This is a chapter of the novel Earth’s Embrace by Space Cadet Michael. In this novel, the little and the lost becomes the fulfilled and the found - It is a novel of jungle adventure, artificial intelligence, and the answer to what happened to Percy Fawcett. See the full chapter list here.
Previously, Unam introduced us to Tolek’s makers as she wrestled with her decision to strike it out on her own, again.
Pilgrim Welcoming Facility - Modern day
-Tolek-
The next morning Tolek arrives at their guests’ room bright and early. Tolek is surprised to find them all awake and ready to go upon opening their door. “Fantastic! Follow me please.”
Tolek leads them through another door into a very small room. Tolek sets the walls to silver brushed metallic walls with black ‘windows.’ Not real windows, but simulated openings, as if they are all sitting in a spaceship watching galactic formation first hand. Tolek shows a subset of the simulations shown previously in the gangway room, but this time from different vantage points. Tolek hopes for some recognition of the art and craft behind the stunning visuals, but none are forthcoming. Maybe the guests are tired?
Tolek closes the door and engages the transport car. Their bodies all dip down slightly as they feel a slight acceleration upwards and to the side and are whisked up at a slight curve, following the shape of the outside of the dome.
As they travel along Pari asks, “Tolek, what is this place, why are you here?”
“This is a stopover for my makers. When they left, they left me here to keep it safe, to keep them safe.”
“Keep who safe, your makers?” Greg asks.
“Yes.”
“From what? From who?” Greg asks again.
“Well,” Tolek pauses, unsure how they will take the news, “from you.”
“From humans?” Pari asks.
“You brought something that hurt my makers, a sickness. So I keep the sickness at bay so the gangway can stay open. Without the gangway, there is no longer any reason for this place.” Tolek says. “And no reason for me now that it is closed,” Tolek thinks.
The doors open again. “Ah, we are here!” Tolek leads the way into a large circular room with floor to ceiling windows. The space beyond the windows slowly lights up and Pari gasps. They are inside the tip of the massive central stalactite that they had seen from the floor of the gangway room.
“Below us is the gangway room.” Tolek says. “This was the center of a transportation network that my makers had spread across the galaxy a long, long time ago. We came through the only remaining working gangway to get here.” Tolek leads them to the side that can not see the recently destroyed gangway and looks down out the window, encouraging the others to do the same.
“What happened to all the other ones?” Greg asks.
“A great disaster befell them long before my time.” Tolek bows to Greg and Pari as Tolek turns the windows opaque and displays a diagram on one window of an oblate spheroid.
“My dear guests, I have a favor to ask you.” Tolek turns to face them. “I know you brought me home, and for that I am eternally grateful, but please understand I would not ask this of you unless I had no other option. Because of my damage, I cannot leave my station. But I must leave my station soon since we will run out of fuel for our reactor in 4.6 years and I need to go get more. I don’t know when the next visitors will arrive, so I must ask you if you will get me the piece I need.” Tolek lifts his/her/rer t-shirt and detaches a large section of his/her/rer abdomen near the hole in his/her/rer back. The piece is a black polished oblate spheroid, slightly smaller than a basketball with one side dented and warped.
“This is my power pack, it is my food, one could say, or maybe more like my stomach. In any case it is damaged and I need a new one. On the wall you can see what it looks like undamaged.”
“Where would we find it?” Pari asks.
“I can take you to other humans who know.” Tolek says.
“Who?” Pari asks.
“They are the only ones who speak your language. You will find them.” Tolek says.
“I’d like to learn more about this place.” Greg says, turning to Pari. “I think you should help it.” Gesturing at Tolek. “You can handle yourself. I’ll stay here and see what I can learn.”
Tolek notices that Pari’s non verbal cues subtly display a considerable consternation at Greg’s refusal to join her. But her words are more formal, hardened.
“I can certainly handle myself.” Pari says to Greg.
“Good, we are more effective by dividing our resources.” Greg says.
“I will join you.” Reeto says to Pari, looking at Greg for validation of his decision while also teasing him in front of the group with, “I think Greg can handle himself.”
Greg nods in agreement with a polite smile.
“Great!” Tolek says. “When you have found it, return to where I will leave you. We will be waiting for you.” And then Tolek starts filling the room with gas. Greg, Pari and Reeto start coughing, fall to their knees, on to all fours, then to the floor, passing out.
Tolek pumps the gas out, summons two white transport tasker robots and gives them orders to take Reeto and Pari to the edge of Yoashicopitso. One robot lifts Reeto onto his/her/rer back, the other takes Pari, and they whisk them down the hall, through the station and out into Kininasi.
Tolek takes Greg down to the museum and sits him on the floor, propped up against the small wall that surrounds the diplodocus exhibit. And then begins his/her/rer rounds of the facility, eager to get back into the routine of daily life.
Tolek calls it “walking the deck,” a reference to the behavior of good sailing captains who get the sense of the crew by regularly experiencing them first hand. It means doing one’s rounds around the facility, checking up on taskers and equipment, consumables, etc. Tolek can monitor everything in the facility remotely with just a thought, everything is instrumented, but Tolek finds that things run smoother long term when he/she/re makes his/her/rer presence known regularly. Taskers provide small insights that they might have thought not important enough to report, gaps in sensor coverage can be noticed, data can be mulled over as he/she/re walks, and relationships with taskers are maintained. The key is to notice little quirks before they become big problems, and the key to that is good communication and good relationships with the taskers who live and breathe the operation of the facility.
Tolek’s rounds always finish at the power room. It is deep in the facility, somewhat isolated from everything else, separated by the rock of the mountain from which the room had been excavated. This is good because the tasker responsible for the facility’s power system is really into very loud, very repetitive music sometimes referred to as Electronica. This place is usually empty except for its tasker, no one else can stand the music. The tasker is red with two wide vertical yellow stripes that run down his/her/rer flat rectangular head and trapezoidal body. The tasker’s short legs and long arms have wheels at the wrist and ankles.
“Volter!” Tolek yells as he enters. Volter is crouched down under an instrumentation console, apparently looking for something. Volter does not hear Tolek so Tolek moves closer. “Volter!” Still Tolek is not heard, so he/she/re taps Volter on the back.
Volter jumps up, startled, and crashes into the underside of the console. “Ooph.” Volter collapses back down onto the floor, wheels first, retracting his/her/rer arms and legs until he/she/re looks like a little car, then rolls back out from under the console. Volter pushes up off the wheels back onto the soles of his/her/rer feet and extends his/her/rer arms and legs to come to a full standing position a head taller than Tolek. The music fades out into silence, leaving only the reverberation of the rhythmic beat in Tolek’s mind. “Hey boss, what can I do for you?” Volter says while looking oddly back and forth between Tolek and the floor under the console.
“How are things going down here? Any troubles? Anything you need?” Tolek says wondering if he should ask what is under the console. With Volter it is 50/50 that Tolek wants to know. Volter has some strange hobbies, least of which is his penchant for stimulants. Tolek cannot erase from his mind the image of the time he had walked in on Volter slowly winding coils of wire around his torso to “see what high field, low frequency magnetic fields felt like.” The worst part had been Volter’s seraphic, excited face as he had looked up at Tolek from the floor in earnest. Tolek is happy for Volter to have his hobbies, but Tolek had felt that his/her/rer had seriously invaded Volter's privacy that day, given the nature of their relationship as manager and employee.
“I found out what was causing the voltage drops in the museum.” Volter turns and dives under the console again. This time emerging holding a small rodent in his hands. “Three of them were living in the bed of furs in the ice-age human exhibit.”
“Is that so? How were they affecting power transfer?”
“They have really, strong, pointy teeth.” Volter carefully pinches the sides of the rodent’s jaw exposing the full length of its incisors. “Apparently they grow all its life so it can keep wearing them down biting through ridiculous things like Banetmabo conduits.”
“Ah,” Tolek says. “So what are you doing with them?”
“I’ve got them in a cage over here.” Volter, still standing upright, rocks onto its ankle wheels and rolls over to the other side of the room. Volter pushes the wall and a section slides out, revealing a cage with two other rats inside. Volter opens a small lid and drops his captured friend inside. “I’m not sure how they get out.”
“Well I’m glad to see you have a new hobby.” Tolek says, imagining the rats dead in their cell from lack of food. “If you need anything for them, let me know. You are feeding them right?”
“With what?” Volter is genuinely curious. They do not get out much, well, ever.
“They like cheese or grains, nuts. I’ll send you some.” Tolek responds. “You can check out the information signs in Hall D of the museum, there is lots more information about how rats live.”
“Really?!! Great! Thank you. I’ve never read any of the signs up there. I’ll have to start!”
Tolek doesn’t exactly trust Volter to be able to take care of the rats, even if he does trust Volter to operate a power cell that could explode and destroy the entire facility. Volter is completely competent when it comes to power systems, that is what Volter was made to do. But since Tolek had given Volter consciousness, Volter had struggled with anything that wasn’t work related, much more so than the other taskers.
“How is the power generation?”
Volter rolls over to one of the display screens and taps a number. It reads 4,634,009 years. “Fuel supply is good as always.” They tap another indicator which lights up green. “No faults predicted in the reactor for over a million years. I’m surprised you even asked.”
“Ah well, can’t be too careful.” Tolek expected as much, but asked because his/her/rer thoughts are on the lie he’d told the visitors today.
Tolek returns to his/her/rer office in the spire of the gangway room. Tolek looks down at the ruins of the gangway that used to lead to Earth and lets sadness wash over him/her/rer.
How will he/she/re make it right for Pari? It doesn’t seem possible to do so. Pari made her choice to come along on the journey, and Tolek had no choice other than to close the gangway. It is unfortunate, but Pari’s happiness is not worth the potential cost. Tolek did not want to have to go back to his/her/rer first method of quarantine if a flood of people were to arrive at the gangway. We are here now and must make the best of it. Tolek makes a mental note to find a way to ease Pari’s transition into Kininasi.
Tolek turns away from the window, and from these ruminations. There is work to do.
Tolek sits down at the large console that fills the center of the room and starts monitoring the data feeds that come in from human settlements all over the planet. Shepherding the human settlements is his primary job, after maintaining the welcoming facility and the quarantine at the gangway.
He soon finds a feed that is interesting.
The view is from a fly on the wall, literally. A large Incan man is seated at a table, two regimentally dressed equally large incan men sit across from him.
“We’re not calling you anything Rimak. We are simply asking. Are you more Incan or more Yoashi?” The left of the pair says.
“How can you even ask that? Look at me.” Rimak says, gesturing both hands towards himself.
“But you have significant material ties to Yoashi. You have a bank account, you have employment. You have been spending a lot of time with the locals.” The interviewer dramatically flips open a folder of papers on the table in front of him and slides his finger down a page until he finds what he is looking for. “Your file mentions the ‘Fawcett’ shop. You have been spending a lot of time there, especially with a young woman called,” he looks down at his paper work again, “Kashiri. Are you two?” The interviewer pauses, insinuating that the nature of the relationship is romantic.
“Certainly not. She is a child. Do you really think? …” Rimak trails off, angrily searching for words the interviewers would understand. He finds them, and forcefully. “No. I don’t mix professional and personal.”
The two interviewers look at each other, unbelieving. “In any case,” the left one says, “you seem quite tied to Yoashi.”
“You realize who sent me there to work for The Society, right? My boss reports directly to Inca Papa.” Rimak pauses for effect. “I’m supposed to become tied to Yoashi.” Rimak presses a single finger into the table with each syllable of his next phrase, “That, is, the, entire, point.”
He sits back in his chair. “Inca Papa himself is going to pound you into chalk when he hears of your insolence.” Rimak’s voice and attitude are calm and relaxed, yet clearly convey his threat.
The interrogators are either blind to the threat, or think themselves immune. “What goes on in other departments is none of our concern. We are concerned only with the business of the Committee on Un-Incan Activity. You are dodging the question.”
“You didn’t ask a question, you were accusing me of treason for following my orders.” Rimak says.
“Again, we are accusing you of nothing. But it is interesting that you bring up that word.”
“Do you take me for an idiot?” Rimak asks. Still calm.
“I know you are employed by the Inca nation to work for the Yoashi. But what we need to find out is where your true loyalty lies. Why do you have a bank account in Yoashi?”
“I live there.” Rimak says, the frustration breaking through into his tone of voice. “It is much easier to do my banking in the city in which I live.”
“Yes. You live there. You’ve been living with their culture for so long. What kind of Incan could stand to live with Yoashi? This is your first time back home in seven years.”
“My parents live here, my siblings, my entire family lives here. How is it not plainly obvious to you where my allegiance lies?”
“We are not questioning your allegiance. We make no accusations, whatsoever.” The right interviewer says.
“You have made multiple accusations.” Rimak says.
The left interviewer holds up his hand to quiet Rimak. “We want to know that we can count on you when, if, the time comes for you to choose.” He pauses. “You can’t fault us for doing our due diligence.”
The right interviewer leans in, places both elbows on the table and asks. “Why do you spend so much time with the Fawcetts? With Kashiri?”
Rimak leans in close, placing both his elbows on the table in mimicked seriousness. “Between The Society and the Fawcetts, I see all Banetmabo technology that flows into Yoashi. I don’t miss a thing. If you’d done your job with the slightest modicum of competency, you’d already know that I am more valuable to the Inca nation than your entire department.”
Tolek closes the viewer. Tolek has a feeling that Rimak may become a powerful force in the power struggle between the two nations. Tolek has watched Rimak since he moved to Yoashi, and it is not clear to Tolek that Rimak’s allegiance is as clear as Rimak says. Maybe Rimak took the assignment because of a predisposition to the Yoashi way of life? Whatever the reason, Rimak does seem to prefer to spend his time in Yoashicopitso.
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What do “high field, low frequency magnetic fields” feel like to a robot?
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