The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  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.

  Mymother 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’swarning ! You lie in your own filth, my children.

  Oh, peace. Why do you do this to me? Why do you do this toyourselves ?

  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.

  Apiece 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, thisthing 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, butthis 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 athing must survive. If a thing doesn’t survive, it isn’t a thing anymore. And thus survival iswhy 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 col
d 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.