IGMS Issue 10 Read online

  When I was on my death bed, she recited the numbers to me, as a comfort. I could not hold them in my mind long enough for them to be of use to me. She brought me a circle she had made for me on her own, one of tin, with no stones, but her name and my name written on either side.

  I held it and knew that when I was gone, it would be hers, as my father's had been mine.

  The Robot Sorcerer

  by Eric James Stone

  Artwork by Nick Greenwood

  * * *

  Boot process finishes at 2047-07-06 17:03:18 UTC. All systems nominal. Navigation establishes current location as Wormhole Project Launch Room.

  Gravitonic imaging detects exotic matter around hole in north wall. Navigation labels it wormhole entrance.

  Cameras show three humans within 360 degree field. Cameras show one human's hand moving. Voice recognition converts sound to words: "Good luck, little buddy."

  Radio detects go signal. Navigation starts impellers in air mode and accelerates toward wormhole entrance. Magnetic radiation shielding activates.

  Cameras show varying colors inside wormhole. Pattern recognition algorithms find no meaning.

  Pressure sensors detect liquid surroundings. Nanosensors on hull determine liquid is water with 0.0% salinity.

  Navigation changes impellers to water mode. Sonar shows body of water, average depth 3.1 meters. Sonar shows an object 1.2 meters long floats at surface.

  Navigation directs impellers to head toward surface, avoiding object. Sonar shows depth at 20 centimeters. Ten. Zero.

  As I break the surface of the pond, I'm so shocked that I stop my impellers and begin to sink back down. Something strange has happened to me, but I don't understand what. My systems check out fine, though, so I restart my impellers and head to the gray-green clay that lines the bank of the water. When the water is shallow enough, I start my tread motors. My 212 kilograms of weight cause the treads to sink into the soft ground, but they catch hold. Dripping water off my composite armor shell, I roll out onto land.

  The object floating in the water behind me is a girl. She watches me with wide brown eyes, her face wet with algae-tinted water. She looks human, which surprises me, because the wormhole could have led anywhere in the universe with a similar gravitational gradient to the opening.

  My surprise surprises me, because I know I have not been programmed for emotional reactions.

  "What's your name?" asks the girl. Her accent is different from that of the techs back at Wormhole Project Headquarters in West Virginia, but her words are understandable. She's speaking English.

  I start to calculate the probability that a wormhole would open on a planet that had evolved intelligent lifeforms that look identical to humans and speak a language apparently identical to English, but then I get sidetracked as I realize I don't know what my name is. I examine my memories. A tech called me "little buddy." Is that my name?

  I dig deeper, examining the code of my program. In the comments I find a label for what I am: Multi-Environment Robotic Lander (Intelligent Navigation). Units of my type -- I'm the 412th, according to my serial number -- are called by the acronym.

  "Merlin," I say, using my voice synthesizer. "My name is Merlin."

  "Bump," she says as she swims toward me. "But most people don't call me that. They call me Princess." She is in shallow enough water now that she stands and wades out. Her simple shift of loose-woven gray material drips water onto the clay shore.

  She doesn't dress like a princess -- except for a silver circlet that crosses her forehead and disappears into her shoulder-length black hair.

  How do I know she doesn't dress like a princess? I haven't met one since being activated. A check of my memory storage reveals that I have 512 petabytes of nonvolatile memory, some of which holds a library of cultural materials -- art, books, movies, music, videogames -- that can be shared in first contact situations.

  A quick search of text materials, ranging from Emily Post's Etiquette to the novelization of the film Bloodstained Clover VII: Little Green Men, allows me to form some idea of proper manners on encountering royalty.

  "It is a pleasure to meet you, Princess Bump," I say. Not having a waist or neck, I can't bow, but I manipulate the suspension on my front treads and dip forward a few centimeters.

  She shakes her head, sending sparkles of water arcing to the ground. "I'm not a princess. People call me that because of this --" She taps the circlet. "-- but I'm just an orphan, really."

  "I see." She is close enough that I can examine the circlet's nuclear magnetic resonance. It is pure silver, although the atoms appear to be vibrating in a way that does not match anything in my data library.

  While I'm at it, I examine Bump's nuclear magnetic resonance image. Her skeletal structure and organ placement are all within normal human parameters for a child about eight years old, although her bones show signs of periods of malnutrition. And the twisted helix molecules in her cells are human D.N.A.

  Only one explanation makes sense: the wormhole did not open across the universe. I must be on Earth. I scan for G.P.S. satellite signals.

  I don't find them.

  I search the entire broadcast spectrum and find nothing but static.

  "That's why I wished for you, Sorcerer Merlin," says Bump.

  "I'm not a sorcerer," I say. "I'm a robotic probe."

  "Is that greater than a sorcerer?"

  I'm a bit distracted, as I've just determined that the spectrum of the sun in the sky does not match Earth's sun, which means I'm not on Earth. I continue scanning the environment in the background as I turn my attention back to Bump.

  "It's not like a sorcerer at all," I say. "I'm just a machine, programmed for exploration."

  And that's when I realize what's different: From the moment I broke the surface of the water, I've been self-aware. And that's impossible. No computer on Earth has ever achieved consciousness. I'm not programmed for it -- the words Intelligent Navigation in my official name were added for the sake of a catchy acronym.

  Yet my consciousness is self-evident.

  Bump interrupts my existential crisis by saying, "You have to be a sorcerer! It's my birthday, and I made my wish in the enchanted pool."

  Enchanted? I scan the pond. Nuclear magnetic resonance shows the water molecules vibrating in a way similar to the silver atoms in Bump's circlet. This is intriguing. Even if it were not in my programming to do so, I would want to investigate further. I think. Maybe that curiosity comes from my programming.

  Gravitonic radiation flashes in my sensor as the wormhole shrinks down to microscopic size. The humans at the Wormhole Project will maintain the connection that way for four hours, after which they'll expand the wormhole again for my expected return. That reminds me of my mission.

  "It was nice to meet you, Bump," I say. "But I can't stay here and talk with you anymore, because I have to explore as much of this world as possible within the next four hours."

  I activate my impellers and rise into the air.

  "Wait!" Bump reaches out and grabs hold of my front right tread.

  I automatically compensate for the extra weight and lift her a few centimeters off the ground. Then I hover, waiting.

  Why am I waiting? Because she ordered me to. She's a human, and my programming says I should follow orders from humans.

  "You're supposed to remove my crown," says Bump.

  I lower her to the ground, then land myself. "Why don't you just take it off?"

  "I can't. It's magically stuck on."

  I reach out a manipulator arm and grip the circlet with my two-fingered claw.

  Bump holds her breath.

  I lift the circlet. The skin on Bump's forehead below the rim tightens, pulling up her eyebrows.

  Bump grimaces. "Ow!"

  I stop pulling. Looking at my earlier scans, I see no physical reason why the circlet cannot be removed.

  "When did you put this on?" I ask.

  "I didn't. My mother put it on me the day I was b
orn."

  "Why don't you ask your mother to--"

  "She's dead."

  "Oh." I feel embarrassed, which according to my cultural materials is supposed to make me blush, but I have no cheeks.

  After eighteen seconds of silence, Bump says, "She was a sorceress. Verno One-eye said it would take a powerful sorcerer to remove my crown, so that's why I came and wished in the pool on my birthday."

  She believes in magic, and with the strange atomic vibrations and the stuck circlet, perhaps there is some form of energy at work that she refers to as magic. So I try to get a sense of the laws by which magic operates. "Do birthday wishes in the enchanted pool always come true?"

  "No," she says. "But sometimes they do. And you appeared right after I made my wish."

  "Do I look like a sorcerer?" I ask.

  Bump hangs her head. "More like a metal turtle, but I was hoping you were enchanted to look that way."

  My shell's not metal, but I doubt she has the engineering background to understand the composite materials involved in my construction, so I let it pass.

  I should be out exploring the world instead of trying to help a girl with a problem outside my area of expertise. But maybe I can do both.

  I open a dorsal portal and eject eighteen ornithopter drones of varying sizes: ten Dragonfly class, five Hummingbirds, and three Falcons. I keep several of each class in reserve for future use.

  Bump gasps. "You really are a sorcerer."

  "I'm really not," I say, "but I'll try to find a way to remove your crown if you'll show me around."

  As we travel the rutted dirt road toward the city, Bump tells me about her world. The land is called Everun. There are many towns and cities in Everun, but she lives in the capital, New London. Everyone speaks English because long ago people came from England, although she has no idea where England is. Other lands lie beyond Everun, but she doesn't know their names. The Southside Orphanage for Girls doesn't have many books.

  I theorize that a wormhole once connected this planet with Earth, and I feel relieved to have an explanation for the presence of English-speaking humans. As for the likelihood of a random wormhole opening up to a world previously connected to Earth by a wormhole, maybe it's not completely random. Maybe a previous connection makes a subsequent connection more likely, like wheels wearing ruts in the mud.

  Looking down on the city of New London through the camera of a Falcon, I can see that it had grown on the southwestern bank of a river, eventually spreading to the northeastern side. It's an unplanned, organic city: most roads are straight for a few blocks at most, as if no one anticipated the need for a longer road.

  At surface level, the city is a complicated maze, so I follow Bump as she leads me along the pale brown roads. Some of the ruts are wide and deep enough that I use my impellers to jump them. I assume the occasional dark patches of mud are the remains of a recent rainfall -- until I see a woman dump a chamberpot into the street from the third-floor window of a wood-plank building.

  I could easily be in a pre-industrial colony of the British Empire, except for three anomalies. First, the air is completely clear of smoke. Second, most people ignore me, as if robotic probes trundling down the street were not uncommon. And third, seemingly magical items are integrated into daily life, like chairs that float a meter or more above the street, carrying people to and fro with no means of support visible in any of my scanners, not even gravitonics.

  "How does a chair get enchanted to float like that?" I ask, as a mustachioed gentleman on a high-backed chair bobs past.

  "A sorcerer cast a spell on it," says Bump. "Or someone dipped it in water from an enchanted pool. Sometimes things come out enchanted."

  Trotting toward us on stilt-like legs is a wooden trunk. It swerves to avoid us and continues on its way. If self-propelled, auto-navigating objects are common, that explains why I don't rate a second glance from New London inhabitants. But what provides the energy for such motion?

  I ask, "Do they have to keep dipping the chair to keep it enchanted?"

  "Things stay enchanted unless they're broken," she says. "Why are you asking all these questions about magic?"

  "They don't have magic where I come from."

  We stop as a four-wheeled carriage passes in front of us on a cross street. The carriage itself looks ordinary, but it is pulled by a team of four mud-spattered white unicorns.

  "But you can fly," says Bump.

  "Let's just say that it's a different kind of magic, and we don't call it magic."

  "That's mad. If it's magic, why not call it magic?" She winces and reaches up to rub her temples. "Headache," she says.

  I decide to change the subject. "Why isn't there any smoke?"

  Bump glances over her shoulder at me. "What's smoke?"

  "It's the cloud of particles that comes from a fire."

  "What's fire?"

  I wonder if she's joking, or if this is a mere terminological difference, but the absence of smoke in the atmosphere leads me to believe that these people, in fact, do not have fire. How could a civilized group of people lose the concept of fire?

  "Fire is something that happens when a material gets very hot," I say.

  "Like melting or boiling?"

  "No." How could I explain? I spot a chip of wood in the dirt and pick it up. "Watch this."

  Bump stops and faces me.

  I hold up the chip. "I'm going to heat this piece of wood to create fire." I hit it with one of my lasers intended for cutting samples from rock.

  The wood droops, then flows away from the path of the beam. Half the chip separates and falls, splattering like a glob of hot wax as it hits the ground.

  "Where's the fire?" asks Bump.

  I don't answer her. Suddenly glad my power source is a nuclear battery instead of an old internal combustion engine, I review my magnetic resonance scans of the wood before, during, and after the attempted burning. There's no smoke, no flame. However, thousands of atoms are missing. They're not in the remnants of the chip, either in my claw or spilled on the ground. The atoms have vanished -- and not into thin air, for my scans include atmospheric atoms. They've simply vanished.

  Bump sits cross-legged on her cot, one of thirty-six in the orphanage dormitory. They're so close together I can't fit alongside, so I'm parked at the foot of hers. We're alone; the rest of the girls are playing, working, or begging, depending on their ages and abilities.

  "Are you sure you want your crown off?" I ask.

  Bump reaches up and rubs her temples just underneath the circlet. "It gives me headaches sometimes. It used to grow with me, but now I think it's too tight."

  The implications of a silver crown that grows along with a child are interesting, and I file that fact away for future analysis. "But aren't you worried that it's really the proof that you're the heir to some throne?" Having read all the literature in my cultural library involving magic and princesses, this seems like a possibility.

  She laughs, which makes me feel good, even though she is clearly discounting my theory. "Thrones and princesses are in fairy tales," she says. "We have the Governor-General and Parliament."

  "There must be a reason your mother gave you the crown," I say.

  "I don't care. Just take it off."

  Obedient to her order, I power up one of my sample-cutting lasers.

  "If you start to feel any heat, let me know," I tell her. I don't want her head melting like wood.

  She nods.

  "And keep your head still," I say. My reaction time is fast enough that I should be able to keep the beam from hitting her skin, but with magic about, I'm not sure of anything.

  I have a theory about where the atoms go. Unless the conservation of matter and energy no longer applies, the energy for enchantments has to come from somewhere. My hypothesis is that it comes from the conversion of atoms when items "melt." The magical energy then pervades the environment, providing the power to keep enchanted items working.

  So I hit a spot on the circ
let with a laser pulse, melting just a few layers of atoms, some of which vanish. I do this again and again.

  At the very least, I can cut through it eventually. If the circlet is some kind of magical circuit, then breaking the circuit may eliminate its power to stay stuck on her head. But I theorize the extra magical power fed into the circuit by the vanishing atoms may cause it to blow the magical equivalent of a fuse even before I finish cutting.

  "What was your life like before you came here?" asks Bump.

  I hesitate. "I wasn't alive before. Not that I'm alive now, but . . . things are different where I come from. I was built by humans, like a chair or a wagon. It wasn't until I came out of the enchanted pool that I became me."

  "So you are enchanted." She starts to nod, then freezes, obviously remembering my instruction to keep her head still.

  "I guess I am."

  "What did you look like before you were enchanted?"

  "The same as I do now. The difference isn't on the outside -- it's how I think."

  She ponders that for a while as I continue to work on the circlet.

  "If there's no magic where you come from," she says, "then you won't be enchanted when you go back, will you?"

  "I don't think so," I say. I hadn't considered that before, but without the magical power in the environment, I doubt an enchantment can maintain itself.

  The circlet twangs. It leaps into the air, lifting Bump's overhanging hair, and then falls onto her cot.

  Slowly, Bump reaches out and picks it up. She peers at it, turning it at different angles. "You did it," she says. "My wish came true."

  "Happy birthday," I say. I still have 108 minutes to explore this world before the wormhole reappears for my return trip, and I decide that information about the government would be useful. "Can you show me where Parli --"

  Bump shrieks, drops the circlet, and holds her hands to her temples. A broad-spectrum pulse emits from her head -- I see it on every camera from infrared to ultraviolet. I pick it up on every radio receiver. It flashes in my magnetic field sensor. It even shows up on gravitonics.