Work Text:
Aliya sometimes wondered what robots would talk about if left to their own devices, far from human input and from human ears. What they had talked about before they were buried, or what they still did discuss under the earth, if sound even carried through the concrete of Iox’s walls, the low reverberated murmurs of their monotone voices pooling up in the university’s dark corners for no-one to hear.
“Taxes?” Three had once ventured, but then again, Three said a lot of things. And by the time she got the means – two robots at once with no disastrous accidents, imagine that – to gather some data on the matter, the thought was long out of her mind.
On this day, moored on a flowering moon somewhere deep in the Wires, she has retired to her cramped cabin in the Nightingale to update their maps, leaving Six and Talliin to fend off for themselves for once. Some quiet. Here’s a thought. Then, rising above the relative silence of river water and creaking planks, she hears a word.
The word is “absence”. Let it be known, let it be chronicled right here and now, in Aliya’s clustered journal pages, that when a conversation takes root among robots alone, it speaks of absence. Which is only fitting seeing how no-one is speaking, not really. No-one living. It is an echo of an echo, the two voices have the same timbre, same mechanical cadence, their thoughts are formed along the same straight heuristic line. It only opens up into two dimensions when Talliin’s compressed millennia of memories approximate a conscience and synthetize compassion, while Six’s words are veiled by the best of the worst that mankind ever had to offer, as painstakingly preserved in its rebeske foil.
More words follow. Muted, composed, precise. Ethical. As robots are wont to be.
Absence, it turns out, is a premise. Having now defined between themselves a clear, shared lexical basis for this concept, they build upon it and expand it to loss (which is a change, rather than a status, one step closer to a verb). Privation, deprivation. One brick after the other, their shared investigation of these concepts sets the perimeter for the building of their discourse. It grows like a house, a spacious villa whose ruins Aliya may once have seen hidden in the valley of a distant moon. She pictures yellow walls. She knows this place, with its columnade at the entrance and its gentle steps, she feels it deep in the loneliness nested in her bones. There is a fern growing in a crack. But as the robots’ discussion ventures inside, and she follows, listening in from the privacy of her cabin, she finds a vast, empty, alien space, closed off from riverlight. The walls are drenched in logic. The robots, too, are lost in these rooms they built, which posit and describe in great detail a society based on nothingness, no needs, no conflicts, no prizes. The system stands their scrutiny but they keep going in circles.
It is Six, Aliya is sure, who halts and interrupts their loop – of course it is. It has to be. For a moment there is a disruptive fervor in its words, and it is enough. “What for?” it asks, and in doing so it raises a mirror in this hall.
The other, who by process of elimination must be Talliin, stutters. Aliya hears the mechanical whirring of a neck being raised. “Because...”
There are two mirrors now.
Six and Talliin face each other, carrying between them so much of the recorded history of the Nebula, and all that history stretches out behind them both, reflected to infinity far beyond the walls.
“There are no words for this,” says one of them, and it feels like it is a reflection talking from beyond the threshold of the mirror. Aliya cannot keep track of who is speaking anymore. The borders blur.
“There used to be,” answers the same voice, emitted by an identical body, deep in the other mirror.
“When?” says a third reflection.
The reply comes as an echo from far away, in the drawn-out syllables of spoken Ancient. It unlocks something – not the root commands of sliset, but an opening nonetheless. A response comes quickly, as if a barrier had been breached and they could do without the filter of translation. What a wondrous thought, to do away with the burden of encoding and decoding. But not for humans. Never for humans. This molecular detail of abnegation that they are discussing cannot belong to humans either. It is abstract: the product of two minds without bodies. The first pang of hunger would bring it all crashing down.
Still, Aliya listens, and attempts to transcribe. Before long, talks get rarefied. Circuits whirr in synchronization. Ancient words hang in the air for minutes as if to let them express the full weight of their meaning.
“Co-existence,” she writes. “Self-less-sharing-thought-feelings,” then “abundance,” which makes her wonder if she has not missed a negative, but then it keeps being repeated, over an echo of that baseline of absence, as if it were its only logical progression, and wouldn’t it be nice to believe that one could go through the void and come out like that on the other side. At last she cannot follow anymore: they stand on the horizon and Aliya can’t fly that far away from the rivers, but she sits on the shore and calibrates her compass. An unreachable goal can still be a direction. The last word she hears before the complete silence of a total communion of minds fills her head and her mouth, its syllables sweet on the tongue. She has never heard it out loud, but she thinks it goes like this:
