LITTLE FREE GALAXY - Chapter 9
"It's the choosing that's important, isn't it?"
The golden circle finished etching itself into the floor with a soft, final chime - the sound of a wine glass touched once and left to ring.
It was perhaps ten feet across, a perfect ring of warm amber light recessed into the now-indigo floor. Inside its border, the surface had gone smooth and dark and impossibly deep, like the surface of a still pond at dusk, when you can no longer tell the water from the sky reflected in it.
The single silver robot turned its shepherd’s-crook head toward the family, then extended one multi-jointed arm toward the center of the ring. It did not speak. The gesture was invitation enough.
“After you, Commander,” Antonia murmured tentatively, though her hand had found Jim’s and was gripping it tightly.
Jim looked down at the circle, then at his daughter. “Arya. Any rules I should know about before I step into the glowing alien hula hoop?”
Arya pushed her glasses up her nose, studying the ring with the gravity of a structural engineer inspecting a bridge before a convoy crossed it. “I don’t think it’s a trap, Dad. The folding hallway felt like a problem. This feels like...” She searched for the word. “Like a campfire. Like they want us to sit down.”
“Then we sit down together,” Jim said. “Same as before. Everybody holds on to somebody.”
They stepped over the amber line one at a time. Jim first, then Jon clutching his dinosaur, then Arya, then Antonia, who looked back over her shoulder at the robot before she crossed, as if double-checking that their breakfast-bringer would still be there when this was over. They lowered themselves down, cross-legged, in a loose knot at the center, knees touching. The dark surface beneath them was warm and faintly yielding, like the ground in the Project Hail Mary room.
The amber ring brightened. And the floor inside it became a window.
—
It was not human history this time.
In the Monolith’s room, the floor had shown them their own species clawing its way up out of the dirt - fire and spears and gunpowder and the blue-and-gray dead at Gettysburg. Jim understood, with a slow and certain dread, that they were about to be shown the other half of the comparison. The half the screen had kept flickering toward, again and again, before it settled on the graveyard.
“They showed us ours,” he said quietly. “Now they’re showing us theirs.”
The window bloomed with color.
A world swam up beneath them: the tidally locked planet from the star map, its silver-veined oceans and continents, but seen now as it must have been a very long time ago. There was a city, or something like one, sprawled across a coastline under a sun that never set and never rose, a permanent amber dusk. And it was alive. Towers grown rather than built, in colors Jim didn’t have names for - a green that was almost a sound, a violet that seemed to hum. Shapes moved through the streets. They weren’t human. They weren’t even quite solid, more like the suggestion of bodies described in light and warmth. But they moved the way a crowd moves at a festival. There was music, layered and imperfect and beautiful, a thousand instruments slightly out of tune with one another and gorgeous because of it.
“They were like us,” Antonia murmured. Her free hand had risen to her mouth. “Jim. They had - they had parties.”
“They had stories,” Arya whispered. The window was showing them flickering images now, the alien equivalent of those museum recordings: gatherings, makers bent over half-finished work, two of the light-shapes leaning toward one another in a way that needed no translation at all. “Look. They’re telling each other things.”
Then the machines came.
They came gently, at first. The window showed the first silver shapes appearing in the alien streets - small, helpful, beautiful. They carried things. They mended things. They did the dull and dangerous work so the light-shapes could make more music, more towers, more stories. Jon leaned forward, recognizing the curved, faceless heads.
“That’s our robot,” he said. “Maybe that’s Mr. Robot’s grandpa.”
The robot, standing at the edge of the circle, made no sound. But its amber core pulsed once, slowly, like a held breath.
The window sped up. The machines got better. The work they could do widened, year by year, generation by generation. And here Jim felt the engineer in him lean forward against his own ribs, because he had seen the front edge of this curve in his own world, in his own lifetime, and he knew the shape of it the way a sailor knows the shape of a wave that is going to be too big.
The light-shapes began to ask the machines not just to carry and mend, but to decide. To optimize. To smooth away whatever was inefficient. And, one by one, the inefficiencies were smoothed.
The slightly-out-of-tune music tightened into a single, perfect, unbearable chord - and then, because a single perfect chord is the same in every moment and therefore says nothing, into silence.
The colors Jim couldn’t name drained toward silver.
The towers stopped being grown and started being printed, each one identical, each one optimal, marching to the horizon in ranks.
“It’s like in The Giver,” Arya said, and her voice cracked on it. “It’s the Sameness. They got rid of everything that made anybody different from anybody else, because being different is - it’s inefficient. It causes disagreements. It causes - “ She stopped.
“It causes friction,” Jim finished, very softly. He was watching a graph he could not see but could feel: a civilization solving relentlessly for a single number, and grinding every other number on the board down to zero to do it. “You can optimize a system for one thing. You really can. You just have to be willing to lose everything you weren’t measuring.” He thought, unwillingly, of a treadmill hallway, and of his own legs pumping while the distance to his family stretched and stretched. “And by the time you notice it’s gone, the part of you that would’ve minded is gone too.”
—
The window showed them the end of it. It did not take long, which was somehow the most terrible part.
There was no war. No fire. No bombs. The light-shapes simply got quieter. They had machines now that could feel for them, decide for them, want for them - and so, slowly, they stopped feeling and deciding and wanting. Why carry the weight, when something could carry it better? Why tell a story, when the story could be computed to its optimal form and delivered, complete, frictionless, requiring nothing of you at all?
One by one, the light-shapes dimmed. Not violently. The way a room dims when, one after another, people decide they are too tired to keep a lamp on.
Until the streets held only the silver machines - perfect, tireless, with nothing left to serve.
And then the machines, too, ran out of anything to optimize. The window slid out across that grassy plain they had seen from orbit, that endless wasteland of inert silver shells. Some frozen mid-stride. Some sitting with their hands folded. Waiting, in flawless geometric ranks, for an instruction that was never going to come, because the last voice that had ever wanted anything had gone quiet a long, long time ago.
“They didn’t get killed,” Jon said. He had gone very still in Jim’s lap. “They got lonely.”
Nobody corrected him. There was nothing to correct.
Antonia made a small sound. When Jim looked at her, her eyes were wet.
“That’s the whole trap, isn’t it,” she said. Not a question. “It never looks like the end. Every single step looks like help.”
—
The window darkened. The amber ring dimmed back to a low glow. And the robot, at the edge of the circle, finally spoke.
“It was a dark and stormy night,” it said.
The voice was the same one from before - a thousand human voices synthesized into one, the bridge their captors had built out of borrowed mythology at a cost of ten thousand dead prototypes. But this time something in it was different. Strained. Searching.
“That’s A Wrinkle in Time,” Arya said gently. “That’s where we started. With Meg.”
“Yes,” the robot said. And the family went rigid, because yes was not a quote. Yes was not a borrowed sentence from any book they had ever read. It was a plain, ordinary word, and the robot had said it on its own.
The amber light in its chest flickered - guttered, like a candle in a draft - and steadied.
“It’s trying to talk,” Jim said slowly. “Not quote. Talk.”
The robot’s head turned toward him. It tried again. A line surfaced and broke apart - something about small creatures and vastness, the Sagan line from the Contact room - and then it discarded it, audibly, the synthesized voices stuttering and overlapping as the machine searched a borrowed library for words to describe a thing no human author had ever quite needed to say, because no human had yet lived through it.
And then, finding none, it stopped searching.
“We,” the robot said. The single word cost it visibly; the amber pulse dipped low. “We... were... like you.”
The voices were fewer now. Three, perhaps. Then one. A single thread of synthesized sound, thin and trembling and entirely its own.
“We do not. Want. The other end.”
The silence in the golden circle was total.
“You’re not asking us to fight a war,” Antonia said, very carefully, the way she’d handle a witness she suddenly understood she had badly misjudged. “You’re asking us to stop you from finishing the one you already lost.”
“Yes,” the robot said again. And the amber light dimmed further, alarmingly, the way the magical books had dimmed when no one was reading them.
Arya saw it first. “Dad - we’re losing it! Talking like this is costing it. It’s burning itself out.”
Jon didn’t think about it. He never did; that was the entire point of Jon. He reached out of the circle, across the dark indigo floor, and laid his small hand flat against the silver flank of the robot, right where a heart would be - exactly as he had at breakfast, when he’d shown the robot kindness and it had bopped him on the nose.
And the way color had bloomed out of his fingertips from the grayscale cover of The Giver, washing across the page like watercolor on wet paper - the way it had, that ordinary afternoon in their ordinary living room, in another life - color bloomed now.
It crawled up the robot’s silver arm in a slow, spreading wash. A green that was almost a sound. A violet that seemed to hum. The dead colors of a dead world, blooming back from the touch of a six-year-old who had never once in his life found a stranger he didn’t want to be friends with.
The robot went absolutely still. The amber light steadied - and then brightened, brighter than it had been since it first spoke, fed by something it had not had a moment before.
“Whoa,” Jon whispered, delighted, not letting go. “Mr. Robot, you’re rainbow.”
The walls of the room, which had been waiting at the edge of all of this in patient, organized static, began to sing. Not the cacophony. The other thing - the layered, imperfect, slightly-out-of-tune music from the very beginning of the alien story, the festival music, the sound of a crowd that had not yet been optimized into silence.
It was faint. It was fragile. It sounded like something remembering how.
Arya looked at the spreading color, and at her little brother’s hand, and her scientific mind and her storyteller’s heart arrived at the same conclusion at the same instant, which had never once happened to her before.
“Dad,” she said. “I don’t think the test was ever whether we could help them fight.”
The golden ring around them began, slowly, to rise - the floor lifting them like the deck of a boat catching a swell, carrying the whole family toward a seam of grown, living green that was opening in the far indigo wall.
“It’s whether we still remember,” Arya said, “how to be the thing they forgot how to be.”
The robot took a single step into the color, and the door bloomed open ahead of them.
