Robots vs. Fairies

by Dominik Parisien

  “The hidden folk will never accept you,” Sigrid said.

  Sigrid’s assistant was responsible for a less common set of skills.

  “How would you feel about some lunch?”

  This seemed like a safer question. It moved the conversation away from the treacherous ground of faith and onto the secure footing of food. The assistant was mostly unconcerned with matters of ontology or theology. Having a soul was not important; by all empirical measures, the human soul appeared to be a delusion. His not having a soul was no different from Sigrid’s not having a soul—only their respective chassis were different. Physically, they had very different needs. Emotionally, Sigrid had a need to believe in the hidden folk. And the assistant had a need for Sigrid to be happy.

  “Didn’t we just eat?”

  Her assistant noted the time. Sigrid had lost approximately three hours. He added this incident to the file he would share with her physician later. “Sundowning,” it was called. It was important to have names for things. Sigrid said that only when one knew the true name for something—an ailment, a crime, a soul—could one ever hope to influence it.

  “Are you not hungry?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Sigrid said. She frowned a little. She rubbed her hands. One of her hands reached out. Without being asked, her assistant handed her a jar of mint-and-moss salve. It was not the joint cream her daughter had brought. He was supposed to do the things her daughter said, because her daughter was the one subscribing to the service, but he was also supposed to avoid conflict whenever possible. “Come to think of it, I could have something.”

  In the kitchen, he stirred the soup the way Sigrid liked. Widdershins, she called it. Names were important. Sigrid had told him that abracadabra, one of the oldest words of power, meant simply: “What I speak, I create.”

  By that logic, without a name, the act of his creation remained unfinished. His name was like the little plastic pouch of oddments left over from a furniture build: not strictly necessary, but puzzling all the same. Sigrid had many such pouches strewn about the place. She had never bothered to pick them up. Whenever he encountered one, he put it in the junk drawer in the kitchen, with all the other things that seemed to have no purpose.

  He was still stirring when the house—which like him had no name—told him that the car from the Vegagerdin, the Road Authority, was on its way.

  * * *

  Sigrid’s daughter, Erika, had explained about the family’s origins, on his first day. “Mom thinks she’s a witch,” she said. “Or a wisewoman, or a priestess, or something. Mom still believes in elves and fairies and ghosts and all of that. Do you know about those things?”

  “I have definitions for all of those terms, yes.”

  Erika laughed. It was a sharp, hollow sound, like a single early clap for a performance that wasn’t really very good. She swallowed. “Right. Well. That’s good. Because Mom believes she can talk to them.”

  “It’s good to have a belief in something,” he had said. “It’s associated with better long-term health outcomes.”

  Erika, who had been chewing on a hangnail, paused and narrowed her eyes at him. “That’s one way of thinking about it,” she said. For a moment she stared at the ruin of her cuticles. Then she looked back at him.

  “I just need you to understand that sometimes, Mom will talk to things that aren’t there. And it’s not that she’s crazy. I mean, I know I shouldn’t use that word, but she’s not . . . ill. She’s not ill in that way.”

  “But you also suspect dementia.”

  Erika stared out the window. This branch of his brand of robot had a coffee shop built into it. It was for clients and assistants to spend time getting to know one another. Like at an animal shelter. She had not sipped her coffee in a long time, though, and he could tell just by looking that the beverage had already cooled.

  “It’s hard to tell, with her. There have been times when I’ve thought . . .” Her right hand gestured vaguely in the direction of her head. The assistant wondered if perhaps she was overtired. Outside it was still bright, but Sigrid’s daughter had come to the shop at one in the morning. Two hours later the light was only just fading.

  That was the nice thing about the shop, for certain clients. It was always open. The assistant models—or nursing models, or construction, or mining—could be awakened at any time, day or night. Time was meaningless without shifts. Time was meaningless without work.

  “I mean she’s never been what you’d call organized. And she’s not always entirely . . . truthful. She finds a way to make the facts fit her narrative. She bullshits. You understand that, too, right? Bullshit?”

  Sigrid’s assistant did have a general sense about the term as an expletive, and an expression of frustration or anger at circumstances that were perceived as unfair. But allowing Sigrid’s daughter to continue sharing information related to the job seemed more important than seeking clarification on the exact use of a curse word.

  “But on the other hand, she’s never let it take over her life. She even made a living on it. That’s something, isn’t it?”

  It was something. It was an unusual choice of career, but less so in Iceland, where a significant portion of the population identified at least a passing superstition regarding fairies, elves, and other magical creatures. Sigrid’s assistant had researched survey data on the subject. Sigrid herself appeared in the research. She had done numerous interviews on the subject and had been profiled by the travel channels. For a time she even had her own video feed, with enough subscribers to warrant extra security on her account. They still sent in money and gifts. It was thanks to them that she could have an assistant.

  “I think maybe she started out cynically,” Erika said. “She raised me alone, you know. So she was doing what she had to do to get by. But I think later on that must have changed, and she started believing what people told her.”

  “People?” Did Sigrid’s daughter mean all people? Everywhere? Or just a certain subset of them?

  “Her followers. They were so passionate. Some of them really did need her. Or they needed someone. Their parents kicked them out, or they lost their jobs, or they lost children, or . . .” Sigrid’s daughter trailed off. She took a moment, sipped her lukewarm coffee, winced, and cleared her throat. Then she regarded the assistant with a more direct gaze. Her hands rested so completely flat on the table that she must have been pressing them down. “I spent a lot of time sharing my mother,” she said, in a voice that suggested a great deal of practice saying these words. “I spent so much time sharing her that I learned to give her less of a role in my life. My mother is not my best friend. She is not my faithful confidante. For her, those things are jobs to be paid for. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that is why I am paying for you.”

  “When would you like me to start?”

  And that was that. Sigrid’s daughter signed the End User License Agreement, and some waivers, and the shop transferred his deed to her name. Later that day, Erika would bring Sigrid over for coffee and cake, and they would be introduced. The assistant helped her set the table. He wiped the rim of the bowl holding the special potato salad that Sigrid’s sister used to make, years ago. (Potatoes, pickles, mayonnaise, sour cream, mustard, salt, and pepper. He was told to remember this. It was the one thing Sigrid would reliably eat.) Finally, when everything was right, he took a seat at the table and waited. Sigrid’s bus deposited her at the front door right on time.

  “Don’t trust her,” Sigrid’s daughter said, suddenly, in the same tone of voice she might have used to remind herself that she had left the stove on. “That’s my one rule. Never trust her.”

  * * *

  Aside from major sabbaths and other holidays, each day unfolded in much the same way:

  05:00: Boot; retrieve updates and install

  05:05: Change clothes

  05:10: Tidy house

  05:40: Prepare breakfast

  06:00: Wait


  07:00: Wake Sigrid

  07:30: Retrieve Sigrid from meditation

  08:00: Bathe Sigrid

  08:30: Feed Sigrid

  09:15: Convince Sigrid to eat a few more bites, clear up breakfast dishes

  09:40: Read Sigrid her messages, answer messages

  11:00: Open parcels, sort parcels, send messages of thanks; if no parcels, help organize ritual tools

  12:00: Lunch

  13:00: Put Sigrid down for her nap to prevent sundowning; prepare dinner ahead of time and set aside

  13:45: Wake Sigrid

  14:00: Wake Sigrid again

  14:20: Prepare for walk outdoors

  15:00: Visit community center for games and tea

  16:45: Walk home

  17:00: Contact Sigrid’s daughter; listen for inconsistencies in conversation

  17:30: Ritual work

  19:00: Dinner

  19:40: Music

  20:40: Put Sigrid to bed

  21:00: Wait

  22:00: Put Sigrid to bed again

  22:40: Wait

  23:30: Put Sigrid to bed for the final time

  24:00: Defragment

  There were minor leaks and tears in the routine, of course. Sometimes the young volunteers at the community center wanted to know what sex their children would be, and Sigrid would ask them to stand up and turn around. Her left hand, which she called the receiving hand, would drift to their lumbar regions and lay flat there, fingers splayed, like a safecracker sensing the delicate shift of tumblers and pins. “A boy,” she would say, or “a girl.” Then the list of things those carrying the fetus must not do, like staring into the northern lights, or eating the eggs of a ptarmigan.

  Occasionally there were more frantic pings: followers who were about to hurt themselves and needed an interface with local police forces in their area, or followers rendered irate by the fact that they could no longer visit and pay homage in person.

  At the new moon, full moon, and sabbaths, Sigrid recorded video messages to share with her followers. They were not the rituals she had once led online, but simple meditations and wisdom relevant to the time of year. Since she had devoted herself completely to the gods and hidden folk in her latter years, she had ceased public ritual work and focused solely on private worship. Some followers said the quality of the videos had changed, now that she could speak to a humanoid. Others treated her usage of a mechanical assistant as a betrayal; for these she prominently displayed the black tourmalines at the corners of her cottage, and the shungite stones in all her water glasses.

  “I need to protect myself from your electromagnetic frequencies,” Sigrid told him, after he came home with her. “Anything that interferes with my personal vibrations will disrupt the waves of intention I send into the ethers.”

  She glared at him and dropped another polished black stone into the pitcher of water that belonged to the refrigerator. The refrigerator bonged softly to get it back; the sticker on the pitcher and the sticker in the fridge chittered at each other in a language that only the assistant could hear.

  “There are spirits all around us, you know,” she said. “And the elves, outside. They’ll smell it, your presence. They’ll smell it on me.”

  “What is the smell like?” the assistant asked. “I myself have no sense of smell, only an air filter calibrated to detect toxins.”

  Sigrid made a sign in the air that was either a banishing stave or an obscene gesture. Either way, the assistant let her leave the room until she asked him, rather sheepishly, to open a jar of loose dragon’s-blood resin.

  * * *

  The house told the assistant about the Vegagerdin representative’s surprise visit long before he actually arrived. The representative’s ride had a very specific call sign, and it told all the intersections and buses when it would be passing moments before it actually passed. Not that there was much need for such a device in their tiny town, but the ride was a special-edition model for municipal and other government use, and the national budget algorithm had found it as a way of filling a gap while in “use it or lose it” mode. The same model was also available in Los Angeles, Bogotá, Seoul, and Mumbai. Their little community was by far the smallest to ever see such a thing: a jagged gray structure invisible to sonar or LIDAR, sharp and dark as the blades of black kyanite Sigrid used to cut etheric cords still knotted in her aura after a particularly bad dream.

  It trundled up to Sigrid’s cottage on big, chunky wheels. It had very good manners and alerted the assistant as soon as the representative had shut its door to leave. This allowed the assistant to open the door just as the representative had reached it.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” the assistant said. “Welcome.”

  “Oh.” The representative’s fist was raised to knock. It opened and closed twice before he hastily dropped the fist to his side. The assistant performed a basic scan: the representative was small for a man of his age, and his BMI would give him problems later. He did not dress like the people the assistant interacted with regularly. His clothes were more expensive than they should have been; when the assistant matched them against online catalogues, he noticed that they had no real lifesaving properties of warmth or dryness. The man obviously did most of his work in the city. “Hello. How—” His mouth snapped shut. This interaction seemed to be rather difficult for him. It was up to the assistant to make him feel more comfortable.

  “We are having a lovely day,” the assistant said. “Thank you very much for asking. Will you come in?”

  “Oh. Yes. I will. Thank you.”

  The assistant opened the door a little farther and welcomed the representative inside. The chicken-foot door hanger, sent all the way from Texas in the United States, scratched softly at the wood as it closed. The representative squinted at it for a moment before abruptly directing his gaze to the floor.

  “I will bring Sigrid,” the assistant said.

  The representative said nothing. He’d fixed his attention on the ram’s skull over the fireplace.

  “This is about the elfstone, isn’t it?” Sigrid asked, when the assistant fetched her.

  “Hello. My name is Brynjar Jonsson, and I’m with the Road and Coastal Administration—”

  “I know who you represent,” Sigrid told Mr. Jonsson. “Is this about the elfstone? The one that’s causing you so much trouble?”

  “Perhaps your guest would like some tea,” the assistant said, and Mr. Jonsson shot him a look of such pure gratitude that the assistant took a moment to upload it to the general database.

  When he returned from the kitchen with a tray, Mr. Jonsson sat perched on the best couch, the one Sigrid had swathed in a bearskin from a disciple in Canada. He sat well away from the fur, although his eye kept catching it and he seemed unable to look away from it entirely. He took the tea eagerly, turning it around and around in its saucer, fussing with the milk and sugar, getting it just right. Not for the first time, the assistant wondered what tea tasted like. Sigrid made the blend herself.

  “Did you drive here?” she asked.

  “What? Yes. I mean, no. Sort of.” Mr. Jonsson laughed ruefully. “It’s outside. The ride. It drove me here. I wasn’t sure, with the roads, so I thought I should take something more specialized, but actually—”

  “Good,” Sigrid said. “Drink your tea.”

  She did not tell him about the damiana in it. And since it wasn’t a scheduled substance, the assistant wasn’t legally compelled to either. They shared a rare glance at each other. Sigrid looked away first. His eyes could hold a focus indefinitely. Hers were organic, and very old.

  “The elfstone,” Sigrid said.

  Mr. Jonsson coughed. “Yes. Well. You seem to have heard about the trouble we’ve been having, building the road for the new resort.”

  “I heard you lost someone on the road crew,” she said. “I heard your bulldozer flattened him like pönnukökur.”

  Mr. Jonsson blanched. “Well, there was an accident, yes. The bulldozer was meant to be autonomou
s, and it acted up. You know how these things can be.” He cast a quick glance at the assistant. “No offense.”

  “But that wasn’t the first incident, was it?” Sigrid asked.

  Mr. Jonsson drank more of his tea. His pupils began to dilate. Color returned to his face. “No. Not as such. Although none have been so serious, until now. Just, you know, rainstorms. Windstorms. Hail. People falling ill, permits getting lost, money not coming through. The same little problems as with any project, just . . .”

  “Just more of them.” Sigrid made no effort to disguise the smug tone of her voice. “I warned your office, you know. I did.”

  “We—I—understand that. That is why we—I—have come to you. We know about your talent. And the fact that you’ve done this before. Spoken with the elves, I mean, ahead of major development projects. We thought perhaps you might go to the site and parlay on our behalf—”

  “I will do no such thing,” Sigrid said. “That stone is home to many generations of elves. I cannot ask them to leave.”

  Mr. Jonsson’s eyes made a movement that Sigrid’s eyes didn’t catch: a barely restrained eye roll. Suddenly the assistant had to reevaluate the man’s affect. He was not nervous about offending Sigrid or incurring her spiritual wrath, but rather nervous about his behavior being reported to his superiors. He resented this part of his job. His aversion to the animal hides and skulls and spheres of obsidian and labradorite was not fear, it was contempt.

  “Your tea is getting cold, Mr. Jonsson,” the assistant said. Mr. Jonsson drank more of it. The assistant wondered if Sigrid had added mushrooms to this particular blend. It would be inconvenient if the man from the Road and Coastal Administration had a bad hallucination in their living room; the assistant might need to call an ambulance, and that would really disrupt their plans for the afternoon. It was Bingo Day at the community center, after all. And Sigrid had such a streak of good luck going.

  “If you could just, I don’t know, ask them what they want,” Mr. Jonsson said. “We have to move the stone either way. So if you could just, you know. Ask them if they want an ocean view, or access to public transit, or something like that.”