This ongoing work in progress is entirely a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed within are entirely fictional and any resemblance to people, living or dead is coincidental.
No part of the work may be reproduced in any form without the explicit permission of the author.
Copyright Ion Fyr 2022
ionfyr.net
Mostly out of his obsessive habit of documenting everything he took out his tattered and battered notebook, his left index finger caressing the softened edge of the pressed-board front cover. The sap green dye had warn through exposing frayed paper fibers. He twirled his pencil stub around his right fingers absently while observing the mechanical men.
Constable Pool couldn’t remember exactly where or when he had heard the term “anthromorph”–probably from Nila. It seemed like a future-word, like vat-leather, the Net, Naskadev Drives–no, that wasn’t it–Naskovich Drives and other. He was certain that it wasn’t modern, or at least current.
“Anthro” obviously referred to their human form, that resembling a man, or a human in general–the language of his time favored the masculine in a way that he increasingly saw as silly. Though Nila–he was sure it was she–had distinctly called mechanisms of similar appearance and function anthromorphs. The second part, the “morph”, was a bit more perplexing. What about it made it change form? Or, did the changing only refer to it’s ability to flex and move about? That didn’t seem right. He would have to ask her.
His fingertips found the page where he had left off, noting the transition from bent and handled pages (with dirt and grease accentuating the tiny letters and sketches) to the virgin, tightly packed pages. He wasn’t even looking at the book; his eyes moved up and down the two machines, from one to the other, trying to see the differences between them.
Aside from a few unique abrasions, mostly on their hands and feet, they were identical. The most obvious difference, apparent in good light, was a brass plate on one that was mimicked by a burnished steel one on the other, each forming a kind of cheekbone on the face, under the right eye. (Their eyes, he now saw were of different diameters, the left being slightly larger. Rather than orbs in sockets, they more closely resembled truncated brass telescopes that protruded about two centimeters in front of the somewhat ovoid head.)
To make identification more clear to him, Pool approached and, with his pencil, to the best of his ability inscribed a One and a Two on them respectively. The pencil marking did not take to the metal forehead well at all, but as long as no one rubbed them out, the markings would remain for at least a little while.
Pool was just finishing the Two, tracing over it again to make the marking darker, when he noticed from the corner of his eye a movement to his right, and given the lifeless environment of the camp, he jerked his attention in that direction.
The head of One had turned, silently, and was coldly looking at him. He could tell the lifeless eyes, the impenetrable lenses, were focused on him, his face in particular.
He lurched backwards. placing his pencil stub between his teeth and standing now two meters away, he felt his pockets for his pistol.
Finding the revolver in the inner pocket where he tended to keep it, where its weight hung better and more comfortably. He half-raised it, the start the machine gave him, subsiding.
“Hold back. I mean you no harm,” he muttered, saying more forcefully, “I am merely investigating.”
As if understanding and accepting Pool’s explanation, number One turned toward Two, which remained dormant, then back to Pool, to his pistol, then back to Pool once again.
Without looking or emitting much sound at all beyond a faint click scrap, number One reached with its arm, to the socket where the cable coming from the battery bank entered its side.
Now disconnected, still looking at Pool, it raised its arm, in a straight, rigid fashion and pointed it at the direction of the mechanical master of the house, the enormous thinking machine in the nearby room.
The anthromorph led him there, and found a cable, that Pool hadn’t given any thought to and proceeded to plug itself in, perhaps establishing a more direct connection. Pool didn’t know.
Nearly immediately, the thinking machine’s gears started churning.
Number One again stiffly pointed towards what appeared to be a spool. It was empty, but appeared to be intended to feed paper into a kind of rolling press.
Ah…It wants to chat. Nila and the Baroness will never believe how far I’ve come: talking to machines…an they wanting to talk back to me. Pool smirked to himself proudly, imagining the two women, fawning over him, having proven his intellectual capabilities, even beyond the extent that he had before. His fleeting fantasy was brought back to reality. Paper. I need paper.
He looked around. In his exploration of the camp up to this point Pool could not remember having seen any spools of paper, of a size that would fit the machine.
From the look of everything else in the decaying camp, evidence suggested that the last person to reside here, the late captain, had run out of many supplies and had resorted to improvising. Perhaps the paper had been used up.
He walked briskly around the room, around the thinking machine and card catalogue, his eyes searching. The pistol had been returned to his jacket pocket a moment after he drew it. Pool doubted he’d need it. The pencil and notebook as well…for now. He had a lot to take note of.
Nothing resembling the roll or spool of paper, or anything else that appeared as if it would fit into the receptacle allotted for it was visible. Pool imagined the dying captain, burning the last remnants to keep warm, destroying the secrets the machine had revealed in paltry fires. He knew this was rubbish; there was still a stash of firewood, and plenty of furniture if that ran out.
In the captain’s chamber, Pool remembered he had seen logbooks. At the time he hadn’t given them any thought. Excited, now bursting with his inspiration, he hastened to that room, bursting through the canvas doorway in a cloud of dust.
The light tube looping down from above flickered and swayed from his entrance and caused the shadows to oscillate. Pool strode directly to the cabinet with the books and yanked out the logbook. He had remembered several, but apparently was wrong.
As in the case of his small notebook, the used up pages were worn and supple and the later pages–in this case only about 15 or 20 from the end were still crisp, albeit yellowed around the edges.
As he was hoping, they final pages were blank.
Pool felt around for his pocket knife and, finding it, opened it and gingerly sliced the broad pages out of the back of the log, an act that he instinctively cringed at–like vandalizing a library book–but they were blank and he had need of them.
Returning to the thinking machine with his clutch of paper, he measured it against the width of the spool, and using the top of the card catalogue he sliced each page carefully down the middle.
While the pages could now be wound around the spool, there was no way to link them together. He would have to feed them in as necessary, when the machine needed to communicate.
Adjacent to the receptacle for the spool, there was a feed-slot, the opening of which was sufficient to hold the paper in place when not in use.
What to ask? What to ask? The question was obvious, at least the first question.
Ion Fyr 