SWNOVELS Chapter 2: The Plot Begins
“What the hell is this, Dixon,” the Old Man shouted as he held up a daily log dated three days prior. It was riddled with notes, half of which were illegible.
“It looks like a log, Sir.”
“Looks like a log, looks like a log. Don’t you think I can see it looks like a goddamn log?” The Old Man was having a bad day. He had woken up with a malfunctioning servo in his wrist and spent two hours getting his pinky finger to move again. The damn thing had been acting up more and more lately, and he was on the verge of replacing it altogether. Of course, he could always just call in a repair-bot, but even the thought of it made him sick to what was left of his stomach. He always did his own repairs, regardless of the cost. He just could never bring himself to trust the robots – not with his body. In fact, he could barely stand to have them touch him at all.
He looked the Domo in the eye and calmed himself down to a quiet angry state. “What I’ve never understood about you ’bots was why you’re so goddamn insufferable. You’ve got more brain than a human could ever dream of, more strength, no pain, and when it comes right down to it you can do practically anything you want. Yet with all that, you choose to be completely, devastatingly, and utterly insufferable.”
“Yes, sir. Insufferable, sir.” The Domo was programmed to know his place.
“Alright, Dixon. Have it your way.”
The Old Man leaned forward and pulled a hand rolled Don Pepin Garcia from the humidor, and cut and lit it himself. The humidor was of course capable of rendering this service for him, but the Old Man preferred the pleasure of performing it himself.
This is one of those clichés in space stories that we can’t seem to get enough of. Although it is the future, and we can have anything we want, there is a sort of pride in doing things the old fashioned way. The reader can’t help but note that 200 years in the future, the old ones are still the best ones. It could have gone the other way, of course. The cigar could just as easily been one of the rare, but incomparable cigars custom rolled by the great cigar-bots of Herodotus 9, or whatever, but that would give us someone who looks forward into a future of technology, rather than backward into a past of real people making things by hand.
This is a man, or half-man, who, like so many people in this story, holds onto the past as a better age. He embraces old things that were made from hard work, and he likes to do hard work himself. He isn’t going to let any machine tell him what to do. At least not anymore.
The Old Man sat back in his chair and enjoyed a few puffs. As expected, the cigar calmed him down a bit, and he felt his grip on the log relax a little. These little remnants of the early days, before the wars, usually brought him back down to earth, and today was no exception, although he was, perhaps, a bit more nostalgic than usual. He looked at this robot, this Majordomo who had served him for over fifty years, and thought about the time, so long ago now, when he had traded his heart for his life, when he had finally given up on that last shred of hope, of humanity, of love, to do the one thing more human than any other: survive. Like the Domo, the Old Man would probably live to be 400, if he serviced his parts regularly. But at what cost?
It had been a bad morning.
“What I want to know, Dixon, is just what in God’s name is going on in sector 47b?”
“Sector 47b?”
“Yes, Dixon. 47b.”
The Domo, of course, knew exactly what the Old Man wanted to know. The information on the log was input in standard form, the anomalies clear to anyone well versed in it, and the conclusions, for the Domo, obvious. The Old Man, however, was still part human, and like so many humans, had a great contempt for anyone that appeared the least bit condescending by knowing an answer before he did, especially a robot. So the Domo acted upon his programming, stating facts without drawing conclusions, allowing the Old Man to come to the appropriate conclusions himself.
“Well, sir, it looks like sector 47b is experiencing an abnormal number of anomalies in the transdimensional flux, which appears to be increasing the severance factor between our space-time fabric and the asynchronis inner film of the Sedgwick Universe, which in turn is most likely creating a gap which the crews in that sector have been unable to close. Sir.”
“In English, Dixon.”
“Yes, Sir,” the Domo responded with the same cold and unemotional style that separated him from humans, while at the same time making him virtually indistinguishable from robots of the same series. “Although we don’t have enough information to conclude with certainty, the crews in sector 47b seem to have created a hole to the other-verse which they cannot close.”
“Ah for Christ sake.” The Old Man leaned forward again and pushed a button on his vid-com. “Miss Dixon!”
“Yes, Mr. Rieder.”
“Send somebody down from science.”
“Right away, Mr. Rieder.”
Miss Dixon knew that bringing a human down to the Old Man’s office would take some time, significantly more time than bringing down a robot. This allowed her the rare opportunity to say a few words in response to the Old Man, which she took full advantage of, such as it was, with the following statement: “I have contacted the science department, and requested your senior scientist to come to your office. He is currently in transit, and should be arriving shortly.” If it were possible for her to feel smug upon the conclusion of this statement, she would undoubtedly have done so.
“Yes, Miss Dixon, thank you,” replied the Old Man, a little exasperated at this unexpected outburst. Focusing back on the robot in front of him, he sat back in his chair and stared at him. Then, with a wave of his hand, he said, “Get out of here, you make me nervous,” and like that, the Domo was gone.
A bit too long for good taste, or for that matter any taste, the Old Man ruminates about his condition. There is a fair amount, if not too much, talk about the difference between humans and machines, what makes a man a man, a machine a machine, the difference between man and the animals, between the animals and machines, and, well, pretty much more philosophical thought than we are likely to care about unless, perhaps, we find ourselves in a position to decide between life as a half-human half-machine thingy, and death by torture. This device is a sneaky, if not wholly obvious attempt to make us feel the passage of time. If we are meant to feel that this time period in fact feels interminable, then it may be said to have worked.
Suffice it to say that the Old Man considers his existence for what, in his world of instant gratification, is an immeasurably long wait for the guy from science to trudge his way down the hall the old fashioned way. But with or without this convention, the guy from science does, at long last arrive in the Old Man’s outer office, where he is announced by the Old Man’s secretary.
“Mr. Rieder?”
“Yes, Miss Dixon.”
“Mr. Elbert from Science has arrived.”
“Send him in”.
Life hadn’t been good to Dr. Peter Elbert. In a world where so many humans had been engineered for health and beauty, he was more like a mistake, like a stale and slightly green potato chip in an otherwise perfect bag. The pear shape to which his body had formed at a young age had never quite gone away. Similar was his acne, remnants of which remained with him to this day. What had left him, inevitably, was most of the hair on his head, although he attempted to disguise this loss by growing what was left of it a little longer, and combing it over his pate, in a style that had stubbornly ignored the scorn of generations.
None of this should have mattered, of course. There had been a long history of great men and women, scientists like himself, who had made their mark on the world not with their beauty, but with their brains. And he had the brains, there was no question about that.
But Dr. Peter Elbert carried himself the way he looked. He was a worn down man inside and out, and showed it with every ounce of his being. He lacked even that false sense of confidence that would have allowed him at least to bully people that lacked his own innate intelligence. Rather, he let everyone he met run roughshod over him, an had the tire tracks to prove it.
Basically, this guy is stereotypical of the guy no man wants to be, and a transparent attempt to set us up for the flashbacks, impending no doubt, that explain how he stole his current job from the much cooler, younger, and smarter scientist, whom we met earlier on that other planet with the house dome thingies and the mines.
Among other things, this character is here to teach us that playing it safe in our world of science fiction is the cardinal sin and leads to a life of boredom and regret. One look at this man and we know that exile and poverty, not to mention more painful punishments, will always be superior to such a life. In our world, cowardice is always rewarded with regret, bravery with adventure. And adventure, of course, is what it’s all about.
He has now been sent in, and stands several meters from the Old Man’s desk in this room without a chair. It’s an old device, but allows us to quickly grasp the attitude of the Old Man toward everyone he comes into contact with. A human standing before a man in a chair shows deference by his very posture. Robots, of course, show deference if they are programmed to, and in any case, have no need to sit.
“What do you think I’m running, a time school? What took you so long?”
This is foreshadowing. Both time and time schools will become prominent themes as the story develops.
“I’m... um...sorry, sir. I didn’t...uh..know this was urgent.”
“Urgent?!” the Old Man screamed, “Urgent?! Everything you do for me is urgent! When garbage is piling up on Gamma Alpha 5, do we take our sweet time and get there when we feel like it while your brothers rot in a jungle of filth? When the retro rockets fail on a continental dump, do we just wait it out, maybe get a coffee and a donut and check it out after our break while it destroys half a planet because its reactor imploded on the surface? Christ if there is anything I hate worse than a robots it’s humans.”
“I’m sorry sir. It...uh...won’t happen again.”
“You’re damn right it won’t, or I’ll have your lazy ass dragged to New Siberia where you will spend the rest of your life cutting frozen ammonia for the Cryogenic Storage Consortium.” The Old Man stared down Elbert, then slowly sat back and put the cigar to his mouth. He dragged slowly, leaned his whole chair back and exhaled toward the ceiling. With his feet on the desk, he took a moment to enjoy the uncomfortable position of this sad excuse for a man standing in front of him.
Few things gave the Old Man as much joy as tormenting humans. The robots had no sense of humor of course, let alone righteousness. If you tried to torment a robot with words, all you got was a face full of “I don’t get it, but if you say so, it must be true” in return. With a human, at least, you got a little squirming. You could actually watch them get a little smaller, and then work them up and down the emotional ladder in a way that offered no small amount of satisfaction.
The Old Man lived for such satisfaction, and breathed it in, flavored as it was with the smoke of this particularly good cigar. Then, the moment properly savored, he allowed the spell to be broken and said, “Alright, relax. I brought you down here for a reason,” and he was down to business.
Elbert, of course, did not relax. He continued to stand, uncomfortably, shifting his weight from foot to foot, waiting for the other shoe to drop, which it always did, eventually. The Old Man had been tormenting him for 12 years, ever since he came to be in charge of the science department, and Elbert had come to dread these face to face meetings. It wasn’t so much the bullying. He could stand that. He had, in fact, lived with bullying from one person or another for his whole life. But the Old Man was utterly unpredictable. Meeting with him was like waiting for your execution behind a blindfold. You knew it was coming, but you didn’t know when, and the waiting was almost worse than the dreaded moment itself.
Maybe today would be different.
“I want you to look at this log from sector 47b. Either we have the kind of mistake upon which empires rise and fall, in which case the poor Trash-bot who certified it is about to be dismantled piece by piece, or there is crack in the universe that our guys can’t fix.”
The Old Man held the paper in his hand, but did not actually offer it to the human facing his desk. He just sat there, taking in the moment. In this office, the Old Man moved for no one but himself. He took another slow drag, and blew his smoke directly toward the scientist. “Since we know a Trash-bot could never make that kind of mistake, what I want you to tell me, Dixon, is how we close the damn crack.”
Elbert moved forward to take the document from the Old Man’s hand. Once he had it in his possession, he stepped back the requisite three meters and studied it. At first he saw nothing special. Just another log from another dump. Maybe this one was a bit larger than usual, but it was the right time of year for that. He began to panic. He knew there was something here he was supposed to see, something that would explain why he got called down here, but he didn’t see it. He could hear the firing squad cocking their rifles, and prepared himself for the worst.
Then he saw it.
He stood dumbfounded, and stared at it like he was struggling with a foreign language he was only casually acquainted with. He moved over to another part of the office with better light, but the more he could see, the more confused he became. His usual lack of self confidence faded away as he studied the paper, and lost himself in the problem taking shape before him.
“This must be a mistake, sir. I’ve run the numbers on this sector myself. In fact, I was just looking at them this morning. If this is accurate, then…”
The two of them stared at each other. When it became clear that his scientist had lost his power of speech, Old Man stood up and walked over to him. When he was barely half a meter away he said, quietly, in almost a fatherly voice “then what?”
“Then…”
“For God’s sake, man, what is it?”
“Oh dear God. It can’t….” and he looked back at the log.
The Old Man grabbed him by the shoulders. “What is it?”
And the guy from science looked up, looked the Old Man straight in the eye. “Were doomed.”
Not that our villain would put much stock in a paranoid statement like that from a shlub like Elbert, but it is a nice opportunity for cliffhanger-like escape from the dark and oppressive world of the machines, to the dark and slightly less oppressive world of the humans.
Teasing us with the imminent destruction of the universe, of course, has a not entirely unreasonable chance of keeping us engaged through what is turning out to be a less than successful, if not downright tedious work. Perhaps the device will work, and the repeated mention of the impending doom will keep us holding on, wanting to learn more. On the other hand, if we are foolish enough to keep reading, it is just as likely that we are too stubborn to put the book down before we’ve really given it a chance, and rather than continuing because of this less than subtle technique, we will continue in spite of it.
But regardless of the reason, continue we do. And with the slightly stale aftertaste of the Old Man on our palate, we go back for a second helping of our hero, whom we last left preparing tomorrow’s hangover.