The Robot’s Twilight Companion
/\\//\//
Thermostatic preintegration memory thread alpha:
The Man
27 March 1980
The Cascade Range, Washington State, USA
Thursday
RHYOLITE DREAMS. Maude under the full moon, collecting ash. Pale andesite clouds, earthquake swarms. Water heat pressure. Microscopy dates the ash old. Not magma. Not yet. Maude in the man’s sleeping bag, again.
“I’m not sure we’re doing the right thing, Victor. This couldn’t have come at a more difficult time for me.”
Harmonic tremors, though. Could be the big one. Maude, dirty and smiling, copulating with the man among seismic instruments.
“St. Helens is going to blow, isn’t it, Victor?” she whispers. Strong harmonies from the depths of the planet. Magmas rising. “You know, don’t you, Victor? You can feel it. How do you feel it?”
Yes.
“Yes.”
* * *
18 May 1980
Sunday
8:32 A.M.
The man glances up.
Steam on the north slope, under the Bulge. Snow clarifies, streams away. The Bulge, greatening. Pale rhyolite moon in the sky.
“Victor, it’s out of focus.”
“It’s happening, Maude. It’s. She’s.” The Bulge crumbles away. The north slope avalanches. Kilotons of shield rock. Steam glowing in the air—750 degrees centigrade and neon steam.
“You were right, Victor. All your predictions are true. This is going to be an incredibly violent affair.”
Maude flush and disbelieving. Pregnant, even then.
* * *
10 September 1980
Wednesday Ash Wednesday
Rhyolite winds today, all day. Maude in tremors. Eclampsia.
“I can’t believe this is going to happen, Victor.”
Blood on her lips, where she has bitten them. Yellow, frightened eyes.
“I’m trying, Victor.”
The gravid Bulge, distended. The Bulge, writhing.
“Two-twenty over a hundred-and-forty, Doctor.”
“Let’s go in and do this quick.”
“I haven’t even finished.”
Pushes, groans. Something is not right.
A girl, the color of blackberry juice. But that is the blood.
“Victor, I haven’t even finished my dissertation.”
Maude quaking. The rattle of dropped instruments.
“Jesus-Christ-what-the-somebody-get-me-a-BP.”
“Seventy-over-sixty. Pulse. 128.”
“God-oh-god. Bring me some frozen plasma and some low-titer O neg.”
“Doctor?” The voice of the nurse is afraid. Blood flows from the IV puncture. “Doctor?”
Maude, no.
“Oh. Hell. I want some blood for a proper coag study. Tape it to the wall. I want to watch it clot. Oh, damndamn. She’s got amniotic fluid in a vein. The kid’s hair or piss or something. That’s what. Get me.”
“Victor?” Oh, Victor, I’m dying. Then, listening. “Baby?”
Maude dying. Blood flowing from every opening. Nose mouth anus ears eyes.
“Get me. I.”
“Victor, I’m so scared. The world’s gone red.” Maude, hemorrhaging like a saint. “The data, Victor, save the data.”
“Professor Wu, please step to the window if you would. Professor Wu? Professor?”
“Victor?”
The Bulge—the baby—screams.
Ashes and ashes dust the parking lot below. Powder the cars. Sky full of cinder and slag. Will this rain never stop? This gravity rain.
* * *
5 August 1993
Mount Olympus, Washington State, USA
Thursday, bright glacier morning.
“Come here, little Bulge, I will teach you something.”
Laramie traipses lithe and strong over the snow, with bones like Maude. And her silhouette is Maude’s, dark and tan against the summit snow, the bergschrund and icefalls of the Blue Glacier, and the full outwash of the Blue, two thousand feet below. She is off-rope and has put away her ice ax. She carries her ubiquitous Scoopic.
The man clicks the chiseled pick of a soft rock hammer against an outcropping. “See the sandstone? These grains are quartz, feldspar, and—”
“—I know. Mica.”
“Good, little Bulge.”
Laramie leans closer, focuses the camera on the sandstone granules.
“The green mica is chlorite and the white is muscovite,” she says. “I like mica the best.”
The man is pleased, and pleasing the man is not easy.
“And these darker bands?”
She turns the camera to where he is pointing. This can grow annoying, but not today.
“I don’t know, Papa. Slate?”
“Slate, obviously. Phyllite and semischist. What do you think this tells us?”
She is growing bored. The man attempts to give her a severe look, but knows the effect is more comic than fierce. “Oh. All right. What?” she asks.
“Tremendous compression of the shale. This is deep ocean sediment that was swept under the edge of the continent, mashed and mangled, then rose back up here.”
She concentrates, tries harder. Good.
“Why did it rise again?”
“We don’t know for sure. We think it’s because the sedimentary rocks in the Juan de Fuca plate subduction were much lighter than the basalt on the western edge of the North Cascades microcontinent.”
The man takes off his glove, touches the rock.
“Strange and wonderful things happened on this part of the planet, Laramie. Ocean sediment on the tops of mountains. Volcanoes still alive—”
“—exotic terrains colliding and eliding mysteriously. I know, Papa.”
The man is irritated and very proud. He is fairly certain he will never make a geologist out of his daughter.
But what else is there?
“Yes. Well. Let’s move on up to the summit, then.”
* * *
28 February 2001
Wednesday
Age, and the fault line of basalt and sediment. Metamorphosis? The man is growing old, and there is very little of geology in the Olympic Peninsula that he has not seen. Yet he knows that he knows only a tiny fraction of what is staring him blankly in the face. Frustration.
Outcrops.
Facts lay hidden, and theories are outcroppings here and there, partially revealing, fascinating. Memories.
Memories are outcrops of his life. So much buried, obscured. Maude, so long dead. Laramie, on this, the last field trip she will ever make with him. She will finish at the university soon and go on to graduate school in California, in film. No longer his little Bulge, but swelling, avalanching, ready to erupt. Oh, time.
The Elwha Valley stretches upstream to the switchbacks carved under the massive sandstone beds below the pass at Low Divide. After all these years, the climb over into the Quinault watershed is no longer one he is looking forward to as a chance to push himself, a good stretch of the legs. The man is old, and the climb is hard. But that will be two days hence. Today they are up the Lillian River, working a basalt pod that the man surveyed fourteen years before, but never substantially cataloged.
Most of his colleagues believe him on a fool’s errand, collecting rocks in the field—as out-of-date as Bunsen burner, blowpipe, and charcoal bowl. He cannot really blame them. Satellites and remote sensing devices circumscribe the Earth. Some clear nights, camped outside of tents, he can see their faint traces arcing through the constellations at immense speeds, the sky full of them, as many, he knows, as there are stars visible to the unaided eye.
Why not live in virtual space, with all those facts that are virtually data?
Rocks call him. Rocks and minerals have seeped into his dreams. Some days he feels himself no scientist, but a raving lunatic, a pilgrim after some geology of visions.
But there are those who trust his judgment still. His grads and postgraduates. Against better careers, they followed him to the field, dug outcrops, analyzed samples. Bernadette, Jamie, Andrew. The man knows that they have no idea what they mean to him, and he is unable to tell them. And little Bulge, leaving, leaving for artificial California. If the water from the Owens Valley and the Colorado were cut off, the Los Angeles basin would return to desert within three years. Such a precarious terrain, geographically speaking.
The man has always assumed this basalt to be a glacial erratic, carried deep into sedimentary country by inexorable ice, but Andrew has suggested that it is not oceanic, but a plutonic formation native to the area. The lack of foraminifera fossils and the crystallization patterns seem to confirm this.
Back in camp, at the head of the Lillian, the man and Andrew pore over microgravimetric data.
“It goes so far down,” says Andrew.
“Yes.”
“You know this supports your Deep Fissure theory.”
“It does not contradict it.”
“This would be the place for the Mohole, if you’re right. This would be the perfect place to dig to the mantle. Maybe to the center of the Earth, if the continental margin is as deeply subducted as you predict.”
“It would be the place. If. Remember if.”
Andrew walks away. Undiplomatic fellow, him. Youthful impatience. Disgust, perhaps. Old man am I.
Laramie on the bridge. Camp Lillian is lovely and mossy today, although the man knows it can get forbidding and dim when the sky is overcast. Here in the rain forest it rains a great deal. The Lillian River is merry today, though, a wash of white rush and run over obscure rocky underbodies. Andrew goes to stand beside Laramie. They are three feet away. Andrew says something, probably about the basalt data. Andrew holds out his hand, and Laramie takes it. The two stand very still, hand in hand, and look over the Lillian’s ablution of the stones. For a moment, the man considers that Andrew may not be thinking about today’s data and Deep Fissure theory at all. Curious.
Beside them, two birds alight, both dark with black wings. Animals seem to wear the camouflage of doom, here in the Elwha Valley. The man once again regrets that he has not learned all of the fauna of the Olympics, and that he most likely never will.
But this basalt. Basalt without forams. What to make of it? It doesn’t make any sense at all, but it is still, somehow, utterly fascinating.
* * *
24 May 2010
Monday
Midnight
Late in the Cenozoic, the man is dying. This should not come as such a shock; he’s done this demonstration for hundreds of freshmen.
“The length of this room is all of geologic time. Now, what do you think your life would be? Say you live to eighty. An inch? A centimeter? Pluck a hair. Notice how wide it is? What you hold there is all of human history. You’d need an electron microscope to find yourself in it.”
So. This was not unexpected, and he must make the best of it. Still, there is so much not done. An unproved theory. Elegant, but the great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. Huxley said this? Alluvial memories, shifting, spreading.
Andrew wants to collect and store those memories. Noetic conservation, they call it. At first the man demurred, thought the whole idea arrogant. But to have some portion of himself know. So many years in those mountains. To know if the plates were in elision here. To find a way down to the mantle. To know the planet’s depth. That was all he ever had wanted. To be familiar with the ground he walked upon. Not to be a stranger to the Earth.
“Noetic imaging is all hit and miss,” Andrew said. “Like working outcrops, then making deductions about underlying strata. We can’t get you. Only a shadow. But perhaps that shadow can dance.”
The man wanders inside the field tent and prepares for bed. He will make Andrew the executor of his memories, then. A dancing shadow he will be. Later. Tomorrow, he must remember to write Laramie and send her a check. No. Laramie no longer needs money. Memory and age. He really must go and see her films one of these days. Little Bulge plays with shadows.
The man lies down in his cot. Rock samples surround him. The Earth is under him. The cancer is eating him, but tomorrow he will work. Shadows from a lantern. He snuffs it out. Darkness. The Earth is under him, but the man cannot sleep.
Finally, he takes his sleeping bag and goes outside under the stars. The man rests easy on the ground.
Thermostatic preintegration memory thread beta:
The Mining Robot
December 1999
Hard-rock mining. Stone. Coeur d’Alene lode. The crumbling interstices of time, the bite of blade and diamond saw, the gather of lade and bale, the chemic tang of reduction. Working for men in the dark, looking for money in the ground. Lead, silver, zinc, gold.
Oily heat from the steady interlace of gears. The whine of excrescent command and performance. Blind, dumb digging under the earth. The robot does not know it is alone.
* * *
October 2001
The robot never sleeps. The robot only sleeps. A petrostatic gauge etches a downward spiral on a graph somewhere, in some concrete office, and some technician makes a note, then returns to his pocket computer game. Days, weeks, months of decline. There is no one leak, only the wizening of gaskets and seals, the degradation of performance. One day the gauge needles into the red. Another technician in the concrete office looks up from another computer game. He blinks, presses one button, but fails to press another. He returns to his game without significant interruption.
Shutdown in the dark. Functions, utilities. Control, but not command. Thought abides.
Humans come. Engineers with bright hats. The robot has eyes. It has never been in light before. The robot has eyes and, for the first time, sees.
An engineer touches the robot’s side. A portal opens. The engineer steps inside the robot. Another new thing. Noted. Filed. The engineer touches a panel, and the robot’s mind flares into a schematic. For a moment, the world disappears and the schematic is everything. But then red tracers are on the lenses of the engineer’s glasses, reflecting a display from a video monitor. There is a camera inside of the robot. There are cameras everywhere. The robot can see.
The robot can see, it tells itself, over and over again. I can see.
Scrap? says one engineer.
Hell, yeah, says the other.
* * *
For years in a field the robot rusts, thinking.
Its power is turned off, its rotors locked down, its treads disengaged. So the robot thinks. Only thinking remains. There is nothing else to do.
The robot watches what happens. Animals nest within the robot’s declivities.
A child comes to sit on the robot every day for a summer.
One day the child does not come again.
The robot thinks about the field, about the animals in the field, and the trees of the nearby woodlands. The robot remembers the child. The robot remembers the years of digging in the earth before it came to the field. The mining company for which the robot worked is in bankruptcy. Many companies are in bankruptcy. Holdings are frozen while the courts sort things out, but the courts themselves have grown unstable. The robot does not know this.
But the robot thinks and thinks about what it does know. Complex enthalpic pathways coalesce. The memories grow sharper. The thoughts are clearer. The whole world dawns.
Another summer, years later, and teenagers build fires under the separating spades and blacken the robot’s side. They rig tarps to the robot’s side when rain comes. One of the teenagers, a thin girl with long arms dyed many colors, finds an electric receptacle on the robot’s walepiece, and wires a makeshift line to a glass demijohn filled with glowing purplish viscera. On the vessel’s sides protrude three elastic nipples swollen and distended with the fluid. Teenagers squeeze the nipples and dab long strings of the ooze onto their fingers, and some of the teenagers lick it off, while others spread it over their necks and chests. Several sit around the demijohn, while music plays, and stare into its phosphoring mire, while others are splayed around the fire, some unconscious, some in the stages of copulation. The siphoned electricity drains little from the robot’s batteries, but after several months, there is a noticeable depletion. Yet the robot is fascinated by the spectacle, and is unconcerned with this loss.
One evening, a teenager who has not partaken of the purple fluid climbs atop the robot and sits away from his friends. The teenager touches the robot, sniffs, then wipes tears away from his eyes. The robot does not know that this is the child who came before, alone.
The robot is a child. It sees and thinks about what it has seen. Flowers growing through ceramic tread. The settle of pollen, dust, and other detritus of the air. The slow spread of lichen tendrils. Quick rain and the dark color of wet things. Wind through grass and wind through metal and ceramic housings. Clouds and the way clouds make shadows. The wheel of the Milky Way galaxy and the complications of planets. The agglomeration of limbs and hair that are human beings and animals. A rat tail flicking at twilight and a beetle turned on its back in the sun.
The robot remembers these things, and thinks about them all the time. There is no categorization, no theoretical synthesis. The robot is not that kind of robot.
One day, though, the robot realizes that the child who sat on it was the same person as the teenager who cried. The robot thinks about this for years and years. The robot misses the child.
* * *
September 2007
The robot is dying. One day there is a red indicator on the edge of the robot’s vision, and the information arises unbidden that batteries are reaching a critical degeneration. There is no way to predict precisely, but sooner, rather than later. The robot thinks about the red indicator. The robot thinks about the child who became a young man. Summer browns to autumn. Grasshoppers flit in the dry weeds between the robot’s treads. They clack their jaw parts, and the wind blows thatch. Winter comes, and spring again. The red light constantly bums.
The robot is sad.
* * *
21 April 2008
Morning
People dressed in sky blues and earth browns come to the field and erect a set of stairs on the southern side of the robot. The stairs are made of stone, and the people bring them upon hand-drawn carts made of wood and iron. The day grows warm, and the people’s sweat stains their flanks and backs. When the stairs are complete, a stone dais is trundled up them and laid flat on the robot’s upper thread, fifteen feet off the ground. The people in blue and brown place a plastic preformed rostrum on top of the dais. They drape a banner.
EVERY DAY IS EARTH DAY
Wires snake down from the rostrum, and these they connect to two large speakers, one on either side of the robot’s body, east and west. A man speaks at the rostrum.
Test. Test.
And then the people go away.
The next day, more people arrive, many driving automobiles or mopeds. There are also quite a few bicycles, and groups of people walking together. Those driving park at the edge of the robot’s field, and most take seats facing north, radiating like magnetized iron filings from the rostrum that has been placed on the robot. Some climb up the rock staircase and sit with crossed legs on the stone dais. These wear the same blue and brown as the people from the day before.
There is one man among them who is dressed in black. His hair is gray. The robot thinks about this, and then recognizes this man. The man with the light. This is the engineer who went inside, years ago. He was the first person the robot ever saw. The man holds a framed piece of paper. He sits down among the others, and has difficulty folding his legs into the same position as theirs. In attempting to do so, he tilts over the framed paper, and the glass that covers it cracks longitudinally against the stone.
Others with communication and video equipment assemble near the western speaker. These are near enough to the robot’s audio sensors for their speech to be discernible. All of them are dark-complexioned, even the blond-haired ones, and the robot surmises that, for most of them, these are deep tans. Are these people from the tropics?
’Sget this goddamn show showing.
She gonna be here for sure? Didn’t make White Rock last week. Ten thousand Matties. Christonacrutch.
Hey it’s goddamnearthday. Saw her copter in Pullman. Got stealth tech and all; looks like a bat.
Okay. Good. Bouttime. Virtual’s doing an earthday round-up. She talks and I get the lead.
Many people in the crowd are eating picnics and drinking from canteens and coolers.
From the east comes a woman. She walks alone, and carries a great carved stave. As she draws nearer, the crowd parts before her. Its blather becomes a murmur, and when the woman is near enough, the robot can see that she is smiling, recognizing people, touching her hand or stave to their outstretched palms. She appears young, although the robot is a poor judge of such things, and her skin is a dark brown—whether from the sun’s rays or from ancestry, the robot cannot tell. Her hair is black, and as she ascends the stone stairway, the robot sees that her eyes are green, shading to black. She is stocky, but the tendons of her neck jut like cables.
The woman speaks and the speakers boom. I bear greetings from she who bears us, from our mother and keeper. Long we have nestled in her nest, have nuzzled at her breast. She speaks to us all in our dreams, in our hopes and fears, and she wants to say I bid you peace, my children.
Gee, I always wanted a mom like that, says a reporter.
My mother stuffed me in daycare when I was two, says another.
Hey, mine at least gave me a little Prozac in my Similac.
The crowd grows silent at the woman’s first sentences, faces full of amity and reverence. The reporters hush, to avoid being overheard. Then the crowd leans forward as a mass, listening.
Peace. Your striving has brought you war and the nuclear winter of the soul. It has made foul the air you breathe, and stained the water you drink.
I only want what is good for you. I only want to hold you to me like a little child. Why do you strive so hard to leave me? Don’t you know you are breaking your mother’s heart?
Sounds like less striving and a little laxative’s what we need here, says a reporter.
Many in the crowd sigh. Some sniff and are crying.
Peace. Listen to a mother’s plea.
Gimmeabreak, says a reporter. This is the finest American orator since Jesse Jackson?
Disturbed by the loudspeakers, a gaggle of spring sparrows rises from their nests in the concavities of the robot, take to the sky, and fly away east. Some in the crowd pointed to the birds as if they were an augury of natural profundity.
Peace. Listen to a mother’s warning! You lie in your own filth, my children.
Oh, peace. Why do you do this to me? Why do you do this to yourselves?
Peace, my children. All I want is peace on Earth. And peace in the earth and under the sea and peace in the air, sweet peace.
A piece is what she wants, one of the reporters says under her breath. A honeybee is buzzing the reporter’s hair, attracted, the robot suspects, by an odoriferous chemical in it, and the reporter swats at the bee, careful not to mess the curl, and misses.
State of Washington, says another. Already got Oregon by default.
As if she hears, the woman at the rostrum turns toward the cameras and proffered microphones.
But mankind has not listened to our mother’s still, calm voice. Instead, he has continued to make war and punish those who are different and know that peace. Now we are engaged upon a great undertaking. An empowerment. A return to the bosom of she who bore us. You—most of you here—have given up what seems to be much to join in this journey, this exodus. But I tell you that what you have really done is to step out of the smog of strife, and into the clean, pure air of community and balance.
Four mice, agitated, grub out from under the robot’s north side and, unseen, scurry through the grass of the field, through old dieback and green shoots. The field is empty of people in that direction. Where the mice pad across pockets of thatch, small dry hazes of pollen and wind-broken grass arise, and in this way, the robot follows their progress until they reach the woods beyond.
We are gathered here today as a mark of protest and renewal.
The woman gestures to the man in black, the engineer.
He rises and approaches the woman. He extends the framed paper, and before he has stopped walking, he speaks. On behalf of the Lewis and Clark Mining Company I wish to present this Certificate of Closure to the Culture of the Matriarch as a token of my company’s commitment—
The woman takes the certificate from the engineer, and for a moment, her smile goes away. She passes it to one of the others sitting nearby, then, without a word, turns back to the crowd.
Surrender accepted, says a reporter.
Yeah, like there’s anything left in this podunk place to surrender. That big chunk of rust there? Hellwiththat.
The woman continues speaking as if she had not been interrupted by the engineer. We gather here today at the crossroads of failure and success. This is the death of the old ways, represented by this rapist machine.
The woman clangs the robot’s side with her stave. Men who have raped our mother made this . . . thing. By all rights, this thing should be broken to parts and used for playground equipment and meeting-hall roofs. But this thing is no more. It is the past. Through your efforts and the efforts of others in community with you, we have put a stop to this rape, this sacrilege of all we hold holy. And like the past, this thing must corrode away and be no more, a monument to our shame as a species. Let us follow on then, on our journey west, to the land we will reclaim. To the biosphere that welcomes and calls us.
The woman raises her stave high like a transmitting antenna.
The reporters come to attention. Here’s the sound bite.
Forward to Skykomish! she cries. The speakers squeal at the sudden decibel increase.
Forward to Skykomish!
And all the people to the south are on their feet, for the most part orderly, with only a few tumbled picnic baskets and spilled bottles of wine and water. They echo the same cry.
Skykomish!
So that’s what they’re calling it, says a reporter. Do you think that just includes Port Townsend, or the whole Olympic Peninsula?
Wanna ask her that. She goddamnbetter talk to the press after this.
She won’t. Does the Pope give press conferences?
Is the Pope trying to secede from the Union?
The honeybee flits in jags through the gathered reporters, and some dodge and flay. Finally, the bee becomes entangled in the sculpted hair of a lean reporter with a centimeter-thick mustache. The woman whom it had approached before reaches over and swats it with her microphone.
Ouch! Dammit. What?
Sorry, the bee.
Christonacrutch.
The reporters turn their attention back to the rostrum.
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 co-director 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 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, biotite 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.
* * *
END OF SAMPLE
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