The Philosopher's Son - 1. The Philosopher's Son

“What’s so hard about giving in for you?” He was kicking at a bed of pine needles, hand firmly planted on a sticky trunk. “The day is perfect. Two hours until you’re expected back. No one around but you, me and the bugs.”

His eyes were clear and frustrated. My gut felt hollow. It was hollow. This was inconsequential. I had to keep moving.

“I’m detached. Today, anyway.” I stabbed some ants to prove my point, stepping through bracken and branches.

“You can’t detach. The fact that I’m here with you is proof.” Jumping into my vision again. “See? I’m right here.”

“You. Should be right here.” Can’t lose focus.

He pretended to jump on my carapace and ride. His hand reached down to stroke my side. He patted my nose. My senses worked diligently, picking up bicyclic terpenes, pinenes and other resinous compounds on his palms.

“Delta-3 carene and sabinene. See? Here.”

“Ah, mother of God. Please get out of my head and let me do my job.”

“Is that a no?” he said with a half-mocking smile.

I stabbed through the woods, jumping over unfamiliar plants. Moving faster. “Yes. It’s a no.”

After a few moments I added, “The second time we kissed. Tell me the story.” As long as I was moving it was harmless. I remembered the first too well.

His lips twitched as if he’d already won.

“It was two days later. You ran into me outside Freeman Hall, where they put the bronze bust of Artemis Four. I think you were excited to see me. But you had this ripped membrane hanging out of your bag. Some random lab failure of the day.”

“It was Vierra. Not random.”

“So you weren’t in the best mood. You were smiling at me with your mouth, but your eyes were red from rubbing. Now that I knew kissing was an option, I felt – frustrated. Could I kiss you when you were sad? Where to kiss?”

“All you could think about was physical contact. As if that would comfort me.” I glowered. He was right.

“Your eyelashes. That was what I loved about your sad face. So I kissed your eyelashes.”

At that moment a tiny vibration careened toward my head. Erratic trajectory.

I instinctively swiped, forgetting the story, and forgetting that at the moment my hand was a forged steel machete. The blade stuck fast in the trunk of a hemlock. I fought back the frustrating urge to yank free. Started counting the now dead insect’s eyes.

“Need any help?” 464. Focus.

“What are you going to do, pull me off with your bare hands?” I laughed at my own joke.

Natural fields of operation suck because of all the organic unpredictability. But at least personal illusions are more obvious out here. And we were trained for this. The problem was that I was distracted and making unnecessary errors.

It was just a machete anyway. I disengaged and flagged the part’s location. I took a cursory look at the remaining stub. Hiro leered at the noob move.

“You’re one to mock.”

“Yeah. But, here we are, still talking.”

“Would a tree survive with that thing wedged in it?” I asked.

He raised an eyebrow. “Harin, it’ll be fine. The tree will grow around it. Probably give a nasty kickback to a saw rig someday.” Hiro saw through the question. “You’re going to be OK too.

“Remember? When we kissed, your eyes closed. You forgot about the metal in your head. You felt better.”

As I turned down the slope he flickered on my left. “Do you know how beautiful you were? Your senses fell like rain. I could feel traces glowing on my skin. That’s when I knew you were going to be great. At everything, I mean.”

“Yes, here I am, being great. On a pipe cleaning mission.” My steps left slashes of wet soil and scattered punctures, as if a giant spider had passed. I probably was a giant spider.

Hiro dodged through the trees beside me. “You kissed me back. You hit me with sheer empathy. I lost track of who was feeling what. I still feel like that.”

“Lovely, Hiro. But at this point, how do I know I’m not just making it all up?”

Huge sheets of cloud piled over the horizon, coming into view as I cleared a dune. The radiation streaked ragged, layers of light as far as I could see over the lake. Something like sunset, in any case. Wavelengths rippled, windy ruffles, slightly blurring the signals I was tracking. I skittered down the ridge. Where the creek cut through sand into the lake, I started sampling.

Hiro squatted to watch minnows flick sporadically in their eddies. Water striders danced in the brown water under his hands, fleeing his fingertips. What would he have thought about, had he really been sitting there? Hydrodynamics? Food chains? The hurt of his absence made my joints shake.

“I’m going out to the intake now.”

“I’ll come with you a ways.” Hiro had always found work past sunset to be sacrilegious. Which was usually a reprieve; but now it made no difference.

I stepped into the water and tucked in sensory nodes, getting ready to seal up for higher pressure. Hiro pulled off his shirt and folded his pants in a neat square on the rocks. Too much bandwidth. SKEDA pinged as I helplessly replayed the intricate patterns of his hair, every muscle in his body relaxed and attuned. He walked into the waves, shoulders tensing a bit as the water climbed up his thighs.

Some of my parts slipped out. Pathetic. I wrapped them in quickly and shoved in deep enough to float. Then I flipped to dorsal and propelled myself with a whirl of legs, squid style.

We followed the pier, then the intake pipe as it jutted into the Great Lake. Hiro swam alongside until the third buoy, about one kilometre. He stopped and climbed up on the floating platform. He pushed the water off his skin and leaned back in the horizontal light.

Wordlessly I slipped into the water. I started a more direct course, diving diagonally to the water supply intake at a depth of 40 metres. This far into the lake there was nearly zero risk of contamination; I would be passing through four thermal layers just to get to the intake. Yet somehow, according to the plant monitors, elevated organic matter was getting in. Probably a clump of weed or a dead fish. But there was no risk too small to investigate. Every day, over two million people drank the water from this source.

I dropped a few sensory sims as I neared the pipe. Satellite positioning was next to useless at this depth so I used relative location instead. I could feel the strong suck of the pipe now directly below me, my legs connecting with the large metal basket which protected the intake pipe from clogging. I slurped up a few samples, carefully at this pressure. What else was I supposed to do? I pondered surging back up and calling it a day. Still, a few samples wouldn’t help much. SKEDA would run scenarios and just send me back.

I worked my way around the basket, keeping my orientation perpendicular to the sucking force. I could sense my legs hitting strands of something wrapped around the basket. I tugged at different angles. Something like rope or a loose net. Made from organic fibres, which I recognized as strange. Nobody had made fibre rope for – decades? Centuries? I untangled the net from one side and moved to the other to untangle it there.

Too late I realized the net had floats on one end. It floated up and around to my side, sucked by the current, covering my exoskeleton with stripes of rough rope. I stayed very still in the dark. I hoped the net would continue to float and slide away. Instead it caught on several joints. Whatever heart I had beat hard somewhere before hormones clamped it. I jerked to get out. The net wrapped itself around more tightly. I panicked and pushed off from the basket with full force, snapping the net off the basket. I started dropping weight as fast as possible. Irrelevant! The fastening ropes trailed behind me, weighing me down. With panic I started dropping my legs and their engines, rushing upwards.

I burst through the surface and realized my rush was pointless; no one was trying to trap me. After a moment I realized the pressure was safe to open my eyes. I didn’t need to breathe. I needed to propel myself, and now I had only two legs and some significant drag. Likely too much drag for the power plant of a scout bot. I thrashed and jerked, trying to cut the net.

In my anxiety I imagined Hiro sitting on my storage pod, pulling hard on the bonds. Water sprayed off his hair as he tossed his head and muttered unintelligibly. How impossible this was. I stopped thrashing and surveyed the rolling waves. I could see the stern lights of a lake freighter nearby. I felt strangely like a lake monster, caught in a fisher’s trap. Or just a psycho. Straightjacketed.

To emphasize the point Hiro started wriggling like a mad man beside me.

“Try moving like this.” He had pulled his knees up to his chest and, using both arms wiggling at his side, rotated himself in a spin. He inched forward.

Unsure of my own sanity, I tried to think of another way out. No cutter; that was still embedded on shore. No lasers or ions or torches. Not even a rough edge to saw with. I could just accept specification death but that would mean a significant hit to privileges.

So I wriggled. My hollow chambers spun and glinted under the moon. After a few minutes Hiro managed to calm me down.

“This is your strength, mecha,” he started to coach. “You’re adaptable. Your body specs change mid-mission and you don’t skip a beat. You just become whatever you inhabit.” Hiro was floating on his back beside me. I was moving that slowly. “It’s amazing that you’re moving at all. No one trained you for this.”

I imagined myself as an amoeba, propelled by my rippling edges. I started to open each of my hatches in a circular motion around my midsection. Picked up speed.

Here I was, a wriggling wrecked mech, gasping to shore like a primordial eukaryote. It was one of the moments in which I could accept myself as something more than human. Evolved. What Hiro wasn’t saying is that I was also weak against the biologically inherited modes of sense, three dimensional movement and emotion, though I tried to use this weakness as an advantage when circumstances changed unexpectedly. These modes challenged most mech operators to various degrees, but I kicked myself for letting them dominate my brain function even while meshed. Hiro pushed on ahead and left me alone.

Four hours later I passed him curled up on the buoy, asleep.

“Thanks. For the tip.” I rasped.

Hiro slid into the water and came alongside with a leisurely backstroke. He was just enjoying the warm night now. I allowed myself to calm more, dragging net and shame behind.

On shore I stumped awkwardly to the bluff, using what felt like my elbows. Hiro flopped down beside me.

“You made it, rider. But I will admit I’ll miss your legs. And all.”

I was exhausted but had to smile. Hatches whirred.

“Would you still have loved me without legs?”

He was quiet for a while.

“I loved you every step of the way.” He was on his side, looking at me. “When the grafting started. When you shuddered in our bed, oozing from the transplant. When I sat next to you during the first sims.`

I didn’t like it when he dropped the act like this. But I needed it.

“I held your hand for hours. Sometimes your heart would stop for a while and I knew you couldn’t feel me anymore. I loved you, and your heartlessness.”

Hiro reached over and cupped his hand behind my pressure gauge. My ear. “When your body twitched into the vat, I loved you. I sang for you. Mahler’s third, do you remember? And if all you had ever been was a figment of my imagination - I would still have loved you.”

We could both see far away points of gamma spattered across the night, framed by gossamer geosynchronies.

My battered senses were aglow. “So… why did you leave?”

But I knew he couldn’t answer my question. It was one of the things I could still not ascertain.

At dawn the waves picked up again. Hiro lifted himself, dressed, and walked back over to wrap me in warm arms. I hovered between myself as mech and as amoeba, savouring the peace of morning, the strokes of wings above. SKEDA would ask questions, later, about my concentration at this point. But Hiro was humming his dream into me. I basked in the burn of figments too difficult to release.

*-*-*-*

When comms came back online Hiro disappeared in a rush of pings. I rolled over on the sand, overwhelmed, and let the mesh fade. For a brief moment I was back in the vat, a glittering string of tears floating before my eyes, pale body stretching whole below me. I caught a glimpse of my EEGi swirling in a mass of golden coils. It arrayed as if it was glorious, caging me. I railed, real hands, real fingers, gel vanishing between my fists. And then SKEDA snapped me into home state and the clamps swept it all away, again.