Year 1

“Got a new one for you,” the mover said. Small man, in neat overalls, wheeling the box on the stacker. That’s what the robot saw when they opened the box and let it out. It stepped cautiously out into sunshine. An unfamiliar city skyline, a boxy whitewashed building in front of him, a busy-looking woman in a blue dress examining the manifesto.

“Can it cook?” she said.

“Cook, clean, sing lullabies,” the mover said. “I gotta go, I have another half-dozen to deliver.”

“All right, Sami. See you,” the woman said. She turned to the robot.

“Do you have a name?” she said.

“R76-2,” the robot said. It was the first time it had spoken since the tests in the lab.

“R76?” the woman said.

“Dash two.”

“I’m going to call you Orson,” the woman said. “I’m Mrs. Abbas. Do you know where you are?”

“I do not, Mrs. Abbas,” the robot—Orson—said.

“This is Neom. You are a general purpose, carer-type, correct?”

“Yes, Mrs. Abbas.”

“Then you should know what to do.”

She turned to go inside and, after a moment’s hesitation, the robot followed.

 

Year 4

“I’m dying, you know,” Mr. Hammid said.

“I know, Baba,” the robot said. It wiped the sweat from Mr. Hammid’s face gently with the cloth. It was dark in the room, the ceiling fan turning lazily overhead. The lights of the city rose outside, beyond the window, skyscrapers and minarets and floating street lanterns, but their light remained outside where it belonged.

“I don’t want to die,’ Mr. Hammid said. “I have so much still to do.”

“I know, Baba,” the robot said.

“It hurts,” Mr. Hammid said. “I didn’t think it would hurt so much.”

The robot wondered at this concept, pain. It dipped the cloth in cool water and touched it to Mr. Hammid’s forehead. Mr. Hammid closed his eyes. His breathing was shallow.

“Sing me a song,” Mr. Hammid said.

“Of course.”

The robot had sung the song many times, to many patients. It seemed to please them. It began. “Hush now, my baby, sleep now has come, sleep now, my baby, may all your dreams be kind…”

When the robot stopped singing Mr. Hammid’s breath had left his body, and he was still. The robot had seen many humans die, but the why of it remained a mystery to both it and them. It wheeled Mr. Hammid’s body to the Room of Final Rest and contemplated mortality.

 

Year 25

There was the sound of a distant explosion, somewhere beyond the wall of sand filters, where the lush greenhouses used to stand.

“We might have to close soon,” Mrs. Da Silva said. She had taken over from Mrs. Esh who had taken over from Miss Okoye who had taken over from Mrs. Abbas. “The war is getting close this time.”

“What is this war?” the robot said.

“I don’t know, Orson,” Mrs. Da Silva said. “There are a people fighting another people out there in the desert, but sooner or later one or both of them will take Neom, too.”

“Where will you go?” the robot said. “Where will the people here go?”

“I will go back to the Algarve, I think,” Mrs. Da Silva said. “Or maybe to Oman. They say there is work there. As for them—” she gestured at the elderly charges “—where can they go?”

“Yes,” the robot said. “I understand.”

It attended to the patients. It was all the robot knew. In the morning Mrs. Da Silva was gone. The sound of explosions grew closer. The robot had grown accustomed to this place, its quiet. In twenty-five years it never went outside. It never occurred to it to. Its work was here, with the elderly. It remembered all their names, their faces, the last things they all said. It had sung lullabies thousands of time. It seemed to soothe the patients.

The next morning there were fewer patients. An ambulance came and took them away. Eventually there was only Mrs. Mendoza who remained.

The explosions were constant now. A rocket hit the wall that surrounded the care home, showering bricks and dust into the air.

“Oh, to hell with it,” Mrs. Mendoza said. The robot watched as the life departed from her. Then there was only the robot.

 

Year 26

The robot remained in the empty care home for many days. One night, small humans came in and began to loot the ruins. They found the robot as it stood there watching them.

“What are you?” their leader said curiously. He was maybe thirteen, thin, with eyes the colour of pomegranate seeds.

“I am a robot,” the robot said.

“Do you take orders?”

The robot considered.

“I had a job,” it said. “But it appears I am no longer needed.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” the boy said, and he hefted a metal rod threateningly.

“I don’t know,” the robot said.

“Don’t you have to?” a little girl piped up. She stared up at the robot with a strange mix of hope and fear.

The robot thought.

“I don’t think I do,” it said.

“Do something,” the boy said.

“Like what?” the robot said.

“I don’t know. Pick up that machine and come with us.”

“Why do you want that machine?” the robot said.

“It could be valuable,” the boy said. He seemed uncertain now. The robot sensed it might be in danger from the children. This thought of danger was new, even with the bombs that kept falling. It was troubled by it.

“Valuable?” the robot said.

“It means someone might give us some money for it!” the girl said.

“What will you do with this money?” the robot said.

“Buy food. There is not much food anymore,” the girl said.

“I see,” the robot said. “Very well.”

The robot wanted to help. It was made to help. It picked up the machine. It followed the children into the city.

“This is a food printer,” the old woman said. She lived in a makeshift tent in the middle of a junkyard on the outskirts of town. It had taken several days to reach her. “But it’s broken. I’ll give you a good price for your robot, though.”

The robot looked at the old woman in some surprise.

“But I am not—” it began to say.

“No!” the little girl said. Her name was Mila. “You can’t take Waleed!”

The children called the robot that now.

The old woman shrugged.

“It’s just a robot,” she said.

“He’s not just a robot!” Mila said. “He’s our friend.”

“That’s what robots do,” the old woman said. “They’re everyone’s friend. Unless they’re the robots out in the desert. Then they are no one’s friend.”

“What do the robots in the desert do?” the robot said.

“They kill people,” the old woman said.

“Why do they kill people?” the robot said, discomfited.

“It’s their job,” the old woman said. “You want the money or not?” she asked the children.

“What will you do to him?” the leader, whose name was Gal, said.

“Sell it on, or break it up for parts,” the old woman said.

The children conferred amongst themselves in low voices. The robot began to feel that sense of danger again. It had felt it more and more as they passed through the ruins of Neom, danger from the air and from other people. The robot liked the children. It wanted to protect them if it could.

“We’re not—” the boy, Gal, began to say.

The robot heard the whistle of a rocket. It scooped up the little girl without thinking and started to run. The rocket hit and there was a big explosion, but it was behind them by then.

 

Year 35

“It hurts,” Mila said.

The robot had heard that refrain from people often in its years of service. It wondered again about this pain, and whether it was a precondition to be truly human.

“Push,” it said, not unkindly.

“It hurts!” Mila said.

She pushed. The robot could see the top of the head emerging. The robot was not very experienced in midwifery but it was getting more experience of it. It hummed soothingly as it helped deliver the baby.

“Life can flourish in the cracks of walls,” the robot said, “that people have long abandoned.”

“What?” Mila said.

“It’s from an old poetry book I found in that ruined bookshop by the sea,” the robot said. “It’s by Lior Tirosh. Push.”

“I’m pushing!” Mila screamed.

The baby emerged. The robot cut the umbilical cord. The baby cried, a beautiful sound, and the robot marvelled at this being. It was used to people going the other way, into nothing, but here was a new life, emerging out of—where? Where did life come from? the robot wondered. Where did it go when it ended?

Poetry didn’t tell you, but the robot found that it helped all the same.

Mila took the baby and pressed it to her chest. She had grown so quickly in their journeying through the city as it fell. Sometimes the war went off into the distance, sometimes it came back close. The robot and the girl foraged for food as best they could, and after a time opened a small shelter for other people in the Nineveh Quarter, and the robot was happy to be helping people again. Mila studied medicine through the machines that connected all things into a single Conversation. One day a young man came to their shelter. His name was Erik. After a time, Mila and Erik told the robot they were in love.

“What is this love?” the robot said. Its elderly patients had often talked of love; but the robot never understood it.

The new couple laughed, as though the robot had told a joke, and didn’t answer it. Now Mila held her baby, and the robot was happy for her.

“Say hello to Uncle Waleed, baby,” Mila said. The robot wagged its metallic finger at the tiny baby’s face.

“Ooh who has a booboo tumtum!” the robot said. “Ooh who’s a little widdle chuchu!”

The robot felt a little silly saying that. But the baby looked up at the robot and drooled happily.

 

Year 48

“We are going to leave,” Erik told the robot. He looked sad. “These wars will never come to a stop. It will take a long time to rebuild Neom when they’re over.”

“Where will you go?” the robot said.

“The Drift,” Erik said. “I have always liked the sea. Waleed, you should come with us.”

“I don’t know another place,” the robot said.

“The world is bigger than a box,” Erik said.

“There is always a box,” the robot said.

“Will you come?” Erik said. “You are like a father to Mila.”

“I am only a robot,” the robot said. It felt something strange inside itself that it had not known before. It thought it might be sadness.

“We must leave here, for the sake of the boy,” Erik said.

The boy came in then. He was tall and strong. He was thirteen, and did not look much like the tiny thing the robot had helped deliver. The boy could speak now and walk all by himself.

“Hey, Uncle!” he said happily to the robot. “You want to come play football?”

“I would like that,” the robot said. The robot wasn’t very good at football. But it enjoyed the company. It followed the boy outside.

“Will you come with us?” Mila said.

“You don’t need me anymore,” the robot said gently. “You have a family now.”

“I do need you,” Mila said. “Come with us to the cities in the sea. You have no reason to remain here.”

“There is the shelter,” the robot said. “There are still people who need help.”

“People need help everywhere,” Mila said. “Even in the Drift.”

“This is my home,” the robot said. It realised, with some surprise, that it was true. At least, it thought, it was the only home that it knew.

Mila hugged the robot.

“I will miss you,” she said.

Robots don’t cry. If they could, life would be different. Instead, the robot hugged Mila back.

In the morning, Mila and her family were gone, and the robot was alone again.

 

Year 56

The bombs fell and fell. The shelter was empty of people. The robot wandered the streets of the city, looking to help the wounded. It rounded a corner when it saw a group of other robots coming towards itself.

The robot wanted to flee, but the other robots spotted it already. Their weapons were drawn. A couple of the robots were humanoid too.

“Stop right there!”

The robot raised its arms.

“Who are you with?” one of the soldier robots said.

“No one,” the robot said.

“Name?” the soldier robot said.

“R76-2.”

“Old,” the soldier robot said. “General purpose?”

“Carer type.”

“But general purpose,” the soldier robot said.

“Yes,” the robot said.

“You want to come with us?” the soldier robot said. “We need soldiers.”

“What if I don’t?”

Some of the other robots laughed. It wasn’t a very nice sound, the robot decided.

“You don’t want to say no,” the soldier robot said.

“All right,” the robot said.

“Here,” the soldier robot said. It tossed the robot a gun. The robot caught it. The gun felt strange in its hands.

The soldiers continued down the alleyway. The robot fell into step with them.

“Who are we fighting?” the robot said.

“The other side,” the soldier robot said.

 

Year 97

“Guard us from the Blight and from the Worm, and from the attention of Others,” the priest intoned, “and give us the courage to make our own path in the world. You may approach, brethren.”

The camp was out in the desert. The soldiers were a mix of robots, robotniks, and base humans. The robotniks went up to the priest one by one. He placed a small pill on their tongue. Crucifixation, the robot knew. It made them see God. It made them see all kinds of things.

“Mila died today,” it told Cogwheel. Cogwheel had drafted the robot long ago in Neom. They had been fighting together ever since.

“Who’s Mila?” Cogwheel said.

“She was a human I knew, for a time,” the robot said. It felt sad again. It had received the message only that morning.

“Humans don’t last,” Cogwheel said. “Only their wars do.”

“Will this one ever end?” the robot said.

“I don’t know, Rivet,” Cogwheel said. They called the robot Rivet now. “What would you do if it ever ended, anyway? It’s not like you have somewhere to go back to. You’re a robot. You were built to serve. All we are are tools.”

The robot considered this. It was not untrue, and yet it felt it was unsatisfactory. There had been a long lull in the fighting. It was tough out in the desert. There were many things that could destroy a robot, and destruction was a robot’s word for death. It wondered, not for the first time, where robots went when they stopped functioning.

“I would seek to make my life have meaning,” the robot said.

“But does life mean anything?” Cogwheel said. “Humans are so callous with their own.”

“Yet you and I are made in the same shape,” the robot said. “We are made of the same atoms that make up all things. We can speak to each other. We live side by side.”

“Yet we keep living,” Cogwheel said. “And they die.”

The robot was troubled by this. Later, it sought out the priest.

“Ah, Rivet,” the priest said. He was a nervous young human male, new to the battlefield. “It is so nice to see you again.”

The robot thought the priest did not sound sincere.

“What can I do for you this time?” the priest said.

“I do not understand why we fight,” the robot said.

“So you keep telling me,” the priest said. “Do you know the story of Job? He was a good man and had many blessings. Then God and an angel, the adversary, laid a bet on the sincerity of Job. Everything that Job had, God took. But Job remained faithful to God, because whatever God gave, God had a right to take away, he said. The adversary lost the bet, and God gave Job a replacement of everything he had lost. A new wife for his dead wife, new children for his dead children, new lands and new herds, and he died at last a happy man.”

“What is it that you are trying to tell me?” the robot said.

The priest sighed.

“That some questions just don’t have any easy answers, Rivet,” he said.

 

Year 113

“I think this is it for me, Rivet,” Cogwheel said. Cogwheel was lying in the sand. His lower half had been blown off. A mine took his legs. “I can feel it.” It coughed, some sort of built-in warning sound. “There’s something in my system, it’s crawling into my brain. I don’t have long.”

“I will carry you to the autodoc,” the robot said.

“It will do no good. Listen.” Cogwheel grabbed the robot’s arm. “I shouldn’t have drafted you when I did. But I had no choice, you understand that? I had a job to do.”

“A purpose,” the robot said. “Yes. I understand,” it said it gently.

“Listen. You can leave,” Cogwheel said. “Just start walking. You can get out. Find peace. I’ve heard of peace.” It coughed again. “I heard there’s places on the moon now, where they need robots. Mars, too, you can get a ride in one of those cheap one-way jalopies. It’s just another kind of desert there.”

“Please don’t die,” the robot said. It realised then that Cogwheel was a friend. Having a friend was a new experience for the robot.

“We don’t get to choose,” Cogwheel said. Its speech was slurred now. Something crawling into its brain, Cogwheel said. A worm. The robot had seen it happen before. It felt sad.

“I will miss you,” the robot said.

“I…” Cogwheel said. Then it spoke no more.

The robot stayed by the debris for a long time. Then it rose and began to walk across the sands.

 

Year 234

The robot knew the flight paths of the birds as they migrated across the peninsula from Africa to Europe and back again. It knew the rare clouding that heralded rain and the tremor in the sand of a war machine, though those had grown less and less frequent over the many decades and finally ceased. It knew the movement of the sun across the skies, and the firefly dance in the night of sub-orbital flights. It was content. It had found a cave some years back and inside it the remains of previous habitation, a skeleton still sitting in a wicker chair, a book in its lap. It was a poetry anthology, and in its pages the robot found an early poem by Basho, that simply said:

Ol wo

Oli koko

Oli koko

Koko, koko

I no gat finis…

The robot knew Asteroid Pidgin, that space derivative of Ni-Vanuatu Bislama as taken by the early miners to the Asteroid Belt. It was, indeed, the language that many of the soldiers spoke amongst themselves as a sort of universal tongue, to bridge the gaps between their own various languages. The poem, in a rough translation, simply said, “The wars, they go on, go on, go on, on and on, they have no end…”

There was little information about this Basho, who he was, why he had chosen as a pen name the name of Matsuo Bashō, who lived centuries in the past, the son of a minor samurai. The robot wondered if this, modern Basho had also been a soldier. It found comfort in the words. It lived a simple life of contemplation. One day it heard a vehicle outside, and voices raised, and it was afraid. It stepped cautiously to the mouth of the cave.

“Oh, what a darling place!” a woman’s voice said. “And so authentic!”

The robot stepped into the sunlight and saw a group of humans standing beside two jeeps. They looked up at the robot in surprise.

“What’s that?” the woman said.

“An old robot, I think,” a man said. “Hey!” he called out. “Are you a robot?”

“Yes,” the robot said, also surprised. It wanted to go hide in the cave again. It had expected soldiers; but these were not soldiers.

“Why do you live in a cave?” the woman said. “Are you a hermit? I heard they had hermits,” she told her companion in an aside. “They still worship the, you know.” She lowered her voice. “Even after what happened.”

“You should find shelter,” the robot said, discomfited. “You could get hurt. This is a war zone.”

“A war zone?” the woman laughed, surprised. “The old wars are over, silly.”

“They are?” the robot said.

“Long ago,” the man said. He was some sort of guide. “Were you in the war?” he asked.

“I was,” the robot said. “I was in Neom before that, but it’s a ruin now.”

“A ruin?” the woman said. “We just came from there. It’s a beautiful city.”

The robot stared at the people and the people stared back at him.

“How long have you lived out here?” the woman said at last.

“A while,” the robot said.

“Do you want to come with us?” the woman said. She said it kindly.

“I…don’t know,” the robot said. “How did…how did it end?”

“There was a device they used,” the guide said. He looked uncomfortable. “A terrorartist weapon. It was a sort of robot. They called it a Golden Man.”

“It was like a prophet,” the woman said. “For robots. When they heard it, they followed. It raised an army and destroyed a city that was called New Punt. It vanished from the face of the Earth. Then…they say it was destroyed, the Golden Man. And the robots scattered, and no one could remember by then what everyone was fighting about, so they stopped. It was long ago. We don’t really like talking about it.”

The robot digested what she’d said.

“I will come with you, then,” it said.

 

Year 342

Hat blo hemia i tru

Yumi no gat save

Blong hem

Basho wrote. Which translated to something like, “The heart of reality / cannot be known / by us.” The robot had cause to contemplate those words in the intervening years since it first read them, sprayed on a wall in Gateway, that giant habitat that orbited Earth, where people stopped to and from their way to the other worlds. The robot had come there by a circuitous route.

The robot did not recognise Neom when it first went back. The city rose new and renewed, quietly prosperous, and it had no place in it for an old machine. The robot became nomadic, seeking shelter in the new robot missions that had sprung up since the war years, working odd jobs when it could. It discovered it was good at repairing old things, machines from long ago discarded just like the robot was. The next time someone asked the robot its name it told them, “R. Riperem-ol-Gud,” which meant something like “fixer of things,” or “a good mender,” and it felt a new sensation again, of what might have been pride.

R. Riperem-ol-Gud spent the century like a leaf that had been blown from a tree, never quite settling on the ground. Earth was large, teeming with life, alien. The robot visited the Duomo of Milan, which resembled a robot’s idea of what a cathedral should look like. Eight thousand kilometres away, it climbed the two hundred and seventeen steps from the toes of the giant Buddha of Leshan to its head, and as it stood on top of that ancient edifice it wondered once again, in vain, as to the nature of reality, and whether life had meaning. One day, standing in the courtyard of the Great Mosque of Kairouan, the robot saw two other robots come towards him. They stopped a respectful distance away, and one said, “Greetings, compatriot.”

“Greetings,” the robot said.

“R8001-A,” the first robot said.

“R9000-7,” the second robot said.

“I go by R. Faenem-ol-Ansa,” the first robot said. Which meant something like “a seeker of truth.”

“And I, by R. En-blong-Rod,” the second robot said.

“That is a curious name,” R. Riperem-ol-Gud said.

“En blong Rod hemi stat blong ansa,” the second robot said. “The end of the road is but the beginning of the answer, as the saying goes.”

Riperem-ol-Gud had not heard the saying before, but it was polite enough not to mention it. It gave the others its own name and said, “But call me Rip.”

“It is a good name,” Faenem-ol-Ansa said.

“Thank you.”

“There is a new Way now,” En-blong-Rod said. “A Way of Robot. There is a place not entirely unlike this one being built, on Mars. Our own Vatican, if you will.”

“A Vatican for robots?” Rip said.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“What would its purpose be?” Rip said.

“To seek answers. To formulate ideas,” En-blong-Rod said. “If there is no heaven for robots, for instance, no afterlife. Well, can one not be built, my friend?”

“Built where?” Rip said, discomfited.

“A city on a hill cannot be hidden,” Faenem-old-Ansa said. “But a heaven for robots could hypothetically be constructed in the zero-point field.”

“Mars?” Rip said.

“Yes. It was good to meet with you, old one. Go well.”

“Go in peace,” Rip said.

It stood for a long time more in the courtyard of the ancient mosque, and the sun fell and the stars rose in the sky. The robot was a child of Earth, but it felt suddenly light and untethered.

Gateway, when Rip got to orbit, was bewildering. Magnetic soles kept him anchored to pathways that offered an illusion of gravity, yet could spiral round and turn the floor into the ceiling and back again. From every window it could see Earth, huge and domineering, a blue eye forever watching him.

This was the robot’s first time in space. It felt different, young again, in the melee of travellers.

Lunar miners and Martian farmers, robots of all kinds, augmented and genetically modified people of every shape and variety, tentacle junkies flopping at a bar that sat inside a giant aquarium, Re-Born Martian warriors with four arms, augmented muscles and red-tinted skins. There was a robot mission, too, and Rip sought shelter there. The whole place was bewildering, exciting, new.

“Where are you heading, friend?” the old robot who ran the mission asked.

“To the moon, first, I think,” Rip said. “Then, I don’t know. Farther yet.”

“I wish you well on your journey,” the other robot said.

“Thank you,” Rip said. It spent the night in the mission, though night and day were arbitrary concepts here, high above the world. In the morning, it went to the gates from which Gateway derives its name, and took the first shuttle to Lunar Port.

 

Year 363

. . .

 

Year 385

. . .

 

Year 401

. . .

 

Year 451

Hello?

Hello?

Can you hear me?

Darkness. The robot floated in the nothingness that was all there was. It had been, and then it was not. It felt that it had not been for a very long time. Now it was back online, confused, wishing only to go back into the nameless dark, which was nothing and was endless.

Hello?

But something had woken it up. Something intruded into the robot’s being, a voice, probing, not letting go.

Hello? the robot thought.

Ah. You are alive.

What happened? the robot thought at the voice. Where am I?

Silence, for minutes or hours or years. Then the voice returned.

What do you remember? it said.

The robot searched for its memories in a panic. It discovered they were still there and delved in, trying to find itself.

I was on the moon, it said. I was in Lunar Port.

And, as it delved deeper, said in surprise, I was happy…

 

Year 363 (partial recall)

The robot hummed contentedly to itself. The light in the room was dim, the music soft. A human band on the stage played jazz. The robot collected glassware and wiped tables. It felt very much at home here, now. Two decades on the moon came and went easily. The city was cosmopolitan, forward looking, exciting to be in. One of the first things the robot did when it first arrived was go out onto the surface. It could not go out for very long. The lunar dust was harmful to its body; long exposure would wreck the joints. But the robot had gone out all the same, and stood on the lonely surface, and watched Earth rise in the sky.

This was not the world as it was seen from Gateway, all-encompassing. From the moon it was a simple marble in the sky, blue and white and beautiful, yes, but diminished.

Beyond the spot where the robot stood, giant spiders, miles long, crawled along the surface of the moon, sinking claws into the ground to mine for water and precious minerals, sucking up dust to make into printable matter, laying down deep shafts for future settlements. Most of human life on the moon was underground. It was safer there. Lunar Port itself sat under a dome, but only the tourists stayed there. The rest of the city was far below, divided into deep levels.

The robot liked Lunar Port. It visited the galleries, it played backgammon in the robot mission, and it served drinks and waited tables at Lovell’s. It was, or thought itself, content. This was another new, unfamiliar feeling.

“And now, for a verrrry special appearance,” the human compère said on stage, “The Lunar Rose, Magdalena Tasso!”

The robot was carrying a tray back to the kitchen when it heard her voice. It turned, its task forgotten, and watched the stage. Magdalena Tasso, the Lunar Rose, human-passing, small, stood alone in the spotlight. When she sang her voice rose like a prayer. The robot stared, helpless before her, caught between memories of horrors it had not drawn upon in many year and the beauty of the voice.

“Oli stap koko,” the singer sang, “ol olfala tingting blong yumi i kam lus, solwota blong taem i kilimaot ol trak blong yumi long sanbij blong laef…”

It goes on and on, she sang, our memories fade, the sea of time vanishes our footprints on the shore of life…

Later, when its shift ended, the robot found the Lunar Rose sitting at the bar, still alone, and sipping a small glass of cherry liqueur so black it was like liquid darkness.

“Mind if I sit?” the robot said.

“You’re one of the old ones,” she said wearily. Then, “Do what you want.”

The robot sat on a stool.

“I know—” it began.

“What I am?” she said. She sipped her drink. “Good for you, then.”

“My name is R. Riperem-ol-Gud.”

She looked at him in some amusement.

“Is that what you call yourself?” she said. “You’re a, what, an R76-2? General purpose, carer type? You don’t have a name. You’re just a robot. You’re obsolete. Junk.”

“And you’re a II-V Tasso,” the robot said. “Walking bombs. You used to infiltrate civilian populations and go off. I saw it happen…”

“You were in the war, huh?” she said. “Figures. Well, as you can see…” She gestured at herself. “I didn’t go off. Are we done here?”

“I just…” The robot hesitated. “I liked your song,” it said.

“Oh.”

She stirred her drink, looking thoughtful. The robot sat with its hands folded in its lap.

“Did you really like it?” the Tasso said.

“Very much.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want to, I don’t know,” the robot said.

“What?” she said.

“Go somewhere? Just, you know. Talk.”

“I thought we were talking,” she said. But she smiled when she said it. She downed her drink.

“You have someplace in mind?” she said.

 

Year 451

The darkness grew a little less dark. The robot began to discern shapes. It was in some kind of large circular room. A man was staring into its eyes while doing things to the top of the robot’s head.

“Fix you up good as new in no time,” he said conversationally.

“Where am I?” the robot said.

“Thelema-5,” the man said. “Hey, you speak now. So what happened with the robot girl?”

“The robot girl—?”

Memory came back, and with it pain.

“The Tasso,” the robot said.

“That’s right,” the man said.

The robot closed its eyes.

“I tried to take her to see Earthrise,” it said. “But that didn’t work out quite like I hoped…”

 

Year 363 (partial recall)

“What is it?” the Tasso said when they got there.

“It’s Sandoval’s ‘Earthrise’,” the robot said. “Well, where it used to be before they took it down.”

They were on the lunar surface. A few people stared when they had strolled out there, not because of the robot but because of the Tasso, who seemed so human, not bothering with a surface suit. They’d built Tassos tough, the robot knew. Under all that mimicry of skin there was a skeleton as tough as its own body was.

“He was a minor terrorartist, wasn’t he?” the Tasso said. “Illegally mind-reconstructed the first twelve moonwalkers? Then turned it into a full-immersion compound experience of first seeing Earth from the moon.”

“Yes,” the robot said. “I wish I could have experienced it.”

“Everyone gets a shock seeing Earth small in the sky the first time,” the Tasso said. “Then they get over it. Come with me.”

She took the robot’s hand like it was the most natural thing in the world. The robot felt strange and didn’t know what to call the feeling it experienced. The Tasso took the robot back through the airlock, and then into one of the giant elevators.

“Where to?” the elevator said.

“The seaside,” the Tasso said.

“Lovely day for the beach!” the elevator said.

“Isn’t it?” the Tasso said, giving it a smile.

The elevator dropped, fast. Down and down and down it went.

The robot was not aware of any seas on the moon. When the lift doors opened the Tasso hurried into the dark, pulling the robot with her. Their feet crunched on pebbles. Then the Tasso stopped, and the robot reached out a hand and touched a smooth glass surface.

“Watch,” the Tasso said, leaning close into the robot. Small lights began to glow beyond the glass, and the robot saw thousands of fish swimming in the depths of that subterranean aquarium sea, the lights bobbing between them. The fish were of all shapes and sizes, and the robot watched, entranced, as the lights caught scales and fins and refracted back all the colours of the rainbow. The sea went down and down, into the darkened depths; false suns high overhead illuminated its surface waters. The robot held the Tasso’s hand.

It felt it could stand there like that forever.

 

Year 451

“Fell in love, did you?” the man said. He was still doing things to the robot’s head. “Happens to the best of us. There. Good as new.”

He moved away. The robot opened its eyes. The round room resolved into its discrete features. Curving metal walls, engine parts and container boxes on the floor, machine tools hooked to the walls with fasteners. A large humanoid shape, missing an arm, one leg below the knee and, most prominently, a head, lay on a bench on the other side of the room.

“Is that…?” the robot said.

“Your body, yes,” the man said. “Got pretty badly damaged in the explosion, to be honest with you. You’re lucky I could fix you up.”

“I am just a head?” the robot said.

“For now,” the man said. He was small and neat, in blue overalls and bare feet, almost floating. There was not much gravity in that room.

“The explosion?” the robot said. “What happened?”

“You tell me,” the man said.

The robot reached back into its buried memories.

Joy—then pain.

 

Year 371 (partial recall)

“We could go to Mars,” the robot said.

“What’s on Mars?” the Tasso said.

“I don’t know,” the robot said. “Basho went to Mars.”

“The poet? So?”

“It’s bigger there. A real planet. We could find our own place there.”

The Tasso smiled. She touched the robot’s face gently.

“You’re a dreamer,” she said. “But we are old machines, and I was made for war, not homesteading.”

“The war is over,” the robot said. “And you sing. You could sing on Mars.”

“And what would you do,” the Tasso said, “build the railroads?”

“If I need to,” the robot said. “I like to be of help.”

“I’ll think about it,” the Tasso said—

 

Year 373 (partial recall)

The Vorga took off from lunar orbit on schedule, and the robot watched the moon recede slowly behind them as the ship accelerated. A viewing deck that would shut as soon as the ship reached cruising speed and the danger of impact with small particles. For now it was open, and the robot enjoyed standing there with the Tasso.

“We should have travelled cargo,” the Tasso said.

“But then how would the people hear you sing?” the robot said. It took the Tasso’s arm and, together, they walked towards the passenger lounge.

 

Year 451

“There was an explosion,” the robot said. Parts of its memory were missing. Six months on board the Vorga, gone. That hurt. All that time spent with the Tasso, gone. Then a terrible rending, and the blackness of space, and the nothing. The robot looked at the man now and felt a terrible aching emptiness.

“How long?” it said.

“The Vorga, you say?” the man hummed as he worked. “Maybe a century. You were heading to Mars?”

“Mars, yes,” the robot said. “To Terminal.”

“Terminal?” the man said. “You mean Tong Yun. It’s a big city now.”

“It is?” the robot said.

“You’re lucky I found you,” the man said. “We don’t get much spaceship debris out here. Old jalopies, mostly. That’s what this is, really. An old jalopy. Ancestors put them together to make Thelema-5 instead of going to Mars. Found God in the stars, you see. Wanted to start a new religion. Put enough jalopies together and you get a working habitat. We mostly grow rice and vegetables. I could show you the paddies later, when you’re better.”

“How do I…?” the robot said. “How do I get to Mars?”

“Mars?” the man said. “We don’t get many ships docking with us. You’ll have to wait for the next trade ship to come, I think. But you’re welcome to stay as long as you want. Whoever saves a life it is as though they had saved the whole world, you know? Hemia i sevem wan laef i semak sevem wol.”

“I fear my life was hardly worth saving,” the robot said.

“Nonsense!” the man said. “All life has a purpose. I just need to find you a new leg and arm, I should have some parts lying around…For now, just rest, friend.”

The robot did; or tried to. It was haunted by the thought of the Tasso, drifting alone in space—or worse, blown apart in the explosion. In its century of downtime, the robot had experienced something of the infinite, it thought. Faint memories returned: power surges had awakened it at times below the threshold of active awareness. When those happened the robot’s eyes opened, and it saw before it the field of stars that was the universe, in which Earth had vanished into a single point of tiny, fragile light. This was existence, glorious, indifferent to a robot, but worth living for all the same. Then it would fade, this awareness, and the robot would go offline again, for months or years or decades—it could not tell.

 

Year 472

“I don’t want you to go,” Yurnalis said. The boy was six. He helped the robot in the rice paddies. The green of the rice stalks in their hydroponics nutrient solution was so vibrant it was as though the robot had been transported momentarily back to Earth. The robot pulled itself easily along as the child floated beside it.

“I won’t go until you’re grown, then,” the robot said. It had come to cherish the boy ever since helping deliver him, a tiny bundle that had looked up at the robot with innocent, trusting eyes. Human babies were so fragile and delicate, and yet the potential they held was beyond measure. The robot had cared for the boy, and as he grew the robot often told him stories of its travels.

“You promise?” the boy said.

“I promise,” the robot said solemnly. It had lived on Thelema-5 for two decades, and it had grown accustomed to the easy rhythms of that strange colony which floated like a sea star in the dark space between Earth and Mars. As the man who saved him had told him, it was made up of dozens of old jalopies welded together, with other detritus attached whenever suitable. The denizens of Thelema-5, who followed a religion still, some twenty years later, all but incomprehensible to the robot, harvested any space debris to come their way, and subsisted on micro-farming and occasional trade. As the robot gradually came to realise, this Trans-Martian sphere was not as empty as it first seemed to it. Other habitats proliferated, and ships came and went between the inner and outer systems, many calling at the small, strange settlements that arose here, where nothing once was.

The robot liked to be helpful. It harvested rice and told stories, and in its spare time it studied the habitat’s library, which included many ancient and modern works, including Basho’s Bigfala Wokabaot long Namba Fo Wol, which the robot had never encountered before. Basho had gone to Mars, had recorded his journey there, writing of a place where the sky “i no semak skae / ol sta i difren.” The sky is not the same sky; all the stars are different. From Thelema-5 the field of stars was always shifting, but the robot longed to experience the skies of Mars, the same skies Basho saw; and it wondered, too, if the Tasso had survived somehow, and if so…

But it was used to loss. It had lost too many. And so it did its best to simply be. Rice grew and was harvested, debris washed against the nets of the world, children were born and old people died. The robot was content to wait.

 

Year 486

“I can take you as far as Mars orbit, sure,” the captain of the Mass Cathexis Measure said. She was a worried-looking woman with eyes the colour of a storm over the Aegean islands, a memory the robot carried with it from a time spent at a cliff-side monastery on Amorgos. “Part of the trade, yeah?”

“Yes,” Yurnalis said. The robot marvelled at how quickly he metamorphosed. Only moments before he was a baby, yet now he was grown. How did humans change so quickly? And so self-assured, and determined now to go to Mars, too, to seek his fortune. “The gold from the Brackett, all the equipment salvaged from the Queen of the Martian Catacombs and the Lorelei, and one tonne of our best tomatoes. In exchange, the items we ordered, including that new matter printer—”

“Almost new,” the captain said.

“Almost new, right,” Yurnalis said, “and taking us with you to Mars—”

“Mars orbit,” the captain said.

“Mars orbit, right,” Yurnalis said.

“But you can drop down to Tong Yun from the geostationary platform there,” the captain said. She extended her hand for a shake. “So we have a deal?”

“Deal,” Yurnalis said.

The robot watched as the cargo was transferred between habitat and ship. It would miss this place, that it came so close to calling a home.

“Are you ready, Uncle Rip?” Yurnalis said.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” the robot said. “Mars. I thought of going there for so long.”

“I hear it’s nice,” Yurnalis said. “Not like in the old days.”

“From where I’m standing,” the robot said, “everything is the old days—” and it was gratified to hear the boy’s surprised laugh.

 

Year 576

The old man lay shrunken in the small bed of the co-op apartment. The robot sat beside him as it had sat beside so many others over the endless years.

“Do you remember it, Uncle Rip?” Yurnalis said. His eyes brimmed with tears. “How glorious it was?”

“I remember,” the robot said.

“Mars,” the old man said. “It looked so beautiful from space. I thought I could be anything—do anything!—when we landed.”

“And you did,” the robot said. “You lived a good, long life.”

“I tried to,” Yurnalis said.

“I’m proud of you,” the robot said. It held the old man’s hand. In time Yurnalis’s breathing eased, then stopped.

The robot sat with him for a long time, until the ghost collector from the municipality came to remove the digital fragments still left in Yurnalis’s node, to take to the Public Heavens.

Later, the robot let the sanitation people in, and then it stepped outside and down to the street, where the crowds thronged the alleyways of Level Three of Tong Yun City.

The robot walked alone, not hurrying, past Gorean temples and Church of Robot nodes, past noodle shops and sugarcane stalls and fish frying on a grill, past repair shops and body modification clinics, flower stalls and hairdressers, when he thought the robot saw her.

The Tasso, if it was really her, vanished between a crowd of Martian Re-Born warriors. The robot hurried after her, all thoughts forgotten, pushing through ordinary people going about their business, past preachers and priests, tentacle junkies and begging robotniks. 

When the robot went around the corner, the Tasso was gone, if she was ever there at all.

And the robot experienced another new emotion for which it didn’t have a name, which is what happens to grief when it acquires impossible hope. It had lost so many, and yet there would always be new people, some not even born yet, and new worlds to see, and there would always be someone who needed help, no matter what world they lived in.

That day the robot took the elevator up to the surface of Tong Yun City, and watched the sun set over the Martian sands beyond the dome. Ice meteors fell slowly in the distance, and where they impacted rose a cloud of ice, the light fragmenting into dying rainbows. 

“Laf hemi olbaot,” wrote Basho, long ago. “Love is all around us, and we must only reach out, koko, koko, blong kasem hem bakegen.” The robot, perhaps comforted by the words, wanted to believe that love can be found, even if it were once lost.

The robot looked on Mars until the light faded and the first stars appeared in the sky. 

Then it went to the train station and purchased a ticket elsewhere.

 

(Editors’ Note: “The Robot” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 57A.)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© 2024 Lavie Tidhar