The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  >>>

  One day in the following spring, at a critical juncture down in the Mohole, Gurney does not show up for work and the digging is halted.The referendum passed, one of the grad students says, and there’s fighting in Forks and a Mattie got killed in Port Angeles, it looks like.

  Andrew gives the robot the day off, and to the robot’s delight, the man and the mu go for a long walk along the Quinault. Andrew seems sad, and the robot says nothing for a long while. The robot wants to speak, but doesn’t know what to say to Andrew.

  It’s not the politics, Andrew finally says. The damn Matties got their Protectorate fair and square with the referendum. But you get the feeling they’dtake it if they hadn’t.

  Hadn’t what?

  Won the vote. There’s something about Gurney and them, the ones that I’ve met. I care about the same things they claim to. I don’t know. Something else again.

  Andrew, I don’t understand.

  They spend a lot of time worrying about whether everybody else believes the same way they do.

  The river rushes against cliff and turns through a stand of white birch. The robot stops the mu. The robot is captivated by the play of light on the water, the silver reflection of the sun, turning the clear water to opaque and viscous lead, then just as suddenly, when a cloud passes, back to happy water once again.

  It doesn’t really change, does it?

  What?

  The water. The way the light’s there, and isn’t, then is.

  Andrew rubs his eyes. He gazes out over the water. You are doing very well with your contractions, he says.

  You were right that I should stop thinking about them and they would flow more easily. Do you think it is Victor Wu’s knowledge surfacing, or my own practice?

  I don’t know. Both.

  Yes, both.

  The trail leads through a marsh, and Andrew struggles to find a dry path. The robot extends the mu’s footpads; each folds out as if it were an umbrella, and the mu seems to hover over the mud, the weight is distributed so well.

  Thank you for the mobile unit, the robot tells Andrew. I really like using it.

  It was necessary for the dig. That’s where most of the first grant money went. Robot, I have to tell you something.

  Andrew stops, balancing on a clump of rotten log.

  You have to tellme something, Andrew?

  Yes. Someone is coming. She phoned yesterday. All this brouhaha over the Protectorate Referendum is attracting attention all around the world. She’s going to shoot a documentary. She’s coming in a week. She’s bringing a crew, and she’ll be staying in Port Townsend at first. I just thought you might. Want.

  Laramie. Laramie is coming.

  That’s right, robot. Laramie is coming home for a while. She doesn’t know how long.

  For the first time ever, the robot feels the man, the man Victor Wu, as a movement, a distinct movement of joy inside him. Little Bulge. Coming home. The robot tries to remember Laramie’s face, but cannot. Just a blur of darkness and bright flush. Always rushing and doing. And the camera. The robot can remember Laramie’s camera far better than her face.

  Andrew begins to walk again. I didn’t tell her about you, robot. I didn’t tell her about her father being part of you.

  Laramie does not know?

  No. She knows about the noetics, of course, but not how I’ve used them. I didn’t strictly need her permission to do it.

  Do you think she will hate me?

  No. Of course not. I don’t know. I don’t know her anymore.

  Should we tell her about me? At this thought the robot feels fearful and sad. But what matters is what is best for little Bulge.

  Of course we should. It’s only right. Damn it, robot, I don’t know how I feel about this. I don’t know how much you knew about it or how much you realized, the Victor Wu part of you, I mean. Laramie and I—we didn’t part on the best of terms.

  I don’t remember. I remember the bridge at the Lillian once. You didn’t like her?

  Of course I liked her. I love her. That was the problem. She was impetuous. She’s opportunistic, damnit. Look at her pouncing on this thing. She called me a stick-in-the-mud. I guess she was right. She called me a sour cynic who was fifty years old the day he turned twenty-five. We haven’t spoken in some time.

  I don’t understand.

  Robot. Victor. You never had a clue, I don’t think.

  I am not Victor.

  I know that. I know that. Still, I always thought he suspected. It was so obvious, and he was so brilliant in other ways.

  Andrew and the robot arrive back at the river. The robot thinks about it and realizes that they’d been traversing an oxbow swamp, made from spring overflows at the melting of the snow. At the river, they pick up a trail, once solid and well traveled, now overgrown and ill kept for two seasons. The Forest Service has been officially withdrawn at the Matties’ request, Andrew tells the robot. Booth, who is the president of the United States, responded to political pressure from Mother Agatha and the Matties.

  The goddamn world is going back to tribes. The country’s going to hell. And taking my funding with it. And now there’s a skeleton crew for the Park Service, even, over at the Hoh. I had a lot of friends who got fired or reassigned to the Statue of Liberty or some shit. Something else, too. I think some of them haven’t left.

  What do you mean haven’t left?

  Haven’t left.

  >>>

  The trail diverges from the river, winds over a rise, then back down to the water again. A side trail leads to a peninsula and a wooden trail shelter, enclosed on three sides. Andrew takes a lunch from his day pack and eats a sandwich while the robot looks for quartzite along the riverbank. The robot has become an expert in spotting a crystal’s sparkle and extracting it from the mud or silt of scree with which it has been chipped away and washed downstream from pressurized veins in the heart of the mountains. This day, the robot finds three crystals, one as cylindrical and as long as a fingernail. The robot brings them to Andrew, back at the trail shelter.Nice. Trace of something here. Blue? Manganese maybe, I don’t know. I like the ones with impurities better.

  I do, too.

  Andrew puts the crystals in an empty film canister and stows them in his day pack.

  I was here at the turn of the century, he says. It was June and there was a terrible storm. All night long I heard crashing and booming like the world was coming to an end. Next morning, the whole forest looked like a war zone.

  The robot does not know what a war zone looks like, but says nothing.

  And all that morning, trees kept falling. If I hadn’t camped out here on the end of the peninsula, one of those trees would have fallen on me, smashed me flat. Killed by old growth. God, that’d probably thrill a Mattie to death just thinking about it.

  Isn’t that a sour and cynical thing to say, Andrew?

  He smiles. The robot is glad that it has found a way to make Andrew smile.

  >>>

  Gurney does not show up for work the next day, and Andrew gives his crew the week off. The men who are from logging families demand that they be paid, that Codependence Day, the first anniversary of the Protectorate’s founding, means nothing to them. The robot listens to the discussion and hears many terms that are incomprehensible, abstract. There are times the robot wishes that Victor Wu was directly accessible. Victor could at least explain what humans argued about, if not the reasons that they argued in the first place.The robot spends the day traveling in the mu, searching for crystals and collecting mushrooms up a stream that flows into the Quinault, near where it passes beneath Low Divide. Andrew is gone for the day, arranging supplies and making sure the dig’s legal work is in order, whatever that may mean, under new Protectorate regulations. When he returns in the evening, he has received no assurances and is unhappy. The robot waits for him to have a cup of tea and to take off his shoes, then speaks.

  Andrew?

  Yes. What.

  Are you all rig
ht?

  Huh? Oh, I’m fine. It’s just today. What is it, robot?

  I thought of something today when I was looking at a map so that I could take the mu to where I wanted to go.

  What did you think of? Andrew speaks in a monotone voice and does not seem very interested. He sips his tea.

  I realized that I can read.

  Of course you can. Glotworks has a reading module as part of the software.

  No. I mean, could I read?

  I don’t follow you.

  A book.

  Could you read a book?

  Andrew is sitting up now. He stares at the internal monitor that is also one of the robot’s eyes.

  Yes. One of yours, perhaps. Which would you recommend?

  The books are kept nearby, in a hermetic box in the room the robot occupies during off-hours.

  Well. Let me. Hmm. Most of them are geology texts.

  Should I read a geology text?

  Well, sure. Why not?

  Can I get one now, with the mu?

  Of course. Go ahead. Try the Owsley. It’s about the most exciting of the lot. It’s about the Alvarez event and the search for the big caldera. It’s a synthesis of other works, but brilliant, brilliant. Pretty much confirms the asteroid theory, and gives a complete and convincing argument for a Yucatán crash site. Made a big sensation in ’04.

  The robot switches its awareness to the mu and picks out the book. It reads the first paragraph, then comes back inside the housing, back to the place where Andrew lives.

  Andrew?

  Yes.

  What are dinosaurs?

  >>

  Summer days lengthen, and Andrew often goes to town—to Port Angeles or Port Townsend, and once making the trek around the peninsula to Forks—all to sort out legal details for the Mohole dig. >From each of these trips, he returns with a book for the robot. The first book is aWebster’s Dictionary , on bubble-card. Andrew plugs the card into a slot, and the robot begins to read the dictionary. The robot finishes with a page of A, then scrolls through the remainder of the book. Here are all the words. Here are all the words in the language. All the robot has to do is look them up and remember them. The robot spends a happy day doing that.The next day, Andrew returns with the poems of Robert Frost. The robot pages through the book using the mu, accessing the dictionary card to find words that it does not know. The first word the robot looks up ispoem .

  /\////

  >>

  After a week Gurney returns to work, and the robot digs once again. The days pass, and the Mohole twists deeper, like a coiled spring being driven into the earth. It only deviates from a curving downward path when the robot encounters fault lines or softnesses whose weakness the robot’s cutters can exploit. But, in general, the hole descends in a loose spiral.Andrew is anxious, and pushes everyone harder than before. Yet Andrew himself works the hardest of all, poring over data, planning routing, driving to meetings in Forks and Port Angeles. He is often not in bed before one or two in the morning.

  The robot fills the time with reading. There are so many books—more than the robot ever imagined. And then the robot discovers Andrew’s record collection, all on two bubble-cards carelessly thrown in with all the technical manuals and geology texts. For the first time since the summer when the teenagers came and plugged into the robot and had their parties, the robot listens to music.

  What the robot loves most, though, is poetry. Beginning with Robert Frost, the robot reads poet after poet. At first, there are so many new words to look up that the robot often loses the thread of what the poem is about in a morass of details and definitions. But gradually, the poems begin to make more sense. There is a Saturday morning when, while diligently working through an Emily Dickinson poem, the robot understands.

  There’s a certain Slant of light,

  Winter Afternoons—

  That oppresses, like the Heft

  Of Cathedral Tunes—

  Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—

  We can find no scar,

  But internal difference,

  Where the Meanings, are—

  The robot has never seen a cathedral, but that does not matter. The robot realizes that it has seen the light, in the deep forest, among the three-hundred-year-old trees. It’sthick , the robot thinks. That’s what Emily Dickinson is talking about. Thick light. Light that makes the robot tread softly through the twilight, with the mu’s pads fully extended. Light that, for no reason the robot can name, is frightening and beautiful all at once.

  From that moment on, the robot begins to grasp most poems it reads or, if not, at least to feelsomething after reading them, something that was not inside the robot’s mind before—something the robot had not felt before but knows, as if the feeling were an old friend that the robot recognized after many years of separation.

  The robot does not particularly care whether or not the feelings are right and true for everyone else. For humans. But sometimes the robot wonders. After reading a fair number of poems, the robot delves into criticism, but the words are too abstract and too connected to humans and cities and other things that the robot has no experience of, and so the robot puts aside the books of criticism for the time being and concentrates on the poetry itself, which the robot does not have the same trouble with.

  The robot finds that it most enjoys poetry that is newer, even though Andrew is disbelieving when the robot tells him of this.

  After a time, poetry is no longer a mass, and the robot begins to pick out individual voices whose connotations are more pleasing than others.

  I like William Stafford better than Howard Nemerov, the robot says to Andrew one evening.

  You like him better?

  Yes.

  Andrew laughs. Neither one of them was in the canon when I was in school.

  Do you think it funny that I used the wordlike ?

  Yes, I suppose so.

  Ido like things, at least according to the Turing test. Poetry goes into me, and what comes out feels like liking to me.

  It satisfies the criteria of appearances.

  Yes, I suppose that is the way to say it.

  Where have you heard about the Turing test?

  I read it in a book about robots.

  The robot reads to Andrew a William Stafford poem about a deer that has been killed on a road. Andrew smiles at the same lines that had moved the robot.

  You pass the Turing test, too, the robot says.

  Andrew laughs harder still.

  >>>

  Now the robot is digging entirely through basalt flow, layer upon layer.It’s the bottom of the raft, Andrew says. It is dense, but the plates are as light as ocean froth compared to what’s under them. Or so we think.

  The temperature increases exponentially, and the humans in the support wagon would be killed instantly if they did not have nuclear-powered air conditioners.

  The robot does not become bored at the sameness of the rock, but finds a comfort in the steady digging, arhythm , as the robot comes to call this feeling. Not the rhythm of most music, or the beat of the language in poetry—all of these the robot identifies with humans, for when they arise, humans have been doing the creating—but a new rhythm that is neither the whine of the robot’s machinery nor the crush and crumble of the rock, nor the supersonic screech of the pile making diamond glass from the rock’s ashes. Instead, it is the combination of these things with the poetry, with the memories of the field and the forest.

  So it is one day that the robot experiences a different rhythm, a different sound, and realizes that this rhythm is not the robot’s own, and does not belong to the humans. At first, it is incomprehensible, like distant music, or the faded edges of reception just before a comlink relays to satellite or to ground tower. The robot wonders if the rhythm, the sound, is imaginary. But it continues, and seems to grow day by day in increments almost too small to notice until it is definitely, definitelythere , butwhere , the robot cannot say.In the rock . That is the only way of putting it, b
ut says nothing.

  Andrew does not know what it could be. So there is nothing to do but note it, and go on digging.

  >>>

  The robot begins to read fiction. But the feelings, the resonances and depths of the poetry, are not so much present in prose. There is the problem of knowing what the author might be talking about, since the robot’s only experience living in the human world is the field and now the dig. Dickens leaves the robot stunned and wondering, and after a week attemptingOliver Twist , the robot must put the book aside until the situations and characters become clearer. Curiously, the robot finds that Jane Austen’s novels are comprehensible and enjoyable, although the life of English country gentry is as close to the robot as the life of a newt under a creek stone. The robot is filled with relief when Emma finally ceases her endless machinations and realizes her love for Knightly. It is as if some clogged line in the robot’s hydraulics had a sudden release of pressure or rock that had long been hard and tough became easy to move through.For some time, the robot does not read books that were written closer to the present, for the robot wants to understand the present most of all, and in reading them now, the robot thinks, much will go unnoticed.

  You can always reread them later, Andrew says. Just because you know the plot of something doesn’t mean it isn’t worth going through again, even though sometimes it does mean that.

  I know that, the robot says. That is not what I’m worried about.

  Then what are you worried about?

  The old books get looser, the farther back in time they go, like string that’s played out. The new ones are bunched and it’s harder to see all of them.

  What?

  For the first time, the robot feels something that either cannot be communicated or, nearly as unbelievable, Andrew cannot understand. Andrew is a scientist. The robot will never be a scientist.

  >>>

  Two months after the robot has walked along the Quinault with Andrew, it is July, and Andrew tells the robot that Laramie will visit over the weekend.The robot is at first excited and thinks of things to ask her. There are so many memories of Laramie, but so much is blurred, unconnected. And there are things the robot wishes to tell her, new things about the land that Victor never knew. So much has happened. The robot imagines long conversations between them, perhaps walking in the woods together once again.