good guys. She can show you how to use those eyes to help your people here.”

  He nods. Drags a foot across the dirt. Stalling.

  “You have something else to say?” I ask.

  The kid scratches his neck. Looks away, then peers up.

  “I just noticed . . . I thought I should say . . .”

  “Go on,” I urge.

  “There’s something inside you,” he says quietly. His voice is clear and sharp out here on the still road. The words he’s said stop my breathing.

  Something inside me?

  I throw a leg over the railing and slide off the armored side of the tank. Drop to the muddy road right in front of the boy. He doesn’t flinch. Cherrah follows, lowers herself onto the dirt next to me. We stand before the boy in the shadow of Houdini. The kid is so small that I kneel just to keep from intimidating him.

  Assuming I can intimidate him.

  “What do you see inside me?” I ask. “Is it Rob-made?”

  “Not you,” he says, pointing. “Her.”

  Cherrah and I exchange a worried glance. She slowly steps forward. Takes both the kid’s hands in hers.

  “What’s inside me, Timmy?” she asks him.

  The boy wraps his arms around Cherrah’s waist and presses his face against her stomach. Instinctively, she puts her hands around his thin back. Gives him a tender hug that makes his shoulder blades stick out like chicken wings. The kid inhales and his breath shudders on the way out.

  You haven’t seen what we’ve seen.

  Finally, the boy stands up straight. Blinks.

  “It’s a baby,” he says. “A little baby boy.”

  4. MIND OF LIFE

  Post New War: 5 Months, 19 Days

  During the New War, Nomura Castle was well defended against the incursion of attacking robots (called akuma by the locals). Mr. Takeo Nomura, who was responsible for building this lifesaving defensive structure, nevertheless did not seem to want any part of ruling the people he had protected. Some of his followers believed that he was shirking his duty as he turned his attention to the sea, and others felt that he should be allowed to move on. But even from afar, I suspected that the old man had found something momentous waiting in the depths of the ocean.

  —ARAYT SHAH

  NEURONAL ID: TAKEO NOMURA

  What is a mind, but a pattern? My mind or yours. Man or machine. Simply an arrangement of atoms. Each of us, a unique expression of the mind of the universe.

  Thoughts are precise bullets of electricity, fired through our neurons in timed pulses. Our bodies are layers of folding skin and muscle laced with fractal lightning. Natural, like veins on a rain-soaked leaf. Cracks in a tumbling stone. Or the sigh of this wave, lapping my shins until they are cold and numb. The clear liquid flows in, suspends the fine black hairs on my legs, and then retreats, laying the hairs down in new configurations. The sky leaks raindrops over my bony shoulders like Morse code.

  We are patterns. Trapped inside other patterns.

  After six months of listening, the sea sends an emissary. The towering bulk of a bizarre machine approaches our outermost seawall. A glistening spire, afloat, the size of a skyscraper. It forges ahead, slow and steady, through azure stripes of rain. From the salt encrusted on it, I would say it came from the open ocean. The dreamer only knows what this derelict has been doing out there on those endless blue plains.

  I am staggered by its layered complexity.

  Half submerged in Tokyo harbor, the spire is saturated with living things. It sprouts so far into the heavens that its upper reaches are shrouded in the rain haze. Some kind of muscular fiber makes up the main trunk, braided thick as the Tokyo Skytree, resembling bark but clearly with much higher tensile strength. It bears further study, as does the stability mechanism. The island-machine flutters delicately on flat fins the size of baseball fields, rising and falling, surfaces curling with wet sea grass on top and studded with barnacles below. Each pulse of the surf surges over the lip of the rear fin and washes straight through the marshy ecosystem.

  “It is beautiful,” I say to Junshi-88.

  The humanoid robot stands in the surf with me, trinocular lenses protruding at maximum zoom. It wears no human clothing, only a camouflaged green and black armored outer casing. Spurning human adornments is a mark of autonomy.

  I hear the raucous squawking of seagulls from here. Hundreds of them circle the treelike structure, hunting the fish that swarm below in its safe harbor. The birds are nesting in the upper branches and have been for many generations, it seems, above clouds of insects. The fiber base is shit-stained and covered in seaweed, riddled with dens and nests and burrows. The voice of the sea has manifested itself to me in the most enormous and ancient form of life possible.

  “Do you think it is shinboku?” I ask.

  “Hai,” says the 88, its voice a grinding whine. Unlike the generations of overly polite robots that populated Japan before the New War, my freeborn ally is barely willing to speak in human audible frequencies, much less exercise impeccable manners. He is his own, not a servant, and there is no risk of my forgetting it.

  I nod vacantly, staring. It must be a form of shinboku, a divine tree, honored by the monks and called upon to protect Shinto shrines. This mightiest of shinboku is beached here, as if lost from some other dimension. It forms a pattern so intricate that it places a gentle flame of awe into the pit of my belly. I am glad that I can simply coexist with a thing of such beauty and complexity. The shinboku has come from the unknowable flat wasteland of the open ocean, through tides of war, crafted by the voice of the sea and now sent into our harbor.

  My equipment detects communications being relayed from hidden antennae located in the upper reaches of the tree. I slide a pair of modified binoculars over my eyes. Flip on a radio overlay of my own design. Scan the patterns until I find an alcove, nestled in the top. Some kind of control center is perched in the crook of two large branches, its entrance
covered by sweeping vines. The binoculars reveal radio communications floating from the tower. Greenish wisps of communication meander over infinite glittering waves, to the horizon.

  The voice of the sea is speaking.

  I tap the 88 on its shoulder and we return to our little boat. Continue puttering up the Sumida River toward Nomura Castle. Behind us, the swaying island-tower watches balefully from where it rises out of the bay, the size of a movie monster kaiju.

  Reaching the top of the shinboku will not be easy. I will need to retrieve my best tools if I wish to climb the tree of life. And returning to my workshop is, unfortunately, complicated. Mikiko will be there and she will disapprove of this mission. My place is on the throne, she says. I made my people a promise to protect them. I haven’t been back to the castle in weeks, staying on the streets with the Junshi-88.

  The darkness settled over my people in the last months like silent falling strips of black silk. In the field of optics, they call the phenomenon a “just noticeable difference threshold.” A slight darkening of things. Each tiny gradation impossible to perceive.

  Until the suicides began.

  One month ago, I returned from a night expedition to the bay. In the frigid predawn, I had just docked my little wooden motorboat on the river. Junshi-88 was walking behind me in quiet pneumatic steps. It stopped. Ground out a verbal warning in Robspeak. My eyes lifted from the roadway and thoughts of the roiling sea evaporated.

  A curious sight.

  Nomura Castle lies on a small hill, giving it a view of the surrounding Adachi Ward. Scarred and leaning, its curtained walls of flash-welded steel and iron surround a star-shaped central keep. The roof of the castle is a curved square, the roofline bowed, edges thrusting out angrily like the horns of a kabutomushi beetle.

  A little fellow was standing on the sweeping arch of the keep tower, his body sheathed in layers of hazy morning light, face empty, taking deep, slow breaths. Fish-scale flakes of armored roofing winked around him and I remember the roosting pigeons were giving him polite space.

  “Not good, Junshi,” I murmured.

  The crack of the young man’s bones on the castle steps was like the report of a pistol. We hurried to his body and tried our best to move him into a respectful position. With the fighting over, I could not imagine why the man would step away from this life. The akuma offer no more threat. But the war must have torn holes in our hearts. When it ended, no hope arrived to fill them.

  “You must be very sad and lonely,” I whispered to the corpse. “But your friends will come for you soon and they will help put you to rest.” Junshi-88 blinked at me, processing my words. I do not know if it understood. By treating the dead as if they are living, we give them respect. We make life easier for those who remain.

  Junshi-88 helped me arrange the body and did not complain. I do not fear to touch a dismantled machine. On that morning I learned that this bravery can go the other way, too.

  The young man was not the first to leap. Nor was he the last. Many of my people are falling. They are drowning. Hanging and suffocating and burning. I cannot say why my people are leaving us. I have never been good with emotions. But I can feel the wrongness of the empty act. The despair and meaninglessness that have settled over us like still, glassy water.

  Without an enemy, we are falling forward. Nothing to push against. Flailing into empty space. We do not know how to start over. There is no route back to the beginning. The pattern of the world is torn. Living in the ruins of our memories is painful, and many would rather die.

  My people may despair, but I do not.

  For many years I have lived in a bare room with a woman and a workbench. A lamp and a chair and well-oiled tools spread out on a reed mat. Warm fingers on my shoulders. Hot tea. The bright smell of washed hair and the warm lingering scent of the soldering iron. It is a world of hope. From in here I can see the tools of rebirth everywhere. Each mangled wire or melted scrap is another piece of the puzzle.

  I say a prayer as I cross the square where that nameless young man stepped out of the world. Beside me, 88 marches dutifully. The awakened military humanoid is a chilly friend. Never a recipient of my services. But Mikiko asked it to protect me, and as a freeborn, 88 takes her command very seriously. It required two nights before I became used to having it watch me sleep.

  “There he is,” calls someone. “Nomura!”

  “What is in the harbor!?”

  “Are we under attack!?”

  My people are gathered. Each measured shout sends my head ducking lower and puts an extra scurry in my steps. Junshi-88 clears the way as we trot up the sweeping promenade of steel steps. They have been destroyed and repaired in a cycle these last three years. Burrowed under, demolished, heat-blasted, and soaked in the blood and oil of our defenders. The enemy akuma never made it inside. Not after that first time.

  No one tries to stop my passage. I glance up, just once, and see that there are hundreds of my people outside the closed doors to the throne room. They are milling around and talking to each other in concerned whispers. A hush shudders through them like a wake as 88 pushes a path through.

  I am not good at talking to them. Head down, as usual, I climb the steps. My workshop is still located in the main hall, on the same spot where I first knelt and began to work on a nearby senshi robot arm. Back when this place was an abandoned factory and not a shining fortress.

  The 88 and I enter through an arched front door made of cross-hatched steel beams. The fortified door gleams like the armored scales of some giant prehistoric fish. It was built by the great crane-arm senshi that rests now, coiled and deadly, high against the ceiling of what is now the throne room.

  Slipping inside, I pad across the vast space. A neat corridor of senshi honor guard flanks the path to the throne. Each robot arm is folded in a salute, coated in glistening, nail polish–red paint. My terracotta army, always capable of animating, but not called on to defend the central keep in more than a year. Are they unhappy to be without purpose now? I wonder. Or will the time soon come again when they must build?

  The scrap-metal throne is empty.

  I leave the 88 behind and trot around the throne. My table and lamp are shoved against the stone foundation of the dais. Polished steel flooring whispers under my paper sandals. My amorphous reflection spreads below like a dark puddle on the metal. Quiet now. A little farther and I can make it out without alerting Mikiko.

  Hastily, I stuff the tools I will need into a brown canvas backpack. Ransacking my work desk, I pull out all manner of tools and trinkets. Soon the bag is bulging. Last thing, I grab my trusty toolbox and tuck it under my other arm.

  “Mr. Nomura,” calls Mikiko.

  Her voice stills my feet. My queen steps out from behind the dais that supports our thrones. I cannot remember the last time I climbed those steps to sit on that ostentatious chair. At some point, it has been decorated with a fan spray of sharp, twisting scrap metal, collected from our destroyed city.

  “Mikiko,” I whisper.

  “Did you notice your people outside?” she asks.

  “Oh, uh. No,” I reply. “Too busy, in any case.”

  Mikiko does not react to my obvious lie.

  “Listen to me now. I cannot stop this darkness. The survivors need a human being to lead them. Someone who understands the despair they feel. An emperor.”

  “No time,” I say.

  “The rate of suicide is increasing,” she says. “I do not know how to help them. They need a purpose. You gave them that, once.”

  “I’ve got to get back to the harbor,” I say.

  “What are you afraid of, Takeo? Really?”

  The question lingers, her synthetic voice echoing.

  “Very busy,” I whisper, taking a step.

  As I turn to go, she speaks: “My darling, you will never find what you have lost. The answers you seek are not in the sea. They are in here.”

  I stop moving. My skin has gone cold. I am thinking of those wide, round lit
tle eyes. The crushing press of the wave against my back.

  “It’s . . . a shinboku,” I say, voice shaking. “In the harbor. The voice of the sea has sent it here to me. I must find out why.”

  “The platform that washed up? It is an artifact of war. Broken and derelict.”

  “I am curious,” I whisper.

  So difficult to explain, these patterns in my mind. The razed remains of Tokyo and the phantom images of buildings that are gone. The wailing ghosts of millions of dead, their bodies churned under the ground and burned to smoke on the wind and swept out to the bottom of the sea.

  I need to understand it. I need to find the meaning in it.

  “Trust me, my love,” I say. “The voice of the sea—”

  “Is in your imagination!” she shouts. Her voice echoes from the thick rib supports that hold up the vast arched ceiling. “I am losing you to the past. To the same despair that is taking your people. Stop this madness. Come back, Emperor Nomura. Do your duty.”

  Now there is exquisite emotion on her face. Anger and sadness. I know she places it there for me alone, an affectation. Each careless wrinkle on her face, every strand of gray in her hair puts a thumping into my heart. Passion and dread. I try to imagine returning to her side and ignoring the voice calling to me from the sea.

  She is her own and you know it, old man. You are going to lose her.

  The thought makes my fingertips numb, puts a thickness in my throat and a warm waiting tide behind my eyes. I cannot face it.

  “This is my duty to myself,” I whisper, and scurry away.

  Watching your feet is not the best way to survive. Crossing the picked-over remains of Koto Ward, I do not notice the danger until it is almost too late. I am passing through a half-collapsed concrete office building that lies in the shadow of the shinboku. Junshi-88 is outside, testing the path ahead—over and through the rubble of the old shipping district. Leftover killing machines are seldom attracted to the 88’s lack of body heat or its unnaturally heavy and long step vibrations. The pitter-patter of my feet is just right for certain varieties of the simple machines, however.