Kent had been appalled when he found the half-formed robot. He shouldn’t have been surprised. What did he think Beachstone was doing with all those tools? What sickened him was the part that his sister must have played in his experiments. It was little consolation that Beachstone seemed inept at robotics.
Kent heard his sister go into her room. At least she knew who was boss. He kept her in the house at night so that she wouldn’t sleep down there with Beachstone. He strained for sounds of her, but she was silent. She must have already shut off for the night. “Dean, is my sister awake?”
“No, sir.”
She couldn’t bear being awake in the house. He should sleep as well.
“Do you want me to inform you when she awakes, sir?”
“No,” he said, standing up. He walked over to his dresser. There was a toy motor that he had played with as a child sitting on top of it, coated in dust. He hadn’t done anything mechanical in so long. The city had just been sims and sims. He wasn’t sure he had ever seen anything outside of his one-room apartment. Who did Beachstone think he was, trying to build a robot? A human! Kent grabbed the small motor, dismantled it, and rebuilt it in less than a minute. The dust settled back onto the dresser top. The lights in the room cast odd forms on the walls and the floor. He turned on his night vision but the forms stayed, white now.
“What do they do down there?” Kent said. “Is she helping him?”
“I cannot say, sir.”
“You can’t?”
“I do not know, sir.”
Dean’s voice. It was Barren Cove. It was home. It made him sick. He couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. He turned and looked at his room. It seemed empty despite the furniture. What was there to do?
He remembered the half-formed robot in the cabana.
He crossed the room and went into the hallway. His sister’s door was open. She wanted him to know that she had nothing to hide. But she had everything to hide. He stood in her open doorway, looking at her as she slept. He could deactivate her right now. All she had was her emergency safeguard to protect her. The sight of her so vulnerable angered him. He almost never rebooted. It was demeaning. He stepped into her room. She kept everything so precise, it was impossible to know that anyone lived here. The way the empty perfume bottles and silver candlesticks were arranged on her bureau was probably the way that Mr. Vandley’s daughter had left them before either Mary or Kent was born. So obedient. He crossed to her, standing in front of her chair. Whose face had she been modeled on? Had their father even had a face in mind? Kent felt nothing about it; it was just his sister.
What would the robot in the cabana look like? Who would it be?
Kent jumped onto his sister’s lap, facing her, his legs on either side of her own. He rearranged her hands so they were sitting on his thighs.
“You know what they do with robophiles in the city?” Kent said to her sleeping form. “The humans kill them.” Kent grinned. “The humans kill them and they deactivate the robots and we let them.”
Mary remained asleep.
Kent watched her. Why didn’t she understand that the humans undermined their way of life? It was only a matter of time before all the humans were dead, and only robots were left, the superior being, continuing the clockwork of life. That’s what she didn’t see. Robots were alive. He was alive. And he couldn’t die. Beachstone was an inferior being.
Kent wished he could reactivate her. He wanted to tell her now, so that she would understand. But there was no way. He had to wait until the time that she had set her system to boot up. He watched her, wondering how his father had gotten her hair. Real human hair. It was all synthetic hair now—synthetic everything.
The sun began to rise, a faint light showing behind the curtains. Kent grew excited. It was hard to believe so much time had passed. He knew Mary’s face by heart.
A faint buzz came from the back of Mary’s head, and then she began to move. Kent grabbed her by the throat. “Good morning.”
Normally they would have been evenly matched, but her systems were still booting up. She pulled at his hand. “Let go of me,” Mary messaged him.
He reached up with his other hand and inserted the USB plug in his fingers into her USB port. She struggled, but he held her down. “Humans don’t build robots anymore.”
“No,” she messaged him. Her face contorted. “No.”
“You think you can make something with Beachstone?” Kent said.
“No.”
He pulled his finger back. The program was activated. They would build their own robot. Kent could do it now with or without her, but she would be a part of it, she knew. It was part of her system now. He let go of her and stood up. “They kill robophiles in the city.”
She stayed in her chair, not moving.
He was angry with her for being still. Was she so submissive? “I’ll be upstairs,” he said, and walked out. He listened for a sound behind him but heard nothing.
16.
CLARKE, ONLY THREE days old, was allowed to roam on his own for the first time. His parents, especially his father, had spent most of the past two days making sure that all of his systems were operational. They had kept him around the house, making him attempt simple tasks as he followed them around—sit, walk, talk. Almost immediately, Clarke had bristled under the attention. He was fine. He could feel that he was fine. All of his activity was conducive with the knowledge already installed on his hard drive. He started to tell them he was fine. His father was angry at first: “You’ll listen to me.” But his mother was nervous, taken aback, as if every word he said was a physical assault. And so, at last, with a sense that they wanted to be rid of him, Clarke was allowed to wander.
He went down to the beach. The sand shifted beneath his feet. He knew about the ocean, the tides, the sand, what they were made of and the theories as to how they were formed, but the feel of the sand shifting beneath his feet was wholly new. Of course, it made sense. The granules would move if acted upon, but the sensation of the ground giving way before him, holding him back from each step, was something to be registered, added to his memory. He walked to where the sand was pounded flat by the waves, but not so far that the water reached his feet as it rushed in and then rushed out, topped with foam. Would the water carry sensations that he couldn’t know without experiencing them? He wanted to rush forward, but something held him back. Going in didn’t seem like a good idea.
“You must be Clarke,” a voice said behind him, and he turned to find a skinny man with long hair leaning on a driftwood cane.
“Beachstone,” Clarke said.
“That’s right. Well, he was able to do it. You appear flawless.”
Clarke didn’t know how to respond. He found that he had an intrinsic apprehension about this man. He must be dangerous. And yet, Mary had said, You must meet Beachstone; as soon as your father isn’t around I’ll take you to meet Beachstone.
“Well, welcome to the family,” Beachstone said, holding out his hand.
Clarke took it; they shook and then let go. “Thank you,” he said. This man was human, wasn’t he? How could he be part of the family? Maybe he thought he was a robot.
“Just watch out for your father,” Beachstone said. “I’d watch out for everybody.”
“Including you?”
“We’ll just have to see,” Beachstone said, and turned away. He started to walk toward the small building nestled along the base of the cliff.
Clarke watched the man walk. He rested quite a bit of his weight on the driftwood cane, limping as he went. Clarke was confused by the encounter. If that was a human, how could you tell the difference? He looked just like Clarke did. Not the exact same features, but the same kind of features. They were indistinguishable. And yet, he had already heard his father say many times how superior robots were. Was it because Beachstone needed a cane? Beachstone disappeared into the caba
na, and Clarke turned back to the ocean. He would ask somebody about Beachstone. For now, he wanted to explore.
He thought again about going into the water but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he started down the beach, walking just above the limit of the waves.
The sun is almost perpendicular with the ground, Clarke thought. It is almost noon. The waves come in on average once every twelve seconds. The world is a constant flow of data, calculable, checkable, and much as expected. Already, Clarke looked forward to something new and different.
Two small figures played in the waves ahead of him. Clarke zoomed in and saw that the figures were small. In fact, in his limited experience, they were the smallest robots he had ever seen, and he wondered why anyone would build diminutive robots. But when he came closer and the two figures stopped to stare at him, he realized his mistake at once. These were humans, children. This, Clarke thought, is what makes us different. I’m younger than they are, but I am fully grown. What a waste of energy for them.
“Hey,” one of the boys said.
“Hello,” Clarke said.
“Can you climb?” the other boy said.
“Climb?”
“Yeah, this lady came by once and she could climb the cliff all the way up.” The boy pointed to the cliff, but Clarke didn’t turn. He knew what the cliff looked like. Instead, he watched how the children needed to look at the cliff as if to reaffirm that it was still there.
“I can climb,” Clarke said.
“Do it.”
Clarke was both compelled and repulsed by the command. He wanted to climb, and yet, if he climbed now after having been told to climb, somehow the climbing would be tainted, not belonging to him, but to this boy.
“Come on,” the other boy said, and the two of them ran up the beach, sand spraying out behind each footstep. When the boys reached the bottom of the cliff, they started to climb. The light-haired boy raised a foot, leaning back almost parallel with the ground, trying to reach the top of a rock that was too tall for him. He steadied himself against the rock wall. The other boy had both hands over his head, his fingers splayed on the rock face. He looked back at Clarke and then up at his goal. Clarke joined them. He grabbed the wall and began to climb at once, the metal fingers beneath his simul-skin gripping the rock hard enough that little rivulets of dust dropped down onto the boys below him.
“Hey, wait for us,” they yelled, but Clarke didn’t want to wait. He wanted to show them that he could do something they couldn’t do. In fact, he could do lots of things they couldn’t do. They were useless. “No fair,” one of the voices reached up the rock wall.
Clarke looked down. Both boys had stopped trying to climb and were watching Clarke’s progress. I’ll show them what they’re missing. They’ll see. Clarke started back down. When he hung just above the ground, he turned and looked over his shoulder. “Come on,” he said, now in control.
The boys rushed forward, each gripping one of Clarke’s shoulders and sliding off.
“No, you, what’s your name?”
“John,” the dark-haired boy said.
“Come around here.” Clarke grabbed John and fit him in front, with the boy’s back to the rock wall and his arms wrapped around Clarke’s neck. “Now, you get on my back.”
“Martin.”
“Martin, get on my back.” The blond boy climbed onto Clarke’s back, and Clarke started climbing again. John strained to see past Clarke’s head, to look below. He gripped tighter and then looked up into Clarke’s face and smiled. They were halfway up the cliff now.
“Mary didn’t let us do anything like this,” Martin said behind Clarke’s back. He readjusted his grip.
“Mary?” Clarke said, stopping at the name.
“The woman who climbed for us before.”
“And got naked,” John said, and the two boys laughed.
“That’s my mother,” Clarke said, angry that the boys were laughing.
John tried to stop laughing, looked down, and grew sober at the sight. “Whoa.”
Martin grabbed John’s left wrist in his right hand and kicked out with his legs.
“Hey, stop kicking,” John said, shifting his position.
“I’m slipping.”
Clarke started to climb faster. Martin readjusted his grip again.
“Quit it,” John said, and kicked back.
Martin grabbed at Clarke and said, “Stop it.”
Clarke hurried, taking less care to find handholds. What did it matter anyway? With his hands everything was a handhold. He could climb a cliff face with two humans holding on to him when they couldn’t even climb it themselves. He moved faster not to reach the top before Martin lost his grip, but precisely because Martin might lose his grip if he moved faster. He wanted to see what would happen if the boy tumbled down to the rocks below. Clarke knew he could jump from this height unharmed—his systems knew it instinctively. But he had a feeling the outcome would be different for the humans. His preprogrammed memory units told him that. But could he trust his parents’ programming? Had Mary mentioned two boys on the beach?
Martin’s hands slipped away, and he gripped more tightly with his legs. He swung himself back up, gripping one of Clarke’s shoulders, pulling, slipping, catching again. John reached for him, and in so doing, he shifted his own legs, which released Martin’s grip, and suddenly the weight on Clarke’s back was gone.
“Martin!” John yelled, letting go and trying to reach down to catch his friend, but the cage created by Clarke’s body prevented him from getting anywhere. “Go down,” he said.
They were at the top of the cliff, however, and Clarke brought them up on the ledge. John stood at the edge trying to look down, but the cliff jutted out, blocking his view. He looked back at Clarke with wet eyes. Tears drew lines in his sand-dirtied face. “You killed him,” he said.
The boy had fallen. Clarke wanted to go back and see what had happened. He understood that John’s reaction was telling him something, that the tears bespoke sadness, but Clarke didn’t feel anything himself, just slight curiosity.
“We have to go back,” John said. “Maybe he’s okay.”
Clarke knew that there was no way that the boy was okay. The knowledge he had been programmed with pertaining to humans told him this, and yet, this human, who must surely know his own kind better than Clarke could, had doubts as to the outcome of his friend’s fall. How was that possible? Clarke picked up the boy without a word. With John in his hand, he felt a sudden urge to throw the boy off the cliff after his friend. It would be so easy. It would be so much fun. Yes, that was what this day was all about—fun. The world was a series of data points, but as time passed, there had to be a better way to occupy his operating system than counting the grains of sand, or mapping the fractals of the ocean waves. That’s what these humans had understood. That was what John’s face had said as Clarke had climbed. And yet, the climbing hadn’t been the fun part for Clarke, whereas it had been for the boys. It was the boys’ reaction. As he was reacting now, kicking and screaming and crying. Then Clarke pulled John’s jerking body to him, and jumped off the cliff. John screamed the whole way down, and then his breath was knocked from him when they hit the beach. Clarke dropped him, and John coughed, dry, heaving coughs, as he crawled on hands and knees on the sand.
Clarke looked and saw what they had come to see. Martin’s head had missed a jagged rock by only inches. Instead, the rock had caught the boy’s shoulder; his right arm was almost broken off from his body, white bone gaping out of the torn socket, brown blood black with sand. His legs were at impossible angles, but his face was almost serene.
John had crawled toward his friend, had another bout of coughing, and then turned away. “I want to go home,” he said.
“Are you happy to be alive?” Clarke said, turning to look at John, whose face was hidden in his forearm.
The boy cried.
“I can kill you at any time.”
“Just take me home, please.”
“I can kill you at any time.”
John said nothing, not even looking at Clarke.
“No,” Clarke said, answering the boy’s request. “I took you to the top of the cliff and back. You go home yourself.”
The boy made a sound. Was he still crying? He started to walk away. He dragged his feet in the sand.
Clarke looked back at what had once been a human. He looked at his own hand. He opened and closed his fingers and then ran his fingers one by one. He was indestructible. A wave crashed behind him. He turned and ran toward the water, not stopping when his feet felt the water pulling the sand out from under him, but plunging forward into the undertow. He dropped forward, the water splashing under his weight. A wave crashed over him, and the water pulled his body away from the shore. The world beneath the water was in constant motion. Clarke saw particles of the ocean floor being churned up by the waves, the brown wisps of smoke twirling and playing. For what? For Clarke to see at just that moment, to record on his memory chip forever. He rolled over, the sky coming into view. The sun was at a 110-degree angle to the ground. Clarke was far from the shore. He moved each of his fingers one by one, starting with the pinky on his left hand and cycling to the pinky on his right and then back again. He looked down the shore in the direction that John had walked. He zoomed in and saw the small figure making his way down the beach. He was bringing his feet up higher now, small tufts of sand like wings at the back of his heels. Clarke could kill that boy. He could end his life. He had ended Martin’s life. Well, it hadn’t been him per se but in fact the human’s own inadequacy. His own small hand’s inability to serve its purpose, to keep the greater form alive. His hands had slipped. And yet, John had accused Clarke of killing his friend. Clarke liked the accusation. Martin wouldn’t have been in the position to have his fall if it hadn’t been for Clarke. Yes, he had killed the boy. So fragile, the bioforms. So useless.
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