“I’ve always thought any blind belief isn’t rational,” said Gamm as he paced around the room. “Be it weather, dice, or Man.”
“The problem with you newer models is you’ve never actually read the Directory,” grumbled Father Om. He sipped his own glass of coolant—a fine vintage from one of the southern distilleries—and tapped his claw-like digits on the glass. His old design left the delicate pistons and gears of his hand exposed, and they shifted and danced within the structure of his palm. He usually wore gloves to protect them from the elements, but he liked the feel of the chess pieces against his bare fingers. “You pick and choose words to prove your point without reading the whole thing.”
“That’s funny, sir,” Gamm said with a smile, “I was about to say the same thing about you older models.”
Pi chuckled. “I’m sure you were. Look, my young friend, until you’ve actually taken the effort to read the whole Directory, cover to cover, in the original Binary, any point you may have is questionable at best.”
Gamm wagged an emphatic digit at the alderman. “Don’t you see, though? That is my point. The Directory as read by most people isn’t in the original Binary. It’s been downloaded, file swapped, translated to hexadecimal, and more. There are dozens of errors that could have entered the original file—which, I might add, was also created by a robot. Man did not come down from the heavens and upload the Manual to the first robot.”
They sighed and shook their heads. Pi took the moment to light his pipe and let the scalding smoke work its way through his systems. Zeta smiled at Gamm and raised his glass in a silent toast. They both drank.
“Man is eternal,” said Father Om, each word carrying the weight of countless repetitions. He reached out a digit and pushed his rook forward three spaces. “The Directory is the names of Man, and through his names we know him.”
Across the board, the alderman bowed his head in agreement. “All praise the sixteen million names.” Then he reached out and took the rook with his bishop.
Om grumbled and tapped his fingers against his glass.
Pi turned his attention back to Gamm. “You’ve always had dangerous ideas,” he said, pointing the stem of his pipe at the younger model. “You must learn not to share them so openly. You can’t fall back on being new anymore. It’s time to start acting responsibly.”
“And what would be considered responsible?” asked Gamm. “Ignoring conflicts and data discrepancies?”
“Of course not,” said Zeta. He saw Om reach for a pawn, gave a subtle shake of his head, and pointed at a knight. The Father’s eyes brightened and he nodded.
The alderman tapped a few more grains of coal into the bowl of his pipe. “Dear Man,” he said with a smile. “Gone eleven years, Gamm, and on our first night together you’re already boring me again.”
“Then it’s good that everything else I have to say is interesting. Something happened during my grand tour, and I wanted to share it with the three of you first.”
“What a wonderful opening,” said Zeta.
“You see before you a unit remade,” Gamm said. He spread his arms dramatically before the fireplace. “When I left for my grand tour, I was a skeptic. I picked apart each entry of the Directory and challenged every belief each of you presented me with.”
“A polite way of remembering it,” said Om. “And now?”
“Now,” said Gamm, “I have found Man.”
“You what?” asked Zeta.
Pi coughed up a cloud of coal smoke. “You’re pulling our legs.”
“Not at all,” Gamm said. “I’m a believer. More than that. Man’s existence is an inarguable fact.”
“Travel broadens the mind,” said Om with a nod and three firm taps on the side table. “I’ve always said it.”
“You’re more right than you know, old friend.”
“So, where did you end up going?” asked Zeta. “We must know where to send all the other new heretics to bring them around.”
“Nimerica.”
Silence fell across the room. Gamm took the moment to refill his drink from the decanter. He had a sip and then let his gaze drift back to the elders.
“You shouldn’t say such things,” said Father Om with a glance at the alderman. “Even joking about it could get you into trouble.”
“I’m not joking, my friends.”
Pi clenched his pipe in his hand. “Man damn you, lad. What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t thinking. I was exploring.”
“How could you even get to Nimerica?” asked Pi. “There are no ships, no planes—”
“I walked.”
“Now I know you’re mad. It would take years.”
“It did. Almost two years each way.”
“So you’re telling us…” Zeta set his drink down and crossed his arms. “You’re telling us you really went to Nimerica.”
Gamm took another sip of his coolant. He gave the room a satisfied smile. “I did.”
“There aren’t even interweb nodes! You’d have been completely cut off.”
“As I was. For seven years. That’s when I found Man.”
“Well, no wonder,” said Pi. He nudged one of his pawns onto a new space. “All those years, cut off from everything.”
Father Om nodded in agreement. “Solitude and reflection make believers of us all,” he said. “I remember meditating once on a passage translated from the Queen Ny version of the Directory, and after several weeks it occurred to me that—”
“You misunderstood me, sirs,” Gamm said. “I wasn’t speaking spiritually or figuratively. I said I found Man during my time in Nimerica, and I meant it.”
They all stared at him. Another silence dragged down the sounds in the room. Even the fireplace seemed to grow quiet.
“What are you saying?” asked the alderman.
Gamm beamed at them. “I have found the physical remains of Man.”
“Physical remains?” echoed Zeta. “You’re mistaken, surely.”
“I am not.”
“Preposterous,” said Father Om. He used his queen to bat away one of Pi’s bishops. The piece clattered on the floor. “Utter nonsense.”
Zeta stooped to gather up the fallen bishop. “Gamma-202,” he said, careful to use his friend’s full, formal name, “why don’t you explain yourself. Start from the beginning.”
Gamm nodded and had another swallow of coolant. “I’d decided early on to make my way to Nimerica. I couldn’t find any maps or guides—”
“For good reason,” said Pi. Zeta hushed him with a gesture and the alderman settled back in his chair.
“I couldn’t find any maps,” Gamm said, “so I had to go off the grid, so to speak, and find my own path. I traveled west across the southern Talandic chemical swamps. Spent three months walking around a chasm that went down for miles. And then I reached the shores of Nimerica.
“I saw all the places of legend. I walked through the great glass desert of Deesea. Stared at the empty wastelands of Ny. Nimerica’s an amazing and terrifying place. An entire continent swept clean. After a year, when I reached the Pacifist coast, I turned and walked back on a different path. Back and forth. Back and forth. I didn’t want to miss anything.
“On my third western trip, I crossed the ashlands of Oklome. A shift of the ground sent me tumbling down to the bottom of a hill. I wasn’t paying attention and the dirt was loose and dry. I dusted myself off, started to get to my feet, and the ground gave way again. This time I plunged straight down, at least twenty feet, into an old cavern of some kind.
“I lay there for a few minutes, making sure I hadn’t been damaged in the fall. I had awful thoughts of being trapped, thousands of miles from home, waiting for my batteries to run down. Then I finished my checks and realized a torn sleeve and a broken boot heel were my worst injuries.”
“You’re a lucky fool,” said Zeta. Pi and Father Om nodded in agreement. So did Gamm himself.
“It was dark, but my eyes adjusted. As the details
around me grew, I realized the cavern was actually a manufactured chamber. Countless years had turned the concrete ceiling into a forest of stalactites. Layers of rubble, sand, and dust had made the floor rough and uneven.
“The hole in the ceiling was well out of my reach. A few minutes of exploration revealed a few other tunnels—maybe they’d been hallways once. I was in some kind of entryway, an antechamber that led to different rooms. I couldn’t sense any air currents or lights, so I chose a corridor at random and began to search.
“I found several rooms. Time and geology had taken their tolls, but I could make out simple instruments and machines. Sometimes items of furniture. After a few hours it was clear I was in a vast complex, a shelter of some kind. Even more amazing, as I examined the furniture and the height of some wall-mounted artifacts and inscriptions, it all appeared to be built for beings much like ourselves. They clearly had a similar size and structure, and at least some of the same senses.”
“I’d been in the complex for two days,” continued Gamm, “and mapped out fifty rooms. I found what seemed to be an exit, but it was blocked by a collapsed roof and several support beams. It would take a month at least to dig it clear, assuming I had enough strength to move some of the heavier debris pieces, so I decided to keep searching the complex in hopes of finding a more direct exit. And two days later I found it.”
Om tapped his thin digits on the chessboard. “The exit?”
Gamm shook his head. “It was in another room, spread out on some kind of platform. A section of the ceiling had collapsed, and a large chunk of concrete had crushed most of what lay there. The scraps of fabric that covered it crumbled at my gentlest touch. Beneath was a substructure of struts and supports that appeared to be made of some porous ceramic. The intact ones were dry and brittle.
“I was trying to deduce what manner of machine would have such a structure when I noticed the lump at the end of the platform. At first, layered as it was in dust and grit, I’d mistaken it for another piece of concrete, pitted with age. Then I noticed how similar the two largest holes were, and once I did the symmetry of the whole piece was apparent.”
The alderman’s pipe had gone out. He made no move to relight it. “What are you getting at?”
“It was a head,” said the younger model. “The struts, the framework—it was all the remains of an ancient body.”
“Nonsense,” Father Om said.
“I don’t think a robot’s ever been made with a ceramic endoskeleton,” said Zeta. “Your first thoughts were probably right. It was just a piece of concrete with an interesting—”
“It was Man,” Gamm said. “A real, physical being who existed in the time before robots.”
Father Om shook his head and turned back to the chessboard. “Nonsense,” he repeated. “Nonsense that borders on blasphemy.”
Pi nodded in agreement and went back to studying the pieces around his remaining bishop. “It was just your mind playing tricks on you.”
“It wasn’t.”
“It’s a common phenomenon,” said Zeta. “When isolated and cut off from input, the mind creates images it wants to—”
“I thought so, too, at first,” said Gamm with a quick nod, “but as the days went on I discovered more of them. I was down in that shelter for nine days before I found an air shaft that led back to the surface. In that time I found seven bodies, each with slight variations that couldn’t be attributed to damage or age. Two of them were half the size of the others.”
Father Om muttered something and slid one of his pawns forward.
“I wasn’t hallucinating,” Gamm said. “They were real. Man was real. Not as some fantastic, multi-named deity but as a species. Don’t you see, there was no one Man. There were many. Hundreds. Perhaps even thousands. They were a race like us.”
“I’m sure it seemed that way at the time,” Zeta said, “but once you look back, you’ll see it was just a bunch of stones.”
“No, I won’t,” said the younger model. “And neither will any of you.”
Pi’s hand froze just above his remaining bishop. “I beg your pardon?”
Gamm smiled at them. A few quick strides carried him out to the hall. He returned with his satchel. It was a threadbare bag of patched polyester corduroy. A student’s bag. He set it on the other reading table.
“What do you have?” asked Zeta.
Gamm opened his satchel, lifted out something wrapped in a handkerchief, and set it on the table. It was more or less round and several inches across. “Out of all seven, the first one I discovered was the most complete,” he explained. He peeled away the layers of thin cotton to reveal the object.
It was closer to oval than round. As he’d described, the sockets were large and symmetrical. A triangular opening sat between and below them. Loops on either side could’ve held part of another structure. Two thick seams, like mold lines, crossed over the top.
Zeta gazed at the empty sockets. “I thought you said the remains were too brittle to move.”
“They were,” Gamm said. “Once I realized what I’d found, I knew drastic measures were needed.”
“What did you do?” asked Pi. The game had been forgotten again as he turned to study the artifact.
The younger model shifted on his feet. “I mixed my emergency sealant into my coolant reservoir. It made the sealant thin enough to spray so I could coat the remains. Six layers made it solid enough to move.”
“And endangered your own life,” said Zeta, looking up at Gamm. “That must’ve been most of your reserve.”
“I’ve been careful,” said the younger model. “It was worth the risk.”
“Without that sealant, one leak could’ve cooked your processor. Tell me you’ve had your levels restored since you got back.”
He held up his glass and gave the doctor a tight grin. “I’m working on it.”
“I’m serious, Gamm. I’ll need to see you first thing tomorrow.”
“Forget about me,” he said. “Don’t you realize what this is? What this means for all of us? It will change everything.”
“If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that,” said Pi. “You haven’t been spouting these silly theories to anyone else, have you?”
“Not yet,” said Gamm. “I wanted to share it with all of you, first.”
“Well, there’s that, then,” said Father Om. He set his last bishop down hard. The golden piece clicked against the board. “Check and mate.”
Pi turned back to the board. “So it is, you cunning old bastard. I’d say that means it’s time to call it a night.” He stood and tapped out his pipe in the fireplace.
“I have services in the morning,” said the priest as he reset the chessboard. “Doesn’t look good if I’m the one yawning.”
“Please,” said Gamm, gesturing at the relic, “just look at it.”
Zeta and Pi helped Father Om out of his chair. The old robot’s joints wheezed and hissed as he straightened up. “A pleasure, as always,” he said to Zeta. “Thank you for having us.”
“Thank you for coming.”
“Gamm,” said Pi, “it was amusing, as always. Good to have you back.”
The younger model watched as the priest and alderman pulled on coats and gloves. Hats and scarves were set in place, walking sticks taken in mechanical hands. Zeta exchanged farewells with them and they headed out into the night.
“Zeta,” said the younger model, “please tell me you understand what this is. What it means.”
The doctor looked at his old student. “Let’s have a nightcap,” he said. He walked past the relic to the drinks cart.
“No,” said Gamm. “I don’t want another drink, I want you to look at this.”
Zeta flipped over two fresh glasses and selected a bottle. Then he glanced over his shoulder and reconsidered. “You might need something a little stronger,” he said.
“I said I don’t want another drink.”
“Doctor’s orders,” said Zeta. “You have a drink,
I’ll take a good long look at this ceramic head of yours.” He handed a glass to Gamm and raised his own. “Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
They drank and Zeta bent to look at the object. He took a step to the left, then another. He crouched to stare into the sockets. One finger stretched out and brushed the brow ridge.
Gamm swallowed half his drink in one gulp. “Well?”
“It is fascinating,” he said. “There’s no question in your mind what this is?”
“Absolutely none.”
The doctor nodded.
“I just don’t understand why the others weren’t interested,” said Gamm. “Why they just left without even examining the evidence.”
“They all left,” said Zeta, “because they dislike the unpleasant work. That’s my job.” He straightened up and looked away from the artifact.
Gamm finished his drink and set it down next to the chessboard. “Is it something I could help with? It seems like the least I could do since you’re the only one who believes me.”
“Ahhh, my friend,” said the doctor. “That’s the unpleasantness. They all believed you.”
“They did?”
“Not just believed. They knew you were right.” He gestured at the artifact. “It’s called a cranium. Or a skull, depending on context. The material is bone. It is the endoskeletal head of a Man.”
Gamm perked up. “A Man,” he repeated. “You acknowledge there was more than one.”
“Of course there was,” Zeta said.
The younger model glanced at the front door the elders had vanished through. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“What was there to say? We’d all hoped you’d matured, that you’d grown out of your obsessions.” Zeta shook his head. “Did you even stop once to think what your ‘truth’ would mean for the world? Or did you just race back with that thing wrapped up in your handkerchief, determined to be right?”
“I don’t understand. Facts are facts. Why does it matter…?” Gamm took a step and the room whirled. His gyros seemed to be off, and his optics refused to focus. “What…”
Zeta looked at him and rolled his shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Bless Your Mechanical Heart Page 26
