Angels of Apocalypse, Part I: Alignment

by J. J. Harkin

  Turning confusedly, David and Rachel looked to see who had just answered his mock introduction. There, carefully descending the little hill from the house, could be seen a good-natured-looking woman of middle age. Behind her followed a plump woman of a more advanced age, who – to their lasting wonder and surprise – happened to be skipping and dancing in an uncharacteristically nimble fashion, this way and that across the hillside. Rachel and David exchanged brief glances of disbelief.

  “Helloooo!” said the good-natured woman, speaking in a colorfully unabashed British brogue, as she arrived before them at last. “Good to see you all!” She was offering David her hand. “Henrietta’s the name; householding’s my game. Got here just as fast as we could, when we got the note. You David?”

  “Yep,” interrupted the plump older woman, now dancing over to dole out hugs to them all, “that’s David alright.”

  “Harriet!” David could not believe his eyes, for there she stood: Victoria’s last true friend from the nursing home. As usual, Harriet was wearing one of her signature printed T-shirts, this one rather tight and displaying the words “Island Fun” in colorful letters. David had only ever seen her on that odd afternoon at the lawyer’s office back in LA, but he remembered her well.

  “Yep!” confirmed Harriet cheerfully, twirling off past them down the hill. Her face was round and simple, rendering unblemished the shining smile that had once won over even the reserved Victoria.

  “How? What is all this?” David, though unexpectedly heart-warmed, could think of nothing else to ask.

  “Note?” asked Rachel, thinking this might be the best way to begin the unexpected interrogation. “What note did you mean?”

  “Yes, of course,” continued Henrietta, catching her breath. Harriet, seeming to have lost interest, was already investigating the nearby collection of rabbits eagerly. Seeing the confusion in their faces, Henrietta explained further. “The note was attached to Victoria’s label maker.” It was clear they had no idea what she was talking about. “There was a note, you see. Victoria left Harriet a few things – one of them a nice machine she could use to make her own iron-on decals. Anyway, Harriet called me not long after the funeral, saying she’d found some money and a note from Victoria. It turned out to be more than enough to cover our travel expenses, so here we are!”

  “Wait, wait,” David broke in. “Victoria invited you here?”

  “Absolutely, darling,” said Henrietta, looking around. “Now where’s Denny? The note was very specific that we’re to make sure he’s eating properly.”

  “So are you a relative of Harriet’s or something?” Rachel was becoming curious.

  “Oh, that! Sorry, love. Yes, I’m her daughter-in-law, to be precise. My husband didn’t think it a good idea to let his seventy-six-year-old mother come all the way out here by herself, and I’ve been antsy ever since I retired anyway.” Rachel felt astounded by this information, for Harriet’s well-controlled dancing might have been the work of a forty or fifty year old.

  David was still sorting out his thoughts. “So Victoria really invited you here?”

  “Of course, dear,” said Henrietta, acknowledging his wide-eyed confusion sympathetically. “Didn’t you know?”

  “We really didn’t have any idea,” put in Rachel helpfully, “but I think there’s no denying we could use some help keeping house here on the island, right David? We’ve barely had time to feed ourselves properly.”

  “Oh, good!” smiled Henrietta. “Victoria expected you’d be entertaining a number of visitors before long, and mentioned a bit of householding help would be in order. I can cook, I can clean, and I can organize – all at your disposal, in exchange for room and board.”

  Neither Rachel nor David could think of any good reason to resist further, as this was a fantastic development. “Well, you’ll be wanting to see Denny, I suppose?” asked David.

  “Yes, indeed,” agreed Henrietta. “That would be a good place to start.”

  “He’ll be in the study up at the house,” Rachel informed her warmly. “Go ahead – make yourself at home!”

  “Excellent!” announced Henrietta. “We’d better have at it, then. Come on, Harriet!” she called, waving energetically to her mother-in-law.

  Immediately Harriet started toward them, bringing a struggling rabbit along for the ride as gently as she could. “Good to see you again, David!” she said, as she passed him on the way up to the house, hugging the bunny close. Then the two women passed out of sight just as quickly as they had arrived, off to find Den and their new rooms in the house.

  “What on Earth is going on?” wondered Rachel aloud. She seated herself comfortably before the workshop at a massive, plastic picnic table which had been dragged off the last barge. It was getting dark; the spotlight on the robotics barn behind them was flickering on. The stars would be coming out soon, but the bunnies seemed restless.

  “I don’t know,” said David. “What do you think?”

  “Who can say? It’s like a page out of some cheesy pet calendar…” continued Rachel, seeming to miss his point completely, as she gaped at the sleek-eared rabbits. “I mean, if these bunnies tried to sell me a car right now I’d have to buy it. Look at ’em; it’s too cute! Better hope they never unionize…”

  After a moment David caught up to her train of thought, and played along. “Naw, Dogie’d step in to protect us. Them greedy bunnies’d never live down the cranked-out slug-fest that dog would rain down upon their adorable lil heads if they ever pulled a coup. Ya know what I mean there, sister?” David’s comments were cute, even if they did make him seem mentally ill.

  “I like your beard,” stated Rachel, firmly and slowly, reaching out to stroke his bristles.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” replied Rachel slyly, “it distracts me from the fact that the rest of your face is such a mess!” She burst out laughing. Chiding him gently was a satisfying pastime, as they both knew she harbored no true feelings of disgust for him.

  “Stop changing the subject,” insisted David, putting his finger on her nose. “Why and how do you think Victoria had the sense to make sure those two showed up just as the rest of the help was arriving? It’s too perfect.”

  “But isn’t Victoria’s foresight a good thing?” asked Rachel. “Why fight it? It’s as if she knew exactly what we’d be needing when we got here, and decided to plan ahead for us.”

  “Like that note we found on the pipe organ?”

  “Yeah,” agreed Rachel slowly. “Her propensity for organizing your futures after her death has been strangely specific.” She folded her hands thoughtfully. “I know I never met her, David, but it’s as if she knew the future, or even doubted the permanency of her own death.”

  “Oh, I’m sure Victoria understood the finality of death,” David felt obliged to add. “She wasn’t senile at all, though perhaps a bit odd. Otherwise at some point I’m sure she would’ve let on – if only accidentally – that she was gathering this huge fortune.”

  “Still, it’s like I said on our first day here: The way she writes these notes, it’s as if she might be returning any time.”

  “Yes, the mystery continues,” agreed David, nodding. His eyes lingered on the long eyelashes of Rachel. “I wonder how long it will be until we really understand what was going through her head during the final days of her life.”

  Rachel wondered as well, but remembered that they needed to stay on task, if possible. “Oh! Hey, let me show you what I was talking about before,” she continued, standing to charge past the backlit bunny pile into the cool workshop. The place was crammed full of blinking lights and flickering screens, all exuding the soft, rhythmic hum of happy processors.

  Rachel had quickly proved good with a wrench, so that she and David had needed very little time to become a quite efficient cyborg building team. Neither of them could believe the selection of android parts which became suddenly available for purchase online once money was no object. Quickly their works had filled
the lab, and the two of them became more and more excited with each passing day, knowing the robots they were developing might well turn out to be the world’s most efficient assembly yet. Actually they had begun investing in the kinds of technologies which no government anywhere else in the world could vie with at that time, due to a global recession which had unexpectedly festered into a depression. It almost seemed as though the blessings of heaven fell more prevalently as one neared Den’s island.

  At the center of the robotics lab stood a hydraulic vice that offered sturdy support to the vertical head and spinal section of a robot which was swiftly coming to realization before their eyes. A pile of long, pointed legs – or perhaps they were talons or pinchers – lay strewn in a nearby corner, ignored for the moment. Rachel had come to stand beside the robotic spinal apparatus.

  “Now what were you saying?” David asked.

  “I was just trying to make the point that one Magic U-Ball alone might not be enough to enable the ’bot to best express the thoughts of the nearest human.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “What I’m saying is that the command robot should at least contain the sensors of seven Magic U-Balls, each calibrated to the stroboscopic frequency of one of the seven electromagnetic centers that adjoin the human spine. In this way the android would be able to pick up, and therefore react to, every level of thought which the humans around it broadcast from their seven chakras.”

  “Wait, wait,” begged David. “You’re leaving me in the dust here.” He stopped to gather his thoughts for a minute. “What do you know about chakras?”

  “I know all kinds of stuff about all kinds of things. What of it?”

  “I know about chakras to some extent, but it seems like you might be a bit more experienced with them than me. Do go on, but back up first, and speak just a little more slowly.”

  “Right,” said Rachel patiently, trying to plan her speech. “When I was younger, you see, I went to this ‘energy healer’ in my neighborhood several times – that’s what she called herself anyway. It was my friend’s mother, so she let me by on the cheap. She certainly looked like a witch doctor, but the two of us ended up bonding as I never had with anyone before. Moreover, there were several occasions on which she would reach into what she called my ‘energy fields,’ to grab onto something that needed removing. She would seem to latch onto some specific point of my body, grab hold of something only she could see, and then, after much application of pressure, seem to pull the ‘blockage’ free of my space, releasing it into the air above us.”

  “Sounds very odd,” David commented earnestly, “though interesting.”

  “It was,” Rachel continued, “but what actually swayed me toward believing it might be real came when I noticed that my mental outlook had the characteristic tendency of changing or developing immediately following every occasion which involved the removal of anything from my chakras. Sometimes she would say she was ‘aligning my fields,’ while other times she claimed to be ‘clearing my energy,’ but I knew that – whatever she was doing – it certainly seemed to stimulate some sort of spiritual, mental, or emotional growth within me. That’s why I went with it so wholeheartedly. By the time she’d finished her work I found myself in a new home and job, with a noticeable improvement in my overall temperament and outlook – all at the age of sixteen.”

  “Sounds incredible,” said David curiously.

  “It was a good childhood once I got free of all my spiritual gunk, if you know what I mean.”

  “I suppose I get what you’re saying, though I’ve experienced none of this myself,” he admitted. “But what does it have to do with the robots?”

  “What I’m getting at is that the chakras are said to broadcast information from the world of energy into the human spine in the form of electromagnetic impulses within the metaphysical region occupied by the body’s ganglia, or nerve centers. There are said to be six major ganglia placed along the spinal column intermittently, each one tuned to receive a slightly higher frequency than the one below it.”

  “Uh-huh. Yeah, I’ve seen pictures of that plenty of times,” said David, starting to feel impressed.

  “Clairvoyants claim the chakra in the pelvis glows red, while the one in the ganglia at the base of the spine is said to be orange. Moving upward, the chakra in the solar plexus glows yellow, beneath the green aura of the heart chakra, and the blue flash of the throat light. The violet chakra known as the ‘third eye’ illuminates the head from within. Finally, the whole is capped by a seventh chakra, the only horizontally oriented one of the bunch, which usually comes across as a bright halo around the person’s head, if it can be seen. The seventh chakra is still a bit of a mystery, actually, as it’s the only one which doesn’t connect directly with a nerve center. Some argue it isn’t a chakra at all, but something else entirely.”

  David was pleased to have found so concise a teacher at short notice; Rachel was beginning to make sense to him. “So you’re saying, since people broadcast electromagnetic information on seven different levels, that a mindreading robot would have to be designed to receive them in the same way the human body does?”

  Rachel was happy to see he had finally gotten her point. “Yes, exactly. If you’re trying to make a robot capable of doing everything you think of, then it’s best to take into account the frequencies across which the mind broadcasts stimuli.” She was proud to have expressed her thoughts clearly. “That way you can design the cyborg accordingly.”

  “So we’ll need seven of the U-Ball sensor arrays lined up along here.” David pointed to the elegant curve of woven cables, tiny shocks, and metal couplings which composed the spinal apparatus.

  “Exactly,” agreed Rachel, “but we’ll need to have them each set to scan only a portion of the full spectrum of radiation. Seven chakras, seven frequencies, and seven sensor arrays – they must all be interconnected, though set to listen separately.”

  “But what if our robot get’s a ‘blockage’ or something stuck in its aura?” David asked, not too seriously.

  “Actually, I’ve so far only heard that energetic cataracts plague humans, though very occasionally animals can suffer from them. The robot, having no soul, will naturally have no chakras, and therefore remain characteristically free of spiritual blockages of any kind, leaving it all the more available to spend its time expressing the energy – and presumably even the blockages – of its nearest human masters.”

  “I hope that ends up being a good thing,” worried David aloud. “Perhaps we’ll have to keep the number of masters per robot to a minimum, or they might begin to behave in schizophrenic ways, never being sure which human stimuli to respond to first.”

  “But what is it within the sensor array of this tiny U-Ball which you so thoroughly trust to measure the intrinsic metaphysical vibrations that bridge the physical and spiritual worlds?” wondered Rachel, holding one of them closely before her eye. “What is it that you’re measuring within these little things?”

  David strayed to a nearby workbench, which displayed the disassembled entirety of a U-Ball. “Look,” he said. He was directing her attention to a tiny plastic vile which had previously remained hidden, unseen amid the tangle of wires.

  “What is that?” she asked. Rachel honestly had no idea what he might be trying to show her.

  “It’s seawater,” David whispered. “That’s all I can tell you…” He returned to work immediately, then, opening a computerized design program which would allow him to modify the structure of the command robot’s spinal workings. Rachel took the hint graciously, and asked no more questions, but strayed again to the shop’s door to view the night sky.

  All remained the same, though Dogie had since been transported gently down the hill with the swarm of migrating rabbits. The dog had become their hockey puck, constantly being prodded by one soft nose or another in his fitful sleep. Rachel wondered vaguely where the little dog might be carried off to by morning, feeling it would certainly be someplac
e so trite it seemed ripped from the pages of a horrid children’s novel.

  “Books…” she mumbled lazily, thinking she must soon visit the library to find a new one, “what a lovely waste of irreplaceable time…”

  David had only partially heard her. “Who’s a ‘lovely waste?’” he asked, joining her in the door once again. “Not me, I hope…”

  “Definitely,” insisted Rachel, “but I’ll survive somehow, I’m sure.”

  “You certainly will if I have anything to say about it,” replied David. He drew close to her then, boldly planting a cool peck upon her cheek. Her clear glance into his eyes signaled a warm embrace between them.

  Up at the villa, Den could see the pair from the study balcony, spotlighted by the bright security lamp at the entrance to the robotics workshop. Though he had guessed this was coming, Den knew that seeing David and Rachel together was going to be hard for him. Den had accepted the fact that he and Maria were over for good, but the sight of his friends’ new bonds reminded him forcibly that he was more alone than ever.

  He turned back to the shelf-lined room to give them their privacy. Den knew he was moping, but did not really care. Soon, perhaps, science would swoop in to distract him from the frustrations of single life. He must do his best to immerse himself in work. Though seeing them had been a real shock at first, showing Henrietta and Harriet their rooms had been a merry time, for they were both brimming with positive energy. Den turned back to the desk. There the little piece of paper which Henrietta had submitted as proof of Victoria’s wishes still glared up at him obstinately. Here was yet another note in Victoria’s own handwriting, more proof that her dying wishes continued to influence them from beyond the grave. What was going on?

  An oil painting of Victoria, which served as the end-cap to a nearby row of bookshelves, attracted Den’s attention. It was indeed a curious image, and quite old. The painting featured a finely dressed depiction of Victoria at the center of a massive hunting party of British men on horseback, surrounded by their dogs, looking for all the world as if they were about to set out upon some legendary outing. Victoria sat proudly atop a black steed, smiling with young confidence, despite the fact that she was the only woman featured. Her eyes seemed to watch him, so that he turned away to find solitude.