by D. F. Lovett
But I should limp, because my right leg is not mine. The White took it. C-Tex, the beast we chase now. I’ve been out here and chased it before and it went wrong. It could not have gone more poorly, in all honesty, as I returned without a leg and the beast continued unharmed.
The six of you are not just my crewmates. You are my harpooners. You will lance it with me. This creature killed my family. This creature took my blood. We put it here, humanity, and we must take it away.
I want to be very clear with all of you that we will accept no defeat. And from here, I will take no argument. You stand against me, any of you, and you’ll be walking home. I’ll sacrifice all mortal interests to this one passion. The more monsters we slay, the better, but we will take no rest until we have destroyed the White itself.
Death to C-Tex. Death to the White. God hunt us all if we do not hunt the White to his death.
Thirteen
And then we broke off, one by one, returning to our cabins. Starboy would be piloting us back up into the night, he announced, and away I walked, in silence, reaching my cabin and lying on the bed and realizing I’d had more to drink that intended.
This poem. What had it meant, and what had he thought it meant, and were they the same? To what fate did Moonborn lead us? The book he’d given me, about the man who hated a whale: what answers lay inside?
Of course, I knew and I did not. I had not read Moby-Dick. I had not memorized “Ozymandias”. But I knew that Moonborn knew his tragedies. He knew them and he knew that he could overcome them. He saw his fate in his history, and he refused to accept it, charging into the night and bringing us with him.
Starboy’s words earlier; Moonborn’s speech; my songs, and the memories they stirred up; a dread in my soul that had not been there before. A wild, mystical, sympathetic feeling now in me. With greedy ears I’d listened, greedy because money had brought me here, a greed for money and for purpose and for adventure. A selfishness in which I lost myself.
Adam’s quenchless feud suddenly seemed mine. By continuing on this crew, on this quest, I’d taken an oath of violence and revenge.
But for what? For what did I risk my life? For what had I journeyed to the Moon?
Discussion Questions on the Story Thus Far
1. What signifies the poem “Ozymandias”? Had you read the poem, before the choppy version included above? What does it mean for Adam Moonborn? What does it mean for Ishmael Brandt? What does it mean for you? What does it mean for me? What does it mean for all of us?
2. Do you believe in fate? Does Adam Moonborn? If fate exists, can it be conquered?
3. Is Ishmael the collateral of a suicidal mission?
4. Why does Moonborn insist on the name “Moon” for his home in the interview, years earlier, but calls it “the Moon” today? What caused his insistence on one name, only to abandon it later?
5. Does Moonborn not understand that Ozymandias is the wreck in the lonely sands? Or does he understand? Which answer is more dangerous? And why?
Canto Six: A Squeeze of the Hand
One: or, “Killing Robots, Historically Regarded”
From the writings of Adam Moonborn
Reference was made to the killing of robots and the way to speak of them now: AIMs, AIPs, and AICs.
These words you read now: they are meant to last a thousand years, to last millennia, if not forever. These words are meant to be read until the last star sets. And so I write to be clear, so that these future generations will understand of what it is I speak, and so I can try to explain what cannot be explained. But don’t blame me, Captain Adam Moonborn of the Ozymandias, for the truths I tell.
Now, some Lunatics (and, please, remember that is not a pejorative) may not recognize the danger of robots. But is this not how it has always been? Have there not always been those who fail to recognize the truth when it stands in front of them? Some Nantucketers distrusted the historical story of Jonah and the whale, like the Greeks and Romans who doubted the story of Hercules and his whale.
Let us go to the beginning of men who killed robots, which began far before robots ever existed. Let us consider the Earthling of centuries ago who first started the movement against technology: Ned Ludd, founder of the Luddites.
The gallant Ludd, a man of England, was the first robot-killer; and to the eternal honor of our calling, be it said that the first robot killed was at his hand. Of course, this is a somewhat skewed view, as the word robot did not exist until the twentieth century, while Ludd lived and died in the eighteenth.
Nonetheless, he destroyed the machines that he saw plaguing his land. They were not true robots, as they still required humans to power them and maintain them, but his fear and his determination is what we postmodern robot-killers have inherited. He led his followers with their pitchforks and their flames and they destroyed the soul-sucking machines that had begun to spring up across the English countryside.
Those were knightly days of destroying machines. And he was honored by sparking a Luddite movement which exists, to this day, in one form or another. True, it is rare to meet a man who calls himself a Luddite, but they exist throughout society in many ways.
I am a Luddite in three ways: a flesher, a robot-killer, and a Lunatic.
After Ned Ludd, we have a gap in the record. The Luddites continued their destruction, and in some cases they were so effective that they destroyed the very records of their destruction.
As stated previously, it was in the early twentieth century that humanity first encountered the word robot. Where did we first see them? In our nightmares. In a story, by one Carl Kapeck of the land now known as Prussia.
But, let us be clear: Kapeck may have invented the word, but he did not invent the idea. Humanity has been haunted by the idea of man-made, man-resembling machines since our very beginning.
Let us look at the tales of the ancient Greeks. Everyone knows the fine story of Jason and his crew of warriors, who fought villains and monsters across the ancient Earth. But not everyone is familiar with his slaying of Talos.
Who is Talos, you ask? Why, Talos is the original robot. A man, made of bronze. What we today would call an AIP (which, as you’ve learned, signifies Artificial Intelligence Person). How did they defeat this creature, this pretender? Jason melted him with a sword, destroyed him in the heat of the midday sun.
Of course, there is one notable thing about Talos that differs him from the robots we kill today. Talos was crafted by Zeus; all of today’s robots are made at the hands of men.
Two
As I read the words above, an interruption: an announcement from Starboy. He announced that we had passed over the edge of the Moon. We had passed from the side that always faces Earth to the side that never faces Earth. We had reached the far side, the distant side, the other side.
He announced this and went silent. No special instructions. No calls to action. Just a piece of news for us, information in our journey.
I returned to Moonborn’s words.
Three: or, “Killing Robots, Historically Regarded, Continued”
From the writings of Adam Moonborn
And of course, there were other AIPs and AIMs and AICs at this time, other man-made monsters to be vanquished. There was the golem of Jewish myth, the clay men of the Aztecs, the mechanical creatures of the Orient. All of which had one thing in common: the desire to destroy, fueling the obligation for man to control the machines.
Then came da Vinci. That madman genius. Painter and inventor and musician, a true Renaissance man. It strikes me that, were da Vinci alive today, he would have dropped all his invention nonsense and moved to the Moon to paint and write and live.
Da Vinci invented the robot. He drafted up the plans, and there is no doubt that, with a man of da Vinci’s mind and abilities and resources, he could have created it if he had so desired.
But Leonardo, he did not create a robot. Which makes Leonardo da Vinci another man in the great legacy of robot-killers is that he chose not to create the robot
he easily could have built. He is of my cloth.
And then we have, on the tails of da Vinci, our first great fiction of a robot-killer. Doctor Frankenstein, the doctor who fashioned himself a robot and then realized his mistake—and killed it.
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein on a dare (and to think there are still men who think women can’t write!) She made it her goal to tell the scariest story she could, and so she chose the scariest thing there is: when men create machines they cannot control. Frankenstein’s monster, of course, was more of a zombie-cyborg than an AIP or an AIM. He was, if you really look at it, similar in all ways to the majority of Earthlings today. A half-dead, half-machine beast, lumbering across the countryside, full of malice and violence.
After Frankenstein, the nineteenth century saw more robots: Jules Verne told of a gigantic mechanical elephant; and real men built false men, including the Steam Man and the Electric Man, two frightening creatures that crossed the American countryside in freak shows, undeterred until that other robot-killer stepped in: time.
That brings us to the century in which Kapeck created the word robot and in which humanity learned two things: how to create robots, and how horrible they are.
In 1939, two awful developments. First, the humanoid robot Electro appeared at the World’s Fair in New York City. Second, the film The Wizard of Oz introduced the Tin Man to children, instilling in them this twisted idea that a robot can be a friend.
But as the century progressed and the pages of time turned, we began to create robots in both our fictions and our realities. Our fictions were where we first learned them to be demons. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, James Cameron and Ridley Scott and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver and Justin Vernon and Lucius West; all these men and women realized that robots are dangerous, and they made the fictions to teach us.
Did we heed the warning? Of course we did not.
Robots spilled from our imaginations to our reality.
We made robots to build our cars, to conquer our planets, to fight our wars.
Robots drove our cars, flew our planes, tracked our data. They dropped bombs on our fellow humans. They dropped bombs on innocents. They dropped bombs on other robots. They mined the asteroids, explored the rings of Saturn, and built the first colony on Mars, all without the presence of a single human.
And where were we? Where was humanity? In the backseat. We were off somewhere, looking at a mountain. Rowing a boat across a lake. Sitting in a dark room reading the rants of our friends and neighbors. Admiring the lives of strangers and their babies. Working, suffering, dying, while robots conquered our world.
Until now.
No more of this.
Consider da Vinci. Consider Shelley. Consider Kubrick. Consider Jason, that gallant knight. A fraternity of heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets; authors and actors and liberators, our order of robot-killers.
Jason, da Vinci, Weaver, Ford, Kubrick, and Frankenstein! There’s a member roll for you. What club but the robot-killers can boast of such members?
Combine the tale of Jason killing Talos with the tale of Perseus killing Cetus, and you have a story you know today: you have my story. I am the killer of robots. I am the liberator of the Moon.
Four
I had intended to go to sleep after the talent show. Instead, I read the chapter you have just read, from Moonborn’s stack of papers, and I felt I had begun to understand.
I had come to a dangerous place. The Moon held danger. The Moon held violence. The Moon held lunacy. And I had boarded a dangerous ship, piloted by a dangerous man.
The poem he read; the book he was writing; the book he wanted me to write. A sequel to Moby-Dick. A sequel to a book which I had never read and, based on its size, I didn’t have time to read.
I knew that I had to find one person: I had to talk to Jennifer Curtis.
But, before I could, something else happened.
Five
The alarms howled through the ship. My hands shot to my ears. I closed my eyes against the blinking, strobing green light filling my room, on and off, rapidly. I had not encountered these piercing screeches yet, as we had no emergency procedure drill when I boarded the ship. The idea flickered through my head that I had very little orientation in my induction as a crewmember on this ship. But before I could dwell on these safety concerns, a new sensation ripped across the ship and through me.
Boom. That’s the best I can do, describing this. A halting noise, accompanied by a jerk and a shudder through the ship. The feeling that we had just been hit by something.
The idea flickering now was not the question of where was my crewmember orientation but an image, the vision of a shark in a macrofilm I’d watched as a child. A shark smashing its snout into the bottom of a boat. A white shark, a giant beast, crashing into the bottom of the boat, trying to tear it open and eat the people within.
The alarms and lights clanging and clashing, I ran toward the door and out into the hallway, racing through the Second Circle, running toward the center of the ship.
Boom, boom, boom. Again, again, again. Something, some beast, below the ship, attacking.
I saw no one but charged through until I reached the Ship Center, and saw Jordan and Nikolai descending a ladder to the third layer.
“Ishmael!”
I looked in the direction of the yell and saw Starboy sticking his head out of the hatch to the Roost.
“Get to the Starboard Ops Room! We need all the eyes on this thing we can get!”
“What is it!”
“Just get over there!”
I did as I was told, turning and running toward the Starboard Quadrant.
I reached the room, racing in, expecting to see starships on fire, chaos on the horizon.
Instead, nothing. I saw nothing, just the vast white lunar expanse.
Then, from beneath my vantage point, a giant orange bird flew out from beneath us. Or this is how it appeared, initially, to my baffled eyes.
“It’s a flying mapper!” Moonborn’s voice announced over the ship’s speakers. “Ishmael, shoot it!”
“Shoot it?” I shouted into the air. I couldn’t remember how these rooms worked. Could they hear me? “How am I supposed to shoot it?”
“The saucer by the window! It controls the Starboard guns!”
I saw the saucer and ran to it. I picked it up. It resembled the saucers I had seen in both the Control Room and the flier, but where was the gun it controlled?
“Okay!” I yelled, still not sure how to do this. Point and shoot? Was that how easy this was?
“Stand down, Ishmael!”
“What?”
“Stand down.” Starboy’s voice now, still over the speakers. “Nikolai and Jordan are in a flier. We can’t risk you hitting them.”
And just as he said it, their flier appeared, gunning after the mapper, which still looked to me like a giant orange bird.
They lit the thing up, the orange of the bird erupting into an orange fire.
“Huzzah!” Moonborn’s voice over the speakers. “Turn back, boys! Another victory!”
But the orange bird did not descend, as I’d expected it to. It continued on, and they did not turn back. Both the bird and the flier continued on ahead, away from us across the Moon, as we in the Ozymandias moved slowly after them.
“What are they doing?”
This voice came not from the speakers. I turned to see Q entering the Operations Room.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“Port Ops Room.”
“They had someone in each of the rooms, so we’d have eyes on it wherever it went?”
She did not answer, giving me only a sometimes you have to stop talking look.
And then I saw: the world dropped away, out there, an edge into the darkness. We were approaching a crater.
“What the fuck is that?” Q said.
“It’s a crater,” I answered, feeling proud to know the answ
er for once. “A giant crater. I bet we could find a map to figure out which one.”
“Not that, not that,” she said, and then I saw.
That.
Six
It came into view, ahead of the burning bird and the chasing flying saucer. A tower of blinking lights, in the center of the crater. It was still at least a mile off, I supposed (I have trouble measuring distances), but the bot and the flier chasing it ripped toward it.
“Why don’t we catch them?”
“We can’t go that fast,” Q answered me. “It’s one of the main reasons we built the fliers. This thing can transport us, but speed and precision aren’t really its strengths.”
“And whose tower is that?”
“I’ve never been to this crater,” she said. “But it looks like probably someone from Lucas.”
“Lucas is the military base?”
That look again from her. Disgust, irritation, and some light amusement.
“Do you know the Moon at all?”
“I mean, I’m not from here. I get mixed up. I did the required reading and everything, but, you know.”
“What required reading?” She stared at me now, some kind of suspicion dawning.
“For the…” I trailed off. “For school. Required reading about the Moon. Everyone takes Lunar History in school now.”
“You paid no attention, then,” she said. “Asking stupid questions like that. Don’t let anyone else hear you asking that, or they’ll know you’re a fraud. Moonborn wanted you on this journey? I’d hate to see the Brandts who failed to make the cut.”
