Ambiguity Machines: An Examination
By
Vandana Singh
illustration by Pascal Campion
“Ambiguity Machines: An Examination” copyright © 2015 by Vandana Singh
Art copyright © 2015 by Pascal Campion
Publication Date: Wed Apr 29 2015 09:00am
A Tor Original
Introduction
This tale is an unusual take on an engineering exam that explores new concepts in machine design and function. All new machine discoveries must be investigated and classified. This is the story of three such machines and the truth or lie of their existence.
This short story was acquired and edited for Tor.com by consulting editor Ann VanderMeer.
Intrepid explorers venturing into Conceptual Machine-Space, which is the abstract space of all possible machines, will find in the terrain some gaps, holes, and tears. These represent the negative space where impossible machines reside, the ones that cannot exist because they violate known laws of reality. And yet such impossible machines are crucial to the topographical maps of Conceptual Machine-Space, and indeed to its topology. They therefore must be investigated and classified.
It is thus that the Ministry of Abstract Engineering has sent the topographers of Conceptual Machine-Space to various destinations so that they may collect reports, rumors, folktales, and intimations of machines that do not and cannot exist. Of these we excerpt below three accounts of the subcategory of Ambiguity Machines: those that blur or dissolve boundaries.
The candidate taking the exam for the position of Junior Navigator in the uncharted negative seas of Conceptual Machine-Space will read the three accounts below and follow the instructions thereafter.
The First Account
All machines grant wishes, but some grant more than we bargain for. One such device was conceived by a Mongolian engineer who spent the best years of his youth as a prisoner in a stone building in the Altai Mountains. The purpose of this machine was to conjure up the face of his beloved.
His captors were weaponheads of some sort; he didn’t know whether they were affiliated with any known political group or simply run by sociopath technophiles with an eye on the weapons market. They would let him out of his cell into a makeshift laboratory every day. Their hope was that he would construct for them a certain weapon, the plans for which had been found on his desk, and had led to his arrest. The engineer had a poetic sensibility, and the weapon described in his papers was metaphoric. But how can you explain metaphors to a man with a gun?
When the engineer was a young boy, stillness had fascinated him. He had been used to wandering with his family across the Gobi, and so he had made a study of stillness. In those days everything moved—the family with the ger, the camels and sheep, the milk sloshing in the pail as he helped his mother carry it, the stars in the circle of open sky in the roof above his head, the dust storms, dark shapes in shawls of wind, silhouetted against blue sky. The camels would fold themselves up into shaggy mounds between the bushes, closing their eyes and nostrils, waiting for the storm to pass. His grandfather would pull him into the ger, the door creaking shut, the window in the roof lashed closed, and he would think about the animals and the ger, their shared immobility in the face of the coming storm. Inside it would be dark, the roar of the dust storm muffled, and in the glow of the lamp his older sister’s voice would rise in song. Her voice and the circle of safety around him tethered him to this world. Sometimes he would bury his face in a camel’s shaggy flank as he combed its side with his fingers, breathing in the rich animal smell, hearing with his whole body the camel’s deep rumble of pleasure.
In such moments he would think of his whole life played out against the rugged canvas of the Gobi, an arc as serene as the motion of the stars across the night, and he would feel again that deep contentment. In his childhood he had thought there were only two worlds, the inside of the ger and the outside. But the first time he rode with his father to a town, he saw to his utmost wonder that there was another kind of world, where houses were anchored to the earth and people rode machines instead of animals, but they never went very far. They had gadgets and devices that seemed far more sophisticated than his family’s one TV, and they carried with them a subtle and unconscious air of privilege. He had no idea then that years later he would leave the Gobi and his family to live like this himself, an engineering student at a university in Ulaanbaatar, or that the streets of that once-unimaginable city would become as familiar to him as the pathways his family had traversed in the desert. The great coal and copper mines had, by then, transformed the land he thought would never change, and the familiarity was gone, as was his family, three generations scattered or dead.
Being tethered to one place, he discovered, was not the same as the stillness he had once sought and held through all the wanderings of his childhood. In the midst of all this turmoil he had found her, daughter of a family his had once traded with, studying to be a teacher. She was as familiar with the old Mongolia as he had been, and was critical and picky about both old and new. She had a temper, liked to laugh, and wanted to run a village school and raise goats. With her, the feeling of having a center in the world came back to him.
So he thought of her in his incarceration, terrified that through this long separation he would forget her face, her voice. As the faces of his captors acquired more reality with each passing week or month or year, his life beforehand seemed to lose its solidity, and his memories of her seemed blurred, as though he was recollecting a dream. If he had been an artist he would have drawn a picture of her, but being an engineer, he turned to the lab. The laboratory was a confusion of discarded electronics: pieces of machinery bought from online auctions, piles of antiquated vacuum tubes, tangles of wires and other variegated junk. With these limited resources the engineer tried his best, always having to improvise and work around the absence of this part and that one. His intent was to make a pseudo-weapon that would fool his captors into releasing him, but he didn’t know much about weapons, and he knew that the attempt was doomed to failure. But it would be worth it to recreate his beloved’s face again, if only a machine-rendered copy of the real thing.
So into his design he put the smoothness of her cheek, and the light-flash of her intelligence, and the fiercely tender gaze of her eyes. He put in the swirl of her hair in the wind, and the way her anger would sometimes dissolve into laughter, and sometimes into tears. He worked at it, refining, improving, delaying as much as he dared.
And one day he could delay no more, for his captors gave him an ultimatum: The machine must be completed by the next day, and demonstrated to their leaders. Else he would pay with his life. He had become used to their threats and their roughness, and asked only that he be left alone to put the machine in its final form.
Alone in the laboratory, he began to assemble the machine. But soon he found that there was something essential missing. Rummaging about in the pile of debris that represented laboratory supplies, he found a piece of stone tile, one half of a square, broken along the diagonal. It was inlaid with a pattern of great beauty and delicacy, picked out in black and cream on the gray background. An idea for the complex circuit he had been struggling to configure suddenly came together in his mind. Setting aside the tile, he returned to work. At last the machine was done, and tomorrow he would die.
He turned on the machine.
Looking down into the central chamber, he saw her face. There was the light-flash of her intelligence, the swirl of her hair in the wind. I had forgotten, he whispered, the smoothness of her cheek, and he remembered that as a child, wandering the high desert with his family, he had once discovered a pond, its surface smooth
as a mirror. He had thought it was a piece of the sky, fallen down. Now, as he spoke aloud in longing, he saw that the face was beginning to dissolve, and he could no longer distinguish her countenance from standing water, or her intelligence from a meteor shower, or her swirling hair from the vortex of a tornado. Then he looked up and around him in wonder, and it seemed to him that the stone walls were curtains of falling rain, and that he was no more than a wraithlike construct of atoms, mostly empty space—and as the thought crystallized in his mind, he found himself walking out with the machine in his arms, unnoticed by the double rows of armed guards. So he walked out of his prison, damp, but free.
How he found his way to the village near Dalanzadgad, where his beloved then lived, is a story we will not tell here. But he was at last restored to the woman he loved, who had been waiting for him all these years. Her cheek no longer had the smoothness of youth, but the familiar intelligence was in her eyes, and so was the love, the memory of which had kept him alive through his incarceration. They settled down together, growing vegetables in the summers and keeping some goats. The machine he kept hidden at the back of the goat shed.
But within the first year of his happiness the engineer noticed something troubling. Watching his wife, he would sometimes see her cheek acquire the translucency of an oasis under a desert sky. Looking into her eyes, he would feel as though he was traveling through a cosmos bright with stars. These events would occur in bursts, and after a while she would be restored to herself, and she would pass a hand across her forehead and say, I felt dizzy for a moment. As time passed, her face seemed to resemble more and more the fuzzy, staccato images on an old-fashioned television set that is just slightly out of tune with the channel. It occurred to him that he had, despite his best intentions, created a weapon after all.
So one cold winter night he crept out of the house to the shed, and uncovered the machine. He tried to take it apart, to break it to pieces, but it had acquired a reality not of this world. At last he spoke to it: You are a pile of dust! You are a column of stone! You are a floor tile! You are a heap of manure! But nothing happened. The machine seemed to be immune to its own power.
He stood among the goats, looking out at the winter moon that hung like a circle of frost in the sky. Slowly it came to him that there was nothing he could do except to protect everyone he loved from what he had created. So he returned to the house and in the dim light of a candle beheld once more the face of the woman he loved. There were fine wrinkles around her eyes, and she was no longer slim, nor was her hair as black as it had once been. She lay in the sweetness of sleep and, in thrall to some pleasant dream, smiled in slumber. He was almost undone by this, but he swallowed, gritted his teeth, and kept his resolve. Leaving a letter on the table, and taking a few supplies, he wrapped up the machine and walked out of the sleeping village and into the Gobi, the only other place where he had known stillness.
The next morning his wife found the letter, and his footprints on the frosty ground. She followed them all the way to the edge of the village, where the desert lay white in the pale dawn. Among the ice-covered stones and the frozen tussocks of brush, his footsteps disappeared. At first she shook her fist in the direction he had gone, then she began to weep. Weeping, she went back to the village.
The villagers never saw him again. There are rumors that he came back a few months later, during a dust storm, because a year after his disappearance, his wife gave birth to a baby girl. But after that he never returned.
His wife lived a full life, and when she was ready to die, she said good-bye to her daughter and grandchildren and went into the desert. When all her food and water were finished, she found some shade by a clump of brush at the edge of a hollow, where she lay down. They say that she felt her bones dissolving, and her flesh becoming liquid, and her hair turning into wind. There is a small lake there now, and in its waters on a cold night, you can see meteors flashing in a sky rich with stars.
As for the engineer, there are rumors and folk legends about a shaman who rode storms as though they were horses. They say he ventured as far as Yakutz in Siberia and Siena in Italy; there is gossip about him in the narrow streets of old Istanbul, and in a certain village outside Zhengzhou, among other places. Wherever he stopped, he sought village healers and madmen, philosophers and logicians, confounding them with his talk of a machine that could blur the boundary between the physical realm and the metaphoric. His question was always the same: How do I destroy what I have created? Wherever he went, he brought with him a sudden squall of sand and dust that defied the predictions of local meteorologists, and left behind only a thin veil of desert sand flung upon the ground.
Some people believe that the Mongolian engineer is still with us. The nomads speak of him as the kindest of shamans, who protects their gers and their animals by pushing storms away from their path. As he once wandered the great expanse of the Gobi in his boyhood, so he now roams a universe without boundaries, in some dimension orthogonal to the ones we know. When he finds what he is seeking, they say, he will return to that small lake in the desert. He will breathe his last wish to the machine before he destroys it. Then he will lay himself down by the water, brushing away the dust of the journey, letting go of all his burdens. With his head resting on a pillow of sand, still at last, he will await his own transformation.
The Second Account
At the edge of a certain Italian town there is a small stone church, and beside it an overgrown tiled courtyard, surrounded entirely by an iron railing. The one gate is always kept locked. Tourists going by sometimes want to stop at the church and admire its timeworn façade, but rarely do they notice the fenced courtyard. Yet if anyone were to look carefully between the bars, they would see that the tiles, between the weeds and wildflowers, are of exceptional quality, pale gray stone inlaid with a fine intricacy of black marble and quartz. The patterns are delicate as circuit diagrams, celestial in their beauty. The careful observer will notice that one of the tiles in the far left quadrant is broken in half, and that grass and wildflowers fill the space.
The old priest who attends the church might, if plied with sufficient wine, rub his liver-spotted hands over his rheumy eyes and tell you how that tile came to be broken. When he was young, a bolt from a storm hit the precise center of the tile and killed a man sweeping the church floor not four yards away. Even before the good father’s time, the courtyard was forbidden ground, but the lightning didn’t know that. The strange thing is not so much that the tile broke almost perfectly across the diagonal, but that one half of it disappeared. When the funeral was over, the priest went cautiously to the part of the railing nearest the lightning strike and noted the absence of that half of the tile. Sighing, he nailed a freshly painted “No Entry” sign on an old tree trunk at the edge of the courtyard and hoped that curious boys and thunderstorms would take note.
It wasn’t a boy who ignored the sign and gained entry, however—it was a girl. She came skipping down the narrow street, watching the dappled sunlight play beneath the old trees, tossing a smooth, round pebble from hand to hand. She paused at the iron railing and stared between the bars, as she had done before. There was something mesmerizing about that afternoon, and the way the sunlight fell on the tiles. She hitched up her skirts and clambered over the fence. Inside, she stood on the perimeter and considered a game of hopscotch.
But now that she was there, in the forbidden place, she began to feel nervous and to look around fearfully. The church and the street were silent, drugged with the warm afternoon light, and many people were still at siesta. Then the church clock struck three, loudly and sonorously, and in that moment the girl made her decision. She gathered her courage and jumped onto the first tile, and the second and third, tossing her pebble.
Years later she would describe to her lover the two things she noticed immediately: that the pebble, which was her favorite thing, having a fine vein of rose-colored quartz running across it, had disappeared into thin air during its flight. The next thing
she noticed was a disorientation, the kind you feel when transported to a different place very suddenly, as a sleeping child in a car leaving home awakes in a strange place, or, similarly, when one wakes up from an afternoon nap to find that the sun has set and the stars are out. Being a child in a world of adults, she was used to this sort of disorientation, but alone in this courtyard, with only the distant chirping of a bird to disturb the heat-drugged silence, she became frightened enough to step back to the perimeter. When she did so, all seemed to slip back to normality, but for the fact that there was the church clock, striking three again. She thought at the time that perhaps the ghosts in the graveyard behind the church were playing tricks on her, punishing her for having defied the sign on the tree.
But while lying with her lover in tangled white sheets on just such an afternoon many years later, she asked aloud: What if there is some other explanation? She traced a pattern on her lover’s back with her finger, trying to remember the designs on the tiles. Her lover turned over, brown skin flushed with heat and spent passion, eyes alive with interest. The lover was a Turkish immigrant and a mathematician, a woman of singular appearance and intellect, with fiery eyes and deep, disconcerting silences. She had only recently begun to emerge from grief after the death of her sole remaining relative, her father. Having decided that the world was bent on enforcing solitude upon her, she had embraced loneliness with an angry heart, only to have her plans foiled by the unexpected. She had been unprepared for love in the arms of an Italian woman—an artist, at that—grown up all her life in this provincial little town. But there it was. Now the mathematician brushed black ringlets from her face and kissed her lover. Take me there, she said.
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