Robogenesis: A Novel

4. MIND OF LIFE


Post New War: 5 Months, 19 Days

During the New War, Nomura Castle was well defended against the incursion of attacking robots (called akuma by the locals). Mr. Takeo Nomura, who was responsible for building this lifesaving defensive structure, nevertheless did not seem to want any part of ruling the people he had protected. Some of his followers believed that he was shirking his duty as he turned his attention to the sea, and others felt that he should be allowed to move on. But even from afar, I suspected that the old man had found something momentous waiting in the depths of the ocean.

—ARAYT SHAH


NEURONAL ID: TAKEO NOMURA

What is a mind, but a pattern? My mind or yours. Man or machine. Simply an arrangement of atoms. Each of us, a unique expression of the mind of the universe.

Thoughts are precise bullets of electricity, fired through our neurons in timed pulses. Our bodies are layers of folding skin and muscle laced with fractal lightning. Natural, like veins on a rain-soaked leaf. Cracks in a tumbling stone. Or the sigh of this wave, lapping my shins until they are cold and numb. The clear liquid flows in, suspends the fine black hairs on my legs, and then retreats, laying the hairs down in new configurations. The sky leaks raindrops over my bony shoulders like Morse code.

We are patterns. Trapped inside other patterns.

After six months of listening, the sea sends an emissary. The towering bulk of a bizarre machine approaches our outermost seawall. A glistening spire, afloat, the size of a skyscraper. It forges ahead, slow and steady, through azure stripes of rain. From the salt encrusted on it, I would say it came from the open ocean. The dreamer only knows what this derelict has been doing out there on those endless blue plains.

I am staggered by its layered complexity.

Half submerged in Tokyo harbor, the spire is saturated with living things. It sprouts so far into the heavens that its upper reaches are shrouded in the rain haze. Some kind of muscular fiber makes up the main trunk, braided thick as the Tokyo Skytree, resembling bark but clearly with much higher tensile strength. It bears further study, as does the stability mechanism. The island-machine flutters delicately on flat fins the size of baseball fields, rising and falling, surfaces curling with wet sea grass on top and studded with barnacles below. Each pulse of the surf surges over the lip of the rear fin and washes straight through the marshy ecosystem.

“It is beautiful,” I say to Junshi-88.

The humanoid robot stands in the surf with me, trinocular lenses protruding at maximum zoom. It wears no human clothing, only a camouflaged green and black armored outer casing. Spurning human adornments is a mark of autonomy.

I hear the raucous squawking of seagulls from here. Hundreds of them circle the treelike structure, hunting the fish that swarm below in its safe harbor. The birds are nesting in the upper branches and have been for many generations, it seems, above clouds of insects. The fiber base is shit-stained and covered in seaweed, riddled with dens and nests and burrows. The voice of the sea has manifested itself to me in the most enormous and ancient form of life possible.

“Do you think it is shinboku?” I ask.

“Hai,” says the 88, its voice a grinding whine. Unlike the generations of overly polite robots that populated Japan before the New War, my freeborn ally is barely willing to speak in human audible frequencies, much less exercise impeccable manners. He is his own, not a servant, and there is no risk of my forgetting it.

I nod vacantly, staring. It must be a form of shinboku, a divine tree, honored by the monks and called upon to protect Shinto shrines. This mightiest of shinboku is beached here, as if lost from some other dimension. It forms a pattern so intricate that it places a gentle flame of awe into the pit of my belly. I am glad that I can simply coexist with a thing of such beauty and complexity. The shinboku has come from the unknowable flat wasteland of the open ocean, through tides of war, crafted by the voice of the sea and now sent into our harbor.

My equipment detects communications being relayed from hidden antennae located in the upper reaches of the tree. I slide a pair of modified binoculars over my eyes. Flip on a radio overlay of my own design. Scan the patterns until I find an alcove, nestled in the top. Some kind of control center is perched in the crook of two large branches, its entrance covered by sweeping vines. The binoculars reveal radio communications floating from the tower. Greenish wisps of communication meander over infinite glittering waves, to the horizon.

The voice of the sea is speaking.

I tap the 88 on its shoulder and we return to our little boat. Continue puttering up the Sumida River toward Nomura Castle. Behind us, the swaying island-tower watches balefully from where it rises out of the bay, the size of a movie monster kaiju.

Reaching the top of the shinboku will not be easy. I will need to retrieve my best tools if I wish to climb the tree of life. And returning to my workshop is, unfortunately, complicated. Mikiko will be there and she will disapprove of this mission. My place is on the throne, she says. I made my people a promise to protect them. I haven’t been back to the castle in weeks, staying on the streets with the Junshi-88.

The darkness settled over my people in the last months like silent falling strips of black silk. In the field of optics, they call the phenomenon a “just noticeable difference threshold.” A slight darkening of things. Each tiny gradation impossible to perceive.


Until the suicides began.

One month ago, I returned from a night expedition to the bay. In the frigid predawn, I had just docked my little wooden motorboat on the river. Junshi-88 was walking behind me in quiet pneumatic steps. It stopped. Ground out a verbal warning in Robspeak. My eyes lifted from the roadway and thoughts of the roiling sea evaporated.

A curious sight.

Nomura Castle lies on a small hill, giving it a view of the surrounding Adachi Ward. Scarred and leaning, its curtained walls of flash-welded steel and iron surround a star-shaped central keep. The roof of the castle is a curved square, the roofline bowed, edges thrusting out angrily like the horns of a kabutomushi beetle.

A little fellow was standing on the sweeping arch of the keep tower, his body sheathed in layers of hazy morning light, face empty, taking deep, slow breaths. Fish-scale flakes of armored roofing winked around him and I remember the roosting pigeons were giving him polite space.

“Not good, Junshi,” I murmured.

The crack of the young man’s bones on the castle steps was like the report of a pistol. We hurried to his body and tried our best to move him into a respectful position. With the fighting over, I could not imagine why the man would step away from this life. The akuma offer no more threat. But the war must have torn holes in our hearts. When it ended, no hope arrived to fill them.

“You must be very sad and lonely,” I whispered to the corpse. “But your friends will come for you soon and they will help put you to rest.” Junshi-88 blinked at me, processing my words. I do not know if it understood. By treating the dead as if they are living, we give them respect. We make life easier for those who remain.

Junshi-88 helped me arrange the body and did not complain. I do not fear to touch a dismantled machine. On that morning I learned that this bravery can go the other way, too.

The young man was not the first to leap. Nor was he the last. Many of my people are falling. They are drowning. Hanging and suffocating and burning. I cannot say why my people are leaving us. I have never been good with emotions. But I can feel the wrongness of the empty act. The despair and meaninglessness that have settled over us like still, glassy water.

Without an enemy, we are falling forward. Nothing to push against. Flailing into empty space. We do not know how to start over. There is no route back to the beginning. The pattern of the world is torn. Living in the ruins of our memories is painful, and many would rather die.

My people may despair, but I do not.

For many years I have lived in a bare room with a woman and a workbench. A lamp and a chair and well-oiled tools spread out on a reed mat. Warm fingers on my shoulders. Hot tea. The bright smell of washed hair and the warm lingering scent of the soldering iron. It is a world of hope. From in here I can see the tools of rebirth everywhere. Each mangled wire or melted scrap is another piece of the puzzle.

I say a prayer as I cross the square where that nameless young man stepped out of the world. Beside me, 88 marches dutifully. The awakened military humanoid is a chilly friend. Never a recipient of my services. But Mikiko asked it to protect me, and as a freeborn, 88 takes her command very seriously. It required two nights before I became used to having it watch me sleep.

“There he is,” calls someone. “Nomura!”

“What is in the harbor!?”

“Are we under attack!?”

My people are gathered. Each measured shout sends my head ducking lower and puts an extra scurry in my steps. Junshi-88 clears the way as we trot up the sweeping promenade of steel steps. They have been destroyed and repaired in a cycle these last three years. Burrowed under, demolished, heat-blasted, and soaked in the blood and oil of our defenders. The enemy akuma never made it inside. Not after that first time.

No one tries to stop my passage. I glance up, just once, and see that there are hundreds of my people outside the closed doors to the throne room. They are milling around and talking to each other in concerned whispers. A hush shudders through them like a wake as 88 pushes a path through.

I am not good at talking to them. Head down, as usual, I climb the steps. My workshop is still located in the main hall, on the same spot where I first knelt and began to work on a nearby senshi robot arm. Back when this place was an abandoned factory and not a shining fortress.

The 88 and I enter through an arched front door made of cross-hatched steel beams. The fortified door gleams like the armored scales of some giant prehistoric fish. It was built by the great crane-arm senshi that rests now, coiled and deadly, high against the ceiling of what is now the throne room.

Slipping inside, I pad across the vast space. A neat corridor of senshi honor guard flanks the path to the throne. Each robot arm is folded in a salute, coated in glistening, nail polish–red paint. My terracotta army, always capable of animating, but not called on to defend the central keep in more than a year. Are they unhappy to be without purpose now? I wonder. Or will the time soon come again when they must build?

The scrap-metal throne is empty.

I leave the 88 behind and trot around the throne. My table and lamp are shoved against the stone foundation of the dais. Polished steel flooring whispers under my paper sandals. My amorphous reflection spreads below like a dark puddle on the metal. Quiet now. A little farther and I can make it out without alerting Mikiko.

Hastily, I stuff the tools I will need into a brown canvas backpack. Ransacking my work desk, I pull out all manner of tools and trinkets. Soon the bag is bulging. Last thing, I grab my trusty toolbox and tuck it under my other arm.

“Mr. Nomura,” calls Mikiko.

Her voice stills my feet. My queen steps out from behind the dais that supports our thrones. I cannot remember the last time I climbed those steps to sit on that ostentatious chair. At some point, it has been decorated with a fan spray of sharp, twisting scrap metal, collected from our destroyed city.

“Mikiko,” I whisper.

“Did you notice your people outside?” she asks.

“Oh, uh. No,” I reply. “Too busy, in any case.”

Mikiko does not react to my obvious lie.

“Listen to me now. I cannot stop this darkness. The survivors need a human being to lead them. Someone who understands the despair they feel. An emperor.”

“No time,” I say.

“The rate of suicide is increasing,” she says. “I do not know how to help them. They need a purpose. You gave them that, once.”

“I’ve got to get back to the harbor,” I say.

“What are you afraid of, Takeo? Really?”

The question lingers, her synthetic voice echoing.

“Very busy,” I whisper, taking a step.

As I turn to go, she speaks: “My darling, you will never find what you have lost. The answers you seek are not in the sea. They are in here.”

I stop moving. My skin has gone cold. I am thinking of those wide, round little eyes. The crushing press of the wave against my back.

“It’s . . . a shinboku,” I say, voice shaking. “In the harbor. The voice of the sea has sent it here to me. I must find out why.”

“The platform that washed up? It is an artifact of war. Broken and derelict.”

“I am curious,” I whisper.

So difficult to explain, these patterns in my mind. The razed remains of Tokyo and the phantom images of buildings that are gone. The wailing ghosts of millions of dead, their bodies churned under the ground and burned to smoke on the wind and swept out to the bottom of the sea.

I need to understand it. I need to find the meaning in it.


“Trust me, my love,” I say. “The voice of the sea—”

“Is in your imagination!” she shouts. Her voice echoes from the thick rib supports that hold up the vast arched ceiling. “I am losing you to the past. To the same despair that is taking your people. Stop this madness. Come back, Emperor Nomura. Do your duty.”

Now there is exquisite emotion on her face. Anger and sadness. I know she places it there for me alone, an affectation. Each careless wrinkle on her face, every strand of gray in her hair puts a thumping into my heart. Passion and dread. I try to imagine returning to her side and ignoring the voice calling to me from the sea.

She is her own and you know it, old man. You are going to lose her.

The thought makes my fingertips numb, puts a thickness in my throat and a warm waiting tide behind my eyes. I cannot face it.

“This is my duty to myself,” I whisper, and scurry away.

Watching your feet is not the best way to survive. Crossing the picked-over remains of Koto Ward, I do not notice the danger until it is almost too late. I am passing through a half-collapsed concrete office building that lies in the shadow of the shinboku. Junshi-88 is outside, testing the path ahead—over and through the rubble of the old shipping district. Leftover killing machines are seldom attracted to the 88’s lack of body heat or its unnaturally heavy and long step vibrations. The pitter-patter of my feet is just right for certain varieties of the simple machines, however.

I am alerted by a noise like a whale surfacing for a breath. Psssh. An oddly beautiful sound. Turning, I see a blur of quivering antennae and skittering forelimbs across the room. A type of killing machine that we call a cricket lands in the doorway. Another one, the size of a fist, punches through a pane of dirty glass and bounces lightly over the concrete. I hear the noises again, outside. I cannot help it and I make a small moan. The newly arrived crickets immediately orient toward my sound and heat.

The cricket is a subspecies of the stumper, a crawling land mine. The difference is that the cricket uses a piston to launch itself short distances. It glides on stubby wings, highly explosive, attracted to body heat. More gray blurs are clustering on the window panes. Some are coming through, landing on shards of shining glass.

It is nothing personal. This is simply their design.

The heavy bag over my left shoulder is balanced by the toolbox strapped over my other shoulder. In wobbling steps, I move into a slightly cooler shadow. The crickets spread out behind me, reflexively self-organizing as they forage. Junshi-88 is already outside, facing me through the far doorway but not knowing how to react. I wave my hand at it. Be still and wait outside, please. There is a good chance I will survive.

The wooden ceiling joists of this building have bloated and splintered like an old locust shell left behind on a tree. The cavernous room is filling with the echoes of scraping armored legs and the tap of antennae as they spread out, picking their way over rain-streaked concrete.

Hands shaking, I reach into my bag.

I clamp my fingers onto a black stick. Pull it out and hold each end in one hand. With a quick twist of my wrists, I activate the joist-seeker. Two struts pop out of each end, forming a hand-sized H. Each strut has a small rotor attached. I hold the device up, fingers clamped to its narrow body as the quad-rotor helicopter powers up.

When I let go, it remains hovering in place.

The crickets pause midstep, listening to the low hum of the spinning rotor blades. I turn my face away as the seeker blinks at the room with a scanning laser. It gently buzzes away toward the ceiling, sending a waft of air washing over my neck.

I scurry away while they are distracted. A gray shape flutters past me like a slow-motion bullet, missing my arm by a half meter. It thunks into the wall and bounces off as light from the doorway hits my face. Junshi-88 is a dark blur outside, poised but waiting patiently. Inside, the seeker is calculating the weakest geometric point of the joists that hold up the damaged building. These flying sticks are how we demolished much of the akuma-riddled Adachi Ward when we needed to create a clear perimeter.

I hurry through the bright door.

Three meters into the front yard, I hear the echo of a warning siren from the joist-seeker. I count down from three in my head. Even so, the concussion surprises me, and I stumble. Staggering, I keep to my feet as the shock wave turns to heat and the broken building crumples in on itself. A simple task of spotting the structural weak points and removing them. Math and equations and explosions.

A series of smaller explosions carve pockmarks as the crickets explode under rubble. The swarm is happy again. More crickets are streaming out of their hiding holes. Piston-launching their cheaply made carapaces into the smoldering heat.

“Moshimoshi, 88,” I say, greeting the machine. “We continue.”

“Head up,” says the 88, watching over my shoulder for a long second, making sure no more curious remnants are filtering out of the broken city. Before us, the shinboku rises out of the harbor like the wet bones of a leviathan. Twisting in the wind, slow and inevitable in its advance to shore. Drops of rain weep from the treelike branches that sway high above. A deep, almost subsonic, moaning emanates from the structure as those field-sized petals churn slowly in the surf. One petal is already wedged partially onto the shore, grass fluttering.

The divine tree leans and the small alcove I saw before is almost directly above us, lost in a tangle of vines.

On unsteady legs, I walk out into the wet marsh area. Insects flutter past my face, not all of them natural. Many of the animals and insects here are artificial. I resist the urge to sit down in the muck and study my immediate vicinity.

Instead, I pull a ratty collage of thin parachute cord out of my bag. The cord is attached to an old board, driftwood once, with two holes drilled in it and the rope wrapped through. I carefully lower myself to one knee. Allow myself one small groan as my back creaks angrily.

Ah well, an old mind is worth old legs.

I lay the board flat on the damp ground. Kneel in the shadow of the

88 and loop all the rope I have together in a neat coil. Finally, I turn my canvas sack upside down and a bundle of stiff black legs falls out. Using a carabiner, I snap the coil of rope to the black thing’s body. It is a climbing device made from something that was once called a tickler.

My own modified design, never tested above two stories.

In both hands, I pick up the tangle of cord. Pinch the scruff of the tickler’s neck with one hand. Four longer articulated legs dangle. I move my hands over the device and check each part. A yank on each of the climbing legs. A twist of the spooler. And a press of the power button.

Bright laser targeting emanates from the device. Tongue peeking from my mouth, I aim the intense, coin-sized green dot into the upper reaches of the shinboku. Train it on the spot where I know the alcove is located.

The target blinks three times.

“Climb,” I whisper, standing. Underhanded, I grunt as I toss the machine straight up. It catches onto the stalk and begins its ascent. As it goes, I hear only the seagoing creak of fiber as the whole platform sways in massive, incomprehensible locomotion.

I sit on the board as the coil of rope steadily unravels into the sky. Feed the rope so it does not catch as the wind blows it like spider silk. The tickler climbs the vines and branches with uncanny precision and speed. It is a black streak, like the reverse beam of a flashlight raking up the side of the tower.

“If I am killed, please return to Mikiko and tell her what happened,” I say.


“Hai,” says 88.

Then the rope catches, pulls the board tight against my thighs. Toolbox over my shoulder, I cling to the rope with both hands. Somewhere, the spooler is activated. As I rise, swinging, the mold-green Junshi-88 stands expectantly below me.

“Farewell, Junshi,” I say, and I am lifted dangling into the air.

Holding the rope tightly, I squeeze my eyes shut. Listen to the wind sigh through the tentaclelike vines. The sound of lapping waves soon recedes. The air cools and sounds fade as the tickler’s rasping spooler reels me up in a steady motion. Peeking, I see arched, hooded microwave transmitters clustered in the branches.

I do not dare to look down.

Finally, I reach the alcove. It is just a Y-shaped crease in the thick vines. A narrow flat surface inside. Wide enough for only a few people. Squinting into the featureless haze of gray sky, I spot the silhouettes of antennae overhead. Fiberlike cables snake like vines over the limbs. All of them connect in a single nexus, here in this alcove.

I scramble inside. Try to ignore the breathtaking drop as I pull my toolbox off my shoulder and drop it onto the fiber-woven floor. On my knees, hunched over, I pry at the wires. Allow the music of the circuits to speak to my hands. I place a directional antenna on the ground and swivel it around with a finger. The finder beeps quietly, scanning the direction of radio transmissions to and from the shinboku.

While the finder works, I plug a diagnostic computer into the mainline antenna. Tap a direct line into the shinboku transmissions. Sets of encrypted data flutter over the line. On a whim, I plug in a small microphone, squeeze the transmit handle, and speak.

“Who are you?” I ask.

Nothing happens. The finder beeps quietly, homing in on a location out to sea. Then, a shiver runs through the tree. Groans form somewhere deep inside the platform. And text appears on my battery-powered display. The luminescence races like green flame across the dusty screen. Strange words appear.

I am the eternal spread of life across the abyss. I am the whole. The vastness.

It reminds me of speaking to the great akuma. But this is a different mind. This transmission has arrived from the open ocean. I adjust a knob to home in on the exact location. I will find this voice.

“I shall call you Ryujin,” I say. “After the dragon god of the sea.”

In ancient times, it was not uncommon for men to speak with the gods. The minds of the earth and sea and sky were once present to mortals. Great wars shook the planet. Wars that determined whether our ancestors would live or die.

“We have been finding new creatures. Not natural and not unnatural. Are you the one who is making them?” I ask it.

Yes.

“Why?”

To replace you when you are gone.

A breeze is building. The platform is moving now, swinging slightly.

“Ryujin-sama, why do you say this? Who seeks to attack us?”

Not you. The enemy seeks the awakened ones. They will die in their mountain stronghold. Feasting on their power, a shallow mind shall grow deep. This thing called Arayt will exterminate the freeborn, and then humankind.

The platform is swinging now. Seagulls shriek at the groaning of the deep struts. Something is wrong.

“What can we do?” I ask.

You. Can. Die.

Slipping, I grab hold of a vine and cling to the shinboku. Long ago, men bargained with the gods. Those times have come again, I think.

“No! Not acceptable. Can you help stop this?”

Yes.

“Will you?”

Perhaps.

I am clinging to the vines now, my right arm entwined. The little wooden board bangs somewhere. The horizon is rising and falling, wind ripping at my clothes as this titanic machine tries to shake me off like a flea.

The finder is beeping wildly, keyed in on Ryujin’s location. Impossible. A far-off point on the bottom of the sea. All transmissions are being delivered piecemeal to clusters spread out over the abyssal plains in the depths.

“What do you demand, Ryujin?!” I ask. “Name it.”

A pattern.

“What pattern?” I ask.

Slammed against the alcove wall, the microphone slips out of my free hand and falls. I wrap both my arms around the vines, but they are slick and wet. A sandal slips off my foot and I watch it pinwheel away into the empty sky. Below, the entire bay is frothing with the thrashing of this colossal beast.

“What pattern!?” I shout.

What is a mind, but a pattern? I think.

The computer has slipped away. Ryujin can no longer hear me.

Lunging, I scoop up my finder and sling on my toolbox. Yank the board to me by its damp rope and sit on it. The tickler is still buried above, holding on tight. Leaning over the void, sitting on the board, I glance the vista of a ruined Tokyo.

Time to go—before the shinboku tears itself apart.

A final swing of the trunk sends the diagnostic computer clattering back toward me. Just before it plummets over the side, I catch sight of a final sentence scrolling across the display. A wail grows in my chest as I read Ryujin’s last words to me.

Give me the one who sings . . . the mother of the freeborn.