skonen_blades

I was at The Off Switch, a ferrobar down in the stinking suburb of Silica. Mostly the only life here was robotic. There were some full-replacement humans here and there, their brains nestled behind the metal and plastic, protected against the acrid poisonous air. But other than that, it was just us ambulatory machines clanking and driving around in our downtime. We’d claimed this area of town back from the dump after the second stage of colonization. It was still too radioactively hot and biohazardous for meatlife but it didn’t bother us. The aurora borealis lit the sky most nights, reflecting off our lenses. Multicolored fog from the shipyards wafted through the alleys. It was shot through with streaks of reds and blues that would froth up most lungs.

The city itself was called Newtown. There were five other cities on the planet with that theme of a name. Newville. Newborough. Newburg. Newhampton. Newwich. And Newford. In a mad rush of pioneer spirit, those were always the cities that cropped up on fresh colonial worlds. They usually changed the names over the centuries to names of prominent wealthy families in a fit of vanity and commercial realism. But for now, we were in the gold rush stage. Claims and stakes and barfights, the law taking hold like lichen in a forest, eking out a small presence, trying to mitigate lynch mobs and frontier justice with traveling trial trains that seemed more like a circus event than a fair shake. It only added to the chaos.

At least with robots there was a sort of order. Meatpeople were crazy. I had a few meatfriends that seemed decent but on the whole? As a race? Mad. Completely bonkers. Their achievements were astounding considering the chaos they spread with their existence. I was happy to come to Silica, free of the softbodies, and get drink here at The Off Switch, my favorite pub.

My designation on this colony was Midi Excavator 56993 but I chose to be called Todd. We’d all chosen meatnames here. I chose a new one for each planet we helped colonize. So far I’d had six. It helped me remember each planet and classify the memories in my backups.

The Off Switch serves unsolvable equations. We’re not set up to drink alcohol but this is the way we get inebriated. The trick is that at first they SEEM solvable. There's an art to the recursive algorithms. But once a robot mind starts chewing on them, a unit can devote a lot of cycles to it. It minimizes our capacity, uses up memory, and lets us drift forward on minimal consciousness.

Depending on the capacity of the CPU, it’s blockchained to last however long you specify and priced accordingly. It’s approximate. Some equations can be spiked with resets but that's why you only buy from registered bars. And young AI can't handle the more complex equations. There's an age limit. They have more basic math for the younguns. No higher dimensional impossible shape stuff.

You parked your shell if you couldn't fit inside the bar. Set up your perimeter defenses if you had them, and jacked in to the inlets, hardwire or crypted wifi.

But I could fit through the door so I’d bought my math from the bartender unit and went to a free spot to solve. I was retracted, relaxing in an alcove and scanning idly when The Tank walked in.

It could barely fit through the door. It was a little bigger than the maximum safe allowable mass but it was a slow night and he was a regular so the alarms were muted and the bouncers shunted to the next entrant. Veterans were allowed a little rule-bending.

I’d met this Tank before. Reema was its name, I think. I pinged her with an invitation.




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Jerry was a fat kid.

Jerry’s body looked over-inflated. His skin looked full to bursting. He was one of those solid fat kids. He wasn’t wobbly or jiggly or weak. He was a wall.

He was half-Chinese. His eyes were gunslits and he had a little wet mouth, open like a kissing fish with streams of air whistling in and out all the time. The combination of epicanthic folds with bright western blue eyes struggling to be seen under the dough of his brow made his eyes almost rectangular. He looked like a vending machine come to life in human form. His neck was hard to move. He had to take two steps to look behind him. He walked like a penguin, pivot to pivot, planting his short legs as if they were stilts.

We were immortal in our complete ignorance of danger and he was no different. He was part of our group that summer. The Math Kids. We saw the world differently. That old beam leaning up against the railroad bridge, for instance, was forming an isosceles triangle.

He didn’t sweat. I always thought that was odd. He was always dry no matter the temperature.

We’d go out and conduct physics experiments on the old railroad bridge. Dropping rocks into the river, timing their descent, and then studiously proving that gravity accelerates objects at 9 meters per second squared.

The railroad bridge was no longer in use. It was rickety. It should have been demolished but people still used it as an unofficial footbridge and the politicians de-prioritized an upgrade or a demolition year after year. They never got around to it. It gave the town a rustic feeling of heritage that helped tourism, they said.

The wood was turning to splintery butter in places. Termites, woodworms and time had turned parts of the bridge into sponges. Especially the hand rails.

Sometimes, even now, when someone bites into a piece of celery or cracks all of their knuckles at the same time, I’m transported back to that moment; Jerry leaning forward, holding out a rock that none of us could lift, chest against the railing of the bridge.

I remember Pete standing on the other side of Jerry. I remember the sun making his thick glasses pure white with reflection. I remember his missing front tooth and his bundle-of-sticks body. I remember the freckles that coated his face like a disease. I remember his too-big, older-brother clothes that he’d grow into one day.

I remember the sound then. I remember being really confused as I saw Peter’s face go from laughter to screaming in slow motion.

I turned and there was Jerry.

Leaning forward in the air. The railing now a broken line framing him in the twittering light thrown up from the river reflecting the summer sun. Just a pause like in a cartoon before gravity reached up and pulled him, faster and faster, towards the center of the Earth unless something got in the way.

Like six rotting crossbeams. Like the surface of the river. Like the riverbed.

He never let go of the rock and he didn’t make a sound.

Pete had started the stopwatch with a convulsive jerk of his hand when Jerry had fallen. He dropped it when Jerry hit the water. That stopped the watch.

Out of respect and because we were kids, we figured out the math of his fall and confirmed that gravity was working properly before we went to the police in screaming tears.




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