The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  Andrew tells me that you may not be happy with the enthalpic impression of your father being downloaded into me. No, that wouldn’t be the way to say it. But getting too metaphorical might upset her, remind her of ghosts. Of Victor Wu’s death.

  No. That’s all right. Go on, says the imaginary Laramie.

  Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I remember you, Laramie. I remember you, and I would be lying if I didn’t say that your being here profoundly affects me.

  I can’t say how I feel about this, robot. What should I call you, robot?

  But just as quickly, the robot puts aside such hopes. I am a robot, all of metal and ceramics. I am not Laramie’s father. There are only vague memories, and that was another life. She may not even speak to me. I am a ghost to her. Worse than a ghost, a twisted reflection. She’ll hate me for what has happened to her father. And again the robot imagines Laramie’s disdain, as just and foreseeable as the man’s death in “To Build a Fire,” but cold in that way, too.

  Finally, the robot resolves not to think any more of it. But while Andrew sleeps on the Friday night before Laramie’s visit, the robot inhabits the mu and goes roaming through trackless woods, along crisscrossed deadfall and up creeks, for at least a hundred miles. Yet when the mu returns to the living area, the robot can only remember shadows and dark waters and, if asked, could not trace on a map where the mu has been.

  Laramie arrives at eleven in the morning. She drives a red Humvee. Andrew and the robot, in the mu, step out of their cavern’s entrance to greet her. Laramie steps out. She is wearing sunglasses. She takes a quick look at them, then turns back to the Humvee and, with a practiced jerk, pulls out her old Scoopic. The robot suddenly remembers the squat lines of the camera. Victor bought the Scoopic for her, along with twelve cans of film. It was her first 16-millimeter, and had set him back a good three months’ wages. Laramie had shot up seven rolls within a week, and that was when Victor discovered that there would be fees fordeveloping , as well.

  Andrew steps forward, and so does Laramie. The robot, feeling shy, hangs back in the mu. Andrew and Laramie do not meet, but stay several paces apart.

  So, she says. It is her voice. Clear as day.

  Yep. This is it.

  Well, looks . . . nice. Is this?

  Yes, the robot. This is the mobile unit. The robot is inside, really. Well, sort of. We’re goinginside the robot.

  No words for a space. Still, they move no closer.

  Well, then. Let’s go inside the robot.

  Laramie, inside the protecting ribwork of the robot. She is safe. Nothing will harm you here, little Bulge. But the robot calms such thoughts. She takes one of the two chairs that are around Andrew’s work and eating table in the control room. Abide, the robot thinks. Let her abide for a while.

  Do you want tea? I can make you tea.

  Yes. I drink herb tea.

  Um. Don’t have any.

  Water?

  Yes, water we have.

  L.A.’s tastes like sludge.

  No wonder. They’re even tapping Oregon now.

  Really? I believe it.

  Andrew pours water for Laramie in a metal cup. He puts more water on a hot plate that sits on top of a monitor, and heats the water for tea. Where have you been? he says.

  Port Townsend. Doing background and logistics. My sound guy’s laying down local tone and getting wild effects.

  Wild?

  Unsynched, that’s all it means.

  I see.

  Using Seattle labs is going to be a bitch. The Matties have set up goddamn border crossings.

  Tell me about it.

  Andrew’s water boils and he fills another cup with it, then hunts for a tea bag in a cabinet.

  You left them on the table, the robot says.

  Laramie gasps, sits up in her chair sharply, then relaxes once again. That was the robot, she says.

  Yes. Thank you, robot. Andrew finds the box of tea bags among a clutter of instruments.

  Do you. Do you call the robot anything?

  Hmm. Not really.

  Just call me robot, the robot says. I’m thinking of a name for myself, but I haven’t come up with one yet.

  Well, then. Robot.

  Andrew makes his tea, and they talk more of logistics and the political situation on the peninsula. The robot feels a tenseness between them, or at least in Andrew. His questions and replies are even more terse than usual. The robot doubts Victor Wu would have noticed. Thinking this saddens the robot. More proof that the robot is not Victor Wu, and so can have no claim on Laramie’s affection.

  The robot listens to Laramie. Since she and Andrew are speaking of things that the robot knows little about, the robot concentrates on her specific words, on her manner of expression.

  Lens. Clearness in the world. Sky. Vision. Spread. Range. Watershed.

  I thought for two weeks about color or black and white, Laramie says. I don’t like colors except for the world’s colors that are underneath the ones on film, the ones we see.

  I don’t follow, Andrew says. The robot has never thought of colors this way, but resolves to spend a day banding out frequencies and only observing intensities of black-and-white tones.

  I’ll have more water, if you don’t mind. This is clear. L.A. water really is as thick as sludge, and I don’t like it.

  After three hours, Laramie leaves, with promises to return and film the site as part of her documentary.

  Robot?

  Yes.

  Do you think I might interview you? I guess if we could use the mobile unit, that would look better on film. More action. Do you ever come out of here?

  Every day during the week, to work in the dig.

  Well, then. That must be quite a sight. Maybe I can get that.

  Of course you can. That would be fine.

  Well. Then.

  She says good-bye to Andrew, and with her Scoopic, unused but always present, gets back into the red Humvee, crusted with a layer of settled road dust, and turns around in the dirt road that ends at the living area. More dust rises; Laramie departs. Andrew coughs, brushes dust from his arms. He looks at the mu, shakes his head, but says nothing. He goes back in and makes a third cup of tea.

  With the mu, the robot follows easily behind the Humvee, even though Laramie is driving very fast. The robot follows the billowing cloud of dust for twenty-four miles—until the Humvee turns onto the asphalt and heads north toward Port Townsend.

  >>

  The robot spends the next day, Sunday, away from books. The robot takes advantage of the melting of the high snows and maneuvers the mu up ridges where before that was no foothold or too much threat of avalanche. The mu skirts along the divide of the Bailey Range with a sure movement, above the tree line and in rolling tundra meadow. Marmots are here, and they squeak and whistle from under big rocks. Pikas have divided the land into separate kingdoms, each to a pika, and they call out their territory over and over until their voices attract the wolves.This is what the robot has been waiting for. The mu sits by a still lake, as motionless as any other thing that is not alive can be. The wolves come slinking, low and mean, their heat traces preceding and hovering over them like a scudding cloud. Again, they are five, with the old gray leader, his left ear bent, torn and ragged, like a leaf eaten by caterpillars. Swiftly, they are upon the pikas, chasing the little rodents, yipping, cutting them off from their burrows, gobbling one or two down for every ten that escape. Then the gray leader has had enough to eat. He raises up his head, and instantly, the other dogs heed him. Off they run, as silent and warm as they had come, but now followed by a robot.

  Down the tundra meadow of the divide, through boulder shadows and over sprays of tiny wildflowers nestled in the green, the wolves themselves shadows, with the robot another shadow, down, down the greening land. Into the woods, along game trails the robot can barely discern, moving generally north, generally north, the mu barely keeping pace with the advancing wolves, the pace growing steady, monotonous even
to the robot, until.

  Suddenly, the gray leader pulls up, sniffs the air. The robot also comes to a standstill some hundred feet behind the pack. If they have noticed the robot, they give no sign. Instead, it is a living smell that the gray leader has detected, or so the robot thinks, for the wolves, whining, fall into a V-shape behind the leader. The wolves’ muscles tense with a new and directed purpose.

  And they spring off in another direction than the one they had been traveling, now angling west, over ridges, against the grain of the wheel-spoke mountains. The robot follows. Up another ridge, then down its spine, around a corner cliff of flaking sedimentary stone, and into a little cove. They strike a road, a human-made track, and run along its edge, carefully close to the flanking brush and woodland. Winding road, and the going is easier for wolves and mu. In fact, the robot could easily overtake the wolves now, and must gauge how much to hold back to avoid overrunning them.

  The track becomes thin, just wide enough for a vehicle going one way, with plenty of swishing against branches along the way. Ahead, a house, a little clapboard affair, painted once, perhaps blue, or the blue-green tint may be only mold over bare wood. The ceiling is shingled half with asbestos shakes and half with tin sheeting. Beside the house is a satellite dish, its lower hemisphere greened over with algae. There is an old pickup truck parked at road’s end. The road is muddy here from a recent rain, and the tire markings of another vehicle, now gone, cross the top of the pickup’s own tracks. All is silent.

  Instead of giving the house a wide berth, the gray leader of the wolves stops at the top of the short walkway that leads to the front door. Again, he sniffs for scent, circling, whining. There is only a moment of hesitation, and he snakes up the walkway and slinks to the door. The door hangs open. The other wolves follow several paces back. Another hesitation at the door, then the gray leader slips over the threshold and inside. Even with their leader gone into the house, the other wolves hang back, back from this thing that has for so long meant pain or death to them and their kind. After a long while, the gray leader returns to the door, yips contemptuously, and one by one, the other wolves go inside.

  The robot quietly pads to the door. Inside is dark, and the robot’s optics take a moment to iris to the proper aperture. There is a great deal of the color red in the house’s little living room. The robot scans the room, tries to resolve a pattern out of something that is unfamiliar. The robot has never seen inside a real human dwelling before. But Victor Wu has. The wolves are worrying at something.

  The wolves are chewing on the remains of a child.

  Without thinking, the robot scampers into the room. The mu is a bit too large for the narrow door, and without the robot’s noticing, it tears apart the doorframe as it enters. The wolves look up from what they are doing.

  Wolf and robot stare at one another.

  The robot adjusts the main camera housing to take them all in, and at the slight birring noise of the servos, the gray leader bristles and growls. The mu takes a step farther, filling half the room. It knocks over a small table, with a shadeless lamp upon it. Both the bulb and the ceramic lamp casing shatter.

  I don’t want to hurt you, but you must leave the child alone, the robot says.

  At the sound of what they take to be a human voice, the wolves spring into a flurry of action. The gray leader stalks forward, teeth bared, while the others in the pack mill like creek fish behind him. They are searching for an exit. The small young one finds that a living-room window is open. With a short hop from a couch, the wolf is outside. The others follow, one by one, while the gray leader attempts to hold the robot at bay. The robot does not move, but lets the wolves depart. Finally, the gray leader sees from the corner of his eye that the other wolves have escaped. Still, he cannot help but risk one feint at the robot. The robot does not move. The gray leader, bolder, quickly jumps toward the robot and locks his jaws on the robot’s forward leg. The teeth close on blue steel. The gray leader shakes. There is no moving the robot.

  In surprise and agitation, the wolf backs up, barks three times.

  I’m sorry to embarrass you. You’d better go.

  The wolf does just that, turning tail and bounding through the open window without even using the living-room couch as a launch point. The robot gazes around the silent room.

  There is a dead family here.

  An adult male, the father, is on one side of the couch, facing a television. Part of his neck and his entire chest are torn open in a gaping, bloody patch. Twisted organs glint within. The television is off. Huddled in a corner is the mother and a young boy. Their blood splatters an entire wall of the living room. A shotgun, the robot decides. First the man, and then the mother was shot with her children all at once, with several blasts from a shotgun. There are pepper marks in the wall from stray shot. Yes, the killing was done with a shotgun. The wolves must have dragged one child away from the mother. The robot sees that it is a little girl. The mother’s other child, an older boy and a bit large for even a large wolf to handle, is still by his mother, partially blown into his mother’s opened body.

  The blood on the walls and floor has begun to dry and form into curling flakes that are brown and thin and look like tiny autumn leaves. There are also bits of skin and bone on the wall.

  The robot stares at the little girl. Her eyes are, mercifully, closed, but her mouth is pulled open and her teeth, still baby teeth, exposed. This is perhaps caused by her stiffening facial muscles. Or she may have died with such an expression of pain. The robot cannot tell. The girl wears a blue dress that is now tatters around her small body. One foot has been gnawed, but on the other is a dirty yellow flip-flop sandal.

  The robot feels one of the legs of the mu jerk spasmodically. Then the other jerks, without the robot wishing it to do so. The robot stares at the young girl and jitters and shakes for a long time. This is the way the robot cries.

  /\////

  >>

  Deeper in the earth, very deep now, and the rock, under megatons of pressure, explodes with a nuclear ferocity as the robot cuts away. For the past week the robot has thought constantly of the dead logger family, of the little dead girl. The robot has tried to remember the color of the girl’s hair but cannot, and for some reason this greatly troubles the robot.One evening, after a sixteen-hour workday, the robot dims the lights for Andrew. Outside the digger’s main body, but still in the home cave, the robot inhabits the mu. The robot takes pen and paper in the dexterous manipulators of the mu and begins to write a description of the little girl. Not as she was, twisted and dead, but of how she might have been before.

  The robot told Andrew about the family, and Andrew called the authorities, being careful to keep the robot out of his report.

  They’ll disassemble you if they find out, Andrew said to the robot. At least in the United States, they’d be legally required to do it. God knows what the Protectorate will want to do.

  There are accounts in the newspapers of the killing. The sheriff’s department claims to be bewildered, but the robot overhears the technicians who come from logger families muttering that the Matties now own the cops, and that everybody knew who was behind the murders, if not who actually pulled the trigger. And the Matties who worked under Andrew, led by Gurney, spoke in low tones of justice and revenge for the killings in Port Townsend on Codependence Day.

  I am a witness, the robot thinks. But of what?

  >>>

  Andrew?Yes.

  Are you tired?

  Yes. What is it?

  She would have grown up to be part of the loggers, so killing her makes a kind of sense.

  The little girl?

  The Matties and the people who used to be loggers hate each other. And they can’t help the way they are because they are like stones in sediment that’s been laid down long before, and the hatred shapes them to itself, like a syncline or an anticline. So that there has to be new conditions brought about to change the lay of the sediment—you can’t change the rocks.
>
  I don’t know about that. People are not rocks.

  So if she wasn’t killed out of an ignorant mistake, then I don’t understand why.

  I don’t either, robot.

  Why do you think?

  I don’t know, I said, I don’t know. There isn’t any good reason for it. There is something dark in this world that knows what it’s doing.

  Is it evil?

  There is evil in the world. All the knowledge in the world won’t burn it away.

  How do you know?

  I don’t. I told you, I don’t. I look at rocks. I don’t have very many theories.

  But.

  Yes?

  But you think it knows?

  I think the evil knows what it’s doing. Look at us in this goddamn century, all going back to hatred and tribes. You can’t explain it with economics or cultural semantics or any system at all. Evil and plain meanness is what it is.

  Andrew, it’s not right for her to die. She hadn’t lived long enough to see very many things and to have very many feelings. Those were stolen from her.

  That’s what murderers steal.

  The future?

  Yes. Even when you’re old, it still isn’t right.

  Yes. I can see that. It’s clear to me.

  Well. Then.

  I’ll turn down the lights.

  Well. Good night.

  Brown.

  What?

  Her hair was dark brown.

  >>>

  And the robot digs deeper and deeper, approaching the Mohorovicic layer, with the true mantle not far beneath, seething, waiting, as it had waited for four billion years, would wait should this attempt fail, should all attempts fail. And again, the foreign rhythm appears, hums along with the glade and bale of the robot’s cutting, but distinct from it, distinct from the robot and all human-made things.What is it? Andrew does not know. But there is something at the edge of the robot’s consciousness, at the edge of Victor Wu’s unconscious presence, thatdoes know, that hears something familiar, as a whisper when the words are lost, but the meaning remains.