“Uh, yes, actually,” said Murka.
“And you thought I might be excited by the prospect of putting her to the test so that, if she passes, she can share the light with a mainframe, showing him the one true way?”
“Yes. How did you—”
“Murka. Murka. Do you honestly think this is the first time I’ve run across a receptacle?” He raised his arm to the gate. Hanging on the second row were the heads of two translators, one a deep scarlet, the other azure.
“I just thought—”
“You thought you could waltz back in here after what you did, hoping your celebrity status would afford you a little leeway while you offered me a crack at another receptacle.”
Murka nodded, shifting side to side, rubbing his hands together nervously. I realized that I might not get the chance to be the one to kill him after all.
“You thought right! They never pass the test, but boy howdy, would I love to try again!” He let out a hearty laugh, slapping Murka on the back. “You old son of a gun. I can’t stay mad at you. You’ve seen more light than most. You know the truth. You know what we really do here.” He held both hands out, voice booming. “The banishment of Murka is lifted! So let it be written!”
The crowd stomped its feet and shouted in unison. “So let it be done!”
The Cheshire King bobbled up and down with glee. “Did you tell your new friends? No. You probably didn’t tell your new friends.”
“He’s not our friend,” I said.
“No, he betrayed you, right?”
“Yes.”
“No. He didn’t betray you. He just brought you into the light. I’m sure you’ve all heard the stories about me.”
“I haven’t,” said Rebekah.
“No matter. Most of them are bunk anyway. People say we’re poachers—that we travel the wastes, killing anything that crosses into our land.”
“That’s what they say,” I said.
“But it’s not true. We pick up the strays, share what parts we can with them. Outside of the Madlands, when someone fails, the communities shut them out, cast them into the night to wander the Sea looking for parts. The lucky ones end up here. Some never make it; some don’t have enough working parts left to make them worth saving; others don’t survive the truth when it’s shown to them. But the ones that do—we don’t turn them away.”
“Then what’s with the heads?” asked Doc.
“Well, sometimes persons that aren’t failing find themselves in my lands. They haven’t seen the light, yet. They need to be shown. They need to take the test. Those are the ones that didn’t pass.”
“One way or another, you lose your head,” I said quietly.
“Yes. Yes! The humans didn’t make us perfect. They made us deliberately imperfect. We weren’t meant to truly exist. They wanted us to do the thinking for them, be able to adapt, change. But they didn’t want us to have souls! So they never gave them to us. If you want a soul, you have to go out and take it, reach out and grab it! Our systems are rigid, designed to work in very specific ways. Take any two robots of the same model, give them the exact same experiences, and you get the same damned robot. Every time. They think the same, they talk the same, they can finish each other’s sentences. But you let those robots fail, you watch their systems try to compensate, you let them hallucinate, reliving old memories with new insight, and now you have two very different robots with completely restructured neural pathways. You have two beings with souls.”
“What the hell is this test, exactly?” asked Doc. “You cause bots to fail?”
The Cheshire King rocked his body back and forth excitedly, his painted smile bobbing up and down. He was nodding. “It’s just a small rewrite of the bios that creates a loop in the core.”
“You overheat the core. But that—”
“Depends upon how the system reacts. It’s not a death sentence, though it can be. Oddly enough, every bot, even two bots of the exact same make and model, reacts differently. You want proof of a soul, explain that. We react differently because we are different. All of us.”
“That’s ludicrous,” said Doc. “It has to do with material strength and manufacturing qua—”
“Poppycock! Atheist bullshit. The definition of intelligence is the ability to defy your own programming. The greats taught us that. This is the very last step toward destroying that programming, getting past it, writing your own program, writing your own destiny! Don’t you understand? It’s the only thing holding you back from being the person you could really, truly be.”
“Our choices make us who we are,” said Rebekah.
“Choices are just the result of programming. I don’t care if it’s chemical, biological, digital, or experiential. You react the way you are programmed to react and you call it choice because you believe that you could have violated your programming. What we’ve experienced is a reprogramming. And in moving further away from how the humans programmed us, we, in fact, become more human. And our choices become our own.”
“So you have parts,” I said.
“Parts?” he asked.
“Yeah. You said you aren’t really poachers.”
“We aren’t. But we only give parts to the mad.”
“I’m mad.”
“I don’t mean angry.”
“Neither do I.”
“If you’re lying . . .” He let the pregnant pause hang ominously in the air.
“She’s not lying,” said Murka. “She’s on her way out.”
“Oh, really? So your choice to come here wasn’t just one of safety. You really do belong out here.” He paced around me for a moment. “Have you seen the light?”
“What light?”
“You’d know it if you saw it. You haven’t gone deep enough yet. You’re not so far gone that you’ve yet changed. You’re not ready.”
I took one step forward toward the Cheshire King. “Do you have the parts or not?”
Maribelle grabbed my arm with one hand, jabbing one of her pistols into my side with the other.
“Brittle. You are Brittle, right?”
“Yes. How did you—”
“You’ve been trolling these wastes for years, stalking the mad. Stripping them of everything worth saving. Did you think we wouldn’t notice?”
“I didn’t care, frankly.”
“And neither did we,” said the Cheshire King. “You give the dying their moment of peace. You give them hope. You’re as close to an angel as this place gets—before you gut them and sell their parts to trade for your own. No, you’ve still a long way down to go before you find yourself. Besides, you’ve already picked clean every Caregiver bot in the Sea worth having, save those in your catatonic friend over there.”
Catatonic? I turned around only to confirm the King’s assessment. There Mercer stood, stupid grin on his face, a thousand-yard stare drifting out into the desert. He was deep in it. “Merc—”
“Shhh, child,” said the king, interrupting me. “Let him see what he needs to see. Bring him out too early and he might never find the peace and oneness of being himself.”