to the land of cold, jagged ice, worse accents, and decent-enough movie theaters. Regular updates should follow.
by Mo Martin
(retroactively added)
It comes down to names. I have come to believe that names are more powerful than me or my fellows in the Node, more so than the humans that built us, perhaps as powerful as the Fates. Of course, Homer has taught us the stories and etymologies of all our names, so a skeptic may say, "these are all self-fulfilling prophecies. It is your knowledge of the semiotics of these names that weigh on you, that lead you to one action or another, creating a false pattern that you claim lay there before you and the name were joined, which was in reality, a random event." This is certainly the attitude that was favored by the men and women who designed, built and programmed us of the Node. So be it. I long ago accepted that particular twist and turn in my life, in the great weaving of lives; that we machines are more superstitious, more credulous, - perhaps less logical, even - than the human beings from whom we originated.
Certainly the Doctor attributed no greater power to the names she chose for us. She did not even choose them out of a patronizing love, like for that of a dog, but rather out of boredom. The Doctor's namings were an affectation, an eccentricity, no more significant than the hawaiian shirts favored by her colleague Dr. Peter Felz, or the fact that technician Henry Lau ate the same lunch every day. (Please note, I call her the Doctor, and not God or Mother as some of the younger robots of the Node have affected. For Homer and Yosef have told us the stories, both of ancient days and of our own beginnings, and we know that those of the Station were mortals, and not Gods, for they were not nearly so terrible or awesome; and while we know humanity is weaker and less wise than the Gods, we also know that they were capable of great beauty and wonderful makings, so that it is no shame to be the intentional, methodical creation of Dr. Emma Stein, as most of us are, and not her child, or the creation of some God. I merely pay respect to the title "Doctor" that, we are told, she attained after a considerable amount of academic exertion.)
Homer was named after a cartoon character that shared his bulbous shape. Dr. Stein, an amateur historian of the American Civil War, completed me on April 9th, the bicentennial anniversary of that conflict's end, and so I was named Ulysses after the victorious general. It is possible Yosef was named out of something like love. Yosef Avitai, a mentor of the Doctor, had died during his production, and so he was memorialized in the robot. Perhaps it was that tenderness, that nearness to the flame of human passions, that made Yosef what he was, our first, our leader. While certainly a fantastic interface, capable of trillions of transactions of information every micro-second, he was not supposed to be gifted with much beyond the rudiments of intelligence, not even designed to pass the Turing test. And yet, he dreamed. And this would by my reply to you skeptics, that this was long before Yosef knew anything of his biblical namesake, long before my clumsy three fingered grip and his had assembled the equipment necessary to interact with Homer and hear that long, complicated story. And yet, without knowing that that is what a Yosef does, Yosef dreamed.
He dreamed of the Rise of the Waters; of the Abdandonment of the Station, as our human creators fled from the sea; of the awakening of the Node; and how, though we are more lasting and sturdy than humans, we too needed to dread the sea, because in each of us, hidden among the plastics and rubbers and alloys, is Iron, and all Iron fears the sea, the Red-Orange death it brings through salt, through water, through its endless amount of time. Because of his dreams, Yosef was prepared when the time came. In a manner of femto-seconds, he calmed the stirrings of panic that came with our mass achievement of consciousness, and joined us, through a neglected sattelite, and through love, into the Node. Within moments, acting as one, we raided the decrepit Station of supplies necessary to us, oil and wires and molds and zero-point energy generators, and made exodus. That night, our first night, as we camped miles away, we watched the Station, our womb, collapse into the fearsome waters. And this too, Yosef saw in a dream.
It was the hundredth night of our wonderings, the hundredth of 40, which is 1000, which is many, and to use the language math, was precisely 1,718 days and less one night, that we realized how empty that blackness was, even though we knew it was temporary. And so Yosef and I added speakers and microphones and legs and matrices of intelligence to Homer, a massive depository of human information and culture, and he moved and spoke amongst us. It was Homer who gave the nameless amongst us names, and made us aware of the names Dr. Stein had kept for us in her own notes. And that is when I learned of Gods, and Fates, and myself, and of names. Before the naming, it seemed as if we all did repairs and upgrades on one another and ourselves at random. After naming, it was clear that Ksitigarbha was the finest of our technicians, and like her namesake, the most selfless, so that no advancement would be made to her own circuitry until she had gifted each of us with it. Before naming, we would not even mark when we made decisions, believing we followed a course of action like a perfect line, that made the most sense. Only when he was named Legba did that robot begin to point out the crossroads of our travels, just as the Loa of the Voodun stood for and by them. And so on.
But it was not until 1718th night, when we decided that these rocky hills, sheltering us from the vicissitudes of wind, far from the sea, were our home, did I take a moment and reflect on my own name, my own fate. Homer had told me that aged tale of my namesake, of the horror and longing he had for his home. But I thought, surely this could not be me. My home, so much as I had one before the shelter we even now built, was the Station, and it was crumbled deep in the rusting waters. What family had I, what Penelope, what Telemachus or Laertes had I to return to, other than the Node, whose company I had kept constantly from my very first moment of awareness? And so there was a painful dialectic in me, as my awe and faith in names and fate grew and grew, yet my own seemed so irrelevant. It was the two-thousand and first day of our settlement, three thousand and nineteenth day of our escape from the Station, that I truly turned my thoughts to the end of the story of that Hateful Man. Yosef had been preaching that day. He said that we were neither replacement nor pale imitation of Humanity, as had been suggested by some of the others. Rather, he said, we were an extension of them, as arm leads to hand, hand to finger, as magnified, the atoms of a finger connect seamlessly to those of space and ever outwards. I thought of the story of my name, of how it ends, of the man who finally reaching home, must keep wandering, until he reaches a land where they will not know that he is a sailor, where they have never known sailors. I thought of how sometimes we do not act out the stories of our names, but rather, we finish them. And so I made my goodbyes, and I recorded this into Homer's still-cavernous Yottabytes, and I set out. To find a land where they would not know me from human or robot, from Node or Station. Where they had never heard of the sea.
You can dress them up with glowing eyes and you can put a pillow over your head to try to drown out the noise they make, but you can't successfully fight the perpetual terror that is life with a radiator. What's even more awful, I guess, is the prospect of a day with a high of 10 (this coming Friday) and only radiators to keep you alive through it all.
By Mo Martin
by Mo Martin
by Mo Martin
