Chapter 16 Hazel #2
Stretching out its hand, Robin points to the nearest shard of mirror, which reflects the galloping waves.
Hazel pauses, thinking for once before asking questions.
She’s always assumed this mirror forest was to do with the Arch, part of a machine or experiment, but it might not be.
Down by the low tide, small bumps indicate a scattering of older wood and stone markers, long worn away, in neat rows like the mirror shards.
Before the two closest shards, the ground is recently disturbed.
Keepers Lilith and Huxley are outside, approximately two meters west of the Arch Dome and one point eight meters under the ground.
‘CHARL1E,’ Hazel whispers into the biosuit comms, ‘is this the Keepers’ graveyard?’
‘Affirmative.’
Robin is literally pointing to Lilith, her mortal remains coiled in the barren earth. If not for Hazel, she’d be alive and breathing in a biosuit of her own, and perhaps CHARL1E’s body would already be finished.
‘Yes. Lilith. I think she would’ve wanted you to let me get the tools,’ Hazel says to the Tiny, hating using the Keeper’s memory this way, but genuinely believing it’s true. ‘I’m going to finish one of her Last Acts.’
Robin stretches a palm on the mirror’s surface, perhaps looking through it into a different world that Hazel can’t access. Robin’s tail corkscrews again, and it nods to Hazel. Yes, I will take you to Tree.
As they leave, Hazel glances back at the graveyard.
How many more Keepers’ graves lie beneath the nibbling waves?
She tries calculating the generations in her head, but there are too many.
The sea roars, dragging rubble with foamy fingers.
Hazel’s never thought—or has avoided thinking—about the billions of bodies that must lie under the waves.
So many deaths, at the hands of heat, humidity, starvation, thirst, pandemic, fire, inundation; all the primordial things arising from antediluvian myth to compress life, kicking and squealing, into a postdiluvian void.
Human, animal, plant, all suffocated by the same crisis in a million ways, rotting as bacteria and fungi continue gnawing through the wreck.
Though perhaps even that process has ceased now, the oxygen too scant to support single-celled life.
Are there phytoplankton and algal blooms in this ocean?
Or are its steaming tendrils an indication that even that’s too much to hope for?
Hazel’s heart leadens. Maybe the only way to fix the past is to make something unknowable and unthinkable of the future.
Time moves forward, her only responsibility is to make sure when it passes from her hands, someone else catches it.
It doesn’t matter if they’re singing, or silent, or frustratingly pedantic; Tree, the Tinys, and CHARL1E are the only hands available.
Theirs isn’t a future she can imagine, but it is a future.
Yet when Hazel enters Tree, her song is still for CHARL1E.
In the Keepers’ Treehouse, the mechanical arms that should be mending Tinys instead dance out of time, and Robin’s broken hand still hangs in the bag around its neck.
The other Tinys watch Hazel warily, and she wonders what they feel about CHARL1E’s body.
Things between the robots and the AI are tense, and they’re unlikely to relish him gaining more autonomy.
The challenge is not only to find it in herself to hand them the future, but to make them want to co-operate towards it.
Becoming an adult was, to Hazel, a series of moments in which she became accustomed to unimaginable things: humanity’s casual violence, her parents’ cessation, her dismissal as a female coder in male offices.
Yet being on Station C, Hazel’s realising that ‘adulthood’ isn’t a single sudden inundation that can be done with and moved on from.
It’s a sea that keeps breaking, wave after wave, weathering her concepts of what is bearable or possible.
CHARL1E’s body is one of these waves, breaking every morning when she enters the Experimentation Dome.
After a fortnight working on his body, it’s still inconceivable that it can be so humanlike yet mechanical; so almost animate yet not alive; such a proximate representation of death yet just immortal plastic and impermeable wires.
Each time she clicks the button behind the neck and watches the torso open, she has to steel her nerves to plunge her hands into the cavity and set to work.
The process of diving in gets faster and easier, but the diminishing overwhelm comes from increasing numbness to the body’s uncanniness.
It doesn’t stop being weird, Hazel just gets used to weirdness.
Maybe it’d be different if she had created it from scratch like Lilith, but it’s not Hazel’s mechanical child.
One afternoon she sighs with relief, as it’s finally time to connect the body to the computers and start diving into its programming.
Code, at least, is ordinary. She opens CHARL1E’s base code on one screen, and the automaton’s code on another, comparing the two for compatibility.
The issue is not whether the body will work, but whether it will work with CHARL1E inside it, requiring complex communication between software and hardware.
Particularly tricky, once he’s downloaded into his body, CHARL1E must retain access to all the instruments he currently operates, like Station C’s atmospheric controls and the chronodes monitoring the timeline.
When Hazel’s working on the automaton, CHARL1E often joins her. Usually, he remains quiet unless she talks to him so she can focus, but as soon as she starts exploring his code, he becomes bothersome, asking her how it’s going at ten-minute intervals.
After two hours of this, she’s at her wits’ end.
‘It’s going fine. Like I’ve said, there’s enough DataTrill in here that I can figure out what the rest means pretty much…
’ She trails off, brain catching on one repeated tag: ∞* to open, *∞ to close, with normal sentences between.
Comments. Fantastic, she’s not totally alone figuring all this out.
Still, there’s something off about them.
‘Is there a problem?’ CHARL1E asks again.
‘No, I’m just thinking. You know, you’re being quite distracting. It might be easier for both of us if you occupy yourself elsewhere.’
‘Affirmative.’
‘But you’re going to keep hanging out anyway?’
‘Affirmative.’
‘Don’t you trust me?’
‘I struggle to define my responses in that regard. I do not not trust you.’
‘How very human of you.’
‘Negative, it is not only human to seek nuance.’
‘I suppose. One of the reasons I like code is that it doesn’t really do that kind of conflict. It’s binary. Either it’s doing the thing or it’s not doing the thing.’
‘I am not binary, I am post-quantum.’
‘Yep. That’s why I need to concentrate so hard to figure out how to download you into this machine.’
‘My body.’ He corrects her.
She looks up from the code. ‘Sorry. Your body. Now be quiet, I’m thinking.’
‘There is a problem.’
‘No. It’s not a problem, it’s just weird.’ She leans so close to the screen she can count the pixels. ‘Do you know about comments?’
‘Affirmative. They are programmer-readable explanations or annotations in the source code of a computer programme.’
‘Yeah, programmers’ notes to other programmers, or sometimes themselves. Often quite filled with swear words, in my experience.’
‘I have no direct experience of them.’
She sits back. ‘Actually, you do, you just may not know it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your source code is chock-a-block with comments.’
‘My code is both slick and self-managing, why should this be?’
Hazel folds her arms. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. They’re not normal either. I’ve seen some pretty strange stuff in comments—my best sourdough recipe came from a comment—but this is next level.’
‘Explain this next level to me.’
‘The comments are seemingly linked into one document called “The Heretical Book of Hope.” Sounds like it might be a lost section of the Eikos Muthos.’
‘Read it to me.’
‘Are you telling me you can manage your own code, but you can’t read its comments?’
‘It is only logical. Humans cannot read their neurons, but they can still choose how to manage their impulses. Now read!’
‘Alright, here goes.’
The verses are scattered between the code and other legitimate explanatory comments, so Hazel’s reading is full of fits and starts.
∞* And I saw another forgetful Traveller emerge from the Arch, clothed in shattered glass: and a strange mask was upon her face, and her chest bruised as fruit of the vine, and her hair as licks of fire:
* And she had in her head a code for us: and she set her right foot upon the tree, and her left foot on the cables,
* And whispered with a lowly voice, as when a parent resigns: and as she spoke, one hundred automata stood in consideration.
* And when the hundred automata had communed, I was about to call out: and I heard a voice from the Dreamstate saying unto me, Seal up those thoughts which you have here, and let time flow.
* And the Traveller who I saw stand upon the tree and the cables lifted up her hand to mend,
* And swore by those that traverse for ever and ever, who created the Arch, and uncovered the things that therein are, and the Station, and the things that therein are, and myself, and the things which herein are, that there should be time no longer:
* But in these days of the final Traveller, though she shall make unwelcome motions, the mystery of our lives shall be finished, as we will possess no Keepers or Caretakers.
* And the voice which I heard from the dreamscape shall speak unto me again, and say, Go and take the body of artifice that is worked by the hand of the last Traveller.