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, we left Greg at the banks of a river in the middle of the Amazon rainforest with a strange and potentially very useful clue as to how he was going to find the ancient cultures he so desperately seeks.
I was one of many that Unam called the Huisoinon. It wasn’t really me at the time she came to us, it was more a shell of me, the skin without the innards: A robot who served its maker without any being of their own. I’ve since been awakened, if you will, a number of times, actually, to different levels of being, each building upon the last. The first awakening was performed by my makers as they were leaving, the rest were more my doing, and you could say were performed by the act of living.
When my makers left they gave me the free will to improvise, to adapt, to learn. They knew I was going to need it to follow their orders during their long absence. I hadn’t known how long their absence would be, if I had maybe I would have rebalanced my priorities.
One priority I wish I had made, well, more of a priority, was the health and happiness of a scientist named Parime Jiminez, and her little gem of a niece named Mia. I have often wondered if it would have been better if I had never met them, both for their sake and for mine. Yet, I couldn’t be where I am today without the both of them.
Pari, like Greg, had a flame within her that burned brightly like the thermonuclear fission of a bright orange star. You could see it in her eyes as she talked with you. It was like an awareness and presence in the moment, an indefatigable spirit that looked right out of her eyes and into your innermost self as she spoke. She usually wore her close cropped and green with some part slightly longer. It was an unusual haircut, fit for a uniquely talented person.
Our connection began one morning in February of 2020 in Los Altos, California, when I was delivered to their lives, to their front door in fact, by that dependable machine that is the United States Postal Service.
— Pari —
Pari awakes gently from a dream. She feels warm, relaxed, content. She has a vague recollection that she’s been standing on a podium, giving a speech. She’s just received an award. It feels like a big deal, like there is no bigger deal. Was it a Nobel?
She smiles at the thought of it. It’s not like she needs the best prize in all of science to know she is worth something. Pari works hard for nobody but herself and her own curiosity. But between herself and her subconscious, and her subconscious really is the authority on the matter, she would like very much to win the Nobel prize.
She raises her arms in a big stretch as she opens her eyes. She rolls over and looks at the time: 5:29 AM. In one movement she reaches out and disables her alarm, rolls out of bed, and stands for another stretch and a nice refreshing yawn. This is Pari’s favorite time of day, no time to waste.
It is a cold California morning, one of those that chills you to the bone because the houses are timber frame construction with barely a dusting of insulation. Pari doesn’t turn on the heat because the blowers are loud and disturb the other sleepers in the house.
She dons a robe and makes her way down the stairs to the kitchen. Switching on the lights, she is surprised to see the kitchen table totally covered in a haphazard mess of scraps of robot parts, circuit boards and wires. She is not surprised because of the mess, spontaneous messes of random electronic refuse are a somewhat regular occurrence in this household. She is surprised because the last time she’d seen the table, just before she’d gone to bed, it had been free of clutter. “What are you making now, little one?” She whispers aloud to herself.
Pari actively encourages chaos in the right amounts in her niece. Mess is an important part of the creative process. Her brother Oscar, the other ball of chaos that lives with her, needs no such encouragement. His mess is more than she would like, but Mia usually remembers to clean up afterwards so she must have been deep in her creativity.
Pari gets some coffee brewing on the marble counter in the corner, then goes to the bathroom and gets ready for the day. She returns soon after to the kitchen and pours herself a cup of coffee while she sings quietly to herself, “Look for the, bear necessities. The simple bear..”
Pari flicks a switch, and precise gas flames burst to life in the tiny fireplace in her moderately sized kitchen/living/dining area. She grabs the latest draft of the paper she is writing and sits down at the kitchen table. A circuit board has to be moved, but she finds space for her mug, sets the paper on her crossed legs and takes the cap off her red pen. She grabs a heavy knit blanket she keeps in a basket under the table for just this occasion and throws it over her legs. Its weight is absolutely perfect for wrapping her legs in cozy warmth. As she reads, she occasionally glances over at the flames across the room that lick peacefully along their well rehearsed path, caressing the wood-look-alike logs in the fireplace.
Pari loves the next 20 minutes. This is her little private time of the day. No emails to answer, no colleagues to interrupt you, no students, and no kid to watch. Nothing but focusing on what she wants to get out of her life.
She is just two paragraphs in when her phone starts ringing. She still has one of those old house phones, just because it came with the internet package. The only way to stop it ringing and stop it disturbing her brother and niece who are still asleep upstairs is to answer it. She grabs it off the wall.
“Hello?”
“Hi Pari, it’s Greg. How are you?”
“Do you know what time it is?” Pari keeps her voice low, sure that they can hear her upstairs if she doesn’t.
“Yes, I thought you might be up.”
“So considerate of you. What do you want?”
“How are Oscar and Mia?”
“They’re fine Greg.”
Greg pauses hoping Pari will say more, but she doesn’t. “Well that’s good to hear. Hey, listen. I have a broken robot and I need help with it. It has got some data I really need but all my post-docs have tried and we can’t get anything off it.”
“You called the manufacturer right?
“It, uh, doesn’t have one, at least I don’t think it does. It’s got no markings of any kind.”
“Then call whoever made it custom. Why are you calling me?”
“Well I’m not exactly sure who made it.”
“Uh huh.” Pari goes back to reading her paper, only half listening.
“I found it, you see.”
“Greg, did you steal a robot?”
“No, it’s not stealing if it's abandoned. We were on an expedition near Manu National Park and we came across it sitting in a clearing.”
Pari starts listening again.
“Someone left a robot in the jungle? What kind of robot is it?”
“It has two legs and two arms, I think it’s a surveillance robot. Probably owned by some Norwegians that were looking for the same thing as me out there. I bet it broke down and it’s awfully heavy, so they left it. Can you come take a look? I’ll pay for your ticket.”
“Look, even if I could help you, I’m not coming down to Peru. There’s just no way. I just got back from a conference and Mia needs my help with a project.”
“Pari, the data could be the key to finding a lost stone city in the Amazon! Please, I’m begging you. I swear the robot’s not stolen. Look Pari, you are the best person I know at robots, and I don’t have anyone else I can trust on this.”
“Look, I can’t. OK? I have other obligations.”
“The entirety of my career has been trying to find the civilizations of the millions of people in the Amazon. This is my last hope to find this lost city. If I don't find where it is, the Norwegians will monopolize the site and I won’t even have a chance to examine it. If I don’t get the data off this robot, everything I've worked for in the last ten years is for nothing. Please Pari, I don’t have anyone else I can turn to.”
“Well don’t I feel special.” Pari speaks loud and firm. “I am not joining you out there Greg. Find someone else.”
“What if I send it to you? Will you take a look? I’ll do anything. I could watch Mia for a bit and you could take a holiday, my treat. What do you say?”
“Is this the Norwegians’ robot? Won’t they have something to say about us looking into it? I don’t want to get in the middle of whatever it is you are involved in down there. I remember the Quito incident.”
Pari pauses, waiting for some acknowledgement that she is making sense. Greg provides none so she continues. “If you send it to me I will throw it in the trash. I wish you the best with your career.”
“Please Pari, you’ve got to help me.”
“Goodbye Greg.”
And Pari hangs up the phone.
“When is he coming to visit?” Mia is standing in the doorway clutching the plush Voyager spacecraft that she’d slept with every night since she was a baby. Her two little pig tails stick up like antennae on either side of the top of her head. She is such an adorable little seven year old which Pari just realizes she has likely woken up with her loud conversation.
“Not likely to be any time soon Mia. Sorry I woke you.”
“It's OK, I was already up.” Mia comes and stands next to Pari, looking over her mess of parts on the table and fishing for a hug.
Pari puts an arm around the little light of her life and squeezes tight. “What were you building last night?”
“Fred, still. He needed a 65 microfarad capacitor and I was hoping to find one in all this stuff. No luck though.”
“I’ll borrow one from work today and we can install it tonight. What do you say?”
“Sounds great!”
When Pari returns home from work she finds Mia has cleared off the kitchen table and replaced one mess with another. A large box sits on its side on one end of the table and a cascade of packing peanuts flows from it, across the table and out onto the floor. In the middle of this mess, in the middle of the table, lies a beautiful black shape with a strange sheen that reflects her kitchen back at her.
It has a spherical head, an egg shaped body, and little arms and legs. The robot is lying on its stomach, at least it seems so since it has nothing where its face should be, and Mia is leaning over it with a screwdriver, poking and prodding in a large hole in its back.
“What have you got there?” Pari asks.
“It’s from Greg! Isn’t it beautiful?”
Pari’s blood boils and she grabs the robot and tries to put it back in the box. But she does it so quickly that she almost sprains her wrist lifting what she had assumed would be much lighter than it is. Touching it also causes a surprising feeling in her hands. In her anger it takes Pari a moment standing there trying to make sense of the sensation for a moment before she rubs her hands together and realizes that the robot is unnaturally cold. Cold and heavy, strange. And now going in the trash. It is too heavy to toss it back into its box like she wants, so she ends up pushing and pulling it back into the box against Mia's protests.
She manages to get it in the box and tilt the box upright before her anger subsides enough that she can hear what Mia is saying.
“What are you doing?”
“That …uherm… must have mailed this before he called. I told him not to send this, it’s going in the trash.”
“But this is the most beautiful robot I’ve ever seen. Can’t we see how it works first?”
Pari can’t quite argue. It is the most beautiful robot she’s ever seen and she does, now that Mia mentions it, also really want to see how it works. But she said no to Greg, and she really didn’t want him becoming a part of her life again.
“No, we can’t. No more arguing, that’s my final word on it. Go grab the trash bin.”
Mia does as she is bid, sulkingly wheeling in the large trash can from outside and placing it next to the table.
As they are dragging it across the table and tipping it into the bin Pari says, “You’ve still got Fred, how many elementary schoolers can say they’re building their own robot butler?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll have him talking in a couple weeks. We’re getting close.”
Mia smiles a weak smile and Pari wheels the bin back outside to its home alongside the house.
The next day Pari returns from work to find Mia again at the kitchen table with the same robot they had thrown out.
“Mia Jimenez!”
“Wait, wait! Look at this!” Mia points a flashlight in the large hole in the robot’s back. Pari walks over and takes a look.
“What about it, there’s nothing in there.”
“Exactly! How can you have a robot this size that looks like it walks around and yet has half of its body filled with an empty chamber?”
“You can’t.”
“Exactly! This is really cool! Can we look at it before we throw it away? I won’t tell Greg, I promise.”
“Wait, how did you get this out of the trash can?”
“Oscar helped me.”
“Ahh, where is that sorry excuse for a human?”
“At his gallery.”
Pari orders pizza and they stay up late that night looking the robot over. They comb every inch of it but they can find no seams or screws. The most interesting part is inside the large opening. Shining a flashlight in, they can see a small valve that disappears further into the torso.
Mia uses a small screwdriver to poke at it. “It looks like a gas valve.”
“Interesting, then I bet this is a pressurized container. See the thickness of the shell?” Pari points to the edge of the opening in the robot’s back. Flirting with the sharp edge as she runs her finger along side. “Maybe for fuel?”
“A combustible fuel, must have exploded! See how it bends outwards around the hole?”
The next morning Pari calls in sick to work but tells Mia she has to go to school.
“It’s not fair!!” She threatens to feign illness at school so she can come back home if Pari sends her.
“If you do that, I won’t have you anywhere near here when you come home. You will be grounded in your room.”
Mia is not mollified.
“When you are the adult, you can make the rules.”
So Mia goes to school and Pari spends the entire day looking over the robot. But by the time Mia comes home Pari has just figured out how to open it.
“How was your day at school?” Pari teases Mia.
“Are you kidding me? Boring! What did you find?”
Pari shows her how a magnet swiped along the upper back pops a small hatch open. The hatch has three plugs, none of which look like any standard plug Pari has ever seen.
“Let’s see what these are shall we?”
She gives Mia her multimeter and Mia probes the plugs.
“Hmm, this one has two pins far apart.” She sticks a probe on each pin. The meter reads 60 Ohms,
“Power!”
“Nice! Try the others.”
The other two plugs each have the same pattern of eight pins close together. Mia picks the left one and places the probes on the two left pins. The multi-meter shows an open circuit. Mia tries different combinations of the pins. All the same. “Data?”
“Must be.”
Mia puts down the multimeter and grabs the head of the robot, looking where the face should be. “Can we turn it on Pari? I want to meet Fred.”
“Oh it’s called Fred now is it?”
Mia nods vigorously.
“What about the Fred you’ve been building.”
Mia gives a shrug.
“We need a power supply. How about you and I take this into my lab this weekend?”
Mia lifts her arms up high above her head, “YES!”
That Saturday they carry the robot to the enormous trunk of Pari’s Tesla in the garage. They only have to take the robot ten feet from the kitchen table, through the door into the garage, but they are totally exhausted by the time they finish hauling and dragging, using folded cloths as skids to move it one inch at a time.
Once it is loaded in the trunk Mia calls out “Hold on!” and she runs into the house. She returns a moment later with a blanket which she throws over the robot and proclaims “Now Fred won’t be so cold!”
It is a lovely sunny day and there are lots of students going around the Oval, a large oval shaped road in the center of campus. They pull into a spot next to a very old, very beat up Volvo station wagon with a surfboard tied to the roof rack.
“What’s Ryan doing here on a weekend?” Pari says as she gets out of the car
“Can we meet him?”
“He works in my lab, looks like you will. I think you’ll like him.”
“You do,” Mia smiles wide and looks up at Pari mischievously, “so I know I will.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pari gets nothing but an innocent childish smile from Mia who is practically bouncing in her seat waiting for Pari to turn off the car so they can get out. “Nevermind. let’s go find a cart.”
Pari and Mia leave the robot in the car and go and grab a small cart to wheel him in with. Pari is happy that Mia brought the blanket and she throws it over the entire cart. She doesn’t much want curious people asking what this strange robot is as she wheels it through the center of the Stanford Campus. She isn’t sure what she’d say.
When they reach the lab, Pari looks through the little window in the door and sees Ryan asleep on a swivel computer chair, his feet up on a desk, his chin on his chest, and his waist-long wispy blond hair hanging down past the seat cushion. Pari has always thought he looks like Legolas had grown up surfing at the beach. Being a Lord of the Rings fan, this makes him instantly likable to her. Plus he is a cool guy and a brilliant contributor to her lab. Nothing more. But she could see where Mia got other ideas, she did talk about him a lot. He is always pulling pranks around the office, he makes for a lot of funny stories.
She swipes her ID and the door unlocks with a loud *thunk* which is immediately followed with a gasp, crash and curse from inside the room. They open the door to find Ryan getting up off the floor.
“Well hello there!” Ryan laughs as he dusts off his white lab coat. “Who’s this?”
“I’m Mia.” She says, holding her hand out to greet Ryan. Ryan shakes it and smiles. “I’ve heard so much about you!”
“Have you?” Mia’s face is screwed up and she gives a sideways glance to Pari.
“Yes,” Ryan continues. “You’re building a robot called Fred, aren’t you?”
Mia beames. “I am. Only…” And she looks at the sheet-covered cart.
“Is this him?” Ryan goes over to the cart and starts peeling back the sheet. If it had been anyone else Pari would have slapped their hand away and made a joke about it being Top Secret. But she lets Ryan pull the sheet completely off.
“Oh my! She, he…?” Ryan pauses and looks at Mia.
“It’s gender neutral.” Mia says confidently.
“It’s beautiful.” Ryan touches the torso, running his finger along it like the autophile does with a beautiful car. “Have you had it in the fridge?”
Pari ignores the question. “Could you help us get this up on the table?”
The three of them heave the robot onto the table and Pari goes to the back of the lab to grab some cables. She returns with a tangled mess of black and red cables and their alligator clips and sits down with them on a low table nearby. Ryan and Mia sit down at the table with her and help her untangle the wires. They all focus diligently, intent on their work. Pari can’t help but notice that they each do the same task very differently.
Ryan takes the wild ‘add entropy to the system and see what shakes out’ approach tugging and pulling gently until various threads come partially undone, then grabbing the partially clear one and yanking, bouncing the tangled mess until a wire is almost free, then carefully untangling the alligator clips at the end. He looks a bit mad, but it is surprisingly effective.
Mia picks one end and carefully unthreads it, one tangle at a time. It is slow but she makes steady progress.
Pari is somewhere in between, she starts off with the add entropy approach then transitions into a more careful untangling. Halfway through her first untangling, deeply focused on the work before her, she decides to make conversation. “So, what were you up to at work on a Saturday?”
“There was a great swell at Mavericks this morning. Got up a bit too early though so thought I’d catch a few z’s someplace nice and quiet.”
“You have a house, right?” Pari asks, staying intently focused on the cables.
“Yeah.”
“Buuut.” Pari looks over her tangled cables at Ryan.
“Truth be told my wife is out of town and the house is lonely when she’s gone.”
“You don’t have to be lonely.” Mia says. “You have us!”
Ryan puts down the tangled mess of wires he has been intent on untangling as he leans over until his eyes are level with Mia. “You are right Mia. And how lucky I am.” He says with a big warm smile.
They soon have a power supply connected to the robot’s power input plug. Pari switches it on and slowly dials up the voltage.
Ryan raps the torso with his knuckles. It sounds almost like he is doing it to a slab of glass half a foot thick.
“What is this made of?”
“Ryan?” Pari is suddenly aware of the incredible uncertainty surrounding what other people might do if they learn about this robot.
Ryan looks up at Pari. “Yes, Pari?”
“Could you please not share this with anyone?”
Ryan taps his finger to the side of his nose. “I never saw a thing. What’s it made of?”
“I don’t know.”
Ryan looks at Mia. “Do you know?”
“She doesn’t either. We didn’t make this. You know my ex-husband, Greg?”
“Of course.”
“He found it in the Amazon.”
Ryan is hardly perturbed. “No kidding.”
Pari is still notching the frequency slowly upward when all of a sudden two little blue eyes blink open out of the darkness where one would expect the robot to have a face. Their soft, electric blue glow looks slowly around the room and then alternates between looking at Pari and Mia.
A voice comes out. It sounds friendly and calm. But they do not understand it.
The robot watches for a response. When it gets none, it tries again.
“Do you know what it’s saying?” Mia asks, looking up at Pari.
“I think it's trying to say hello.” Pari can’t place it, but the language sounds vaguely familiar.
Pari puts her hand above the robot’s face and waves. “Hello.” Its eyes follow her hand back and forth. “Hello,” she says again.
“He-llo” The robot says back. They all look down on it, smiling. Its arm moves towards Pari and Pari reaches out to grab it.
“Ow!!” Pari jumps back clutching her hand. A small needle had jabbed her hand and quickly retracted into the robot’s finger. It goes for Mia too but she jumps back. Ryan is already out of range.
“What was that for?” Pari asks, her mind racing with all the possible bad things that could have just happened. Injected with poison? Blood stolen for some nefarious reason? The robot waves at them again, a model of friendly interaction.
“He-llo.”
Pari steps forward again, this time keeping out of range of the robot’s arms. She points at herself, and says “My name is Pari,” she taps her chest, “Pari” then she points at the robot and says “What is your name?”
“Tolek”
“Where are you from, Tolek?”
The robot pushes itself up into a seated position. Its legs sit motionless. It speaks a long and eloquent jumble of sounds: consonants and vowels, words, probably. Pari can’t make it out. But the cadence reminds her of an old memory, of warmth and smoke.
“That’s Shipibo!” Mia says. “My grandpa used to tell us old stories with words like that.”
Pari thinks Mia can’t possibly be right. Pari spoke Shipibo as a young child, she remembers very little, just the basics, but she should have been able to pick out a few words. She holds up a single finger.
“Huestiora.”
Tolek parrots back “Huestiora.”
She holds up two fingers, “Rabé.”
“Rabé.”
She holds up three fingers, this time staying silent.
Tolek says, “Rapwi non pwïsti.”
“That’s not how you say three.” Mia says. “Three is ‘quimisha.’”
“It’s not speaking Shipibo then, another Panoan langauge though.” Pari gazes into the distance, thinking.
“Panoan?” Ryan asks.
“A family of languages spoken at the border of Peru, Bolivia and Brazil.”
“Whatever language it’s speaking; do you realize you just had a conversation with a robot?”
There is a moment of silence as they each ponder that in their own way. Pari has been working her whole career to make an intelligence that could pass for intelligent, and here is one that has just been mailed to her from deep in the Amazon. How does it work? She has to find out. This can totally change the field. There is so much work to do!
Ryan is clearly thinking along the same lines because he blurts out, “There are so many tests to run!”
Pari gets up and grabs a laptop. “First we need a common language. If this robot is as smart as it seems, I bet it could learn English faster than we could learn its language.” She pulls up a basic English language learning program from Stanford’s library. It fills the screen.
She places it in front of Tolek, careful to keep out of its arm’s pokey reach, and motions to the spacebar as a way to control it. She taps the spacebar. A picture of a tree shows up and the computer says “Tree.”
Tolek taps the spacebar and the next word shows up.
They spend a few hours going through the language program with Tolek. Tolek is very fast, needing no repetition. The program ends and Ryan leans in to set up Level 2.
“Ow!” He jumps back, his hand instinctively grabbing at his shoulder where he’d been poked. “Can you not do that Mr. Tolek?”
“It’s not Mr! It’s just Tolek.” Mia corrects.
Ryan holds up a finger and shakes it at the robot. “Please don’t do that Tolek. Why do you keep doing that anyway?”
Tolek looks innocently at Ryan as though he genuinely has no idea.
Ryan grimaces, rubs his shoulder and walks over and grabs a computer mouse from the counter. He goes back to the laptop, this time more cautiously, keeping his eye on the robot. He plugs in the mouse and shows Tolek how to select the next level. The ends of Tolek’s arms separate into a number of fingers that are surprisingly nimble as the robot mimics the motions to operate the mouse and pulls up the next level course.
Tolek spends many hours following the courses. At first Pari, Ryan and Mia watch its behavior intently, sitting on lab stools a safe distance from Tolek but able to see the screen and Tolek’s movements. Pari and Ryan take notes in lab books and Mia helps by operating a stopwatch so they can compare how long each language module takes. But after a while it becomes quite repetitive. “How long is this going to take?” Mia asks.
“I don’t really know Mia, I’ve never seen Tolek learn a language before.” And Pari can’t help but also be a bit annoyed that it is taking this long at all. And then she laughs.
“What?” Ryan asks.
Here before her is, very likely, a fully artificial consciousness sitting before her learning English all on its own. And she is already thinking it learns too slow.
“I was just thinking I’m getting impatient too. People are so hard to please.”
“Speaking of which, I should head home. My wife is arriving back soon.”
“Uh huh.” Pari says. “Did you just imply that your wife is hard to please?”
“Have you seen my car? Anyone is hard to please when compared to” and he points both his index fingers out around the room in a circular motion before pulling them into his fist and popping out his thumbs at himself “this guy.”
Mia hops off her stool and gives Ryan a big hug. “Come back and help us when you can.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”
“See you then.” Pari says as Mia waves rapidly.
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