Robogenesis (37 page)

“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 terra-cotta 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.