Keepers of the Automata by Brian S. Wheeler
Chapter 5 – A Strange Story and a Bold Request
The public climate signs mounted on the bus stop warned the waiting commuters that it was a code gray day, a day when those waiting for the buses couldn’t see beyond a single city block due to the blanket of industrial ash and monoxide hovering in the air. The air felt like soup in his mouth, but Bryce’s heart felt carefree and light as he breathed through his aspirator. He held his most recent manuscript within the plastic carrying case that sometimes housed his typewriter. He couldn’t wait to share it with Rebecca and the other keepers. A code gray day was not enough to keep him from the bookstation and the automata.
An elderly woman leaned into the bus stop as a wet cough jarred her aspirator from her face. The woman stumbled onto a knee as she dropped the sacks held in each of her hands and pushed the aspirator back into place. No one seemed to notice her discomfort as the woman strained to steady her breath. None of those seated on the bench moved to offer the coughing woman a seat. Bryce’s shoulders slumped. The world’s apathy continued to haunt him. Did no one but him notice how dark and stained that woman’s old aspirator had become?
“Let me help you with your bags.”
The woman violently shook her reddening face and pushed Bryce away when he tried to offer assistance. The world was harsh. The sky offered no pleasure. Bryce suspected that experience taught that woman to mistrust the help of strangers.
Bryce stepped backed and began gathering the contents spilled from the woman’s bag, giving the woman the opportunity to hold her respirator to her mouth as her breathing calmed. Bryce tossed heaps of plastic bracelets and tiaras, play jewelry often collected by children, into the emptied sacks. He helped to refold several princess dresses, and he carefully set fox and kitten masks atop the soft fabric. Several tubes of paint and brushes confirmed Bryce’s deduction that the woman supplemented her state income by working as one of the face-painting vendors who often congregated outside of the bookstations to attract the attention of the children who waited in line for the latest Freddy the Fox offering. Bryce hoped that the woman might’ve used whatever she earned at her costume stand to enhance her diet beyond the tasteless proteins offered by the state cafeterias. But he knew better as he collected the glossy paperback books that had spilled from the woman’s other bag. Pictures of bare-chested men holding swooning women adorned each of those covers. All of them were books created by that automaton named Val Carrington.
“Why do you buy so many romance novels?” Bryce asked as he handed the bags back to the woman.
“What’s it to you?”
“It just seems like one is just the same as any other. Don’t you get tired of reading the same story over and over? Don’t you want to get a little more for your hard-earned money?”
The woman snarled. “You’ve got some nerve, mister. Those love stories are the only things that keeps me going in this ruined world, and you stand there and tell me one is just like another. You’re an ignorant fool and a sadist.”
The woman stomped to the other side of the bus stop and didn’t give Bryce another glance. The bus rumbled out of the smog several minutes later, all the color faded on the advertisements pasted onto every inch of the vehicle promoting Sheriff Tate’s newest western, or Mary Hecate’s latest blood-fest. Bryce found a seat at the back of the bus, and his thoughts swirled as he waited to arrive at the bookstation repair shop. The attention of every other rider was locked in one of the automata paperbacks, onto all the books following the predictable action of the stale, robotic genres. Bryce shook his head. The world was blind. No one realized that the human heart could shape language far more gracefully than an oiled automaton ever might. What, if anything, might ever remind those passive commuters that the most powerful stories were those imagined by woman and man?
Rebecca greeted Bryce at the bookstation’s rear entrance, and the two quickly got to work preparing the automata for the next round of software updates soon to arrive in their bookstation. They spent their day soldering damaged circuit boards. They replaced hydraulic fluids. They polished wax skin and painted robot eyes and lips so that the automata would look their best when the customers again gathered in mass to receive the special books the robots provided during the days immediately following an update to their artificial intelligence. Time passed quickly for Bryce. Bryce found that his work provided his days with purpose. His work gave him some sense of importance. Yet an old resentment still gnawed at the back of his mind. He still wished the world might value his skill with words as well as it valued his skills with metal and wire.
Rebecca surprised Bryce when she tapped his shoulder well before the end of the workday. She perplexed him when she lifted a chilled bottle of expensive Champaign in an ungloved hand.
Bryce grinned as he removed his safety goggles. “Real bubbly? Made from real grapes? Where did you get hold of that bottle? What’s the occasion?”
“My sources for such drink will remain secret, but the Champaign is to help us celebrate.”
“Celebrate what?”
Rebecca poured a round of the valuable drink into the plastic drinking cups that unscrewed from their work thermoses. “You’re the occasion, Bryce Munson. The franchise is opening another new bookstation, and you’re the perfect person to serve as its keeper. You’re the best possible candidate the franchise might find anywhere in the city to maintain its automata. You’ll have a shop of your own filled with all the tools you can think of, and you won’t have to annoy me any more by putting my tools in the wrong cabinets. You’ll have your own tools to misplace from now on.”
Bryce clinked his plastic cup with Rebecca’s and sipped from his toast. He had never imagined that he would find such a purpose in the work of maintaining the robots he had for so long despised. The Champaign tasted sweet, but Bryce couldn’t help but perceive something bitter lingering upon his tongue. He would miss working alongside Rebecca. He would miss how the smell of oil mingled with the scent of Rebecca’s skin. He lacked the courage to tell her that the way her leather apron fell upon her hips stirred his blood. A shop of his own might prove to be a very lonely place. And there was still his pride, his pride that still struggled to accept the possibility that his skill could only secure a position maintaining the robots instead of a position replacing them.
Rebecca refilled Bryce’s plastic cup. “The gang at tonight’s writing group is going to be thrilled at the news. It’ll give everyone another reason to eat and drink. It’ll give us all a reason to be happy. I hope you have a good story ready for everyone. Everyone keeps talking about the words you pound out of your typewriter.”
Bryce nodded. “I don’t know if what I’m working on is any good, but it sure is strange.”
“It wouldn’t be one of your stories if it wasn’t strange,” winked Rebecca. “Repay me a little for this wonderful drink. Give me a taste of what your next story’s about.”
“It’s set during the years right before the franchise introduced their first automaton, in that period just before the world really started to unravel at its seams, in a time just before the climate signs appeared to warn us when the sun was too hot for our skin, or when the air was too poisoned for our breath. It’s set in one of the small towns that used to exist in all the empty space between the cities, a place surrounded by real crops like corn and bean, a place that still found the means to survive before the synthetic seeds came along with the automated planter-harvesters to drive such a town off the land.”
Rebecca eye’s widened. “I doubt anyone knows very much about that time. The automata never use that period as a backdrop to any of their stories.”
“Well, I’m sure that all those marketing gurus employed by the franchise believe such an era to be too depressing to serve as any kind of background for a robot’s best-selling novel. My first draft is a terrible mess because I’m trying to push the envelope. I’m trying to do something different, and that’s what makes it hard, and that’s what makes it worthwhile.
Rebecca arched an eyebrow. “Ah, maybe your story might find some readers after all. The Val Carrington robots are always putting fancy sports cars in their romance novels.”
“Maybe, if my story was only about the front of that house,” Bryce continued, “but most of my story takes place behind that house, where the entire back wall has fallen away to expose the home’s dark interior. Now, all the people who live in that small town surrounding that home don’t have anything better to do all day but stand behind that house and stare up at the second-story bedroom. They don’t have anything else to do but stare at the dead body wrapped in a bed covered with heirloom blankets and quilts.”
“Sound ghoulish,” interrupted Rebecca. “Are you sure Mary Hecate might not steal your story?”
“She might if it was only another zombie story, but I’m trying to do something different. Rebecca, the people looking into that second story don’t know that the man wrapped in bed is dead. That man used to be a tycoon of some kind. I can’t decide if he owned the lumber mill or the glass factory. But that man up there in that house use to supply that small community with whatever purpose and wealth it ever owned, and all those folks standing at the back of the house are just gathered there waiting for that man to rise again from his bed. But the problem is that none of those folks can accept what their eyes tell them. None of them will accept that the man’s been dead for so long that he’s stinking into bone. None of those folks turn away long enough from that house to see how their world is falling apart all around them. None of them think to do anything about it for themselves. They’re all enslaved with dreaming of what their town must’ve been like before that man in the second story died in his bed.”
Rebecca stared at Bryce. “You’re right. None of the automata would ever write a story like that.”
“Well, it’s still very rough.”
“That doesn’t matter, Bryce. We’re all going to love it. We love everything you write.”
“I’m glad for it, but it’s too bad the rest of the world doesn’t feel the same way. I might then sell just enough books to make me a very comfortable man.”
Rebecca laughed. “And not have the chance to earn your own bookstation shop? And not have the chance to be a keeper?”
“And I would not have had the chance to meet you.”
Rebecca wrapped her oil-stained fingers around Bryce’s hand, which bore the small scabs and minor burns of hard work given to the maintenance of the automata. Bryce didn’t suddenly lean forward to lock Rebecca’s lips passionately with his own. Nor did Rebecca swoon into his arms like all those airbrushed women on the cover of Val Carrington’s paperbacks fell into the embraces of their shirtless lovers. Rebecca and Bryce only gazed for a fleeting moment through their safety goggles into one another’s eyes. Bryce thought any of Val Carrington’s lovers would’ve laughed at the timid intimacy they shared, but Bryce’s heart surged with a love few of those romance readers would ever feel. The gaze lasted only for a breath before Rebecca retracted her hand to grip a screwdriver.
“We’ll still have plenty opportunity to see one another, Bryce.”
“We’ll still have the writers’ group.”
“We will,” Rebecca winked, “and there’s no reason why we couldn’t meet someplace else. We could meet someplace private. Someplace without so many eyes. You could come to my apartment, or I could go to yours.”
Bryce’s heart thundered. “There are all kinds of eyes in the housing stacks.”
Rebecca leaned forward. “Maybe, but they all belong to strangers.”
A buzzer echoed just as Bryce thought he would overcome his cowardice and feel the moist warmth of Rebecca’s lips pressed to his. Another automaton finished installing the latest round of software updates. As keepers, Bryce and Rebecca still had many responsibilities to complete for the benefit of bookstations’ writing robots, and plastic mugs of Champaign would have to wait.
Bryce couldn’t remember ever feeling so optimistic as he spent the remainder of the workday tending to fine gears and motors. He found a fellowship of human writers when he learned a keeper’s trade. He believed he found love. And Bryce Munson believed that he might still find a way to change the world.
For a very strange story brewed in Bryce Munson’s mind, and that robotic keeper still hoped the magic of words might spark that rebellion needed to save the world.