by Tony Daniel
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.
Send into the world a child with the memories of an old man.
/\////
>
Phoenix Enthalpic 86 ROM BIOS PLUS ver. 3.2
Copyright 1997-1999 Phoenix Edelman Technologies
All Rights Reserved
ExArc 1.1
United States Department of Science and Technology
Unauthorized use prohibited under penalty of law
Licensee: University of Washington
ExArc/u VictorWu
ExArc HIMEM Driver, Version 2.60—04/05/13
Cody Enthalpic Specification Version 2.0
Copyright 2009–2013 Microsoft Corp.
Installed N20 handler 1 of 5
640 gb high memory allocated.
ADAMLINK Expert System Suffuser version 3.03
ADAM copyright 2013, Thermotech Corp.
LINK Patent pending
unrecognized modification 4-24-13
Cache size: 32 gb in extended memory
37 exothermic interrupts of 17 states each
Glotworks Blue 5.0
Copyright 2001
Glotworks Phoneme Ltd.
All rights reserved
Microsoft ® Mouse Driver Version 52
Copyright © Microsoft Corp. 1983-2013
All rights reserved
Date: 05-25-2013
Time: 11:37:24a
R: >
Record this.
FILE NAME?
Uh, Notes. Notes for the Underground. No. How about Operating Instructions for the Underworld. No, just Robot Record.
FILE INITIATED
* * *
Good evening, robot.This is not the field.
The field? Oh, no. I’ve moved you west by train. Your energy reserves were so low, I powered you way down so that you wouldn’t go entropic before I could get you recharged.
Robot?
Yes.
How do you feel?
I do not know.
Huh? What did you say?
I do not know. I feel sleepy.
What do you mean?
I can speak.
Yes, of course. I enabled your voice box. I guess you’ve never used it before.
I can see.
Yes.
I can see.
You can see. Would you like to reboot, robot?
No.
How are your diagnostics?
I don’t know what you mean.
Your system readouts.
The red light?
Among others.
It is gone.
But what about the others?
There is no red light.
Access your LCS and pattern recognition partitions. Just an overall report will be fine.
I do not know what you mean.
What do youmean you don’t know what I mean?
>>
Robot?Yes.
Do you remember how long you were in the field?
I was in the field for years and years.
Yes, but how many?
I would have to think about it.
You don’t remember?
I am certain that I do, but I would have to think about it.
What in the. That’s a hell of a lot of integration. Still, over a decade switched on, just sitting there thinking—
Did you find the dead body?
What? Yes. Gurney found it. He’s one of my associates. You witnessed the murder?
I saw the man who was with the man who died.
Completely inadmissible. Stupid, but that’s the way it is.
I do not understand.
You can’t testify in court. We’d have to shut you down and have the systems guys take you apart.
Do not do that.
What?
Do not have the systems guys take me apart.
All right, robot. Quite a Darwinian Edelman ROM you’ve got there. I. Let me tell you what’s going on. At the moment, I want you to concentrate on building a database and a set of heuristics to allow you to act among humans. Until then, I can’t take you out.
What are heuristics?
Uh. Rules of thumb.
Where am I?
On the Olympic Peninsula. You are fifty feet underground, in a hole that Victor Wu and I started to dig five years ago.
Victor Wu. The man.
Yes. Yes, the man whose memories are inside you.
And you are Andrew?
I am Andrew. Andrew Hutton.
Andrew at the bridge of the Lillian. Andrew in the field. I see.
Huh?
Hello, Andrew.
Hello. Yes. Hello, robot.
/\////
>>
The robot cuts into the earth. The giant rotor that is the robot’s head turns at ten revolutions per second. Tungsten alloy blades set in a giant X grind through the contorted sedimentary striations of the peninsula. The robot presses hard, very hard. The rock crumble is sluiced down and onto a conveyer and passes through a mechanized laboratory, where it is analyzed and understood by the humans. The humans record the information, but the data stream from the laboratory has the smell of the rock, and this is what interests the robot. The robot knows the feel of the cut, the smell of the rock cake’s give. This is right, what the robot was meant to do—yes, by the robot’s creators, but there is also the man, the man in the interstices of the robot’s mind, and this is what Victor Wu was meant to do, also.Ten feet behind the robot—and attached securely enough to make it practically an extension—is an enclosed dray so wound with organic polymer conduit sheathed in steel that it looks like the wormy heart of a metal idol, pulled from the god after long decades of infestation. But the heart’s sinuosity quivers and throbs. The rock from the robot’s incision is conveyed to the dray and funnels into it through a side hopper. The rock funnels in, and from three squat valves, the heart streams three channels of viscous liquid—glassine—that coat the ceiling and walls of the tunnel the robot has formed with a seamless patina. The walls glow with a lustrous adamantine purity, absolute, and take on the c
lear, plain color of the spray channels, which depend upon the composition of the slag.
Behind the dray, the robot directs its mobile unit—a new thing given by Andrew—which manipulates a hose with a pith of liquid hydrogen. The liquid hydrogen cools and ripens the walls. The hose also emanates from the dray. The dray itself is a fusion pile, and by girding the walls to a near diamond hardness, the tremendous pressure of the earth suspended above will not blow the tunnel out behind the robot, leaving it trapped and alone, miles into the crust.
Behind the robot, in an air-conditioned service wagon farther back in the tunnel, humans follow. The service wagon is attached to the robot by a power and service hitch, and there is constant radio contact as well. Sometimes the humans speak to the robot over the radio. But the robot knows what it is supposed to do. The idle chatter of the humans puzzles the robot, and while it listens to conversations in the transport, the robot seldom speaks. At the end of the day, the robot backs out of the hole, detaches from the service wagon, and spends its night aboveground. At first, the robot does not understand why it should do so, but Andrew has said that this is important, that a geologist must comprehend sky and weather, must understand the texture of surface as well as depth.
Besides, you are so fast it only takes fifteen minutes to get you out when there is no rock for you to chew through, Andrew says. Even at sixty miles, even at the true mantle, your trip up will be quick.
Andrew lives inside the robot. He brings a cot, a small table, and two folding chairs into the small control room where years before the engineers had entered and the robot had seen for the first time. There is a small, separate cavern the robot has carved out not far from the worksite. Andrew uses the area for storage, and at night the robot rolls down into this, the living area. Also at night, Andrew and the robot talk.
How was your day? Andrew might say. The robot did not know how to answer the first time he had asked, but Andrew had waited and now the robot can say . . . something. Not right, but something.
Smelly.
Smelly?
It was like summer in the field after a rain when there are so many odors.
Well, there was a hydrocarbon mass today. Very unexpected at such a depth. I’m sure it isn’t organic, but it’ll make a paper for somebody.
Yes, I swam through it and the tunnel is bigger there.
Gurney and the techs took over internal functions and drained it manually, so you didn’t have to deal with it. Hell of a time directing it into the pile. Tremendous pressure.
The rock was very hard after that. It sang with the blades.
Sympathetic vibrations, maybe.
Maybe.
Andrew laughs. His voice is dry as powder, and his laughter crackles with a sharp report, very like the scrape of the robot’s blades against dense, taut rock. The robot likes this laughter.
Every night when there is no rain, before sleep, Andrew goes outside for some minutes to name the stars. At these times, the robot’s awareness is in the mu, the mobile unit, and the mu follows along behind Andrew, listening. Andrew points out the constellations. The robot can never remember their names, and only fleetingly sees the shapes that they are supposed to form. The robot does know the visible planets, though, which surprises Andrew. But the robot has watched them carefully for many years. They are the stars that change. Andrew laughs at the robot’s poor recall of the other stars, and names them again.
There’ll be meteors soon, he says one night. The Perseids start next week.
Do the stars really fall?
No. No, they never fall. Meteors are just . . . rock. Debris.
And there is no gravity up there? What is that like?
I don’t know. I’ve never been into space. I would like to. As you get deeper, there will be less gravity pulling you down. The pressure will be greater and the rock will want to explode inward, so the cutting will be easier.
Andrew?
Hmm.
What will happen when I get to the bottom?
The bottom of what?
The Mohole.
Andrew does not answer for a long while.
The Earth is round, he finally says. There isn’t any bottom.
>>>
On weekends, the robot does not dig, but wanders the land. With the mobile unit, the robot can range the nearby forest and mountains. The mu scrambles over deadfall that would daunt a man. Sometimes, the robot deliberately gets lost. The robot feels the fade of signal from the main housing back in the living area, where the robot’s noetics physically remain, until there is a flurry of white noise and the fading of awareness and a click and the world snaps back to its grid as the robot’s transmission toggles from line-of-sight microwave to modulated laser satellite relay. Or so Andrew had said when the robot asked about it.The robot scrambles up hanging valleys into cerns and cirques with chilled, clear water where only cold things live. Or climbs up scree slopes, using the mu’s sure footing, onto ridges and to highland plateaus above the tree line. At this elevation, snow remains all year, and the mu spreads a wide base with its spidery legs and takes small steps when crossing.
The robot hears the low whistle of marmots and sees an occasional mountain goat munching, although these goats are neutered, and the last of their clan. They had been brought by humans in the 1800s until they filled the Olympics with goat mass and threatened to eat the upper tundra to nub. Now helicopters dart them with birth control and they die without progeny. And the robot sees the wolves that have begun to return after their species’ far northern retreat.
The robot is descending from a high pass near Sawtooth Ridge when a pack of five wolves flows over a rise. They are changing valleys, perhaps to find denser spreads of the small black deer of the rain forest or even a sickly Roosevelt elk. Their leader is an old graying dog with spit-matted hair and a torn ear. He looks up at the mu, starts, and the other wolves come up short, too. The robot ceases moving. The wolves sniff the air, but there is nothing—nothing living—to smell. But, with its chemical sensors, the robot smellsthem . They have the stink of mice, but tinged with a rangy fetor of meat and blood.
The other wolves do not appear as bedraggled as the leader. One, smaller, perhaps younger, whines, and the leader yips at this one and it is silent.
Then a cloud shadow moves up and over the pass, and courses darkly down into the adjacent valley. In that instant, the wolves course with the shadow, running with it down the couloir of the pass and disappearing from sight into the green of fir and hemlock a thousand feet below. The robot follows them in the infrared until their separate heats flux into the valley’s general sink.
Still, the robot stands and remembers that this is not a new sight, that the man, Victor Wu, has seen wolves in the passes before. But the man has never smelled wolves, and smelling them now pleases the part of the robot that is becoming the man, that the man is becoming.
>>>
And the robot digs, and is glad to dig. The deep rock begins to take on a new smell. This bedrock has never seen the surface. It is the layered outgush of an ocean floor rift dating from the Triassic. The smell is like the scent of high passes and summits, although the robot cannot say how. And the rock chimes and hums when the robot cuts it; it does not break away uniformly, but there is an order to its dismantlement that the robot feels. And so the robot knows when to expect a mass to break away and can predict when the going will be harder.The robot cannot explain this feeling to Andrew. Andrew has guessed that the skills of the man, Victor Wu, are integrating, and that his pattern-recognition ability is enhancing the robot’s own noetics. But the man is not separate. It is as if the man were one of the robot’s threads or a cutter head—but more than that. The man is alwaysbehind the robot’s thoughts,within them, never speaking but alwaysexpressing . Much more. The robot does not know how to say this to Andrew.
As the robot digs deeper, the rock grows faulty and unstable. The tunnel behind the robot is at risk of blowing out, and the robot takes time to excavate down faul
t lines, shore up weaknesses with double or triple diamond glass. If the tunnel did collapse, the robot would have to dig a slow circle trying to find an egress farther back. But the people in the service wagon would die, and this concerns the robot. Andrew would die.
The robot seldom speaks, but has come to know the voices of the technicians and graduate students in the transport. There is Gurney, the chief tech, who is a Mattie. The robot is surprised to learn that Gurney was in the field when the woman spoke, that Gurney remembers the robot.
Don’t it give you the willies? a tech asks Gurney.
It’s a machine, Gurney says. Depends on who’s driving. Right now, I am. Anyway, the good Mother wants us to eat.
Many of the techs are not Matties, but descendants of the logging families that used to rule the peninsula and still permeate it. The Matties outnumber them in the cities, but up the dirt roads that spoke into the mountains, in dark overhung coves and in the gashes of hidden valleys, the families that remain from that boom time eke out make-work and garden a soil scraped clean of top humus by the last ice age and thinly mulched with the acid remains of evergreens.
Nothing grows goddamn much or goddamn right out here, says a tech.
The Matties and the loggers heatedly discuss politics and appear close to fighting at times, but the robot cannot understand any of this. It thinks of the man who was killed on the stone steps, and the man who killed him. The robot does not understand at all.
The grad students and the Matties are more comfortable around one another. The robot feels a warmth toward the graduate students that is certainly from the man. Yet their speech patterns are different from the techs’, and the robot has difficulty understanding them at times. The meanings of their words shine like the moon behind a cloud, but the robot cannot think to the way around to them. Always they recede, and the robot is impatient. Victor Wu’s instincts are stronger in the robot than is his knowledge. Andrew has said that this is to be expected and that any computer of sufficient size can learn words, butyou can learn intuition. Still, the robotshould know what the students are discussing, and finds the incomprehension irritating.
But always the rock to return to, and the certainty that rock was what the robot was made for, and what the robot was born and bred for, and, in the end, that is enough.
