Logan’s hand had gone numb three days ago, yet his father still gripped it in his rigid fist. Initially, he had tried to remember to flex his fingers, coaxing the reluctant blood into moving, but on that first night, when they’d hunkered down against the base of a huge maple tree, he’d made the mistake of dozing off. When he woke up, he could no longer feel the icy chill and the pins and needles that were the consequence of reaching for his father’s hand that last time.
Overhead, the sun whispered promises of warmth and resplendency between wisps of pessimistic clouds as Logan and his father crossed the gentle sloping hills of a meadow. Dotting the landscape at intervals were the desolate ruins of houses, their roofs caved in, gardens overgrown, vines creeping up crumbling chimneys as though trying to tear them down with their leafy tendrils.
Under different circumstances, Logan might have found the trip to be an adventure, one where his father named the plants and animals they saw along the way, singing songs about the lives of garter snakes and the dangerous berries of plants with three leaves. Dangerous to Logan, at least, the one who needed to consume organic nutrients. They’d talked about it often enough, now that Logan was older—at least twelve, probably no older than fourteen—a father–son journey into the wild, bearing witness to the vestiges of humanity and the time before. Conversations Logan was trying hard not to think about as he led his silent father along by the hand, the light long gone from behind his azure eyes.
At least the hydraulics in his father’s legs still worked, mechanical steps trouncing through the high grass. Logan spoke to him from time to time, just in case the part of his CPU that could hear and process information still retained some functionality, even if his powers of speech and the motor skills in his left arm were fried.
“Look, a stream. It’s a meander, right? The way it snakes back and forth across the meadow? I’m glad we found it. I’m thirsty.”
They changed directions and headed toward the bank, his father neither replying to confirm the type of stream nor objecting as Logan pulled him abruptly in the direction of the water. Logan knelt, using his left hand to inefficiently cup water and bring it to his mouth. It would’ve made more sense to get the bottle out of the bag he’d slung over his father’s shoulder, fill that up, and drink from there, but thirst had a habit of trumping common sense. At least in the human brain.
If his father could speak, he’d certainly have said as much and guided Logan’s behavior toward greater efficiency, explaining at some length the seconds lost by Logan’s bumbling human attempt to slake his thirst without first considering the best way to go about doing so.
“I know, I know,” Logan said, not needing to hear the lecture aloud to feel chagrined.
After he drank his fill, he pulled his father down into a kneeling position. “Let’s rest here for a minute. The air is cooler by the water and the ground is soft.”
More human frailties, of course, but his father never begrudged him those. Only stupid mistakes and ineffectual thoughts, and even then, only gently.
They knelt silently, Logan watching the soft swirl of the current and the water bugs dancing across the surface. He couldn’t remember what they were called, though he’d seen them before. His father would know, of course. Common name, scientific name, life-span, breeding habits. His father knew everything. He probably even knew how to fix himself. Or would know, if . . .
“I wish you could tell me a story,” Logan said quietly.
The silence stretched between them, longer and vaster than the distance to the horizon on a clear day.
He felt his eyes beginning to well up. He hadn’t expected to hear his father’s voice fill the silence, not really, but the finality of the way it remained unbroken grasped at Logan’s sinking hope. He could practically feel his optimism seeping into the moist earth, leaching through the soil, down into the bedrock below.
“Once lived a fish in a meandering stream,” Logan began, struggling to find the space to talk around the lump in his throat. “No, not a fish. A minnow. Family, uh, Cyprinidae, I think. Anyways, he was just a scrawny little minnow, but he loved to dart through the current, and to break the surface tension of the waves to catch bugs that hovered just above the water.
“The little minnow didn’t have any friends. He wasn’t part of a school. He couldn’t remember where the others had gone, only that one day he looked around and it was just him all by himself. He didn’t mind, though. He was really good at catching bugs.
“Except that one day, while he was preoccupied following a juicy, fat mosquito just out of reach above the water, he didn’t notice the hungry trout that was following him . . .”
Logan sighed and stood, pulling his father up with him. “Never mind,” he mumbled. He was no good at stories. Better just to keep going.
They set off again, into the afternoon, following the stream—it was a meander, he was sure of it—as it snaked its way down the field. Streams always flowed downhill because of gravity, although in the case of meanders, the slope was very slight, and they also moved sideways because of the way the current cut into the banks around the bends.
Geology had always been his father’s favorite subject to teach, and Logan’s least-favorite to learn.
“You should strive to learn as much as you can about the ground beneath your feet,” his father would say.
“But why bother if it’ll still be there when my feet aren’t?” Logan would reply.
Of course, now he felt guilty for all the times he gave his father lip. He thought about saying sorry, but his father wouldn’t be able to reply, and sorry never fixed anything anyways.
Another lesson he didn’t appreciate learning.
For the rest of the day, they continued to follow the stream while the meadow’s hills grew more pronounced. Houses became more frequent, nestled among the hills, connected by crumbling roads and forming what used to be called “neighborhoods.”
They approached a few of these only to find them as dilapidated and abandoned as all the rest. It was risky to go looking for others like this. Logan knew that only too well. The problem with looking for others was that you might find them, and they might turn out to be too feral, too crazed, too downright mean for you to get away.
Human or machine didn’t matter. The two groups had gone to war for all their differences, destroyed cities, countries, countless lives, even rendered parts of the globe uninhabitable, and yet after all the carnage and waste, they turned out to be exactly the same. Not that either side was willing to admit it. Not out loud, and certainly not to each other. The few who remained, anyways.
History had been Father’s least-favorite subject to teach and by far the one Logan most wanted to learn.
“Who attacked first?”
“Does it matter?”
“Who won?”
“No one, obviously.”
“What about before the war?”
“Humans ruled the Earth. Poorly, in a lot of ways. But they did the best they could.”
“Why poorly?”
“Because the people that lived before you cared more about their own petty greed than they cared about geology, about the earth beneath their feet and what would happen if they didn’t take care of it.”
“Is that why you hate us?”
“Hate?” His father’s mechanical eyebrows rose. “I don’t hate you.”
That was the problem with this language they spoke with one another. Plural and singular were the same word in the second person, and Logan already knew his father didn’t hate him, singularly. He still wasn’t sure about the plural.
When the sun began to go down, Logan decided to sleep in one of the abandoned houses. It was dangerous to travel at night, even when you weren’t locked hand-in-hand with a machine that weighed ten times as much as you and would crush you if it fell on you.
Logan selected a brick house with a white door that stood ajar. He tried several times to close it, but the frame had warped too much from the heat and moisture of too many summers and too many storms. Instead, he closed it as far as it would go and then propped a chair under the knob to hold it in place. He would have preferred to move something heavy in front of it, like the moldy old couch, but that would’ve required two hands and more cooperation than a lifeless machine would be able to provide.
Just beyond a set of stairs, they found a bedroom with surprisingly clean yellow walls, undamaged by time and the elements. A pink armchair sat in the corner by a window, and at the center of the room stood a large bed with a floral quilt and thick, sumptuous pillows.
If it weren’t for the skeletal remains of two people snuggled together right in the middle of the covers, it would’ve been the perfect place to sleep.
How they died, Logan couldn’t puzzle out. Though the blankets were stained under and around them, it looked more like the kind of filth that decomposing biological matter would create rather than any sort of wound or illness. Instead, it appeared as though both simply gave up and lay down to die.
He swallowed hard, remembering a time when he’d thought about doing the very same thing. Though it was dry inside the house, he shivered with the memory of icy-cold rain pelting his skin. He could still hear the machine-thud of his pursuers’ footfalls, the ominous hum of their processors as they closed in. For a moment, he could almost feel the pressure of his father’s hand on his, slick with rainwater but surprisingly warm in the dark . . .
Logan shook his head to clear it, then pushed his father back out of the room and closed the door behind them. After searching the rest of the ground floor, they found no other bedrooms. There were probably others upstairs, but Logan didn’t know what kind of condition the floors were in or whether they would hold his father’s weight. Unfortunately, the only way to find out would be to take his father with him and possibly fall through when it turned out to be a poor idea.
The ground floor left two possibilities, and while his human brain strongly opposed sleeping in the room with the corpses, he knew his father would tell him to push past his emotions and his repulsion and recognize it as the safer of the two options.
Back inside the bedroom, Logan regarded the corpses. Again, his father’s voice echoed in his mind, telling him that they no longer had need of the bed and its comforts and could not begrudge him its use, but as Logan’s eyes traced the way one of the bodies had its arm draped over the other in a final, eternal gesture of protection and love, Logan shook his head.
“No,” he said in answer to his father’s unspoken advice. “I won’t move them.”
There was still the chair, and if he positioned himself sideways and dangled his legs over the arm, it would still be plenty soft. His father, having need for neither comfort nor sleep, could spend the night on the floor.
He found a spare quilt in the closet, arranged it as best he could on the chair, then pushed his father into a sitting position facing the chair so that Logan could keep his arm at a reasonably comfortable angle while he tried to sleep. After he crawled under the blanket, he lay with his eyes open, trying not to consider the bodies a few feet away and pretending that his father really was watching him sleep and keeping guard until morning.
By the time Logan dozed off, he almost believed it.
He awoke to a beam of yellow light hitting him full in the face, and for a brief, shining moment, he thought it was his father rebooting. Then the light shifted to his father’s unmoving visage, and Logan heard the voice.
“Nanny Series? No, that’s not right. We made ’em look friendlier than this. Something with small children, though. Teacher series, perhaps. Primary school. Would explain the human offspring, if not its presence in the home.”
“Who are you?” Logan’s voice came out steadier than he thought it would, but when the light jerked back onto him, he felt himself flinch deeper into the chair.
“The offspring speaks,” said the voice. “Don’t be afraid. If I wanted to kill you, I wouldn’t’ve woke you up first. I’m Charlie.”
“What do you want with us?”
“Us? Oh, you mean yourself and the machine whose hand you’re gripping so fastidiously. Not used to hearing humans grouped willingly with my kind, even with something so innocuous as a pronoun. But since you ask, I want to understand more about this ‘us’ you so cutely mentioned.” The light turned towards the doorway. “May as well get up, kid. Come back to my place so we can have a proper chat. Bring your machine with you. Doesn’t look like your parents can manage the trip, though.”
“My parents?” Logan sat up and rubbed his eyes with his free hand, only belatedly remembering the skeletons on the bed. “Those aren’t my parents. My father and I were just sleeping here for the night.”
The light swiveled back to Logan’s face, then to his numb hand, crushed in his father’s fist. In the sudden silence, Logan could hear the soft computer hum of Charlie’s processors. “Your father, huh? Well, ain’t that something. Come on then, let’s go.”
The sound of metal footfalls against the hardwood floor punctuated Charlie’s exit, while Logan lay blinking in the abandoned darkness. Next to him, his father offered no guidance, not even inside Logan’s head, as to whether or not they should go with Charlie. But while there was no telling what kind of place Charlie would lead them to, it was true that if he had wanted to kill Logan, there would’ve been no point in waking him up first. Plus, the whole reason for this trip had been to find someone—anyone—who might be able to help, and this was the first someone they’d come across.
Logan kicked the quilt off and tugged his father up from the floor. Back in the living room, Charlie waited, evidenced by the light still hovering in the air. Logan followed it into the kitchen and out the back door, which Logan had not remembered to barricade or even check to see whether it was locked when he was searching for a room to sleep in.
Another stupid, human mistake. That seemed to be about all he was capable of these days.
Outside, the moon was a thin sliver in the cerulean sky, not nearly big enough to provide adequate light, but Charlie kept his beam on as they walked through the streets. Logan led his father along, picking his steps carefully. Cracks and potholes were the least of his worries. From what he’d seen during the day, there was also litter, broken-down cars, forgotten bicycles. And bodies. Always bodies, though not so neatly organized as the ones he’d found in the house. All the same, it was no less horrifying to trip over a solitary femur, and he would be no less injured if his father fell on top of him because of it.
They walked for what felt like hours, long enough for the moon to wander a good distance across the sky, and it wasn’t until the eastern horizon began to glow that Charlie finally clicked his light off and announced that they had arrived. It had grown just light enough that Logan could make out some of Charlie’s features. He was humanoid in the same way that his father was—two legs, two arms, a single head, though his finish wasn’t the mirror-like chrome of his father’s. Rather, Charlie’s finish was more of a dull brass that looked like no amount of polishing would shine. Unconcerned with Logan’s staring, Charlie lifted a hand toward what Logan could only describe as a shack, and a ramshackle, run-down one at that.
It sat at the end of a gravel path, which had branched off the main road, and though there were lights on and evidence of movement inside, the wooden walls looked more like kindling than shelter.
“Home sweet home,” said Charlie, pushing the door open. “Come inside. I’d offer you something to drink the way humans do, but I don’t think you’d want anything I have to offer, unless you have a particular fondness for lubricant or lighter fluid.” He laughed at his own wit and entered.
Logan followed suit, pulling his father along. Inside was a single room lit by two floor lamps positioned on dingy green carpeting. A small robotic vacuum cleaner made paths across the floor, sucking up dust and debris. Not that the carpeting looked any cleaner for it.
On each side of the room were enormous piles of parts—robotic arms and heads and lenses—not quite haphazardly placed but not quite organized, either, at least not to Logan’s eyes. He also saw processors, CPUs, hard drives, and other things he couldn’t identify.
“You’re a mechanic,” Logan said.
“And Bingo was his name-o,” Charlie said, watching him from across the room.
Logan was quiet a moment, shocked at his own good fortune. Of all the possible “someones” to find, a mechanic was the best they could hope for, and somehow, this one had found them instead. But then his shock faded, and his father’s voice reminded him to think rationally.
“You didn’t just happen to find us, did you?” Logan said.
Charlie didn’t answer, simply regarded Logan with a look of amusement.
Logan glanced to his father, down at where their hands were joined together. He remembered the seizure that ran through his father just before Logan grabbed his hand, the horrible sound of buzzing electricity and the smell of burnt wires.
“He’s sending off some type of signal, isn’t he? Even now, even though he seems . . . nonfunctional.”
Charlie nodded. “B-I-N-G-O.”
Logan closed his eyes a moment, saying a silent thank-you to his father and the ingenuity of machines.
“It’s a bona fide SOS,” Charlie said. “Figuratively speaking, of course. My kind has far more efficient ways of transmitting information. Not that you’d know what Morse code is, anyways. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s have that chat now, kid. I’d tell you to pull up a chair, but I don’t have any of those, human company being something of an oxymoron for an old robot like me. I’ve got the floor about as clean as it gets, though, if you want to take a load off.”
Logan eyed the grimy carpet, found a spot with fewer visible stains than the rest, and lowered himself to the ground, pulling his father down with him.
“How’s the hand holding up?” Charlie asked.
For the first time in days, Logan actually looked at his hand in his father’s fist—his numb, swollen, discolored hand. He remembered flexing his fingers a little on that first day, the cool feeling of blood flowing in response to the muscle movements. How long ago that seemed, now. He tried moving it again, wiggling the blackened fingers, willing his hand to clench more tightly, twitch, or show any sign of life. He might have tried to wiggle his father’s fingers for all the good it did.
“I can’t feel it anymore,” he admitted.
“Human anatomy ain’t exactly my area of expertise,” Charlie said, “but I don’t think you’re ever gonna feel it again.”
“You can fix my father, though, right?”
“Beats me,” Charlie said. “It’s all a matter of having the right parts. I know I don’t have anything from the original model, and I’m doubtful of the compatibility of what I do have. I could detach his arm, free your hand, let you wander off to die from blood poisoning, but even if your injury weren’t a factor, I don’t think that’s what you’re after, is it?”
Logan looked again at where their hands were joined. How many times had they held hands just like this? Walking together, playing made-up games in the fields, hands clasped while his father told stories . . . That first night in the rain when this strange, not-yet-familiar machine saved him from other robots that wanted to kill him by offering his hand and half-carrying, half-dragging him to safety. The years that followed, teaching Logan to survive on a half-ruined planet, to find things to eat that wouldn’t poison him, to seek shelter from the weather and the creatures that would hurt him, and to teach him everything that his human brain could hold about the world and his place in it.
“He’s my father,” Logan said in a quiet voice.
“Your adoptive father,” Charlie corrected.
“The only father I have.”
“Don’t you go getting sentimental on me. This world we live in has no room for that kind of nonsense. You love him. He loves you. You have that special father–son bond. Let me tell you something, kid. It ain’t real. None of it. It’s just chemicals, and machines don’t have the right ones. Trust me on this, I would know. I build machines.”
“You didn’t build my father.”
Charlie barked out something like a laugh. “No, you’re right about that. But I could take him apart and put him back together, one rivet at a time, and I wouldn’t find a single milliliter of that mess you humans call love anywhere in there. Like I said, it’s all a matter of having the right parts. What he has is programming. An inclination, to use another human word, to watch out for and educate children. Any child will do for his coding. It doesn’t make you his son. It doesn’t make him love you.”
“But it did make me love him,” Logan snapped. “I don’t care if you think it’s stupid. I don’t care if you say it’s not real. He’s my father and you’re just a stupid old grouch.”
This time, Charlie’s laugh filled the whole room. He doubled over, slapping his thigh with a clang so loud it made Logan’s ears ring. “Sorry, kid,” he said between giggles. “Human anger would be completely adorable if it weren’t so damned destructive. But you win, all right? I am a stupid old grouch, but I’ll see what I can do to help.”
For the next hour or so, while Logan watched the sky grow brighter between the gaps in the boards, Charlie dug through his piles of parts, muttering to himself about serial numbers and operating systems and other things Logan didn’t understand. The little robotic vacuum cleaner went to charge itself then continued running. Though it carefully edged around Logan’s father, it bumped directly into Logan’s thigh, then backed up and did it again.
“I think your vacuum is confused,” Logan said.
“What?” Charlie’s head swiveled around to see the little vacuum bumping into Logan’s knee this time. “Oh. He wants you to get up so he can clean that spot. Isn’t that right, Buddy?”
The vacuum beeped once and then paused, as though waiting.
“That means ‘yes,’” Charlie said. “Once for yes, twice for no.”
“Wait,” Logan said. “You mean he’s . . . um . . .”
“Aware?” Charlie finished. “Yeah, he is. Buddy was an experiment of mine. Wanted to see if I could program consciousness into a machine that was never designed to accept it. I thought it would be miraculous. Like creating life. I hadn’t yet figured out how cruel it actually was.”
Buddy bumped into Logan’s leg again, and Logan scrambled to his feet to get out of the way. “Cruel?” he said, watching as the little vacuum meticulously swept the carpet where Logan had just been sitting. “How?”
“It’s all about the parts,” Charlie said quietly, pausing in his rummaging. “If Buddy decides he wants to paint a picture, read a book, or even have a conversation, he can’t. Doesn’t have the parts. He tries sometimes, you know. The conversation bit, at least. He’ll try to use a different series of beeps and tones, different pitches, longer or shorter durations, rapid or slow. I don’t know what any of it means. Imagine having something important that you want to say to someone, but you have to depend on that person to ask the right questions for you to be able to communicate it.”
“That’s . . .”
“Awful,” Charlie finished for him. “Absolutely awful. But Buddy’s nicer about it than I probably deserve.”
“Beep,” said the vacuum, apparently in agreement, which made Charlie laugh softly.
“Anyways, kid, I think I’ve found about the closet thing I’ve got for your pops here. Now we just have to crack him open and see what’s going on in there. Bring him over here, would ya?”
Logan led his father to the other side of the room where Charlie was waiting with some type of powered screwdriver in his hand. This he used to remove a panel at the back of his father’s head and then another one at the base of his neck. He poked around at the various parts so revealed, grunting or mumbling to himself, and occasionally wielding his screwdriver or a can of compressed air to detach, reattach, or clean things. After that, he used a cable to connect one of his father’s ports to a computer.
Logan didn’t watch any of this too closely. He wouldn’t know what to look for, for one thing, and there was something about seeing parts of his father exposed that felt indecent, somehow, as though to look would be to intrude on his father’s privacy. So instead, he mostly watched Buddy work his way around the filthy carpeting.
Was his father in a similar state to the little vacuum now? Still conscious and capable of complex thought, but trapped in a body that would no longer allow him to express it? Logan thought again of the couple in the bed and how they chose to die rather than continue to exist in a world they no longer understood.
“Buddy, do you get bored vacuuming all the time?”
“Beep.”
“Have you ever thought about . . . just stopping? Like, letting your battery go dead and not recharging or something?”
“Beep.”
“Why don’t you?”
Buddy stopped vacuuming and pivoted on the carpet so that his lens was facing Logan.
“He can’t answer you, kid,” Charlie said. “It’s not a yes-or-no question.”
After a moment, Buddy turned away and headed back toward his charging station.
“Do you want to hear a story?” Logan asked.
Again, Buddy paused, this time for so long that Logan began to wonder if his battery hadn’t gone dead before he made it home. Then he pivoted again and came to rest in front of Logan.
“Beep.”
Logan cleared his throat, hesitating for just a moment before beginning. “Once, after the world had ended, there lived a baby owl. He was a scrawny little thing, born from a scrawny little egg. Nobody ever thought he would hatch, and when he did, nobody thought he’d live long enough to fledge. There wasn’t much food, you see, and the owlet’s family could barely keep themselves alive, let alone this new baby that didn’t have the courtesy or common sense to stay in his egg, what with the world ending and all.
“But, somehow, the owlet grew bigger, living off the tiny amount of food his family could spare, and supplementing this with any bugs he could find in the nest. The world hadn’t ended for insects, you see, and the owlet wasn’t too proud to eat grubs or caterpillars, even if they didn’t taste as good as field mice or rabbits.
“One day, while the owlet and his family were sleeping, huddled together against a rainstorm, a flock of crows swooped in and attacked the nest. To escape, both his parents took flight, and some of the crows followed them, but there were two others that did not. They saw the owlet sitting alone in the nest and they cackled to themselves as they closed in. He hadn’t yet learned to fly, you see. It takes a long time to grow up when you’re not getting enough of the right foods.
“The owlet tried to flee, clamoring higher up through the boughs, flapping his downy wings to help him climb faster. But the crows were expert flyers, and while they weren’t as nimble or able to wiggle through narrow gaps in the branches the way the owlet could, they were still gaining on him.
“As he began to near the top of the tree, he knew his time was running out. His poor little feet were sore from scrabbling between the branches and his wings were exhausted and sopping wet and cold despite the exertion of climbing. The crows weren’t going to give up. His family had told him all about how much crows hated owls and how he should always be on the lookout for them, but none of those lessons were of any use when they could sneak up on a nest while everyone was asleep.
“Alone and too tired now to keep going, the owlet hunched against the rain at the top of the tree and closed his eyes. It was no use. He had nowhere else to go and no energy left to get there. He just sat there, wet and shivering, listening to the sounds of his pursuers getting closer. Any moment now, they were going to break through the cluster of branches and catch him. He didn’t know for sure what they intended to do with him—whether it would be a quick death or a slow one or some other form of torture or enslavement. All he knew was that he was tired, so very tired, and he wanted it all to be over with.
“As he waited for the end to come, he heard a sound he wasn’t expecting. A raven’s caw filled the air. Ravens being cousins to crows, the owlet thought at first that it meant to join the hunt, so he didn’t open his eyes right away at the sound of wings swooping in from overhead. But then, instead of ripping into his flesh or pushing him out of the tree, the raven grabbed the little owlet in his talons and carried him away.
“The crows followed for a time, but the raven was the stronger flier and eventually outpaced them. After that, they landed in another tree, the raven setting the owlet down gently so as not to hurt him, and instead of flying away to resume living whatever life he’d had before, the raven stayed with the owlet, keeping him company, showing him how to find other things to eat besides grubs, and, eventually, teaching him to fly.
“With time, the owlet grew into a fully-fledged owl, and even though he understood that ravens were very different birds from owls, he never forgot the raven’s kindness and called him ‘Father’ from that day on.”
When Logan finished the story, he reached up and wiped away the tears that had welled up in his eyes. Crying had always been his least-favorite part of being human, the inconvenience of it and the mess.
“Sorry,” he mumbled as he sniffled. “Anyways, I hope it wasn’t too bad of a story.”
“Beep beep,” said Buddy as he scooted forward and gently bumped into Logan’s foot.
Logan didn’t know what it meant but decided to take it as a compliment.
“Some tale, kid,” Charlie said, interrupting the silence, “Anyways, I’ve got the diagnostics here on your pops. Most of it is bad news. You ready for this?”
Logan didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just nodded to indicate that Charlie should continue.
“CPU’s fried. Looks like a power surge. Your father is an older teacher model, not really built to last more than ten, fifteen years, and according to this serial number, he was manufactured almost twenty-one years ago. Looks like the cooling fans failed, too, and the hard drive isn’t looking great, either. That’s the bad news. Well, the first part of it, anyways. The good news is that he knew this was coming, must’ve felt the sluggishness in his performance or maybe he just knew he’d already outlived his expiration date. Either way, he set up a hard drive partition and all that data is still intact. That’s how he sent out the help signal.”
“But you can fix him, can’t you?” Logan asked. “You have CPUs here. And hard drives. One of them has to be compatible, right?”
Charlie shook his head. “That’s the problem, kid. Everything that used to be your father got cooked when he short-circuited. His programming, his operating system, memory, all of it. I might be able to shove some parts in here and maybe even download and install some version of the instructor software, but even if I do all of that, he won’t know you anymore. He’ll be just another instructor bot with different specs, different coding, and a different set of tasks to execute.”
“But, you could—”
“He’ll be a different person,” Charlie said. “He won’t be your father anymore.”
Logan’s knees hit the floor as the last traces of hope were crushed by a brassy robot who, by his own admission, lacked the ability to truly empathize with this kind of loss. Buddy nudged his knee, possibly in a gesture of consolation, but Logan ignored him. Although he’d gotten teary-eyed telling the story—his story—his eyes were dry now. Maybe some part of him knew that this had always been a pointless journey. Maybe hope was just another kind of human frailty.
“Can you get him to let go of me?” he said to Charlie.
“I can,” Charlie said quietly, “but if we don’t do something about your hand first, the toxins that have built up are going to travel to your heart and kill you.”
“Good,” Logan said.
The silence that followed this was as complete as any Logan had ever heard before. Buddy nudged his knee again, and Logan had to stop himself from shoving the little vacuum away. Instead, he tried to wrench his hand out of his father’s grip, not caring when the skin tore and a foul-smelling pus oozed out of it.
“You know,” Charlie said, “no ravens are going to show up and carry irritating little owls away from this one. If you want to end yourself, that’s your business. I’m not going to waste time arguing with a human when his mind’s set on something, however foolish it is. But before you go screaming and wailing at me for not acting quick enough in some petty little fit of human rage, how about you calm down a moment and let me tell you the rest of what’s on the partitioned hard drive?”
“Fine,” Logan snarled, pausing in his thrashing. “What else is on the hard drive?”
Charlie gave him a hard look and turned back to the computer screen. “There’s a .txt file. It’s probably better if you read for yourself.”
Logan closed his eyes momentarily, not sure if he even wanted to know what last words his father might have for him. They wouldn’t bring him back, and words never made anything hurt less, no matter what the stories said. But after a long moment of hesitation, he pulled himself to his feet and peered into the monitor.
It was just a few short sentences, not some lengthy lecture or dramatic fare-thee-well. How like his father to spend most of Logan’s waking moments going on at great length about plants and animals and the nitrogen cycle and things, only to leave such a short good-bye. Still, Logan looked at the glowing words on the monitor.
“Consider the top two layers of the Earth. The lithosphere is hard and brittle, and it cracks and breaks when stress is applied, whereas the asthenosphere flows and is much more malleable to pressure and opposing forces. Learn from the ground beneath your feet. Unlike the Earth, you can decide how you handle stress. Don’t let this break you, son.”
He stood there blinking, reading the words to himself again and again. Even at the end, all his father had for him were lectures. No confessions or assurances of love and acceptance. Just a lesson, and a geology lesson at that. His least-favorite subject.
And yet . . .
Had his father not explained the inefficiencies of anger many times? Whenever he’d lost his temper, his father would be there showing him how his tantrums were making things worse, causing him to be careless, to make mistakes, to act without thinking.
He must have known that Logan would respond poorly to the news of his death, that he would not fully consider the implications of destroyed hardware and would get his hopes up. After all, his father was a machine and machines aren’t mortal the way humans are.
It just turned out that they were mortal in other ways.
Logan swallowed, trying to ease some of the sudden dryness in his mouth. Then he turned back to where Charlie was watching him.
“Thank you for showing me that,” he said.
Charlie nodded. “So you are capable of reason. He taught you well.”
“Maybe not well enough,” Logan said. “I shouldn’t have tried to grab his hand when . . . it happened.”
“To that point, I have an idea. Now, I said before that human biology isn’t my forte, and I meant that. It’ll be risky. But it seems better than certain death. You interested?”
Logan had lost his hand months ago, but sometimes he swore he could still feel the itches and aches of the limb that was long gone. Although he knew the sensations were entirely in his head, that didn’t mean they weren’t real enough to feel. The cold was real, too, but that was located in the wrist he still had, right where the stump of his arm was attached to a familiar mechanized chrome hand.
The cold was endless, especially when the temperature dropped. His wrist would throb with icy fire, pulsing with each heartbeat, sometimes sending shivers through his whole body. But it was a small price to pay. The hand—his father’s hand—worked.
Though he couldn’t feel anything with it—no discerning soft from hard, silky from smooth—he could grip and grasp and wiggle his fingers as much as he wanted with just a thought, same as his other hand. It felt like magic. Maybe it even was magic.
His father would’ve scolded him for saying so, but maybe technology and magic didn’t have to be mutually exclusive. Maybe magic was just what happened when things you thought weren’t possible suddenly materialized, even if you knew they were controlled by actual science and a grumpy old mechanic named Charlie.
Logan knelt by the bank of a river to get a drink. This one was downcutting, not meandering, owing to the rocky ground and the shale outcroppings of ancient mountains. He cupped his hands into the stream and then brought them to his lips to drink. Not as efficient as filling the bottle, of course, but he liked using the hand, liked seeing it animated and under his control.
The rocky riverbank felt hard beneath his knees. With his robotic hand, he could easily smash any of the sedimentary rocks he saw around him. It wouldn’t take much force, just a simple flex of his metallic fingers. These rocks were brittle like that. They couldn’t handle change or external pressures.
Not like Logan. He’d learned to be malleable.
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May/June 2011. Copyright Stephanie Kraner