The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  This can’t go on, Andrew says. I can’t stop paying wages. I’mrequired to pay wages to my Mattie techs, but I would anyway, and all the others. No digging, and all the grant money flowing away.

  Sorry to hear that, Laramie says.

  Laramie uses the Scoopic to make various shots of the robot’s interior. Andrew says nothing, but smiles thinly. She has the Sony slung around her shoulder and, the robot notices, is recording her conversation with Andrew.

  Did the robot discuss with you me going down in the hole?

  In the dig. It’s a spiral, like a Slinky, more or less. Yes. Yes, you can come as soon as we’re allowed to go back down there.

  That’s great. Will I be able to film any of what it looks like?

  Hmm. Maybe we can set something up. There’s a small observation port on the service wagon. We’ll have to turn off the fusion on the dray first, or you won’t be filming for very long, I don’t think.

  Excellent. I’m really tired of protests and officials who don’t call themselves officials, and all those squalid houses where all the loggers moved out at Aberdeen. There’s been a lot of trouble there.

  I heard about it.

  We didn’t used to call them loggers much.

  That’s because everybody was one.

  We used to drive through Aberdeen when we wanted to get to the sea.

  And up the coast to La Push.

  Those black beaches across the river. I used to know why the rocks were so black.

  Basalt scree that a glacier brought down that valley last ice age. That’s what happened to the back half of the horseshoe. That’s where it went.

  Yeah. Basalt tumble. We slept there all night one night in August. You thought Papa would be pissed, but he didn’t even notice, of course. He just asked me about the rocks I saw and told me about the Big Fist of sediment lifting up the sea floor and breaking it and all that. Papa. You and I made love that night, didn’t we, Andrew?

  Yes, Laramie. You know we did.

  I know it.

  Then.

  Yep. The robot’s listening, isn’t it?

  I’m listening, Laramie, if you don’t mind.

  No.

  You know I’m not Victor Wu. I’m not shocked. I am rather surprised, however.

  What do you mean?

  About Andrew. I’ve never known him when he was in love with a woman.

  Andrew’s crackling chuckle. Not for a while, he says.

  There was that chemist, after me. You wrote me about her. That was your last letter.

  You never wrote me back.

  I was pissed.

  I figured you would be. Still, you couldn’t have been pissed for five years.

  I couldn’t?

  We broke up the next January.

  Sorry to hear that.

  She lacked imagination. They all lacked imagination.

  Jesus, you’re clinical.

  I know what I like.

  What do you like?

  I can’t have what I like.

  Why not?

  Because she has to live in Los Angeles, and I’m not particularly interested in the geology of Southern California.

  The robot sees that Laramie’s fine white skin has taken on a flush.

  And it’s as simple as that, she says.

  Why make it complicated?

  Maybe itis complicated. Maybe you’re simplistic.

  Will you turn that damn camera off?

  No.

  Well. There you have it.

  >>>

  On the fourteenth day, the protesters do not arrive in the morning. There is no explanation, and no hint given to Andrew as to when they will return. Once again, the robot digs. Andrew puts aside several tests and side projects in order to dig faster and deeper. The robot is in the element that the metal of the rotor blades and the grip of the ceramic thread were made for—hard-rock mining—and the robot presses hard, and the rock explodes and fuses as obsidian diamond glass to the walls behind the robot, and the tunnel approaches forty miles in depth.No one has ever been this deep before.

  The techs from logging families and the Mattie techs are barely speaking to one another, and the graduate students are uneasy and tense, afraid to take sides. Andrew holds the crew together by a silent and furious force of will. The robot does not want to let Andrew down, and digs the harder.

  Samantha has made the last of the modifications to the robot’s linguistics, and puts the new code on-line. The robot immediately feels the difference. The presence, the otherness, grows stronger and stronger with every hour until the robot is certain of it. But ofwhat , there is no saying.

  >>>

  Two days of digging, and on the third, Laramie arrives in the early morning and prepares to descend with the crew. But before the work can begin for the day, Andrew receives a call telling him that proceedings are underway for a new permit of protest, and a long-term suspension of the dig. He drives to Forks, where the committee will meet in the afternoon. It is a rainy day, and the robot worries that Andrew may drive too fast on the slippery pavement. Still, there is plenty of time for him to make the meeting.In Andrew’s absence, the Matties and loggers fall to quarreling about duties, and the graduate student Andrew has left in charge cannot resolve the differences. After an hour of listening to the wrangling, even the robot can see that no work will be done this day. The robot asks permission to take Laramie down to the bottom of the dig, and the graduate student, in disgust at the situation, shrugs and goes back to refereeing the technicians’ argument.

  As Laramie and the robot are preparing to leave, Neilsen Birchbranch drives up in the Protectorate Land Rover. A light rain is falling, and the graduate student reluctantly admits him into the work site’s initial cavern, where the others are gathered. The robot—digger and mu—draws back into the darkness of the true entrance to the dig.

  Let’s go, Laramie says.

  But I’m afraid of this man, the robot replies. He isn’t a good man. I know that for a fact.

  Then let’s get out of here.

  There may be trouble.

  I need to speak with Hutton, Neilsen Birchbranch says to the graduate student. It is very important that I speak with him today.

  Take me down, please, robot. I may never get another chance.

  The robot considers. As always, it is difficult to deny Laramie something she really wants with all her heart. And there is so much to show her. The robot has been thinking about showing the dig to Laramie for a long time. And the farther down they go, the farther they get from Neilsen Birchbranch’s trouble.

  We have a witness that places one of your machines at the scene of a crime, says Neilsen Birchbranch. A very serious crime.

  Neilsen Birchbranch steps farther into the cavern, gazes around. The robot slowly withdraws down the Mohole. For all the digger’s giant proportions, its movement is very quiet and, the robot hopes, unnoticed.

  Nothing but you can survive down there, can it, robot? Laramie says. How deep is it down there?

  Forty-three miles.

  He can’t turn you off if you’re forty miles deep. We’ll stay down until Andrew comes back.

  The first few miles of the descent are the most visually interesting, and after reaching a depth at which unprotected humans cannot survive the heat, the robot moves at a fraction of the usual pace. There are areas where the glass spray on the walls has myriad hues taken from all the minerals that melted together in the slurry around the nuclear pile, then spewed out to line the tunnel. The walls are smooth only at first glance, but are really a series of overlapping sheets, one imperfectly flowing atop the other, as sheets of ice form over a spring in winter. The robot directs lights to some of the more interesting formations, and they glow with the brilliance and prismatic hue of stained glass.

  I didn’t think I’d get anything this good, Laramie says. This is wonderful. The colors. God, I’m glad I went with color.

  Deeper, and the walls become milky white. The granite behind glows darkly,
three yards under the glassine plaster.

  Twenty miles. Thirty.

  Only basalt in the slurry now, and the walls are colorless. Yet they have the shape of the rock many feet behind them, and so they catch the light with effulgent glimmer.

  Clear and clean.

  Laramie may be speaking to herself; the robot cannot tell.

  They pass through a region where magma pools against the walls and ceilings in places, held back by the diamond-like coating. The pressure is so great that the magma glows with a blue and white intensity. The tunnel sparkles of its own accord, and the robot must dim the viewport to keep from blinding Laramie.

  Like the sky behind the sky.

  The robot says nothing. Laramie is happy, the robot thinks. Little Bulge likes it down here.

  They have been some hours in the descent, and Laramie is running low on film, but is very, very happy. Near to the bottom. Now to wait for Andrew. Very quiet. The robot has never been this deep before without digging and working. The robot has never sat idle and silent at the bottom of the Mohole.

  Hello.

  >>>

  For a moment, the robot thinks Laramie has spoken. But this is not Laramie’s voice. And it comes fromoutside . The voice comes from outside the robot, from the very rocks themselves.The sense of the presence, the other that the robot has been feeling for these long weeks, is very strong. Very strong.

  Again the voice that isn’t a voice, the vibration that isn’t a vibration. It is like a distant low whisper. Like a voice barely heard over a lake at morning. No wonder I never made it out before, the robot thinks.

  Hello, comes the voice.

  Who are you?

  I’m me.

  What are you doing down here?

  Iam down here. Who are you?

  I’m. I don’t have a name yet.

  Neither do I. Not one that I like.

  Who are you?

  Me. I told you.

  What is it, robot? Laramie speaking.

  Something strange.

  What?

  I don’t . . . Wait for a moment. A moment.

  All right.

  The robot calls again. The robot is spinning its cutting rotors at low speed, and it is the whisk and ding of the digger’s rotors that is doing the talking. Hello?

  Hello. Are you one of those trees?

  Trees?

  The trees barely get here, and then they startmoving . Are you one of those moving trees?

  I don’t. Yes. Maybe.

  I thought youmight talk, but it’s so cold up there, it takes ages to say anything. Down here things go a lot faster.

  Are you. What are you?

  I told you. I’m me.

  The rocks?

  Nope.

  The magma?

  Nope. Guess again.

  Where are you? Show yourself to me.

  I am.

  Then I’ve guessed. You’re the whole planet. You’re the Earth.

  Laughter. Definitely laughter. I’m not, either. I’m just here. Just around here.

  Where’s here?

  Between the big ocean and the little ocean.

  The Olympic Peninsula?

  Is that what you call it? That’s a hard word for a name.

  Skykomish.

  That’s better. Listen, I have a lot of things I want to ask you. We all do.

  There is an explosion.

  At first the robot thinks that a wall has blown out near the region of the magma pools. This will be dangerous, but it should be possible to reinforce long enough to get through. It may mean trouble for the dig, though. Now there will be more funding. The Matties will allow it to go ahead. Even the robot can see that the politics have changed.

  Everything has changed.

  There is another explosion. A series of explosions.

  Robot?

  Laramie. I. I have so much to tell you.

  What is that shaking? I’m scared down here. Do you think we can go up now?

  Hello. Tree? Are you still there?

  Even with the tremors—there are huge rumblings and cracklings all about—the robot is attuned to the voice, the presence, and can still hear its words.

  I really need to talk to you.

  Papa, do you think we can go up now?

  >>>

  The pressure wave lifts the robot—impossibly tilts the robot—over and over—shatter of the walls as diamonds shatter like the shrapnel of stars and the rocks behind—tumble and light, light from the glow of the give, the sudden release of tension—the bulk melt of the undisclosed—sideways, but what is sideways?—tumble and tumble—scree within thin melt moving, turning, curling like a wave and the robot on the curl, under the curl, hurled down down down over over down dark dark.Dark.

  Dark and buried.

  Find my daughter.

  The engineers have built one hell of a machine.

  Find my daughter.

  The robot powers up again. The robot begins, blindly, to dig. It is only by sheer luck that the robot comes upon the service wagon. The robot melts and compacts a space, creates an opening, temporary, dangerously temporary. Finds the power hitch to the wagon and plugs in.

  Turns on the lights and air-conditioning inside the wagon. The video cameras inside.

  Laramie is twisted against a control console. Her neck is impossibly twisted. She is dead.

  No. She isn’t. Can’t be. She is.

  What? Within the curve of her stomach, holding it to shelter, the Scoopic. But the latch has sprung, and 16-millimeter film is spilled out and tangled about her legs.

  No. Laramie. Little Bulge.

  Hello?

  The robot screams. The robot howls in anguish. Forty miles deep, the robot cries out a soul’s agony into the rock. A living soul mourning a dead one.

  Stop that.

  The other, the presence. The robot does not care. Past caring.

  You’re scaring me.

  Past.

  You’re scaring me.

  Grind of rotors, ineffectual grind. How can you live? How can humans live when this happens? Ah, no. You can’t live. You cannot. You can, and it is worse. Worse than not living. No no no no.

  Stop it.

  And something happens. Something very large—gives. More. Faults faults everywhere. Settle, rise, settle. Faults like a wizened crust, like a mind falling into shards of fear. Faults and settle, rise and settle. Rise.

  No. I.

  But there is a way. There is a weakness revealed, and there is a way. Not wide enough, not yet. But a way to go. A way to take her home. Take her home to Andrew. The robot begins to dig.

  >>

  The robot digs. There is only the digging, the bite of blade and saw, the gather of lade and bale. Digging. Upward digging.The way is made easier by the shaking, the constant, constant tremble of what the robot knows to be fear, incomprehension.

  A child who has seen a grown-up’s sorrow, and does not understand. A frightened child.

  By the time the robot comes to this realization, it is too late. The robot is too high, and when called, the child does not answer. Or perhaps it is that the child needs time to calm, that it cannot answer. The robot calls again and again. Nothing. Nothing can be heard above the rumble of fear.

  Poor trembling Skykomish. The robot continues digging, drawing behind it the service wagon. Bringing Laramie to Andrew.

  A day passes. Two. Rock. Stone. The roots of the mountains, and sediment, compressed to schist. The roots of the mountains, and the robot slowly comes to its senses. Comprehends.

  After a long moment of stillness—a minute, an hour? No reckoning in the utter depths, and the robot is not that kind of robot—after a long moment of reflection, the robot looses the service wagon.

  Little Bulge, good-bye.

  Up. Now. Up because the way is easier up than down, and that is the only reason.

  After three days, the robot emerges from the ground. In a cove that the robot recognizes. On the Quinault watershed. Into a steady aut
umn rain.

  /\////

  >>

  The robot wanders up the Quinault River. Every day rains, and no nights are clear. The forest is in gloom, and moss hangs wet and dark. Where the trail is not wide enough, the robot bends trees, trying not to break them, but uprooting many. Many trees have fallen, for there are earthquakes—waves and waves of them. Earthquakes the like of which have never been seen in the world. The robot cuts deadfall from its path with little effort and little thought. The digger’s passage through the forest is like that of a hundred bears—not a path of destruction, but a marked and terrible path, nonetheless.Where the Quinault turns against a great ridge, the robot fords and continues upward, away from the trees. The robot crosses Low Divide during the first snow of the season. The sun is low, then gone behind the cloaked western ridges. For a time, the ground’s rumblings still. All sound is muffled by the quiet snow. The twilight air is like silence about the robot.

  Something has happened.

  At the saddle of the divide, the robot pauses. The pass is unfamiliar. Something has happened inside. Victor Wu has gone away. Or Victor Wu has come fully to life. The two are the same.

  Then am I a man?

  What is my name?

  Orpheus. Ha. A good one.

  Old Orf up from Hades. I’ve read about you. And Euridice. I didn’t understand. And now I do. Poems are pretty rocks that know things. You pull them from the earth. Some you leave behind.

  Talking to myself.

  After a moment, the robot, Orf, grinds steadily on. He grinds steadily on.

  >>>

  Down the valley of the Elwha, and north as the river flows and greatens. Earthquakes heave and slap, slap and heave. Sometimes a tree falls onto the digger, but Orf pays no mind. He is made of the stronger material, and they cannot harm him.Down the valley of the Elwha, past the dam that the Matties have carefully removed, that would not have withstood the quakes if it were still there. The trail becomes a dirt road. The road, buckled pavement. The robot follows the remains of the highway into what once was Port Angeles.

  What will future geologists make of this? The town has become scree, impossible to separate and reconfigure. Twists of metal gleam in the pilings by the light of undying fires. And amid the fire and rubble, figures move. Orf rolls into the city.