The Sweet Hereafter*



It had been crying since it had arrived. Mecha usually exhibited
some motor functions even after coredump. Not unlike human hair
growth after death, robots would continue to twitch, grunt,
blink, and sometimes even speak after they had "died". Once their
main power supply was disassembled, all activity would cease.

The technician examined the robot's face as he shoved his hands
into the tight latex gloves. Although the torso and extremities
were heavily damaged, its face was not. A pretty face it was too,
he noticed, like all S-33 females. In spite of this, his orders
were clear: nothing was to be salvaged, not even the potential
recyclables. After extracting the small plutonium battery she was
to be cremated, essentially erasing any trace of her
existence. This was an unusual, but not exceptional procedure.

Still, there was something which bothered the technician,
something which kept tugging his thoughts from the back of his
mind. As he reached for the high-pressure Aqua Jet Systems'
hydroscalpel he turned to catch another glimpse of her face. The
girl kept silently weeping, eyes wide open, blankly staring into
the powerful lights above. Tears trickled down the gracious arc
of her cheekbones, snaking down the perimeter of her ears until
they reached the tips of her lobes, precariously trembling before
splashing down on the surgical table.

The technician grabbed a roll of surgical tape he kept on a
nearby tray. He cut two small rectangles and gently pressed them
against her eyelids, closing her eyes shut. He surprised himself
by wiping the excess moisture from her cheeks and gently stroking
her hair, clearing a few strands off her face.

    "Stupid," he muttered to himself, turning on a microphone
which hung nearby.

    "23 hundred hours. S-33, serial number..." he lifted her left
arm, peeking into her armpit, in search of the tiny
identification, "... S33FAB21416," he said, hastily reaching for
the hydroscalpel.

He pressed the thin pencil against her skin, steadily moving it
between the mounds of her breasts. The monomolecular water jet
easily pierced through the thin plastic, cutting a precise
incision which he later extended to become a narrow rectangular
pattern. The technician then turned off the jet and slowly
removed the plate he had carved. He continued speaking into the
microphone, describing what he saw in a surgical, almost
mechanical manner.

At first the internal damage was not apparent. Save for the
duralumin skeletal infrastructure, the insides of the S-33 were
mostly soft, its internal organs held in place by a
semi-coagulated polyelectrolyte. This gel was in turn laced by
the boomer's fibre optic nervous system and a very complex
cardiovascular web centred around the mecha's rather small heart.

Unlike the rudimentary GE electromagnetic pump of the BU series,
the S model possessed a delicately crafted Baier+Koppel heart.
For over a century the tiny Prazisionsapparatefabrik had machined
its products near the waters of the Pegnitz, quietly bringing
engineer's dreams to life. Braided with thin platinum-iridium
strands, the cardioid-shaped Hypalon chamber housed over a
thousand moving parts, including four diaphragm pumps. It was a
delicate design, devised for a precise flow to critical
electronics under conditions of weightlessness, a heart much more
sensitive and fragile than its human counterpart.

As the technician scooped his hand underneath the organ to search
for the battery which powered it, he felt the rim of two
perforations on its surface. Albeit small, the technician knew
the damage was critical. He correctly guessed that a couple of
pellets had punctured the delicate pump, the subsequent
hemorrhage and cavitation quickly rendering it inoperable. A
BU-55 could easily overcome such damage through redundant
engineering and sheer resilience. The S-33 possessed no such
qualities, each of its organs was precious.

He finally managed to grab hold of the small pack pressed near
the mecha's spinal column. After disconnecting a couple of wires
he began pulling it out, still careful, for some reason, of not
damaging it any further. The girl was now truly dead.

Once outside her body the technician quickly placed the bright
yellow packet inside a relatively large cylindrical container.
The core of the battery was almost indestructible, a pellet which
housed a weapons-grade delta-phase plutonium alloy made of
Pu-239, Pu-240, and gallium. The shielding was thin but
effective, although no precautions were too few when dealing with
such radioactive substances. The technician tightly closed the
lid of the cylinder and proceeded to safely lock it away. He then
returned to the girl's side, ready to complete his job.

The small adhesive patches, now slightly damp, had become
unglued, and her eyes remained partially open. She had finally
stopped crying, the last traces of tears already drying. The
technician sighed.

He slowly began to wheel the surgical table towards a hatch
protruding from a wall. After pressing a few buttons on the
latch's numeric keypad, the thick metallic door smoothly opened
outwards.

He lifted the girl in his arms. He didn't have to do that, of
course (most boomers weighed much more than himself, there was a
forklift to move the bodies), but he didn't want to just dump her
into the crematory. It seemed to him that it just wouldn't be
right to do so. He gently placed her in the large chamber,
carefully covering her with a white blanket before securely
closing the hatch. He then typed in the authorisation code on the
keypad. A dozen plasma jets suddenly showered the girl's body,
which literally vaporised as the superhot gas dissolved metal and
plastic with equal ease. The process took about eighty seconds,
but the technician would not see or hear anything until a beep
indicated the cremation had concluded.

    "Cremation completed at 23:52 hours."

The technician turned off the microphone. The operation had been
rather swift, without complications, but he felt very tired. He
threw the surgical gloves into a disposal chute and sat down on
the couch besides his desk. Experience told him that he wouldn't
be able to sleep, and so he grabbed a book off the table and
opened it at the bookmark. The technician's lips silently mouthed
the words as he read.

The book contained a compilation of popular beliefs held by
various tribes throughout Africa. The people of a nomadic tribe
which once roamed the plains of Kenya, read the technician,
believed that everything, alive or inanimate, possessed a soul.
Since the soul is the receptacle of all that which we see or
feel, all things must therefore be somehow aware of their
surroundings. Thus not only humans felt awe of the majestic
Kilimanjaro, but also the animals which lived at its skirts, and
even the trees and the rocks. A fish, swimming upstream on a warm
summer night, felt happiness in its own fishy way, and certainly
despaired during a drought. Furthermore, the river itself was
also capable of enjoying its own flow, and suffered when the
rains were scarce.

The tribe who professed this simple religion no longer existed.
The rest of their culture, their language, even their name, had
become extinct. The book, researched by a modern African scholar,
was elegantly written in Mandinka, the most beautiful of all
languages.

    "La knewing coodi nna siiboo yooy, boko jiyo kinoto jiyo."

He read the sentence three, four times, boko jiyo kinoto jiyo,
like water in water. At this point my dream dissolves, like water
in water...

The technician abruptly stood up and scrambled towards the
shelves besides his desk. Quickly inspecting the various titles,
he finally grabbed the well-worn copy of the "S Series Technical
Handbook," and began to leaf through it. He flipped the pages,
rapidly scanning their contents. "S-33" ...  "Power plant" ...
"Skeletal Design" ... "Main Processing Unit" ... "Sensory I/O"
...

There.

    "... possesses a unique optical design (Figure 5-M66), using
an internally self-lubricating Pentax-M biolens, and an
electrostatic surface cleanser..."

The technician slowly closed the book, as he finally remembered
that strange but nonetheless logical feature of a machine which,
lacking any feeling or shade of emotion, had no need left for
tear glands.



* With apologies to Russell Banks


_________________________________
marco@chinook.physics.utoronto.ca
Gunnm: Broken Angel
http://128.100.80.13/marco/alita.html