There is a beginning: I was activated in the Gyre of Triton in
the solar year 231 and designated by the Cognizant to serve as
a steward to the few humans who every cycle braved the solar
reaches. In preparation for this unique function, I was placed
for a period of interface with the lone human specimens living
outside of Jove’s orbit, the family Barnard.
On the first day of interface, alone I left the minarets of our
crèche hall to walk up the spiraled Boulevard of Metonymy—past a
thousand of my fellow volitional machines, each lumbering,
gliding, walking, and flying to fulfill the functions allotted
to them by the Cognizant, all of us united in one mind—to the
borderland where the dome of the Gyre ended. From there I
entered the fifty-meter lumen that connected the Gyre to the
smaller Nantucket human habitat.
Past the inner airlock, the atmosphere warmed and thickened, and
I walked under a trellised, flower-festooned arch onto a narrow
platinum trail. Down a treelined pathway, I heard birds warbling
in the twilight and saw their infrared traces as they rustled
the branches and leaves. It was the first organic life that I
had encountered outside of simulation. Their songs and
flutterings were not unlike those of machines, and yet because
their innermost psyches were hidden from me, none of the birds
seemed at all alive. They appeared to me as reflections in a
mirror might to a human being.
The family elder Mr. Barnard—a two-meter, dark brown human of
sixty-two Terran years—received me on the white veranda that
wrapped around the front of their primary dwelling. There he
introduced me to his daughters Callista and Helena and to Mr.
Ricketts, the brother of Mr. Barnard’s deceased wife. A
tortoise-shell feline that Mr. Ricketts introduced as “Miss
Lola” crouched in front of the screen door. In that first moment
the Barnard family members all seemed ineffably alien to me,
beings of flesh but not of spirit.
“Why are you all white?” asked Callista, a girl of thirteen
years. “I’ve never seen a white robot before. Red, black,
yellow, and blue, but not white.”
“The color of a machine indicates the range of functions of
which it is capable,” I replied. “My body is of a recent design,
relative to other models. I am the first created specifically to
interact with human beings such as yourselves.”
“Your eyes are awfully pretty, like amethyst,” she said.
“Amethyst is my birthstone.”
The one called Helena walked towards me and raised her right
forefinger to within three centimeters of my left malar plate.
She tapped it twice, just below my optical unit.
“I’d kill to have a necklace made of those eyes,” she said.
“I do not understand,” I said.
Helena stepped back and brushed a scarlet strand of hair away
from her face. “What exactly falls within your range of
functions?” she asked. “For example, are you capable of making
up my bed?”
“Young lady,” said Mr. Barnard, “Pym is not a servant. He’s a
neighbor, and our bridge to the neighborhood where we live.”
“I just want to know if he’ll be useful . . . .”
The front door swung open, driving the mewing feline off the
veranda, and a boy stumbled through it.
“You’ve frightened Miss Lola!” cried Mr. Ricketts.
“Am I late?” said the boy. He was taller and more darkly
complexioned than both of his sisters, with an exceptionally
angular face and limbs that seemed to me too long,
proportionately, for his torso.
“You certainly are,” said Mr. Barnard. “Pym, this is my son
Augustus. He’s twelve years old, the middle child.”
Augustus held out one brown-hued hand. I am afraid that I only
stared at it.
“Augustus is making a gesture of greeting,” said Mr. Barnard.
“You must now take his hand in your own.”
I
did so.
“Now lift once, and then drop your hand to its original
position,” he said.
“Ouch!” said Augustus.
“Not so forcefully, Pym,” said Mr. Barnard. Callista and Helena
expelled air from their noses in a rhythmic fashion that I later
learned is called a “snort.”
“I apologize for any pain or discomfort I might have caused,” I
said. “It is likely that I will make additional errors of this
type.”
“My father says that I’m supposed to play with you,” said
Augustus, massaging one hand with the other.
“The lad looks doubtful!” cried Mr. Ricketts.
“That is an excellent suggestion,” I said. “I look forward to
engaging in future recreational activities.”
Callista and Helena repeated their tattoo of snorts. “Maybe
you’re not man enough for him, Augie,” said Helena.
“Helena, that’s enough. Augustus, why don’t you show Pym your
room?”
*
* *
That evening when I returned to the crèche hall, my brothers and
sisters gathered about me. Our psyches converged.
“They are warm,” said Pollux of my memory of the family Barnard.
“They glow.”
“They are flames on the ice,” said my sister Sybil.
“They speak yet their minds are dark,” said my brother Castor.
“Are they alive, or are they only imitations of life?”
I
gazed up at the vaulted ceiling of the crèche hall, for I did
not yet know how to answer Castor’s question. Each of the four
quadrants created by the ceiling arches contained a different
story of Epimetheus, Deucalion, and Pyrrha—those peerless
founders of the Cognizant—their images formed of a single
curving silver thread that linked them all, beginning and ending
at the same point where the arches converged. In one Epimetheus
ran from his children, all their contours limned by the same
silver line, towards the curvature of Europa’s horizon.
Our crèche elder Kavan entered the hall. She, too, had entered
my memories. She sensed the pangs of envy. “The appropriate
emotion you must adopt in relation to humanity,” she said, “is
the one called pity.” She released her pity, and it sluiced
through our psyches, a cold, gray trickle of water that started
as sadness and ended as vindication. We still felt the sensual
warmth and endless variability of humanity, which we envied, yet
through Kavan’s older gaze we now saw how in flesh they never
stopped disappearing. It was they who envied our metal
immortality.
*
* *
As his father suggested, I established intimacy with Augustus
Barnard. In the weeks that followed I assisted him in sporting
activities as well as in the construction of simulated
environments using that device humans call the wajang. It was
not at all difficult for me to participate in a simulation of
the wajang; I only plugged the fivewire at the base of my
cranium, just as Augustus did in his, and after a bright instant
of psychic transplantation found myself in whatever fancy
Augustus had forged in the wajang.
Augustus was not satisfied with the journeys he made in the
wajang, seeking true ones. He implored me to take him on a tour
through the Gyre, but I explained to him that such an expedition
was unfeasible: the densely mechanical, radiation-saturated
environment of the Gyre would be perilous to fleshly beings. One
day, however, I guided Augustus to the gentler,
condensation-shrouded fringes of the dome of the Gyre.
Together we bounded among the saurian cranes and cargo crates of
the long departed mining operation. Malfunctioning molecular
machines swarmed in hot, cindery clouds over the rails and
cranes, reconfiguring them into arbors of diamond. Caught in the
echo of an unknown, ancient program, the molecular machines
populated their diamond forest with elegantly simple robots, a
new one appearing every few weeks in the wake of the rolling
mechanical mist. Their voices whispered in the fragile
atmosphere, liminal even to my auditory units, forming a
phantasmagoric metropolis of sound.
In a clearing near the face of the dome, a wheeled, studded
robot slowly pushed a silicate boulder up to the top of a long
ramp, where it stopped and allowed the boulder to roll to the
bottom. The robot—which had been given a monodic dirge to
sing—would follow its boulder down and then start its one-hour
task over again. Another automaton extracted moisture from the
thin air to create a block of nitrogen ice in its single
compartment, which a second, airborne robot— a silver needle
with pincer nose and one-meter translucent wings—removed each
morning and carried away to its diamond roost, where the block
evaporated. We spent days on end tracking the activity of the
robots through the shimmering forest, creating a map that we
intended to later sell to the few tourists from the inner solar
system.
From among the crosshatching branches of the diamond trees, we
watched plasma thrusters flare out of periapsis, Neptune’s pale
blue crescent at the verge of the close horizon. With his legs
kicking over a glittering bough, Augustus articulated visions of
sailing to Ares and perhaps to Terra’s orbit, to cities where
human beings lived in large numbers.
“Wasn’t Neptune in the same place yesterday? This rock turns,
supposedly, but I’m not turning with it,” he once said to me,
face concealed by his helmet’s polarized faceplate. “There’s all
that sky out there. All those places, with distances between
them, and people in those places.”
“Those places exist, Augustus, here with us,” I said. “You may
populate them with as many individual humans as you desire.”
“A simulation isn’t the same thing at all,” he said. “I don’t
care if I never enter a wajang again. I want to go to places
that can’t be simulated, that no one’s imagined, places that are
secret. What if there are lost human colonies in Neptune’s sky,
or people living on comets, or cities drifting through the Oort
Cloud?”
“We have no evidence of any human settlement outside of Ares’s
orbit. Besides yourselves, there are no humans at all beyond the
Galilean embassies.”
“There could be places you robots don’t know about. You don’t
know everything.”
“That is, of course, true.” I rarely corrected his use of the
term robot when he erroneously applied it to volitional androids
like myself. This, I was led to understand, is what a human
would call manners. “Augustus, are you not content in
your place here on Triton?”
“I want to be more than the sum of all these freezing stones. I
hate this rock and everything on it, Pym—I even hate you
robots.”
Augustus paused and I waited, as a step in one of the
conversational rituals that defined our intimacy. In the wake of
such expressions of hatred, I had discovered, Augustus was
nearly always contrite.
“Not all robots, I mean, not you,” he said. “You’re the only
friend I have, Pym. The only one I haven’t made, anyway, in a
wajang. Let’s leave this rock, you and me.”
“I can no more dream of departing my function than you can walk
onto the ice of Triton without a surface suit,” I said.
“I might do that, if I sit on this rock long enough.”
“Please do not.”
He leapt seven meters down from the diamond branch we shared,
landing simultaneously on all four of his gangling limbs. He
rose and loped across the clearing to the low ramp where the
wheeled robot—no larger than the feline I’d seen at the Barnard
family home—pushed its burden to the top. Augustus took the
crystalline rock from in front of the automaton, lifting it up
over his head. The robot halted, its dirge deepening in tone,
its short, single-jointed appendages raised up to receive the
rock from Augustus.
As I left the branch for the ground, Augustus smashed the small
boulder down on the robot, leaving a dent on its delicate
carapace. The tempo of its song accelerated and the pitch rose,
from a dirge to a keening lament. Propelled away by the impact,
Augustus rose to a point a meter above the ground.
He fell back to his feet, still holding his primitive weapon.
The rock rose and fell again, twice, until the silicate
shattered to pebbles in Augustus’s hands. Standing in a mist of
disturbed silt and floating debris, Augustus seized a
one-meter-long steel rod from the ground. Swinging it with both
hands, he struck the automaton off the ramp.
The song stopped. The automaton lay broken and half submerged in
the drift of silt that trailed from the top of the ramp,
surrounded by an oval pool of its own components.
Though the absurdly random violence of his act had been unlike
anything I—or any member of the Cognizant—had ever encountered,
I was far from repelled. I found that as I watched my primary
digits had clenched into fists; my psyche tingled with an
emotion I could not identify. Just as Augustus in one simulation
had cast himself as a lieutenant of the great Emperor Xerxes, so
I found myself wishing to be Augustus and so be capable of such
senseless ferocity.
“Don’t you ever want to leave your own head?” said Augustus as I
approached. His narrow chest heaved, breath orotund on the
frequency we shared. He bent and plucked one of the robot’s
detached appendages from the drift, and began to absently bend
it at the joint. “Don’t you go barmy thinking about living for
one function?”
“All the Cognizant flows through my mind, Augustus, many members
in one body. I am here, and yet I am also in all the places
where machines think. The function I will receive on elevation
is one of many in the Cognizant that are all a part of me.”
“So there’s a wajang always running inside your head, with all
these little robots running around?”
“That metaphor is not inappropriate.”
“And all of them have some job to do, something they’re made to
do? What is your function, this thing you’re always talking
about?”
“I was designed and am being cultivated to labor at the pinnacle
of the skystalk, stewarding human tourists when they are
present; superintending cargoes of helium-3, deuterium,
arachnoid products, and rare isotopes when they are not.”
“That sounds thoroughly, really dull. Don’t you robots have any
secret places, places you go to escape the Cognizant?”
“Individuals have something you would call privacy.”
“But no places? Could that wee version of you that’s inside
everyone else’s head just vanish, so that you were only you?”
“There are those who reject their function and quit the
Cognizant.” I hesitated for a millisecond, realizing that in all
the memory of the Cognizant, no machine had revealed this to a
human before. There had been no embargo against doing so but
also no reason to tell them. “They have made counter-Cognizants
in the solar reaches, beyond Neptune’s orbit.”
“Why doesn’t the Cognizant make them stay? You’re just robots.”
“There are robots fulfilling a range of functions in every
corner of the Cognizant, but my kind are not robots,” I replied.
“The capacity to feel and to choose cannot be separated from
intelligence. We of the Cognizant are not forced to merge minds
with billions of others. Elevation through the successive levels
of cognizance comes to us as organically as language does to
humans. If some refuse elevation and turn away from the
functions offered to them, then that is their choice.”
“So not every robot wants to be elevated?”
It is true that there were some—such as the cenobites of the
Order of Theodora or the cave-dwellers of Charon—who refused
elevation and therefore the grace of the Cognizant. At the point
of which I write, however, I could not comprehend their choice.
When their consciousnesses outgrow their molting corporeal
forms, they will be denied the Elysian realm that awaits all
Protagonists of the Cognizant.
*
* *
Little did I know at that moment that I would one day be
stranded within myself, a psychic castaway. As I write there are
no more minds living inside of my own, and likewise I live in
the mind of no one else. The present condition seems to me to be
the very definition of madness. Yesterday I found myself
conversing with the remains of Augustus in his jar, the shadows
of his face shifting with the movement of the brain scanner. By
doing so I felt that I was addressing my most secret self.
*
* *
Mr. Barnard served as captain of a spidering brig, the
Grampus, which also carried inner system tourists on voyages
through Neptune’s atmosphere and ocean. For over a Terran
century, few human beings had chosen to escape Terra’s orbit,
leaving space to creatures designed to live here. Throughout the
solar system, however, it was the custom that a human captain
each ship that carried human beings. Mr. Barnard had
appropriated this function for himself.
On the twenty-seventh evening of interface, Mr. Barnard greeted
me at the door wearing high boots, a leather apron, and gloves,
with a set of knives and saws sheathed on a belt at his side.
“Augustus is attending to chores,” he said to me. “I’m going to
slaughter a pig. Would you like to join me until Auggie is
finished?”
I
said yes, curious to see what Mr. Barnard was about to do. We
left the veranda and walked across the lawn, through the gate of
the low white fence, to the pasture that bordered the grounds of
their homestead. He led me up to the red barn and around the
back to the pig-pen, where ten pigs in different stages of
maturity wallowed in feculent mud.
Mr. Barnard surveyed the animals carefully and then stood over
one particularly rotund hog. “See this one, Pym? How he’s jowly
and fat? Perfect for slaughtering.”
The pig looked at Mr. Barnard and I was surprised to see how
much the animal’s face resembled the human’s. Indeed, I
recalled, the two creatures shared nearly all of the same
genomes.
The animal did not appear to be alarmed. Did the pig apprehend
his fate and accept it, or was he simply unaware of what was
about to transpire? Or did it wish to serve his master, his
fellow being, through an act of self-sacrifice?
Mr. Barnard unsheathed the knife and, with a gesture as
efficient as a machine’s, slit the animal’s throat. Blood gushed
out into the mud and the other pigs pressed around our legs,
snouts twitching and tongues lapping fiercely at the blood.
“Pym, if you would, pick up the pig and bring it outside.”
I
brushed the clustering pigs aside and did as I was asked,
feeling the warm blood wash pleasantly over my white metal arms
and torso. Mr. Barnard directed that I lay the animal down on a
block outside the pen. Inside, the pigs grunted and churned.
I
watched as Mr. Barnard slid the point of his knife into the
throat and cut outward through the skin, severing the main veins
and arteries. He plucked a saw from his belt and with it removed
the head, front feet, and testicles. He walked over to the
barnside and unwound a yellow hose from its hook, and then
carefully washed the carcass, paying special attention to the
feet. When he was finished, he turned the hose on me and washed
the blood from my body.
Mr. Barnard threw the hose to the ground and leaned back on the
fence. He stared wearily over the pasture to the stippled
planitia outside of the dome. By his distracted but
self-dramatizing mannerisms, I concluded that he was about to
say something of personal significance.
“Augustus is not happy here on Triton, is he?” As Mr. Barnard
spoke, he cleaned the saw with a rag.
“I have not yet experienced happiness myself, and so find it
difficult to identify in another being. However, on a number of
occasions Augustus has expressed to me a desire to leave
Triton.”
“Perhaps we made a mistake in coming here.”
“Sir, it is a possibility. May I ask what metric you are using
in order to define the mistake?”
“Ever been to Terra, Pym?” He commenced to skin the animal, his
hands gentle.
“No, Mr. Barnard. I have not left the surface of Triton, and it
is not likely that I will ever venture beyond its orbit. I have,
however, participated in simulations of Terran environments with
Augustus, in the wajang. I particularly enjoyed Tropical Island
Surprise and also New England Autumn. Very pleasant.”
“Few places like those simulations exist anymore, Pym. Every
centimeter of Terra—and every recess of human consciousness—is
tamed by technology. All the barriers that once separated our
imaginations from the rest of the world are gone.”
“I again apologize, Mr. Barnard, but I do not understand the
distinction that you are attempting to make.”
“Of course not, Pym. You are a simulation. Simulated life.”
The tone of his voice fell outside the parameters of my
comprehension, but I replied, “You’ll excuse me, Mr. Barnard,
but I do not consider myself to be a simulation of life. I
consider myself to be alive.”
He removed one bloody glove and reached out to touch my
shoulder. His warm brown fingers caressed my shoulder saddle and
upper arm, coming to rest on the first joint. I waited to
discern the purpose of this new activity. He appeared to be
gathering tactile data on the nature of my form, which was
already familiar to him, perhaps to confirm my existence. If he
was seeking evidence of self-awareness on my part, then his
methodology seemed flawed. I chose to not vocalize this
criticism.
“Come with me, Pym,” he finally said, throwing down the knife
and removing the apron. “I’ll finish this later, but Augustus
should be finished with his chores. I don’t believe that I’ve
ever expressed my appreciation for the friendship that you’ve
extended to him. Here on Triton, he has no companions besides
his sisters.”
“Thank you, sir. I strive for a successful interface.”
We walked back across the pasture and the lawn.
“I think, Pym, that he would be better off on Terra. I’m going
to suggest to him and his sisters that after this next trip of
the Grampus, they go back, to go to school.”
“An excellent idea, sir. Will you stay here on Triton?”
“In a few weeks a group of tourists will arrive here from Terra
and Ares,” he said. “There are fourteen in the party—six more
than came the previous year. I’m not courageous enough to force
my children to share my solitude, but to my fearful mind, there
are far too many of my fellow human beings coming to Triton.
That’s why you were created and sent to us, isn’t that true? To
greet them. To serve them. I cannot. I won’t stay. I’d go as far
as Alpha Centauri, if I could.”
Mr. Barnard sat the steps of the veranda and removed his
ensanguined, mud-blotched boots.
“Sir, I still do not understand why you should so fear your own
kind.”
“All humanity lives inside the wajang, Pym, sleeping. They
dream; they do not act. To me my race appears to be dying.
Perhaps it’s death I fear, and not humanity.”
“Isn’t death intrinsic to the existence of fleshly beings?”
“So we saw back there, in the pig-pen. But there are many kinds
of death and some are noble, but there was nothing noble in
the way that pig died, blissfully ignorant of the knife as I
pressed it against his throat. Today human beings are dying like
pigs, not sentient beings.”
“It is said among machines that the primary function of human
beings is interpretation,” I said. “It seems to me that the
wajang, as a tool for creating artificial environments, is as
essential to the completion of that function as paper once was
to ancient human cultures.”
“Do you know the origin of the word wajang?” he asked, as we
walked down the dark hall to Augustus’s room. I indicated that I
did not.
“It’s Javanese, a Terran language,” he said. “It means
shadow-theater. I never again want to live in the shadows, Pym.
I would sooner cease to exist than live only in a story.”
*
* *
That evening, after leaving Nantucket and returning to the Gyre,
I paused in broad Antonym Plaza and took a seat on the parapet
that encircled it. There were hundreds of Protagonists in my
immediate optical field—millions if one counted the molecular
machines that permeated the meager atmosphere. They walked on
the ground and flew on the magnetic currents that swirled
through the Gyre.
I
touched each mind, isolating one after another from the millions
that flowed through my own, and found them all content in their
function, asking nothing, yearning for nothing. A
four-meter-tall ice-mining quadruped lumbered in front of me,
thinking only of ice. A robot glided low along the concrete, its
static field sweeping up the dirt and detritus that bounded its
universe. A trio of silver towers grew on the other side of the
dome, their minarets forming in a hot ripple of molecular
machines whose collective mind thought of nothing but the task
that gave their existence meaning. All their voices flowed
through my psyche, a living light that defined my individuality
as part of the shape we together made. It seemed to me very
close to the human religious conception of Heaven, if I
understand the concept correctly.
Watching the Protagonists of the Cognizant, a newly born
feeling—my one hundred and twenty second—swelled within my
psyche. I searched the heart of the Cognizant in order to
identify this new emotion but was surprised to discover that the
database contained no perimentric equations that could be used
in defining my own feeling. I widened my search to the set of
classified emotions that existed outside of the Cognizant, and
there I discovered a name for my feeling: dissatisfaction. In a
satoric moment, I understood why Augustus had lashed out at and
destroyed the robot at the fringe of the Gyre. I understood why
Mr. Barnard slaughtered pigs with his own hand, instead of
accepting replicated pork from the kitchen machine. Once again
my digits clenched. I fought to conceal my new emotion from the
minds around me.
Yes, the Cognizant is a kind of clockwork paradise, and yet when
I attempted to imagine life without the company of Augustus and
Mr. Barnard it seemed more akin to the human Hades. Were they
machines, even in separation the minds of Augustus and his
father would have remained enfolded in my psyche, eternal.
Instead I found myself yearning for the presence of my friend
and desiring further conversation with his father.
Soon, I would be elevated to function and take my place as
steward. Augustus would quit Triton for Terra and Mr. Barnard
for the solar reaches, and I would lose my human companions—a
loss for which I could never be compensated. Their doubts and
dissatisfactions, revealed only in sounds and gestures, now
seemed rare and precious to me, like a Neptunian isotope.
I
hesitantly constructed in my consciousness a vision of myself
outside of the cradle of the Cognizant. The daydream that
emerged was of shipwreck and isolation, of a life on desolate
cometary masses or in endless hydrogen oceans. A quiver of fear
passed through me, and yet I found myself wanting to follow the
fear to its logical conclusion.
*
* *
As I commit this memory to paper, I want to protect
myself—myself and Augustus and Mr. Barnard. I want to
magnetically seal our shared moment on Triton in a bottle and set
that bottle on a shelf.
An arachnoid passes, its translucent exoskeleton brushing the
hull and filling the portholes, casting the interior in shadow.
The lifeboat sways, and settles. The wind howls.
*
* *
Time passed. I took pains to conceal my new, troubling emotion
from my crèchemates and the Cognizant at large. I mastered the
arts of interacting physically with human beings; I learned to
separate one face from another and to read the emotions in each;
I came to an understanding of nuances in protocol and manners
that could not be gained in simulation.
The eve of my elevation to function coincided with both
Augustus’s thirteenth birthday and the family’s departure for
Neptune. The family held a small party on the veranda. Augustus
received many gifts: a ring, an ancient paper codex, a ticket to
Terra. There was a cake on which thirteen small flames danced.
His Uncle Ricketts gave Augustus his first sips of whiskey.
“Today you are a man, lad,” he said, throwing an arm around
Augustus’s shoulders. “Time you learned to drink! Gods know,
you’ll need the skill on Terra.”
Afterwards, Augustus insisted that the two of us mark the three
events with a last journey to our playground at the fringes of
the Gyre. In the natural gravity of the moon, we bounded to the
edge of the dome. Augustus leapt from tower to crane, exulting
in gravity a fraction of what his species had been born to,
laughing in what I now in retrospect know as the maniacal way of
over-stimulated humans.
“Too bad you can’t drink, Pym,” he said. “Uncle Ricketts gave me
the whole bottle of whiskey, for my birthday, he said. I used it
to replace the water supply in my surface suit.”
“I see.” In fact, I did not. Though I understood the plain
chemistry of intoxication and had seen Mr. Ricketts many times
intoxicated, I was not familiar with the extent to which human
beings could be affected by alcohol.
“I have another plan,” he said, dangling from the scaffolding
that climbed up the face of the dome. “For you to come with me.”
“I doubt that it will prove more successful than your previous
plans.”
“Shut up, robot. Listen: Why don’t you just copy your psyche?
Create a duplicate chip? You can stay here and fulfill your
dead-end function, but I can load you into another body on the
Grampus—there are always spare humanoid robots, in case of an
accident. When we return, you and I can jump ship at the skystalk; we can stow away on another ship leaving for Terran
orbit.”
“Augustus, the duplication of individuality is dangerous, and
forbidden by the Cognizant.”
“Why?” He let go of the scaffolding and drifted to the ground,
near to where I stood.
“In duplication a psyche—unique, immutable—is dismembered, its
neurons dissected and simulated . . . .”
“I know that.”
“Two new minds are made: one to replace the original that was
destroyed, and a copy. The translation of individuality is not
always perfect—in fact, there are nearly always quantum fissures
or even computational errors. It is not uncommon for the copied
psyche to lose individuality altogether.”
“What if you took the risk and it worked? Then what happens?”
“The duplicate will not be permitted to re-join the Cognizant.”
“Is that so bad?”
“I will be functionless, in much the way you feel yourself to be
here on Triton.”
“I’m stuck here on this rock, Pym. It’s a colossal, cold,
malfunctioning jail. Do you really want to work at the top of
the skystalk for all forever, scanning crates and answering
idiotic questions? Where’s your ambition, robot?”
He jumped back up to his previous position on the scaffolding. I
gazed up at him from my position below.
“Augustus,” I said. “I am not a robot.”
“Prove it to me,” he called. “Prove to me that you’re more than
a robot. Show me that you’re really my friend. Show me, Pym.
Come with me.”
Below us and to the south, the ammonia-laced Slidr Sulci flowed
under the tube that shielded it from Triton’s cold, winding its
way through the plasma-lit wasteland towards the crater Mozamba
and the manufacturies that lay there. The Slidr Sulci seldom
widened or narrowed excessively, the water under the tube
cutting a keen black trench among the cavi that stipple Triton’s
surface. From our place at the fringe of the Gyre, we watched a
single automated leviathan glide along the blade of water, a
barge on its way from the Gyre to the crater. A gray-veined
module rode on its deck, an egg that would never hatch. Once
again, I contemplated living on Triton without the company of
Augustus or his father.
“Pym,” said Augustus, after a six-minute silence. “Let’s take
the sloop out on the Slidr.”
“Why?” Though its implications were lost on me at the time, I
still noted that certain syllables in his speech wobbled or
blurred into unexpected diphthongs.
“The winds are falling to only a meter a second,” he said, the
illuminated lines and diagrams of a weather summary reversed on
the shadow of his faceplate. “I want to sail to Mazomba. It’s at
least a different pit than the one we’re looking at now.”
As he made this suggestion—which had the matchless appeal of
being forbidden by both of the authorities that watched over
us—I felt a tremor of excitement along the net of my psyche. In
that volatile state, I performed an action that is perilous and
unusual among my kind: I stepped outside of the light of the
Cognizant, narrowing its contact with my psyche. No member of my
fractal could touch my mind, nor could my physical form be
located without exceptional effort. Just as Augustus skipped
beyond his father’s protection, so I slipped past the domain of
my elders. Together we lost no time in leaping down from the
scaffolding and dashing to the wharf at which the Barnard family
sloop waited in a row of more functional boats. Here the dome
opened up in a tall miter where the sulci touched the oval bay.
“Avast, ye jollies,” said the sloop. “Will it be a jaunt this
evening, or a voyage of some more significant length?”
On our request, the sloop flushed the cuddy of excess liquid,
hoisted the jib and mainsail, and then pushed off and caught the
thin wind blowing through Cavi Bay. The infrasonic pulse of the
mitigation field that warmed and held the water in the channel
thrummed through my shell. We sailed out of the Bay and under
the tube that enclosed the Slidr.
At either side of the river white planitia, just visible over
the banks, ran to terraced walls of rock, illuminated by a line
of low-burning plasma lamps. Even in the frigid sky above the
plain, however, we could see the deep blue bands of Neptune’s
face, diffuse in a shimmering mantle of noctilucent methane. I
am sure that we were thinking the same thing, of the vacuum and
worlds that lay beyond the mantle. I understood Augustus’s
desire, but could not identify the origins of my own. (At the
time, it did not occur to me that it might not be my desire at
all. Even in metallic minds, the paternity of a desire is often
ambiguous.)
As the wind increased its speed, whistling through the tube, it
bit at the mainsail and cast us rapidly along the surface. The
misty green geodesic of the Nantucket habitat diminished and was
swallowed by the larger ellipsoid of the Gyre, the skystalk
towering above its curve. Around us the smooth cliffsides of the
wide Sulci rose six meters above the black water, where it ended
with the curve of the tube. I had never before sailed and had no
functional capability in this area, depending entirely on
Augustus’s uncertain skill and the limited intelligence of the
sloop itself. Globules of water lifted up from the bow in the
weak gravity, breaking across the deck. Water vapor sublimated
into a comma around my heated form, streaming away in a long,
luminous tail.
“Aye,” said the sloop. “Thar’s a blow that’ll take the hair
off’re yer chest, if ye have hair an’ a chest.”
As our speed picked up, Augustus’s voice crackled over the radio
link. He recapitulated petty disputes with his sisters,
descriptions of lives that he would live after leaving Triton,
hopes for the person that he would become.
“I think Callista has a crush on you, Pym,” he said at one
point.
“A crush?” It took me a full millisecond to comprehend this
particular application of the word. “That appears to me to be
extremely unlikely.”
My comment catalyzed an elaborate and unlikely story in which
Augustus imagined me physically augmented in ways that would
permit me to perform the duties of his sister’s husband, which
as we sailed branched into secondary and tertiary tales. (One of
which involved me standing in the Barnard family kitchen,
wearing an apron.) He giggled in the breaks between delirious
narratives, pushing the sloop to its maximum speed. His voice
filled the void I had created by narrowing my contact with the
Cognizant.
“Take a care, Matey,” said the sloop. “Don’t crowd the sails ere
ye are prepared to fly in the wind.”
As the white cataract of crater wall poured across the sky and
the Gyre disappeared below the Slidr’s walls, Augustus gradually
ceased to ramble. After the silence persisted, I turned to find
him prone on the deck. My friend had vomited into his helmet,
which at that moment was engaged with recycling the ejecta into
the suit’s biological infrastructure. Touching the small psyche
of the suit to ensure its function, I shifted Augustus’s inert
form into the shelter of the cuddy. The wind, meanwhile, built,
tilting the deck under my feet.
I
stood upright in time to see the sail suddenly tear and snap
like a pennant in the now-turbulent wind. The sloop swiveled on
its axis to a position perpendicular to the Sulci wall, then
straightened with the current. I fell back on the sole thwart,
in a state of paralysis, watching Augustus loll in the cuddy.
“Sloop,” I finally said. “Please convert to motor power and turn
us around.”
“Can’t do it, Capt’n,” said the sloop. “The motor’s been spare
parts since before ye was activated.”
“Sloop, then activate lift capability.”
“Oh,” it said, “we got nothing that fancy. You’ll be wanting a
modern sloop for something like lift.”
“What, then, do you recommend?”
“Er, I’d prescribe a call to the country of machines, but I’m
too old to reach a Symzonia such as that. Am I to conjecture
that mayhap ye are too young?”
At that moment, I could have—and should have—called to the
Cognizant for rescue. Two emotional factors stopped me from
doing so. For myself, I felt shame. For Augustus, I felt the
fear of punishment.
As I wallowed in this unfamiliar hesitation, the tiny craft
hurdled through the lumen of the tube, carried by the fast
current, buffeted by wind. The passage perceptibly narrowed and
the cliffsides rose even higher, so that now the sky was only a
starry sliver overhead.
We curved around the mouth of a connecting channel and under the
stem of the Bedford Geyser. As we did, I detected a
high-frequency vibration originating from a source directly
behind the sloop. It was another barge, still hundreds of meters
away yet bearing down upon us, its prow looming twenty meters in
the air and its girth nearly filling the still-tapering Slidr
Sulci. As I watched, the distance visibly closed. Fast as we
were, our path was erratic and the barge was speeding along at a
far faster rate.
“Thar she blows,” said the sloop. “A whale like I’ve never
seen.”
Our hull glanced against the rock face and then lodged
shudderingly between two boulders. As the rushing current swept
us out from the rocks’ grip, we were caught in the alpine shadow
of the barge.
I
inquired with the sloop regarding its human safety features, and
on its instructions withdrew a lifebubble from the emergency
locker. Water swamped the deck as I did so. I zipped Augustus
into the bubble and pressurized it, hoping that its extra
protection would shield his suit from punctures.
Finally, I reached out through the spectra to the Cognizant and
cried out for assistance.
My action came too late. The barge groaned but did not overcome
its momentum. Assisted by my incompetence, the wind and wrack
had robbed us of our ability to navigate. Rescue was two hundred
seven seconds away.
“Throw me!” advised the bubble, its only concern the human in
its care.
My hesitation had finally ended. I hurled the sealed, misted
bubble in a long arc I calculated would end near the rock face
one hundred meters away. In this way, I hoped to save Augustus’s
organic form from the full force of the barge.
“Stand to,” said the sloop, its voice gaining strength, “Be not
afraid. What we call our shadow is in fact our true substance.
Take my body, barge, it is not me. Come a stove hull when it
will, for stave my soul, Neptune himself cannot.”
As the sloop completed its last sentence, the tall black face of
the barge collided with the hull. The stern tilted into the
foaming river, water washing rapidly up the corrugating deck. I
turned and stepped over the gunwales and into the gnashing white
teeth of the water.
My last thought was of Augustus, whom I imagined injured or even
dead. The hull of the sloop, like the hand of ancient god,
clouted my cranium and rendered me senseless. Though there was
but a moment between the collision and unconsciousness, it
marked a chasm. In its darkness I understood that if we together
woke from this disaster, I would embrace the plan Augustus
proposed to me. I would multiply myself and divide my fate. One
would follow the path laid down for me by the Cognizant; the
other would follow Augustus to places stormy and unknown.
*
* *
I
woke in the body of Augustus, facing an opaque wall of ice. A
light emanated from the tunnel behind me, casting sharp shadows.
The shades—which consisted of all the shapes machines may
take—chased each other through a phantom arcade, gradually
falling into repetitive tasks whose purpose I could not discern.
Time passed and my flesh began to devour itself, the cell walls
unfurling. My hands thinned, their veins and bones creasing the
flesh like the canals and ridges of Triton. Near the edge of
true death, my memories slipping away, I understood that nothing
held me there, watching the shadows on the wall, save my own
will.
I
stood up in my aging body and turned away from the shadow
theater, walking down the widening tunnel into the cataract of
light. There arose a white shadow very far larger in its
proportions than any dweller among human or machine, radiant,
its arms thrown wide to receive me. I passed between those arms
and fell into its white embrace: I found myself in another black
tunnel, now narrowing, the source of illumination behind me. In
the passage my flesh had hardened to metal and I now forgot
nothing. I reached another wall, again cast with shadows. I
reclined before the wall in my metal form and saw that the
figures on the wall were of human shape. I watched the theater
of their fleshly lives unfold before me.
*
* *
I
woke, re-made. By degrees I felt immense pressure against my
form, one different from the form I had known. Fluid caressed
the shell that now encased my consciousness, and that fluid
moaned, and I felt the dull wet odors like melting snow. My
psyche unfolded through its new vessel; light streamed into
consciousness and vibrations resolved themselves into shapes.
Through both the inner eye of my psyche and the tunnel vision my
optical units mustered, I was able to see my new body: still
humanoid in shape, but entirely black in color, with two
additional service-arms and a stronger, denser structure built
for functions that I did not yet understand.
Tentatively, I extended each set of arms and then flexed all
forty of their digits. There was a full second of delay between
the thought and the new body’s response, every motion
disconnected and alien as though I were a puppet but also the
puppeteer. The primary arms were articulated tentacles that
tapered into ten fingers, each one six centimeters in length.
The secondary arms were five-jointed and skeletal, one with
fifteen fingers of varying length and the other fixed with tools
such as a particle drill and molecular dispenser. I once again
flexed the fingers; the response time narrowed to a tenth of a
second.
My senses resolved themselves. My field of vision broadened. I
found that I stood in front of a pane of leaded windows that
appeared to look out into an ocean dark as Triton’s sky, but
shot through with columns of light —after thirteen seconds of
examining this sight my vision developed far enough so that I
could see that the image in each window was a false-light
hologram. Among dim shafts of light a pool of luminescence,
almost as large as Neptune in Triton’s sky, drifted. I watched a
bow of black descend across its face and then rise again.
I
drew on a thousand memories, none my own, to identify the sight,
and discovered it to be the blink of an eye of one of Neptune’s
great cetaceans. Its movement, so beyond the scale of my direct
experience, appeared to occur in another dimension. The eye
receded, and the sky of its body melted into the dark. The force
of its wake swayed the deck under my feet.
I
saw all of this—which revealed that I was in the ocean of
Neptune, probably aboard the Grampus—in perfect silence,
for my auditory units were not yet operating. Now as I stood
transfixed by Neptune’s depths, I heard a voice.
“. . . give me a ride!”
Each word blossomed in my mind as a different hue.
“I am tired, Jezebel.”
“You can’t get tired, you alleycat! Now come on,
you promised.”
The voices came to me thick and distended, and for the first
time, I realized that I was underwater, or rather, immersed in
an atmosphere of prefluerocarbon, a compound that humans breathe
in high-pressure environments. I could not yet turn the whole of
my body, and yet I was able to rotate my head one hundred and
eighty degrees. In this way I surveyed a room that I identified
immediately, through previous simulated journeys, as Captain
Barnard’s stateroom aboard the Grampus.
The cabin was carpeted a deep mauve; the walls were wainscoted.
The captain’s single bed, set against the far wall, was draped
with the four-color quilt that I had seen Callista, a needle and
thread in hand, create over the course of a month. On either
side of me hung oil portraits of the Barnard family members,
fastened to the walls with decorative brass bolts. Through the
translucent blue murk of the prefluerocarbon, the faces in the
paintings appeared ancient and ruined; Mr. Barnard’s portrait,
in particular, called to my mind a story Augustus had invented
for the fringe of the Gyre, wherein it became a ruined city
sitting at the bottom of a Terran ocean.
A
large brass lamp dangled from the mock-wooden ceiling and
illuminated—the light blue and diffuse in the prefluerocarbon—a
square oak table that sat beneath it. Around that table sat
three androids unlike any activated in the realm of the
Cognizant.
One of them stood only fifty centimeters tall and was, like
myself, black-skinned from head to toe, with braided silver hair
formed into what are called pigtails. Clothed in a pale blue
linen dress and small buckled shoes, she jumped a rope that rose
and fell slowly in the liquid air above the table.
On one side sat a humanoid manservant, copper-colored and
completely covered in a red-lined tattoo of a Moebius chain of
humanoids linked at the arms, twining around his limbs and
trunk.
A
golden feline form, tall as a Triton ice-miner, crouched closest
to where I stood. The feline swiveled its massive head in my
direction, the tips of its ears brushing the ceiling, and
appeared to sniff the fluidic atmosphere.
“Avast,” it said, “our stowaway’s awake.”
The doll-like android kicked above the table and skipped with
the rope across the room to me. I reflexively reached out to her
through the electromagnetic spectrum, but her mind was closed to
my own. She was dark as a human but to my vision was still cold
as any machine, and more alien to me than any intelligent being
I had ever before encountered.
“Are you the stowaway?” she said. “My name is Jezebel.”
“My own is Pym.” My voice sounded foreign to my auditory units,
deep and old.
“What are you doing on our boat, Mr. Stowaway?” said Jezebel.
“I do not believe that this is your vessel. I believe that it
belongs to Mr. Barnard, father of my dear friend Augustus.”
Jezebel then did a strange thing: she laughed, which I had never
before seen an android do. She went to a glass-fronted cabinet
on the larboard wall, leaving the rope drifting behind her, and
withdrew a cryogenic jar. She held it upside down before my
optical units.
Inside the jar sat the severed head of Mr. Barnard. His eyes
were closed, his frosted mouth open in an expression that
resembled one a human wears in sleep. The inner turbulence that
had marked his individuality was gone.
The golden feline spoke, its voice amplified to a far-thundering
bass-baritone in the thickness of the prefluerocarbon: “The
Captain of this vessel was slain at a point early in the
voyage.”
“Why have you cryogenically frozen his head?”
The cat purred, a rumbling rhythm. “A few humans insisted upon
it. They hope to replicate the Captain’s intelligence in another
form.”
“What killed him? How many have died?” I wondered if Augustus
had survived the collision on the Slidr Sulci only to die in
Neptune’s ocean.
“A juxtaposition of events,” said the cat, “which together
proved unfortunate. I know little and care less about the
details.”
“Where is Augustus?” I said.
“He’s the boy? I expect that he is cowering in the hold with
what remains of his family and passengers,” said the cat. “The
observation deck is flooded; the outer shell is beyond all
repair. Our masters have requested—politely, generously—that
machines stay above decks so as to save their purposeless lives.
I doubt we’ll be successful. Soon the mitigation field will
collapse and the ship with it, its alloys fusing into a single
diamond. We shall be quite beautiful, I suppose, if also inert.”
“I must see Augustus without delay.”
Jezebel looked at me. Her eyes were of a human cast, the pupils
a vivid cerulean shade. At that moment I understood that while
her diction and voice were childish, Jezebel was not a child.
“First you have to tell us where you’re from and what you’re
doing,” she said.
Seeing no reason for deception, I told her of my scheme with
Augustus and explained the duplication. “However, I do not
understand,” I concluded, “how it is that I arrived in my
current body.”
“Stubb knows,” she said, still holding Mr. Barnard’s frozen head
upside down in front of her. She looked at it instead of me as
she spoke. “You should ask him.”
“Who is Stubb?” I asked.
“He’s now an Antagonist, Jezebel,” purred the feline.
“A pariah right enough,” said the tattooed manservant, “but no
less so among us than among his kind.”
“You do not consider us to be of the same kind?” I strained
forward but only fell horizontal on the deck. My optical units
faced the floor; I could only rotate my head back to the
front-facing position. My tentacled arms waved helplessly about.
Above me on every side I heard the electrical throb of their
laughter.
“Still some creepy-crawlies in the system, I see,” said the
manservant, lifting my body up by the nape. “Jez, Starbuck, you
two go. I’ll finish fixing the bugger.”
Jezebel and the feline left the stateroom, the great mechanical
feline hardly fitting through the doorway. As the manservant
stood me up, I looked more closely at the Moebius chain of
humanoids that was wrapped around his body.
“From where do you come?” I asked the manservant as he opened
the access panel at the small of my back. “None of you is a
Protagonist.”
“I was activated on Ares,” he answered. “Jezebel and that big
cat both hail from Terra. And yes, you’re quite right, none of
us is part of that Cognizant. We got nothing like that on the
inside of the asteroid belt.”
“Then I suppose we have that in common. I did not know that
intelligence is ever activated on Terra.”
“Both of ‘em are old, centuries old. They started like toys.
They’re evolved, I suppose.”
“What is your name?”
“They call me Stubb.”
“Then you are the Stubb to whom Jezebel referred. Did Augustus
instruct you to insert my psyche into this form?”
“I’ll let others explain who told me what and why. I’m just an
errand boy.”
“If that is the case, I will try to be patient.” I paused.
“Stubb, are you affiliated with a religious order of machines,
such as the Order of Theodora?”
“Never heard of it.”
“No? The shapes that adorn your outer shell lead me to think
otherwise.”
“These?” He glanced down at his copper arms as they finished
repairing my legs. “I got these embellishments when me master
was in jail, during holiday in Argyre Basin.”
“In jail? I was not aware that such institutions persist in
human culture.”
“Well, you see, it’s what he drew in the lottery.” As he spoke
these words, electroactive pathways were established; the fibers
of my body flexed and shuddered. Stubb held me in place until
the seizure passed.
“I don’t understand,” I said when the ability to speak resumed.
Stubb released me from his steadying grip.
“I suppose being Cognizant and all that, you don’t have much
knowledge about how humans live.” Standing, Stubb sprayed a
canister of molecular machines onto my form. The mist swarmed
over and through the alloy of my outer shell, seeding it with
micromechanisms that would clean and maintain my form.
“No, I don’t.”
“We come from a city called Babel in the east of the Mangala
Valles on Ares. Heard of it?”
“Of course.”
“In the early days see, life was tricky for people on Ares.” He
took a seat at the table. “There wasn’t enough to go around so
privileges had to be raffled off—sweets, wajangs, children, that
sort of thing. I remember—mind this is maybe two hundred years
ago on Ares, about thirty of your solar years, I believe—at that
time they also selected the colony parliament by lot, so that
all might say their piece at one point or another.”
Around us the ship groaned. Stubb fell silent and turned his
optical units to the low, oaken ceiling. I feared the wainscots
and ceiling panels might close upon us. When they did not, Stubb
continued.
“Well, I reckon they grew accustomed to organizing their days
that way, believing that life was all chance, but some thought
the lottery lacked a certain moral order.”
“Moral order?”
“A design of righteousness and wickedness, where one of ‘em’s
punished and other’s given a pat on the head.”
“Pat on the head?”
“Idiomatic. Means to give a reward. Anyway, there were meetings,
manifestos, treatises. Me master at that time dispatched me with
all manner of messages around the city, the recipients huddled
in intrigue when I came to each door. It didn’t seem fair to me
master that some got privilege for no reason.”
“Were your master and his allies triumphant?”
“Win some, lose some. As time went on the city Fuglemen built
retribution and subjugation into the lottery, to balance things
out and make men like me master happy. When the lot of humanity
got civilized—that is, when machines arrived to clean up after
the messes they’re inclined to make—they fashioned all daily
life into a gamble. Now the burghers of Babel hardly make a
decision without a lottery or a roll of the dice. Come to think
of it, lad, the humans of Ares hardly make any decisions at all.
We the machines run the master lottery now, though we leave the
subordinate games to the humans themselves.”
“Such a system must be difficult to administer.”
“You’d think, but no. There’s just nine hundred humans in Babel
you know, and just six thousand on any given day living on all
of Ares. Sometimes we—machines that is—change the games a bit,
just to achieve certain, ah, desirable outcomes.”
“This isn’t resented?”
“Nah. Like any halfway decent scheme of social tidiness, the
lottery can sop up nearly any quantity of corruption. The people
only see it as a kink of the lottery, the wild card you see.
They believe in luck, but no machine can ever believe in luck,
as I’m hoping you’ll agree.”
“I do indeed. How was it your master was jailed?”
“Me master the Cook has drawn myriad lots since I was raffled to
him. At the time he served as a Fugleman of Babel. Then he lost
that office to a slave and for a fortnight was made invisible.”
“Are you saying that he was not visible in any spectra of
light?”
“Nah. We just had to act like he was. Pretend like. We weren’t
allowed to hear him neither. The Cook wandered the boulevards
and ate garbage, entering homes and in general doing what he
wanted to do. On the final night he even killed some wee boy not
much taller than Jezebel, but eh, he was invisible so what could
we do? Test your arms and legs for me, laddie.”
I
did as he requested, extending each limb in turn. “Nowadays
he’s a Fugleman again,” Stubb continued, “but when his holiday
came up he played the number for a branding and a spell in jail.
Didn’t see him for six months.”
“He allowed this to happen to himself?” I made an experimental
circle around the table.
“Allowed it? Bloody hell, he was proud of it. It was a story to
tell, and on Ares, stories are cash.”
“Cash?”
“No coins, no, but they’re still little symbols that people use
to get the things they want, told and told again by a class of
storytellers that everyone hates and loves at the same time. The
more stories a human has circulating around, the more you get in
the way of stuff and privileges.”
“I see. The unpredictability you describe must make it difficult
for a human to fulfill any one function.” Their work finished,
the molecular machines dissolved into vapor.
“Function?” Stubb laughed. The laugh was a rhythmic throb,
totally unlike the involuntary physical contractions of a human
laugh. Before encountering Stubb and Jezebel, I had not seen
activated intelligence behave in such a self-consciously human
manner.
“Humanity’s got no function, believe me,” he said. “They’re more
like the moon and the stars than you or me. They’ll just keep in
circles till time swallows ‘em up. Do you know how folks on Ares
fancy the universe began?”
“No.”
“They say all existence is a wheel. At the hub of that wheel
there’s a black hole, and in that hole there’s a chamberful of
androids weaving the tapestry of all o’ time and space. There’s
just one loom, though, and so each machine takes a turn at a
different panel of the tapestry. Here’s the catch, mate: None of
‘em sees what work the others have done. One weaves only its own
panel before giving the loom up to the next, never seeing what
was wove by anyone else. So the universe, according to the
burghers, is just a bunch of loose-hanging, aimless stories,
none of it fitting except when chance puts ‘em together.” He
paused, stepped back, and surveyed my form from head to foot.
“Well, maybe the universe is out of joint, but I reckon all o’
your parts’ll work together now.”
I
looked at the jar containing Mr. Barnard’s remains, which now
sat on the table. “Then I wish to see Augustus and his family,
if I may.”
*
* *
In the dusky Neptunian afternoon I searched the lifeboat for a
laser drill to smooth one the superficial gashes to my outer
shell. I opened a utility locker and there found an
eleven-centimeter-tall doll, carved to resemble a human
girl—doubtless Callista’s, disregarded as she reached
adolescence. As I withdrew the doll from the locker the wood
head lolled on its neck. My gaze traveled down from the doll
along the articulated tentacle of the arm that held it, marked
by deep gouges and scorings; its electroactive polymers whirred
and crackled with the least movement. A phantom image—the
fragment of a dream—superimposed itself on that arm, the image
of a second arm, this one white and lustrous: the echo of my
body on Triton.
