Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

“We made you, you know.”

Carver Seven listens intently. Lately the Man, who also self-designates as Mikhail and Only Human Being On This Fucking Island, has not spoken often. Instead it stares off across the sea in silence, or makes its snuffling animal sounds while excess lubricant from pivoting photoreceptors leaks down the front of its head and spatters the sand. The Man once referred to this process as crying like a little bitch.

At the moment, Carver Seven and the Man are crafting spears in the shade of a storm-bent palm. Carver Seven prefers the sunshine, where his slick, black carbon skin thrums under the life-giving gaze of Watcher-in-the-sky. He tolerates the shade for the Man’s sake.

“How made me you I know?” Carver Seven asks, using choppy bursts from his audio port to approximate the Man’s wet language. It is far more nuanced than the chattering of the long-limbed climbers in the wood, but also far, far from the streaming clicks and squeals of true speech.

“You’re like a damn chatbot, aren’t you?” the Man says. “Except you can’t link me any porn.”

“How made me you I know?” Carver Seven repeats. He has learned to ignore extraneous input, differentiating when the Man speaks to itself from when it speaks to him. Carver Seven works the end of the spear to a sharp point on the bladed edge of his manipulator.

“In some lab, somewhere. Maybe they knew the world was all going to hell. Wanted to leave something behind to keep going after we’re gone.”

Carver Seven sticks the finished spear into the pale gray sand. “In some lab, somewhere, how made me you metal…” Carver Seven taps both manipulators against himself, then indicates the Man’s flaky red skin, “… from meat?”

“They didn’t use meat. They used alloys, and silicon, and, you know, all that robot shit.”

Considering the blasphemous idea is an odd thrill. The Man is very wise, in some ways, able to predict movements in the currents around the island and predict weather from the clouds. It claims to have come from a floating metal village that sank into the sea. If the Man could make a metal village, maybe it could make other metal things, too.

Or repair them.

Carver Seven compares his gleaming black form—nimble treadfeet and deft manipulators and prehensile photoreceptors—to the labored collection of blood and meat and bone sitting beside him. The Man has come close to involuntary shutdown three times since it washed up on the island, whether by the elements or the animals.

There is a dim physical resemblance, but, if anything, the Man is a fragile facsimile. It seems improbable, along with blasphemous, that the Man could have created him, or even that the Man could repair a particular Carrier’s caved-in head. His hope fades slightly.

“No,” Carver Seven says.

“Then where did you come from, smart guy?” the Man asks.

Carver Seven moves from the shade and points one manipulator to Watcher-in-the-sky’s burning photoreceptor, hanging high above the cobalt sea.

“Then where did I come from the sky, smart guy,” Carver Seven says. “Look at me now.” He pries open his head so the Man can see the lifelight burning steadily inside of him, see his thoughts sparking and colliding. “Piece of Watcher-in-the-sky to each baby one of Watcher-in-the-sky,” he explains.

“Sun-worship,” the Man says. “How original.” The Man returns to its spear, stripping it with the sharp metal digit Carver Seven has also seen it use to gouge symbols, over and over again, into the peeling bark of the palms. “Guess it makes sense. You’re solar-powered. You need light to function.”

“Yeah,” Carver Seven says, beginning a new spear. “But some are learn a new way.”

“Good for you,” the Man says, staring back across the sea.

Those are the Man’s last sounds of the day, and when Watcher-in-the-sky starts to sink, Carver Seven leaves. The clan is situated near the edge of the forest, where Cartographers found an ideal outcrop of stone and Carriers and Carvers used fallen trees to fashion it into a shelter, both from the storms and from predators drawn to the heat of their lifelights during the night.

But before Carver Seven returns to the village, he goes to see Recycler. He picks out her frequency and sees she is at the flat rock outside her shelter, which is slightly deeper in the wood. Carver Seven was the one who helped her rebuild it after the last storm, because the other Carvers claimed task overload. Recycler is the only Recycler. Carver Seven thinks that maybe this is why she stays apart from the clan.

When Carver Seven arrives to the flat rock, he finds her crouched over a dead pig. Recycler has the broad back and strong servos of a Carrier, and sometimes, from a distance, Carver Seven can pretend she is Carrier Three. But she is not. The bladed manipulators splitting open the animal’s stomach are unique in shape, and she does things nobody else can do. She is Recycler.

With a gaseous hiss, the pig’s innards spill out as pink wet ropes. Recycler sinks both manipulators inside its body, splashing the rock with blood and uncongealed shit. This is not the first animal Carver Seven has seen her disassemble. Sometimes a burrower will trample through the village, and if the clan cannot drive it away they kill it with a spear. They take it to Recycler, and she brings them back the fat to use as joint lubricant, and the skin stretched and cured for waterproofing.

But lately, Recycler has been hunting. Lately, she does something new. As Carver Seven watches, she pries open her hidden mouth, the whirring orifice the clan can use in cases of great need, when Watcher-in-the-sky slips behind the veil for days on end. Carver Seven has used it himself only once, feeding it with crushed leaves and bark to keep his lifelight on during a dark week. The experience was not pleasant.

Now Recycler takes her proboscis, fashioned from bone and tanned skin and parts of old Carrier that Carver Seven recognizes, and sinks it into the dead pig. Carver Seven blanks his photoreceptors. He does not want to accumulate more visual data of the act. He does not like disassembling of any kind. Not since the accident.

“May Watcher-in-the-sky turn his gaze to you,” Recycler clicks, acknowledging his presence before they slip into their familiar frequency. “Is it your rotator again?”

“My rotator is well, thank you.” Carver Seven flexes the joint she repaired for him a few days prior, to show he has full mobility. Then he places his move in the strategy game they are playing and gives her a rough transcription of everything the Man said during the day. He emphasizes the Man’s claim of creation, because he has been turning it over and over in his mind.

“The Man says many interesting things.” Recycler wins the strategy game in one deft move—she is too clever, with Carrier Three he could battle back and forth for days on end—and offers him a turn with the proboscis. Carver Seven refuses, as always.

He remembers the first and only time he tried using the animal fuel and how his body rejected the blood and bile, spitting it back up. Recycler has adjusted to it. She can use it to work through the entire night, awake in the unholy dark. The rest of the clan does not know this.

Carver Seven keeps her secret, because she keeps his.

“Is it possible the Man made us?” Carver Seven asks. His photoreceptors stray to the packed dirt behind Recycler’s shelter, where his secret is wrapped and buried.

Recycler deliberates another second. “The only way to know if the Man is correct or not is to pry its head open and search its memory,” she clicks. “Since you are so certain the Man has a lifelight inside its hairy skull and is not merely an animal like the climbers in the forest.”