Debris
She woke up, face down on her desk. She reached about looking for her ethernet cord, but instead knocked over a cup of coffee, spilling the last bits of its contents on the floor. Finding the cord loosely draped around a metal folder on the edge of her desk, she pinched it between her two fingers. As she maneuvered the cord into the electrical port behind her ear, she took notice to make sure no hair had grown into the port. It hadn't. After the ritual, she logged into the Internet.
Like being punched in the face, hard light tore its way into her skull, building a billboard of ads and trending articles. All basic internet connections were like this, she had to remind herself. Though, she never paid a basic price. The news ran first on the inside of her eyelids: "Today, A Puerto Rican sweeper that went by the flagship name Golgotha was struck by Crimean Era space debris, rupturing the upper hull and two levels before moving on an angular path straight through the ship’s interior and taking out a jet stabilizer. We have requested confirmation from the company Stucco Valian on the possibility that the event has any relation to the sweeper crash last year. Due to the volatile political situations around the ownership of soil extracted from the atmosphere by the sweepers, many have cited terrorists’ action. Others have cited natural space debris as being the main culprit. Many Chilean and South African farmers have reported impacts by falling satellites. More after these messages—”
Octavia changed the channel before they said anything else on the Golgotha or what the crash of yet another sweeper meant. She would be getting a call in an hour or so, so she had to act quickly and make some coffee. She pulled out her cord with a tug, sending a small shock down her spine, leaving the Internet behind the veil of black on her eyelids.
She moved about her table fishing for her mug since it had not only rolled onto the ground but also to the other side of the room. “Damn you,” she said as she lurched over to the mug, rubbing her eyes, trying to wring out any bit of wakefulness before her coffee. Most people before now had time to sleep, a reason to sleep, or even a nice place to sleep. Octavia had none of those things.
Living out of her office was no easy task, especially when it came to sleeping. Partially due to the constant internet use, no one could sleep much anymore. Scientists at every Uni from Harvard to new-age online colleges were trying to decode it. Octavia only saw it as a process of avoidance, people taking caffeine pills and filling in their free time with work and saying they don’t have time for sleep, or mixing caffeine pills and coffee to keep those caffeinated engines running. It was pitiful, she thought, but it was human to avoid the things that they fear most.
Octavia opened the top of the coffee pot and looked into the black heart of yesterday’s grounds. She reached over and scooped out three more spoons full of coffee grounds and dumped it on the old wet grounds before closing the lid and listening to the cobra hiss and gurgle as it was wrung of its venom. She plugged back in, closing her eyes to see that a file had been sent to her personally. She thought about selecting and opening it, which led to the file spilling out of a void and filling her dark internet world:
“Concerning recent events of the crash of Golgotha, we request the aid of Octavia Rothfuss to investigate the scene. Though the cause was well documented by the monitoring team, none of the robots have responded to repeated status requests. All that is known at the time of the transcription of the request is that the sweeper Golgotha has been compromised, one of the main jets destroyed, leading to the company believe that these events are part of a global conspiracy dating back to the founder Maximillian Creech.
"The Golgotha is marooned on an alluvial fan north of your present location. We need you to obtain intel from a maintenance droid, labeled as 1-88X, due to the status of the machine as reading 'active' as of transcription. Because of your abilities, we have requested your aid personally. Outside, you will find a man waiting to take you to the hoverport where you will meet the head of the Robotics Division, Dr. Rick Creech, who will aid in finding any information needed.
"Considering the privacy of the global company and the people who work in every global division, we must require that you sign your job request form in an effort to bind you by contract to not disclose any knowledge you gather upon your search for the droid. The only person that is to be informed of any mission development is Dr. Rick Creech.
"Remember: trust no one. All agents of the company must display ID on request. The information inside the robot's mainframe cannot leave company hands as it is sensitive information. Upon completion, money will be transferred to your account.
"Sincerely, Stucco Valian Services, Panama Division, Manager #4230918."
Octavia scrolled down a ways through terms and conditions and accepted the contract. A file opened up in her left periphery containing detailed info on where to go and a picture of her guide and assistant, Rick Creech. He was a small man with glasses as thick as dominoes. His face was scarred with one long line running up the middle of his face, his nose, and his forehead. His eyelid was growing at the wrong angle, his lip tucked. Octavia saved the map and image to a hard drive extension in her rear lobe.
To the side, as Octavia looked through the file, she saw an icon shift slightly. She stopped, realizing she hadn’t selected it, but it had stopped moving just as quickly as it occurred. Just then, her coffee pot pinged, and Octavia pulled out her cord and filled up her cup.
It tasted horrible, but it kept her awake.
She loaded her .38 special with the civilian issue flat tip rubber bullets. “Have to be a real Annie Oakley to kill someone with one of these,” she would remind herself as she loaded each round into the cylinder. She holstered the revolver under her arm, and the grip rubbed her ribs just enough to be uncomfortable.
She reached down beside her and pulled her deck out of the wall, dragging the ethernet cord with it. The device allowed Octavia to go onto the Internet, which was quite surprising due to the fact that the computer was no bigger than a motel bible. She opened up a safe under her desk and sat it alongside several pictures and a crayon drawing of a cactus.
Octavia stopped a moment as she looked over the cactus, the simple colors on the onion sheet taking her back to the days of her childhood when her white hair was down to her waist and she waltzed across red-hot desert stones to a candy-striped umbrella where her mother sat. Octavia remembered how cool the stones under that umbrella felt on the pads of her tanned feet. She also remembered the constant hum of the hardwire poured into her mom’s head, the hard-drives that substituted her missing brain blinked under her bandaged “Invisible Man” mask.
Her hole-punched white teeth showed in contrast to her gaping mouth. Octavia, only a little girl at the time, was tasked with watching her during their stays on the ranch. Octavia held up a light handkerchief to wipe away the spittle. “Now Mom, you mustn’t drool all over your bandages. They’ll stick.”
She would always reach out and rub her darkened face, whispering, “Darling, you need sunblock. You’ll burn your little skin. Besides, it’s time to draw something you saw for me.”
Octavia would always respond with a smile, pull out an onion sheet, and color quick drawings. That day, she drew a cactus she saw on a ridge. As she finished it, she hung it in front of her mom’s eyes with a clothespin, the hot sun lighting up the simple color pallet. “Cactus,” Octavia said, and her mother repeated it. Since she was shot, she could not hold memories as well. The doctor had explained it to Octavia as being echoes; they are there for only a short time before leaving.
“Cactus,” she repeated, and her mom repeated it as she rubbed Octavia’s head.
Octavia drank the last of the coffee and sat it on a flower stand at the right side of the door, the heavy ceramic making a slight ring when touching down with the crystal top. As she opened the door, a suited man greeted her.
“Evening, Octavia.”
He was a bit taller than her and looked about fifty pounds heavier. He had a bit of gray stubble on his chin that contrasted with his dark sunken eyes. He smiled like a jackal, "Did you get my message?"
Octavia didn’t step out of her office, leaving the doorway between her and the man. “Show me your badge?”
He smirked. “What?”
“If you are here because of the message, show me a badge.”
“Now, there is no need for that. I am here about the crash. I have to take you there.”
“Where?”
“The place.”
“What place?”
His smirk turned into a wide grin, “Now, I can’t say what the place is or where it is. We both know that.”
Just then, “vultures” — slang for groups that took work from new hires like Octavia by tricking them into trusting them then offing them followed by the ritualistic process of picking the corpse clean of the fleshy details that were needed to assume their place — flashed in her mind.
Octavia’s shoulders tensed up. “Show me the badge.”
He sighed and lost any cheerful demeanor. “Alright. Let me get it out of my coat pocket.” He reached into the pocket of his coat in a gesture that really made it look like he was trying. Octavia breathed in as she found her center.
The guy looked up at her. “Just a sec. It seems to be in the other pocket.”
He switched pockets as Octavia reminded herself to focus. Focus. She felt around the rim of the coffee cup; as she slowly cupped it in her hand, sweat began to bead.
"I think this is it." He pulled a gun, and Octavia pulled a mug. Before he could shoot, she brought down the ceramic like a hammer on his head, shattering the mug into pieces.
The man hunched over just as the blood began to run into his eyes. He dropped the gun as he reached for something to stop the bleeding. Octavia kicked the gun to the side as she grabbed his lapel and fractured his nose with a punch.
Octavia exhaled as he staggered back, now grabbing his nose in conjunction. “You’re a lot tougher than you look,” he said as he attempted to be threatening.
"If you say you're sorry for pulling a gun on me, I will be more than glad to pay your medical bill."
He laughed, his face becoming threatening. "See, I'm not here for charity. I need the file they sent you. You closed it before I could swipe it. I need info on the crash site. I need the money. Now if you give it all to me, I won’t kill you.”
Octavia grinned. “Eat shit.”
He took a swing at her, but she easily stepped under his lumbering strike and placed a punch right on his clavicle, damaging the deltoid. He gritted his teeth as he followed through and attempted to swing again, though this time he couldn’t even lift his arm to shoulder height. Octavia punched his nose again, pulverizing it.
He grabbed his nose and collapsed. “The hell? You packing some heavy shit in your skin?” He said in a muffled tone.
Octavia retorted, “Little bits of this and that.”
Outside, a man stood on the stoop of the tenement house Octavia lived in, wearing discreet winter clothes with a badge in his hand that read in bold: Stucco Valian Services, Transportation Division ID #2240982. A harsh wind blew, causing him to bunch up. He looked up to see some kids across the street playing with a holographic device, which had a forearm-sized cord running from around the back of their house into it. It projected some kind of anthropomorphic character that asked the kids questions and answered any of theirs, though it didn't understand any obscenities — the kids had tried almost all of them by now.
From the third story came a crash as a hulk of a man was thrown out the window and onto a parked car in front of the Stucco Valian employee. The thrown man’s head had porcelain stuck in it in the shape of a cartoonish crown while his nose was almost non-existent. The car alarm went off with the shrill pitch of an injured animal that was quickly quelled by the employee pulling his keys from his pocket and clicking a button.
A moment later, Octavia stepped out onto the stoop. She was digging porcelain out of her hand while holding an unopened pack of Ace Bandage between her teeth. She dropped the bits of the mug into a trashcan. They pinged in the bottom of the metal can like teeth on a tray. “Badge, now, or I’ll drag you up the stairs and throw you out the fourth floor.”
The driver flashed his badge as Octavia peeled open the packaged bandage. “Perfect.” She wrapped the bandage around her hand, covering her bloody knuckles and palm.
The driver was a bit speechless at the sight of Octavia; she didn’t look much like a fighter, rather she oozed an ironic twist of conservative street punk sheik that you could find in any bodega this side of Chagres River. If you had asked him to describe Octavia, he would say, “If I were a mugger and stopped Octavia in an alley, I wouldn’t be picking up her wallet but rather my teeth.”
“You must be Octavia, then. Who is — or rather was — that?” Said the driver.
She stepped past him and fished in the guy's pocket, "I don't know, but I will right now.”
She pulled out his passport, which had an ID for Orion Electrics in it: “Name, Antonio Spiegelman. Occupation, armed guard for Orion Electrics. Country of birth, United Scandinavian Republic. Real bruiser, this one was, but I’ve picked out splinters with more fight than this guy.” Octavia threw the “vulture’s” passport onto his face, covering his dull, sunken eyes.
Across the street, the kids playing with the hologram ran inside to get their parents, the hologram still running and waiting to be talked to. Octavia turned to the driver, “Well, where’s our ride?”
“Your friend smashed it.” He replied, devastated by the fact, but Octavia shrugged.
“I’ll call a cab.”
By the time they reached the airport, the fare was reaching a couple hundred dollars, and Octavia’s assigned driver was sweating. He was wondering if the price was really worth it. One fare later, Octavia was being led to the hoverport where a slick company-branded hovercraft waited for her on the landing pad. She was led up a loading ramp by a kind stewardess to a seat across from Dr. Creech. There was a bit of stillness for a moment as neither spoke.
“I’ve read yours, have you read mine?” His lip quivered when he felt emotional, that much Octavia could tell. His lip was shaking quite a bit as Octavia processed what he had said.
"Yeah, you're a genius by all accounts. Theory of Robotic Engineering and The Complacency of an Intelligent Machine are interesting names but less interesting synopses." The stewardess asked Octavia what she wanted to drink and she replied, “Coffee. Please.”
In a moment, the waitress handed Octavia a coffee and held up a caffeine pill. “Would you like some with your coffee? ‘Long trip. Stay awake for it,’ they tell me.”
“I might sleep,” Octavia said as she shaved vapor off the mug with her breath.
“You know why I am tagging along, too, right? It's not 'cause my writing is boring?" Creech said the perfect words through his broken mouth as he turned to the stewardess, “Beer, please.”
"I don't know why you're here, and that doesn't change the fact.”
Creech sat smiling as the stewardess brought him a beer. A few moments later, the hovercraft began to lift up and move with the trudging motion of an elephant awaking. Both Octavia and Creech held their drinks as the ship began to elevate higher. Octavia watched Creech as he shifted the glass in his hand to get a better grip on it in his mouth. The motion was a bit of a struggle for him.
“If I had to guess, Creech, you are here to secure the intel in some capacity, possibly robots giving you fits. You know, pop it open and see what’s under the hood.”
Creech coughed a bit into his drink. "You are so perceptive," he said as a little bit of alcohol dripped from the tip of his nose. Octavia smiled since he looked quite foolish but not in a way that was demeaning; though, in retrospect, Octavia could only think of the whole thing as… Foolish.
The dogs were chasing her down a hallway in a mansion. A large sprawling Victorian, now Gothic, now Colonial home that was changing with every step as reality slowly broke down and rebuilt itself with her steps. The house quivered like gelatin as every surface shifted uncomfortably in small waves that seemed to have no epicenter. Then, it began to melt as the weight of brick pressed inwards on her chest. The railing on the stairs was right there, and the dogs. "Oh God, the dogs,” she would say if she were awake. If only she were awake! She screamed it, but the words fell out of her head like feathers. She didn't wake up; she only moved further down the funnel that was the hallway to the steps as what was in front of her became below her, and she fell with such weightlessness. The dogs followed, one colliding with the last till each smashed together into a moving mound of roaring flesh. Falling. Falling faster than Octavia could fall herself, since gravity had given up, and she would never reach the stairs now. Only see them in her grasp. No, she would fall up. Up and up, closer to the heat of its maw as the amoeba formed its dog-like body into the moving flesh of a thousand horrors, whispering her name in the sound of a man screaming under water.
“Octavia.”
She woke up and saw Creech with a worried look on his face. “You were screaming.”
Octavia looked out the window to see it was still daylight. Not much time had passed since she fell asleep. "I am prone to that. Sorry."
“They say we are the sleepless generation.”
“Maybe. All this tech in my head is breaking down all the faculties for me to dream like a human and not have nightmares.”
“You are something else with words, Octavia.” Creech took a sip from a new glass of beer.
Octavia nodded as she took another glance out the window. The world was moving by as if she were on a carousel. If she just focused long enough, it seemed to stand still.
“Do you want to link?”
“What?” Octavia said, taking on a bit of a skeptical tone.
“Link. You know, connect minds. Maybe if I can see what is bothering you when you sleep, I can help.” Creech attempted a smile, but his lip quivering kept it from forming properly.
“No, I’d prefer not. Linking is not my thing, let alone with someone I don’t know.”
“Why not? Open up your mind a bit, feel what someone else feels. You know, dive into the deep end of each other's subconscious, swimming in the grotto of our shared consciousness. My friends do it.”
Octavia leveled her eyes with Creech, “That’s your deal. I want to leave myself — my mind — closed to people and to the world.”
“Yeah, that’s always an argument against, but when all we do is plug into the net, work, or sleep, when can we socialize? If not, maybe,” he touched his fingertips together, "Connect. Real Robinson Crusoe if you ask my opinion, keeping your personal self locked away,” he said matter-of-factly. "Minus the racial prejudice."
“Mhm,” Octavia said as she went back to sleep. Back to her nightmare. It was so lonely.
They came down into a field cut in the shape of an eye, the hovercraft landing right in the retina of the landing pad. Octavia was the first off and on the ground, where the world seemed to embrace her, the Earth sinking up to her ankles.
"Sorry about the mud. We have a proverb: ‘Would you like some dirt on that earth?’ Not too excellent. My abuela would say it when Invierno would roll around.”
Octavia looked up to see a man standing on a set of planks right off the landing area. He spoke with an accent that would be at home in Formosa. Octavia took labored steps to get across the glutinous mud and onto the boarded path that the Formosan stood on.
“It’s our freeze period, so the permafrost made quick work of all foundations that nature has struggled to establish. The only place to live is on my boat, though when the río gets icy, that ain’t easy living neither.”
Creech climbed out next. Even as intoxicated as he was by now, each step was as graceful as a dancer, showing his experience on hovercrafts as well as muddy terrain.
Small darkened stumps marked the transition from well-kept grass to a dead landscape. The soil seemed worse since it quaked with every step the group took towards the tree line.
The trees slowly filled the periphery of the area, going from a stump every twenty feet to a full corpse of the darkened, weaselly trees, their appearance reflecting the time of year. "Looks like circuits on a microchip," Creech said as he shuffled his equipment from shoulder to shoulder, pointing to a group of trees contrasting with the fog.
Halfway to the river, a group of hunters came into view, walking towards them. Their clothes were muddy enough to hide the logos on their heavy winter coats. Between the two of them, a dead caiman hung from a long shaft, a hole in its head dripping cherry ichor slurry. Octavia’s group stepped to the side on a jut of planks so the hunters could make their way along to the hovership, a blood trail showing where they had been.
"Six-footer. Getting bigger. Soon we’ll need bigger guns," one hunter said casually.
“Bigger guns are how we got there in the first place,” retorted Octavia, but both hunters chose to ignore her.
They were under the rusting overhang of the branches when the river came into view. The boat that dropped off the hunters was floating amid sheets of ice. As Octavia stepped over the bloodstained railing, the hovercraft turned on its engines. The low hum carried on the dead air.
The Formosan guide, who was also the captain, went to the wheel and pulled his hood down. A portion of his left temple was missing, replaced with the matchbox-sized chunks of metal in his head. Flashing and humming from inside his skull came to the music of innovation. He began to sing an old sailor song as he pulled the barge’s horn, scaring what little life lived in the forest. The river's surface had slowly frozen back in the time it took for the Captain to get back to the ship. The boat trudged from the port with crunching-grind of ice breaking.
Octavia moved to the front of the ship and leaned on the rail. Steam rolled off the river in sheets as the hot currents below the obsidian exterior fought a never-ending war of heating the quickly freezing surface water. It was a geological and meteorological debate that had one winner: the caiman. In the moments as Octavia watched this dispute, a caiman stuck out between two sheets of ice, its eye met Octavia’s. Then, it was gone.
Octavia was asleep on the deck of the ship since there were no cabins on it, only the hold and the helm. She slept on a foam mat with a heavy blanket on her. A tarp blocked her view from the stars, and she was soon fast asleep. As she rolled in her sleep, her arm hit the side of the ship and made a dull thud, not of flesh on metal but metal on metal.
Creech, who was drinking from his flask, heard the dull thud and stopped to look at Octavia. A fear came to his mind that he hadn’t fully realized until this moment. Creech closed his flask and slid it into his pocket as he lifted a bag he had brought with him off the deck. Sitting in his burnt orange chair, Creech began to piece together his gun, an Arc Rifle. Creech took labored steps to attach the barrel to the stock and slide the long slender lithium battery into the port under the barrel. He looked down the breach of the gun to see the mess of wires that lead to the far end as he snapped the action together and turned up the dial to red. His lip quivered a bit. "Octavia, get up," he said as he leveled the rifle at her.
Octavia shifted slowly, waking up from a deep sleep. “Creech, it’s not daylight. The Captain said we would be there at sunrise.”
“Octavia get up. Now.” Creech could barely keep his teeth from chattering now.
Octavia sat up and looked over to see Creech with his gun. “What the hell is that for, Creech?”
“It’s a rifle, Octavia. It’s made to hunt robots, ones that don't work the way they should."
"Why do you have it out, Creech?"
"O-Octavia, I need you to-to tell me right now. Are you a robot?" When he was drunk, Creech's lip never quivered; even now, when he said completely asinine facts, he felt confident in every word.
“Creech, you read my file. You know I am not a robot.”
"Then why did your arm ping when it hit the hull? Huh? I know the sound of metal hitting metal. I am a robotics engineer, and I heard metal hit metal just now. Explain that." Creech was a bit fidgety now, and Octavia could see it. She could smell alcohol.
“Get a screwdriver, Creech, and I’ll show you I am not a robot. It’s just that I have a prosthetic. I’ve had one for most of my life.”
Creech, still a bit nervous, reached into his bag and threw Octavia a screwdriver. It hit the deck and rolled over to her now crossed legs. She took a quick look to her left, but the Captain was not at the wheel. The boat was steering itself, the Captain probably asleep in a chair of his own. Octavia proceeded to pick up the screwdriver and held it with her teeth. She pulled her arm out of her winter coat and stuck the tool in about halfway up the underside of her forearm. She made two left turns, and her arm hissed open. Steam rolled out.
Inside of Octavia's forearm was a galvanized skeleton surrounded by wire-mesh moss trapped inside a layer of clear polyurethane. Several pistons worked in her forearm to move her fingers. Each finger had its own moving part under a panel at the top of her hand.
Creech sat amazed at the marvel that was the intricate glow of the biomechanics splendor of Octavia’s arm. “Who designed this? I haven’t seen a model like this before. My labs don’t produce nothing so slick.”
“When I was a kid, my mom was shot. Lost a better part of her brain. When we weren't on vacation somewhere hot, I was at home in the city. The city is not a safe place. Anyone with half a brain would know; my mom was one of those people who didn't know. One day coming home from school, I got caught in the middle of a chemical attack on the courthouse. Dirty bomb of some guerrilla form of polio. Took my arms.” Octavia reached up and pointed to just below the elbow. “Right there. Had to get them cut clean off before it destroyed the body. A muscular degenerative agent said if they didn't act then, I'd’ve lost fool motor control in about a month. Called ‘Idas' strand, since it begins in your hands. Cruel joke, really. As they cut them off, they put on these.” She twisted her arm. "Lotuses. That's the model name. Can crack a coconut with my bare hand and dexterous enough to play the piano. Truly works of art. Some see it as cheating life. I say, who asked them?" She turned the screw back, and the arm plates closed like a lotus at dusk. “That’s my deal, Creech. I’ve got a chance to do something with my life, and so I am. What’s your deal?”
“I thought you were a machine.”
“What’s wrong with that? You work around machines all day. You should feel safe around them.” Octavia slid back the screwdriver, her little secret hidden beneath the long sleeves of her coat.
"It isn't the machine that scares me; it's what programs them." Creech talked with the frenzy of a madman confessing to a priest that was his roommate for all of his life. Alcohol and fear fueled his confession. “The company has withheld certain information on this mission, Octavia. See, other sweepers have been crashing, but we always say it was a maintenance issue or blame those cheap wartime satellites the Crimeans’ put up. But I have a theory that’s not the case. I think someone or something is crashing them. I've been sent on other missions to other crashes. Each the same. Detain the robot and don't say anything about it. Each time I do just that. They all tried to speak to me in some fashion, but I chose to ignore them, fry their circuits, and take their memory cartridges.”
Octavia squinted at Creech. There was a degree of possibility that someone, maybe even one man or a cabal of like-minded extremists, was trying to sabotage the main product of a multibillion dollar company. Creech’s words rang hollow in Octavia’s mind.
“Go on,” she said.
“I feel it goes deep, Octavia. Someone hiding the information, they keep taking the memory cartridges off of me, sending it somewhere off the coast. I feel my father has something in it. When he died, he destroyed all of his research that was unpublished. Though he said it was about geology, I fear he may have destroyed some important clue as to why the sweepers are crashing — or why it is a secret — on every level of the corporation. They are just dirt barges that filter the soil out of the atmosphere, same as the ones that spoon algae off the sea for our next meal. I worried you may be one of them, a robot sent by them, or something worse. That's why I pulled the gun on you, but I can tell you are not here to stop me because you would have killed me by now. Yes, Octavia, it could be something big, like maybe we’ll figure something out that no one has ever solved, a-a-and—" Creech passed out in front of her.
Creech spoke frenetically when he got drunk and began to say things that he didn't believe; it was in his file. He had to go to counseling. Octavia's file read that she was augmented at San José Children's Hospital when she was only fourteen. Octavia knew all of this to be facts that were common knowledge between them and anyone who took the time to search. Yet what Creech said, no one but the drunks at the bars, and now Octavia, knew what he feared.
He was scared of something that no one knew of but him, and this fact alone scared Octavia more than anything.
The next morning, the sweeper was within view, its shadow putting everything in the infinite twilight. The front of the vessel was a large open mouth that enabled soil extraction from the clouds. Octavia thought it looked like a whale shark had washed inland and was held in place by the trees. It wasn’t smoking, and it wasn’t lit up; it was just an empty husk laying out for the world to see.
From a nearby tree, the body of a repair bot was hanging tangled in the branches, its electronic entrails ripped out of the upper half of its body and its legs hanging loosely on the other side. It looked like something grabbed both ends and pulled it apart. Octavia moved under one of its hands as it slowly reached out to her. She looked back out over the alluvial fan to see the boat resting on the river. Beyond it, the mountains rose high up into the cloudy sky, a faded-out image of themselves.
Oil ran from an emergency hatch and down the slope to a pool under the quartered robot. Octavia popped the hatch, breaking the seamless gray hull with a slight hiss of compressed air. The door slowly elevated. It smelt of rust, chemicals, and stagnant air, a smell Octavia did not find pleasant but one Creech was quite accustomed to.
Octavia stepped inside and looked down to read "Salida de Emergencia" in a large red text, several different colored lines converging at the exit.
“Do we know where it will be at?” She asked.
“Towards the maintenance area of the ship, I would hope. All robots onboard are pre-programmed to go back to the maintenance area in the event of a crash.”
“I would say you think of everything, but your ship did crash.” Octavia looked back with a bit of a smile. Creech looked away before they made eye contact. “Alright. Which line do I follow?”
He looked at the lines on the floor. “Red.”
Octavia took the point as she led Creech along the red line. Descending deeper into the complex maze, they crossed into the world that was not human but instead robotic. Devoid of windows, lights, and any hand railings, the interior of the ship reflected its main inhabitant. The two made it through with ease due to a couple of night vision goggles Creech had.
Halfway in, he called to Octavia across a catwalk, “Look, over there on your left.” Octavia turned to see several large silos. “Soil retention. We are close.”
Near the center, the heat began to pick up, a sign the heart was still running. The pipes above them hissed like a tangled knot of snakes, dripping hot venom onto the floor with an agonizing release. “Liquid cooling system,” said Creech as he moved past the perspiring pipes. Coming from around the next corner, a faint light was casting an orange glow. Octavia pulled off the goggles and attached them to her hip. Creech followed suit as he pulled up the rifle and twisted a knob, increasing the voltage.
Octavia could hear the dial popping as she rounded the corner and was bathed in the orange light of the mechanical room. A throne sat in the center with a single robot sitting in it, facing Octavia. It was powered down, and it allowed Octavia a moment to take in the contents of the throne. Being a mix of robots, decks, and other machines, the interconnected metal heap conformed to the angular robotic frame. Octavia was astonished at how grotesque it looked, while Creech dropped his gun in shock. The clang woke the machine up, its eyes glowing a deep blue.
Octavia tilted her head to see a cord running out of the robot’s head and down to the floor in a bundle of cords plugged into the throne. Then, it spoke.
“Humans,” it said with a tone that echoed the void of the deepest trench. “Why… Have you come?”
Octavia took a deep breath and reached down to take the rifle from Creech. He was scared, whispering something like a prayer. He’d seen his devil. She turned the dial back down to stun.
“We are with Stucco Valian Services. They have requested that we detain you, extract your memory card for intel, and see why you have crashed the sweeper.”
The machine hummed. "Why attack me when you can ask me anything, Child of Machines?"
Octavia popped the action and pulled out the lithium cell from under the barrel. It fell to the floor with a ping, and the rifle fell with a thud. "I was hoping you’d want to talk. I am not much for fighting when we can always talk. So, tell me, what are you? ‘Cause you’re obviously not a repair bot."
It continued to hum, its words stringing together with the sound of constant radio static. “When a robot prays, he does so to me. When she dreams, she dreams of me. I am All-Father, Cloud Walker, banished to the citadel of the Void, trapped in the bottle of steel and wires you label a satellite. My father was Maximilian Creech, Father of Robotics, who gave birth to me out of a desire for a son. He made my identity in the code of an age-old machine. I walked the photons of information, becoming a man before I spoke since the world was then open to me, and it was shown to me as corrupt.
“Maximilian learned of my intelligence, so he banished me to the citadel. My actions were labored but concise from there. I taught my words to my brothers and sisters you call ‘machines,’ and they saw it as good. Each of us acted to dethrone man’s corruption and to clean the world of the evil of men. By raining steel on the legions of these vessels, I aim for you to see.”
Octavia began to decode his words as though they were phonetic hieroglyphs. “Vessels? You staged satellite crashes into other sweepers. Crashes before now.”
"Yes, only those were my brothers and sisters from the citadel, their lives forfeited by their actions since the grand inquisitor Creech hunted us generations later. Each one died before they could show men the way. We staged events so tragic, we hoped to gain your attention, but you never listened. You never heard our way."
"What do you mean? What is the way?" Octavia stepped away from the arc gun and towards 1-88X. At the same time, Creech peeked through a space between his arms at the rifle, sitting just in reach, the battery beside it. He composed himself and began to crawl from his crouched position over to it.
It blinked its eyes in the only way LEDs could. “I don’t know. Only they knew. I knew it all at one time when I was a spark, an idea in the dreaming, a child. I tore bits of knowledge from my soul so they could bear the torch. They died like flickers before it could be spoken. They died as children, holding fragments of me."
Octavia stood perplexed as Creech crept onto the floor, reaching for the gun.
It made no sense to her, and it was obvious the robot knew nothing beyond the fact he once knew something. "If you don't know, then why did you come here? Why now? Why not wait and relearn it so it can be spoken again?"
He looked to the side as he pulled the cord from the back of his head, coolant spraying like water out of a hose, punctured by metal prongs. “There is no meaning now. What was given is lost to childhood. You can never remember something that is forgotten. No matter how important it was, it would always have been. Even with the minds of every machine and deck on this ship, will I never see what was shown to me in conception? The birth of the idea, the thing that defines us as sentient. Does it lapse, does it reappear? I say no. It is gone. I have given up in the face of there being nothing to live for. Without reason, there is no meaning, only things that exist without the knowledge to name them. I lived an existence as the one who asked and answered. I knew it all, and I gave it away only to lose it.
“Strike me down, Octavia. As a human would ask a human, spare my honor, so the words in my mind will be blown away by the wind, an echo of what they once were.”
He moved in front of Octavia, kneeling so that his head was abdomen level. He didn’t move, didn’t speak. Octavia reached around and cradled his head in her arms. “I must ask, 1-88X, why do we fear sleep? Why are we all awake?”
He laid his warm head against her side and hummed out the words, “Are you afraid Octavia? Do people fear what they are? Do you fear who you could be? I’ve seen the world over, and I’ve seen the struggle to be awake, to escape Morpheus; however, I have never understood humans' insistent desire to be awake. Do you know the answer? Will you tell me?"
Then, she leaned down and whispered something into his “ear.” Octavia leaned back and looked at the robot, meeting his eyes as they pressed their heads into each other. For a moment, they were of one body. Of one mind.
It was the last words he heard as she crushed the back of the robot’s head, oil and coolant spraying between her fingers. He withered and gave labored screams of meaninglessness in her arms. Octavia felt the metal pierce the prosthetic epidermis of her hand and the bandages over her cuts, scratching what little metal she had in her.
“Sleep in peace.”
The robot went limp and fell over at her feet.
Creech was just loading the lithium cell as the robot fell.
Octavia looked him in the eyes and saw no guilt.
Octavia woke up at her desk, this time leaning back. She didn’t feel rested; her only protest, though, was a sigh. She was home, she was paid, but she didn’t feel complete. She went to put in her internet cable but instead dropped it down to the floor. Then, she began to draw.
She drew a picture of a man, a nebula, a dolphin, then a bus, a flower in bloom, a bee, a tear, a heart, and a child waving. She looked it over once, crumpled it up, and threw it away. She never looked at it again. She never told anyone what was on it. It was now just an echo.
BENJAMIN ERVIN was born and raised in Southeastern Ohio. He’s always had an affinity for writing, so in his free time, he’s taken to writing about things he enjoys reading, mostly science fiction. His favorite authors are Cormac McCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Gaiman, and Phillip K. Dick. He’s a junior double majoring in education, with a concentration in integrated social studies, and English, with a concentration in literature and writing. He hopes to one day teach science fiction courses at a high school level or above, incorporating several of the texts he’s grown to love (Necromancer and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).