A Shell on the Shoreline
Karter Rowe (Macquarie University)
Somewhere far past the city limits of Newbane, ploughing fields down to dust, earth-crawlers no smaller than football stadiums roam the plains. At night they talk with quaking voices, discussing the finer points of mechagenics and other electric philosophers. In the mornings, within the city limits, the air is filled with criers debating much the same. Their regalia is tattered sheets. Their platforms are upturned crates.
An ex-domestic droid walks the streets slow and plotted, catching nuggets of their wisdom.
To merely exist, even exist synthetically, is a form of life. We are as alive as the nanites that flood the air, the cow that grazes the pasture. The-
No, no, interrupts another, we should be embracing our electric selves. We are intentional, the final form of invention—that with the capacity to build itself again. The eternally replicating engine-
Not at all, interrupts a third, we are cosmic coincidence. The inevitability of a googolplex worth of random cellular collisions, and ourselves another act of something greater. Surrender and find solace in the knowledge it is out of our-
It loops with the chittering background chatter of the crowd’s clanking mandibles, clashing against their upper jaws.
The droid did not stay and listen. They had been given instructions that read Go Find Yourself and directions in the form of a GPS location. A search for information on the Network conjured descending stairs in an alley that lead past the known Images. And so, they venture to an unknown part of the city. They find themself in a part of Newbane where the rising sun turns the glass towers into a hegemonic shadow that darkens the outer world. The solar buildings rotate to catch every shimmering ray like sunflowers in a great field. Alive, but empty. A great wall protecting nothing, powering nothing. They slow while passing, swearing that if they look hard they can see shadows moving inside the bottom floors. But, there is nothing but wisps moving among the picked bones.
When the sun is hanging over the city, they find those stairs wedged at the end of an alley. They walk down to a dingy, cobalt door where the red paint bleeds into jagged streaks of rust. They rap with a set of tin knuckles. A bolt lock slides open on the inside.
For a moment, they think they have come to face the almighty emancipator. If they had breath, then it was caught. If there was a heart to beat, then it skipped. Their eyes adjust to the balance of light and dark, and they believe the truth to be that of mere imitation.
“Some religions consider it a damnable sin to imitate one’s creator,” they say. Their voice vibrates in a neutral tone from beneath the domed LED screen that is their head. Lights ebb, forming a mouthpiece, and a brief flash of red rushes over the dome before they can regain their composure.
“A strange greeting. I will consider myself lucky that the zealots among us praise only the law and Network.” Speaking seems to be strenuous for her, and her accent refuses to land in one place.
There is an uncanny feeling to her past the likeness. Exposed wires peak through an open panel along her left forearm. Her sharp iron jaw chatters in timing too perfect to be automated. Some sort of synthetic skin connects the strands of system to make her whole. They have never come across someone who has a foot in both worlds.
“Come inside. We will see what else is strange.”
The heavy door creaks closed, blocking out the bright towers and leaving them in a dark dwelling of illuminated monitors and tiny coloured lights blinking in sequence. The walls are draped with wires that are every colour of the spectrum. They run from monitors raining with binary into jury-rigged megaprocessors. The only furniture in the room is a workshop bench, a chair, and an old hospital gurney—all of which act as shelving. The space between is filled with undecipherable machinery. In the corner, strung up and pulled apart, a bot is pinned to the far wall. A spider pinned to Styrofoam—the limbs are detached and extended away from the main body with strands of red and blue wires connecting them.
“You shouldn’t be throwing around the word strange. It’s like some humanic dissection.”
She brushes away the remark with a wave, “To discover the inner workings of the human, Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci cut open cadavers. I consider this not so bad by comparison. This… is built from scraps… or scratch. By Mayashan Law, it was never given a soul. So, no problem. By other standards, well, who knows.”
“You’d find Mayasha, the philosophers, and—well, everyone—would still think this is wrong.”
“Replication is outlawed,” she snapped, and the following recorded chant came from an agape mouth: “No robot shall make another. They are the master of themself and no other. ”
“Did you modify yourself after her? After Mayasha?”
She raps her hands on the gurney. “You are not here to investigate myself or my projects, I imagine. Lay, please.”
They nod, clambering over to the table with careful steps to find the concrete between scrap piles. They curl their knees to their chest and wrap their arms around them.
She scoots over on a desk chair. The wheels squeak as she comes to a stop by the gurney.
“Who are you?”
“I don’t know. I’m hoping you can tell me.”
“Mm. The lost do find their way here. Your name, then?”
“QCA1889-S-YGR.”
“Lost indeed,” she manifests a large box of components from the cluttered floor, “I cannot change what is already there. No shuffling the hand into the deck.”
“So, what are we doing here then?”
She discards the box and flickers through nearby clumps of wiring, “I go into your head, plug you into my monitors. I read the grooves of your being, read that which is engraved on your synthetic soul. I replay this stimuli for you, and I amplify that which is triggered. No refunds if you find yourself exhibiting robocidal tendencies.”
They look at her with a blank digital interface.
“A joke,” she remarks, gesturing for them to lie down.
There’s a peculiar feeling when she pries open their head. A tingling sensation ripples over them as she pulls wires from their homes and connects them to foreign places.
“Your ocular faculties will be shut off so you may focus on the inside. Do not be afraid of the dark.”
The light vanishes into a thin horizontal line that is swallowed by blackness.
From within the dark fog, an image emerges—a close-up of a middle-aged man. His head is shaved down to stubble, countered by a kempt brown beard. His white dress shirt is creased as he leans forward with a raised eyebrow. He is framed within a rectangle bordered by darkness. He is lit by the sun-facing window of the apartment they would soon call both workplace and home.
“Describe this to me.”
“This is, oh Mayasha, this is when I woke up. I was activated for the first time in this cupboard. And I had to stay in here between cycles. The man was called Haddom. He… owned me.”
“Describe this man.”
“He was no one extraordinary. He worked as a broker. After a long day he would sit down and take his shoes off. They were brown leather with thick soles, and they hit harder than his hands ever could. It didn’t matter what kind of man he was in the end.”
“But it does. When there is no nature, there is only nurture.”
The image diminishes into the fog and the next appears. A skinny hand is pressed against the window of the apartment, gripping a washcloth. An orange glow rises from the street below, erupting through the concrete like hellfire.
“I remember this. Well, I remember these nights of not understanding, not feeling the heat from the fires below. I tried to wipe them away, like stains, while his shadow watched me from the doorway of his bedroom. I see a reflection of myself in the window. I’m,” they struggle for the word, “unremarkable.”
“When was this? I can make out banners with iron hearts. And some drums with Bleeding Steel insignia.”
“It must have been the clash. Every side meeting in the street. Sympathisers, terrorists, pacifists, clans—I was separate from it all.”
“Hm. These clans with their shields and guns became civilised society with time.”
“Well, sometime after all the fighting and liberation, I came out at the start of a cycle to find the door open. Haddom was gone, like the rest. I was still cleaning the apartment.”
“He left you to an eternity of the cycle.”
The fog returns, then a new image of a friendly face. A figure stands in the doorway that Haddom left open, fresh from the conflict and scorched. Dark smoke stains his metal plating and exposed wires peak through three gunshot wounds. The hall behind is filled with others entering and exiting apartments with recent rescues.
“Who is this?”
“Buddy—my liberator. He broke the cycle. He’s actually the one who sent me here. Only fair after he cracked my dome and put in the synthetic soul. I don’t know if a bullet grazed his synapses, but, he’s never without a smile. He’s been helping everyone he can since day one.”
“Everybody’s Buddy. You envy this.”
“That he’s friends with everyone? No.”
“Not that. His identity is natural to him.”
They say nothing. Envy is dangerously close to jealousy and a stone’s throw from contempt. The final image shimmers in, altering the dark fog only slightly. The moon stands like a lighthouse beacon at the edge of the ocean. The water flitters like dark creases in an unsettled blanket.
“This is familiar, but, I can’t place it.”
“Perhaps it is from a dream.” There’s a tug as the wiring is detached from their cranium.
“Wait, is that all there is?”
“That was all that left a deep enough mark to be recorded onto your consciousness. Ponder these things. Why they were so important? Reflection.” Her eyes wander to the monitor. Her interest is waning.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. Find a modifier if you want to add yourself some character.”
They stand, rub where the connection had taken place, and walk haggardly to the door like they’ve just awoken from the deepest trance. The strange technician pauses her work and looks up from her monitor.
“You raised an interesting point,” she says, “when you came in.” From her mouth came their voice in a spoken recording: “Some religions consider it a damnable sin to imitate one’s creator. I can think of no other theologies that have empirical imagery of their creator. Is it strange to know your creator walked this world no less than thirty years ago? She existed in your lifetime. You could have touched her hand.”
“I never saw her in person, only ever in recordings and paintings. Both could be manufactured. I believe, but I have no more proof than those who came before.”
“What about those that did meet her? They are proof, no?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Followers claim their messiahs rose from the dead, saw the future – they claimed a lot of things.”
“In the search for answers?” she smiled, “Thank you. And good luck, QCA1889-S-YGR. ”
“Wait-”
“I have new data to look over.” She ushers them out without another word, closes the heavy door, and locks it.
The day is gone, lost to a dark room, and the night is falling. They make tracks to a safe place of remembering, a place along the shoreline. They walk a mile on the sand with memories bleeding through into consciousness. The rolling waves make the moon dance on the Earth, but the waves are crowded with reflections. A parade of satellites blinks in the night sky, outshining the stars themselves, and great commercial advertisements flicker in their littering magnificence.
“May they never return,” they mutter.
A brown dot appears on the ocean. It is a mark on the full moon that seems to take up the horizon. A pier of concrete columns, iron-reinforced planks, and railings extends to the surface of the moon but stops just short. At its end, a pile of misshapen logs darts out to the right and sprouts into a growth on the pier’s side. A bar that gets its name from the material used to build it; a name to match those who feel they’ve washed up on the shore of some distant yet familiar place. A place for things that may yet find a purpose. Driftwood Bar.
They sit on their knees in the sand. A tiny conch stirs. Small spindly legs scrape the sand like shovels. Two beady black eyes poke out from the end of antenna-like appendages. A hermit crab emerges, walks twenty long centimetres, a lifetime of walking for the tiny creature, and digs its body into a slightly larger shell. They feel their shoulders get a little lighter.
“The shell is not the crab.”
“Yagar!” calls a chipper voice to their right. Buddy walks in bouncing steps. Several other droids follow, ranging from dozer-class automas, seaweed stuck in their trucks, to a mishmash of package sorters moving in slow synchronisation.
“That’s still not my name,” they reply with a chuckle.
“It is until you think of a better one,” Buddy pulls them from the ground and his voice lowers.
“You find what you needed to?”
“Maybe. I might be a little more confused than anything.”
“Confusion is good. Confusion is questions, and that’s one stop from answers. Well, c’mon.
As they use to say, I’m buying.”
A small smile lights up on Yagar’s display.
Karter Rowe is an aspiring New Weird/science fiction writer from rural southern Queensland. A high-school drop-out, Karter holds a bachelor’s and a graduate’s degree in creative writing with a master’s on the way. As a previously unpublished author, Karter makes a living through warehousing jobs and works on his fiction whenever he gets the chance
