Barren Cove

by Ariel S. Winter

Clarke was beyond the waves now. Why had he hesitated to go into the water before? He was waterproof. He was indestructible! His mother had climbed for those boys. The thought stopped him. Before he had been built his mother had climbed with those boys. One of those boys was now dead. They had liked his mother. They had laughed at seeing her naked. Clarke ripped his own wet clothes from his body. He was a robot. All of this simul-skin that made them laugh, that made them think of themselves, what did it really have to do with them? Clarke knew of sex. Clarke knew of prudery. But his mother was a robot, as was he, and he had killed one of the humans and he could kill the other one at any time. He began to swim toward the shore. His hands cut through the water as his arms brought them around and around, the metal joints at his shoulders turning smoothly. He propelled himself forward. A wave swelled, trying to pull him away, but he climbed it and it then pushed him toward the shore.

  When he stepped out of the water onto solid land, he was naked. He had drifted away from Martin’s body. When he zoomed in, John was still visible on the horizon. Clarke wasn’t interested in either of them now. He wanted to tell his mother about his day. He wanted to remind her of the boys she had seen before he had been activated. He wanted her to know what he had done. He knew how she would react. He knew how his father would react as well; he’d be thrilled. And yet, it was his mother’s reaction that he looked forward to. John had cried, or at least there had been tears in his eyes. What would a robot’s face do?

  He started toward Barren Cove. The sun dipped over the edge of the cliff, casting the beach in shadow. The temperature dropped four degrees. He would have to pass Beachstone’s hut again to get to the house. Watch out for everybody, the human had said. Everyone should watch out for me, Clarke thought. Clarke wondered what Beachstone’s reaction would be to know that he was now living with a homicidal robot.

  The weather seemed to change suddenly. Clouds that had seemed benign before, gentle white tufts drifting in the sky as the earth turned, now covered all of the sky in front of him. They were dark in the center.

  I don’t have to pass Beachstone’s hut, Clarke thought suddenly. I can climb the cliff face. Of course I can climb the cliff face.

  There was a change in the barometric pressure, and the air was suddenly soupy. Clarke climbed the cliff, rushing up to the top this time, unburdened by any weight, uninterested in the act of climbing, merely focused on getting from one place to the other. At the top of the cliff he flexed each of his fingers in turn once more.

  Barren Cove was visible ahead. The sky that served as its backdrop was black. Clarke zoomed in. Was it raining there already? It looked like it was. He looked up at the sky overhead. A fine mist hit his naked form, like sea spray, but the sea was now far below. Along with Martin’s body.

  I am a robot. Built by two other robots. The rain began to fall, and then it was torrential. Clarke walked through the sudden nighttime as if nothing had changed. He was nearly at Barren Cove now.

  The yard was empty. Kapec must have known enough to get out of the storm. Dean welcomed Clarke as the front door opened.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “Upstairs,” Dean said. “In her room.”

  Clarke took the stairs two at a time. Lightning crackled outside. He went to his mother’s door.

  She stood at the window with her back to the door. The world outside was black, the pane of glass acting as a mirror, reflecting his mother’s face back to him. Her face was strained, her eyes searching for something that she couldn’t see. She turned to him suddenly. There was no change in her expression, not even at his naked form.

  Clarke stepped into the room. A puddle of water had formed where he had been standing.

  Mary looked away again, staring back out the window.

  Clarke wanted to tell her that he had killed a human. That he had liked it and wanted to kill more. Her reaction would be terrible. He just had to say it. But he couldn’t bring himself to form the words. “Aren’t you even going to ask me where my clothes are?”

  “Where are your clothes?”

  “I took them off to go swimming.”

  A hint of a smile showed at her lips. Or was it a trick of the reflection? “That’s nice.”

  If he said it, she would turn; she would pay attention. How was it that the weakened man on the beach held all her attention, that she managed to seem sick without him? The lightning flashed. “Mom,” Clarke said.

  Mary didn’t turn.

  Clarke crossed the room, knocked over some things on his mother’s bureau, and then sat down. He listened to the rain while his mother stood looking at what? Her own image in the window? The ocean? The two of them were silent.

  • • •

  The storm lasted on and off for four days. Clarke stayed near his mother when she was in the house, bristling with his secret homicide. When Mary went down to the beach to be with Beachstone, Clarke sat with his father and listened to the older robot rail against Beachstone while he dismantled and reassembled a small engine. On the first day that dawned sunny, Clarke left the house before his mother did. He found himself retracing his steps of several days before, stopping at the place where Martin’s body had rested. Somebody had retrieved the body, and any sign of blood had long ago been washed away in the rain, but Clarke swam again, enjoying the feeling of the water on his simul-skin. It wasn’t long afterward that he decided to return home. He would tell his mother about killing Martin. Maybe he would even threaten Beachstone for the entertainment value. It would certainly make his father proud.

  He entered Barren Cove and started upstairs. He stopped at the sound of his mother’s voice.

  “Attach green to green and blue to blue.”

  “I know,” a voice answered.

  Who was Mary talking to? His father had made it clear that Beachstone was not to be in the house. “Not Kapec?” Clarke said, smirking, the joke automatic.

  A racking cough came from down the hall. It was similar to John’s heaving cough over his friend’s dead body. It came from the stairway. Clarke walked quickly to the end of the stairs, looking into each of the open doors of the hall as he passed. Clarke climbed the steps to the upper floor. He knew that this was where he had been built, where, in fact, his parents had been built by his grandfather, and yet he had not been up the stairs since first being activated and had almost no data pertaining to the space. But when he came to the top of the stairs, he did not take in his surroundings but instead focused on the people in the center of the room.

  Beachstone, his cane leaning against the edge of the table before him, bent over Kent’s prostrate body. Mary stood at the end of the table near her brother’s feet. Much of Kent’s simul-skin was peeled away, revealing the metal skeleton beneath. Beachstone looked up. “Ah, you’re early.”

  “What are you doing?” Clarke said.

  “Making some necessary adjustments,” Beachstone said, bending back over his work. He took several cables, attached them to ports in Kent’s open chest, and then ran the cables back to a laptop sitting on a bench nearby.

  Clarke tried to register the sight before him and access the appropriate response, but his systems seemed stuck in a loop. He looked to his mother.

  “Beachstone is only doing what is best,” Mary said.

  Beachstone was sitting before the laptop now, typing.

  Clarke understood what was happening—his father was being reprogrammed—but he didn’t understand how or why. The sight of the featureless metal skeleton encased in the open crust of simul-skin was surprisingly startling. Clarke saw Martin’s broken body on the beach. Beachstone was here doing the same thing. No, Beachstone was doing more, because all that Clarke had been able to do was to destroy. But here, Beachstone was changing Kent’s life. He was erasing the Kent of the past and creating a new Kent that would reside in Kent’s shell. Clarke knew that his parents had been robot built—that he had been robot b
uilt—but despite that legacy, here was the all too clear evidence that the humans built robots first. Clarke didn’t like the idea that this frail human, whose own systems were so faulty that he needed to walk with a cane, was in some way superior to him. He could step forward and end his life with one blow. “You’re killing him,” Clarke said.

  “I’m giving him a new life,” Beachstone said.

  “What was wrong with his old life?”

  “If I told you the truth, you would never forgive me.”

  “You are in the process of killing my father. How do you think I will ever forgive you?”

  Beachstone turned from the computer and looked at Clarke over his shoulder. “Your father raped his sister, and now we have you,” Beachstone said. He turned back to his work.

  Clarke looked at his mother again, but she was engrossed in the details of her brother’s open body. Clarke didn’t have to ask if it was true. He could feel it just by being in the room. And yet, instead of hatred, he felt respect. Beachstone had warned him not to trust anybody. And here Beachstone was proving that point. Yes, Clarke was superior to the humans, more powerful, indestructible, but this human . . .

  You don’t fuck with Beachstone. He will fuck with you all the way back.

  I could kill him, he thought. But then, why hadn’t he told his mother about killing the boy?

  Beachstone continued to type as Mary watched him with awe.

  I will not be fucked with either, Clarke thought.

  17.

  IT WAS SOMEHOW in the low fifties, gray and rainy, when the temperature had been in the seventies only two days before. Despite the weather, Mary found Beachstone sweating in his shirtsleeves with the cabana doors wide open, stooped over a tablet that was resting on the edge of the table beside the partially assembled robot.

  “Do you need my help?” Mary said.

  “No,” Beachstone replied without looking away from the tablet. His left hand rested absently on the robot’s thigh.

  “If there’s something unclear—”

  “No, Mary,” Beachstone said, pointing at the tablet and half mouthing the words he was reading there.

  Mary stepped up to the table, started to reach for the completed leg, but then gripped her own hands against her chest instead. It was so unreal to see the robot in progress, impossible and unnatural. But Kent had completed Clarke by himself in a quarter of the time Beachstone had worked on their son, and Beachstone wasn’t halfway through.

  Beachstone gripped a collection of wires coming out of the simul-skin of the leg toward the pelvis and counted them off. “No,” he said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Mary could see at once that he’d left a wire out, which would mean opening the simul-skin back up to add it. “It’s okay,” she said. “If you just—”

  “Mary!” His eyes widened, his jaw jutted out. “Did I give you an answer?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No. I said no. I don’t need your help. Was that hard to understand?”

  Mary averted her eyes and shook her head.

  “Good.” He sifted through the open toolbox on a nearby chair and came up with a utility knife.

  Mary walked around the table. An open laptop was on another chair, wires connecting it to the robot. She looked at the screen, a simple program to gauge whether the wires were functioning.

  Beachstone turned on her. “Mary, no, leave.”

  “I touched nothing.”

  “You’re just driving me nuts,” Beachstone said. “You’re distracting me.”

  “I want to help,” Mary said.

  “You will, later, when I tell you. Right now there’s nothing for you to do.”

  “I can—” She stopped herself. Beachstone seemed almost panicked behind his anger. If he’d just let her help him . . .

  “Mary . . .” He thrust his open hands in front of him, tilting his head, his expression suggesting she was doing something stupid. “I asked you to leave,” he said.

  She wanted to say, This is supposed to be our son, my son too, but she was afraid to hear his response. “I’m here to help whenever you need me,” she said.

  He softened. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to do this.”

  “Right, you do,” Mary said. She started around the table in order to leave.

  “Don’t be like that,” Beachstone said, the anger fresh again.

  “Like what? I’m agreeing with you. I’m doing what you told me to do.”

  He considered her. The muscles in his face twitched, subtle gradations of emotion Beachstone was unaware of, something another human couldn’t even read. “Thank you,” he said at last.

  She said nothing. She was in the rain. What had happened? This was supposed to be their son, but Beachstone had shut her out completely. Ever since Clarke was born, Beachstone had become a different person. Even when he wasn’t working on the robot, he was shut off from her. And she didn’t know how hard she could push him without him erupting, and she never wanted that. She wanted him to be happy. The child was supposed to make them both happy.

  The rain had molded her clothing to her body, but she made no effort to hurry. When she looked back, the light in the cabana looked like it came from another world.

  There was a sudden thud. Mary yelped and jumped back.

  Clarke was laughing. “Scared you, Mom,” he said, getting to his feet. He’d landed on his shoulder.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Want to see if I can jump off the cliff and land on my hands.” He held them up and wiggled his fingers, as though she might not know what hands were.

  “Why?”

  Clarke nodded his head toward the cabana. “Is Boyfriend building my playmate? Or is it Stepdad? Maybe I should go say hi.”

  “No,” Mary said sharply.

  “All right, Mom. Whatever you say. Jeez.”

  Mary let three seconds pass. “Beachstone does not want to be disturbed.”

  “Ooooo. Threw you out, didn’t he? Didn’t he?” He pointed at her.

  “Clarke, please.”

  “That can wait. I’m too busy right now.” He turned back to the cliff face. “Want to climb?”

  “I’ll take the stairs.”

  “If you want to take all day about it.” He started to climb.

  Mary went to the staircase and began to ascend. She was perhaps halfway when she saw a flash in the rain and heard the thump of Clarke hitting the sand again.

  “Almost!” he yelled in the darkness.

  If Clarke and Beachstone were both otherwise engaged—and Beachstone didn’t even want her nearby—what was she going to do? She recalled an image of the partly finished robot. She felt doubly cast out. It was the strain. Beachstone was pushing himself too hard, and he wouldn’t even let her help him relax. He’d made it very clear just then.

  “Hey, Mom, watch,” Clarke called. He was at the top of the cliff again.

  Mary turned on her night vision even though it was still midday. Clarke dove over the side of the cliff, his form perfect, as though he were worried about how big a splash he would make even though there was no water. From her position, she couldn’t see his landing.

  She looked at Barren Cove, dreary in the rain. Kent was in the house. The thought made her feel sicker. She would power down, she thought. Beachstone wouldn’t be available for many hours yet. Without something else to do, why waste her battery?

  • • •

  In bed, at night, Mary held Beachstone close to her as he slept. No sound came from outside—no wind, no bird, not even the ocean. The expansion and deflation of Beachstone’s chest as he breathed was comforting, but it was his heartbeat, which she could feel in her side and the arm she had around him that truly delighted Mary. It had slowed over the years, but the sensation of it reaching out to her through his body never changed. She knew she needed
to power down, too; Beachstone preferred that she sleep when he did—he didn’t want to feel watched—but she was spending so much of her days shut off, and these precious, rare moments with Beachstone were too important. Otherwise, it was as though he had gone away.

  He turned. He would be angry if he awoke to find her awake. She withdrew her arm from under him and began to swing her feet over the edge of the bed.

  “Wait,” he said.

  She turned back. He played with her hair, scratching her back through it.

  “Come here,” he said, and reached for her as though he wanted to be picked up. She turned onto her side and rested her head on his chest, his heartbeat now in her ear. “I love you more than anything,” Beachstone said.

  “I know,” Mary said.

  “Do you?”

  She nodded against him.

  “Was that a yes or a no? I can’t see.”

  “It was a yes.”

  They lay in silence.

  “We’re going to be so happy,” Beachstone said at last. “So happy.”

  Mary hesitated and said, “It’s going well then?”

  She expected Beachstone to tense up, but instead he hugged her closer and said, “Better than that.”

  He sounded so certain that she believed him, despite what she’d seen.

  “I’ll need your help soon.”

  “You will?” She snuggled in closer.

  “I will.” He turned onto his side, extricating himself from under her so that they were facing each other, so close she could feel his breath on her lips. He put a hand on the side of her head. “We’re going to have everything,” he said.

  She cast down her eyes but smiled. He leaned in and kissed her on the lips, a small kiss, but it became a bigger kiss, his tongue—she closed her eyes—better than his heartbeat. When he stopped, she said, “I love you.”

  “I know,” he said, grinning. Then he flopped over, turning away from her but dragging her arm over him so that they were spooning. “Sleep with me,” he said.

  “Once I power down, I won’t have control of my muscle functions. I might fall on top of you, and you could be pinned down.”