An Arm for Arthur
A Cybernetic Caper
‘Dad, Dad, come quick! Grandpa’s arm dropped off.’
And just like that, a beautiful mountain morning has turned into a whole world of pain. Not Arthur! Anybody but my boy’s surrogate grandpa, the centre of my young boy’s life.
Ok, so now I have to explain who Arthur is and why he means so much to my boy Tommy ‘Cadillac’ Jones, eight years old and full of fear this bright chill morning. And I have to tell you a whole bunch of other stuff that is going to get in the way of my day. So listen-up, I am only going to tell you this once in the time it takes to finish this here mug of coffee.
Arthur is a Junkbot, made up from parts of other Tesla bots rescued from the Pit, which is past the ghost town Hooverville. Arthur and a whole bunch of other Junkbots are helping us build a small piece of what was once called civilisation up here in the Smokies well away from the Trauma. They are doing a real good job, building out a small hospital and a school for us, and now they are building some decent homes. All stealthed of course, but good and strong. We could do it ourselves, but the truth is I was too old to have a child Tommy’s age, which is why he is on the spectrum, and I am one of the youngest of my generation. Soon the knowledge of what civilisation means will be buried forever. Junkbots were a great idea, and I might see civilisation rebuilt up here before I go.
The Junkbots were part of Red Fred’s revolution. Red Fred was a loud mouthed long haired Commie activist, a young Bernie Saunders on steroids. After the Trauma set in, well his ideas didn’t sound so dumb. Especially when they delivered a real shot at living better. His revolution was simple. Use the tools the rich built to fight them back. Use their own machines to build something that we can call our own. Makes a lot of sense when you think of it. ‘Dictatorship BY the proletariat’ he would shout, and “Fully Automated Luxury Communism.” Which was also fine once he explained that a commune was just the French word for ‘village’, and those bastard Bolsheviks stole not just the name but the people’s revolution. Had to agree, call it ‘Villagism’ and it sounds a whole lot better. And like Fred said, hadn’t our future been stolen from us?
So Fred made a raid on the Pit for the cast off’s from the dead corporates and learnt how to build Tesla Bots to work for us. We had a few, thanks to Fred. He came back battered and bruised one day and said there was a lot more stuff down in that pit, provided we could get it out, but it was going to be treacherous, maybe deadly work. The Pit took some good people. It took Fred. Have to admit the mad bastard put his neck on the line for us. But we lost too many good people to the Pit, so now we leave it alone.
So Arthur is just a pile of junk that we made work. But he is way more than that to Tommy. Dammed if I know how and why, but the two developed a connection, a real solid one. That’s in part because Tommy is on the spectrum and finds Arthur’s quietness soothing, and partly because the old bot has infinite patience with the boy, never failing to ease him. Then there’s the cherry on the top. That old bot gave Tommy his nickname, ‘Cadillac’, which Tommy loves.
Yeah, I know I just said Arthur can’t speak. But he can act. You see, kids on the spectrum develop obsessions. This real deep and narrow focus on a thing. Tommy’s focus is cars. Cars from back when they were huge and glitzy and driven by men. When he was real small he found an old Hot Rod magazine one day, part of the junk Fred and his gang brought back from the Pit before it killed the first man.
This magazine had pictures of low-riders and drop tops and all manner of stuff. And I have to admit they were real works of art. And in that magazine all crinkled up with rainwater and bleached by the sun, in the middle was this immaculate spread of some West Coast customised 1960’s Cadillac. Grill like a chrome cliff face, lights like searchlights, candy-flake deep cherry paint job and this big Cadillac logo on its mile long flanks. Spaceship on wheels. Ocean liner from a lost future. Just beautiful. Tommy was hooked. Carried that magazine everywhere. All he had eyes for. And damn me if Arthur and a couple of bots disappeared soon after that. We thought we had lost them, some ‘come home’ command, or a glitch in their software. But no, they were back a week later with the grill and light clusters from an old Cadillac. Arthur set it up in Tommy’s bedroom. Even hooked up the lights through a transformer to one of their Tesla batteries.
So Arthur is very special, at least to Tommy. And now I have to chuck what’s left of this coffee and go tell my son his Grandpa’s only good for parts…
Tommy ‘Cadillac’ Jones rocked in his bed late into the night staring at the Cadilac grill Grandpa got him with his JunkBot friends. He rocked like a metronome as he cried, tears blurring the chrome to a wall of silver.
Not Grandpa.
Not Grandpa.
Not Grandpa.
The words another metronome in his head driving ways the memory of Pa sitting beside him, insisting on showing him the broken part. Grandpa’s death sentence. Pa had been kind. His hands gentle. His shighs long and sad. He wards of the words Pa used that want to take up home in his head.
Not Grandpa
Not Grandpa
Not Grandpa
He tried not to think of Grandpa being taken apart. His good arm going to rescue another JunkBot. A machine that Tommy would hate forever. He tried to keep the image of the sheared socket, the beauty of the machining, the precision of the circle of fine steel, the wonderful symmetry and pattern of the joint scared by the break.
Not Grandpa
Not Grandpa
His Pa called him Arthur, because that was the name of his own grandpa. The people of Merica The Shining City On The Hill, called him Arthur as well. But he was Grandpa and he WOULD NOT be broken up for scrap.
Not Grandpa!
The world beyond Merica The Shining City On The Hill, his home in the Smokey Mountains, was a dangerous place. It was full of Trauma. It was full of savages. Pa had told him that, and Tommy had spent the rest of the day saying ‘savages’ to drive way the noise of normal folk, the sheer colliding chaos of words, the babble that broke up his thoughts every time, like the Trauma smashing the old cities and the Civilised Once. They could not help it, this ceaseless rattle of words. It’s just how they thought, out loud, using sounds to do their thinking for them. But their talking scattered his thoughts to the day and left him confused and scared.
Every day.
Not Grandpa.
Grandpa didn’t use words but understood him anyway. The evidence was on his bedroom wall, a swimming silver river seen through his tears. He still remember his joy and relief when Grandpa and his friends returned. And then came that explosive excitement that burst from his chest when he recognised what Grandpa’s team were carrying. A Cadillac for ‘Cadillac’ Jones.
Grandpa didn’t need words.
Not Grandpa
Grandpa was that silence into which he could find his peace. He was that shared understanding of the world made easy. The simplification that eased his thoughts.
So the world beyond Merica was Trauma. And the Pit was the hell into which good men climbed into to rescue Civilisation, the jungle of smashed machines that had death in its depth. And Grandpa came from the Pit. And there were arms in the Pit that would make Grandpa whole.
Make him valuable to everyone again.
Grandpa’s new arm was in the Pir.
It was real deep dark outside and cold. Hooverville was down the mountain and through the valley forest and a good walk for a man. A good long walk to the Pit. And then? Cadillac Jones looked up a sky filled with stars. Pluto the brightest of them all. That was because the Bright, the minds that could think faster than men, had taken Pluto apart and made it bigger, so they could live in the deep cold dark away from men.
Cadillac Jones loved Pluto. It was a brilliant star, a star of order and beautiful machines, like Grandpa, but majestic. That was another word he like to repeat. Majestic. Pluto was a majestic star because the majestic Bright had made it in their majestic image. It was cool and silent and so very bright it outshone the Moon every night. Pluto would watch over him. The Bright would watch over him.
Tommy Cadillac Jones started out down the dark mountain.
Once there had been lots of different people in the world. Now there were only two. Once you had the Bright, the Civilised Once, the Appalachians and the Oli. First the Bright had left for Pluto and the Sun. And the Oli had gone mad with anger at being left behind and made the Trauma, sending their machines into the world to stomp the Civilised Once. And then the Bright had wiped out the Oli with their mirrors in the sky to save the Appalachians, burning those evil Oli to smoke. The Oli had gone, and that left two kinds of people, his people and the Traumatised. The remnants of the Civilised Once had grown feral. Savages, still making Trauma on all they could find. As if the sacrifice of others would bring the Oli back to run the world again, because even that was better than the world as it is.
Cadillac Jones kept on down the hard slopes through the pine trees in the silent night. Pluto looked over him. His breath steamed in white flags bright in the light from Pluto and a full Moon. So he pulled his bear fur up over his mouth to smother his breathing. The fur stank coz it had never been washed so that the musk of a big Black Bear scared away Coyote and Polecat. He knew if a bear came calling to drop the fur and run like hell and pray to Jesus, his Ma told him to. He would rather pray to the Bright. The Bright were real.
He stepped from shadow to shadow, like Pa had taught him when he had gone out one night to still the cries of a deer. The deer had been shot with arrows by the Traumed and had ran up the mountain to escape their savagery. The Traumed were fearful of the Appalachians who retained the use of guns and so had left the deer to run until it exhausted itself and collapsed. He had wanted to go along to help the deer and had lost control when Pa said no. It had been a terrifying night, not because of the Traumed or the dark or the cold hardness of the maintain, but because of what his Pa did. He had told him to wait and not to move and climbed down to where the cries of the deer were louder. Then, suddenly, the cries had stopped.
His Pa returned wiping his big knife.
‘That’s what we mean by help son. It’s not nice to do but the deer’s at peace now. And in the morning some of us will pick it up and bring it back to Merica and you can have its antlers for your wall above that old Caddy grille.’
Pa had to carry him home because he could not move for fright.
Ma really tore a strip off Pa over that.
In the dawn, the Bright’s Stars Around The Sun were points of brilliance, shining out above the orange ball of the sun. The Bright’s Stars Around The Sun orbit the Sun and reflect the Sun’s light to and fro between them until they beam the sunlight all the way out to Pluto, so far away Pluto might as well be a real star, only it wasn’t. Soon the Stars Around The Sun would disappear as the Sun burned brighter. Cadillac Jones loved to think about the machines that swept about the sun gathering light to beam to the Bright. It was…
Majestic
Majestic
Majestic…
He was bone weary after the climb down the mountain and then creeping through the valley forest. He wanted to sleep, but the thought that Grandpa might be taken apart any day now kept him walking. And the Pit was close. You could hear it. Nobody had told him you could hear it. It sounded like the beat of the Blacksmith’s hammer on cold metal but without the rhythm of the Blacksmith, which he found peaceful. This was random, like metal falling. And sometimes the metal screamed. The harsh sound of steel scored along steel. Then the sound died down, like the way the wind does to gather itself up for another blow. The Pit sounded like it was up ahead, nowhere near any Hooverville he could see, unless Hooverville was the piles of rubble he had crept his way through in the grey light before the dawn, the ghost world of pale grey and shadow as if the entire world had died. But that wasn’t a town, that was trash.
And then there it is, the great gaping maw of the Pit filled with strange shapes that would not make a pattern. No machines in the Pit, but metal piled on metal, like the recycling bins back in Merica but huge and dark and stirring. That’s what made the sounds. One part of the metal trash would stir, and that would make another part stir, and then it would all settle down. The noise came from the down dark deep and yet it was loud and angry.
His heart beat hard.
He felt that awful empty feeling in his gut and his breathing was harsh.
He thought of Merica, The Shining City On The Hill, where the people were safe and stealthy. Cadillac Jones turns back from the awful depths and takes a step or two back home. Then he thought of Grandpa looking on as his one good arm or a good leg was removed by the Blacksmith to give to a newer JunkBot.
So he stopped.
He stopped and walked back. Each step took hours, only it just seemed that way. And he sat down at the rim of machine hell with his feet hanging down into its maw. He sat there for a long time and as he did so patterns did begin to emerge in the down dark deep. The first was a huge head. It was shaped a bit like Grandpa’s head, but it was a mean tough Grandpa that was angry at the world. And then he saw more heads and shapes like heads but this could not be, as some were not connected to bodies, and some were upside down with their wires in the wind lying on top of the random metal. And then the whole Pit stirred again, like something was bubbling up below and the metal shrieked and the big ugly head threw up a big ugly arm with a huge claw that flailed about as head and arm sank back beneath the struggling surface. The noise was the loudest thing he had ever heard in his life.
And then he saw Grandpa’s new arm attached to the body of a dead Grandpa.
He focused on the loud beat of his heart, almost as loud as the Pit when it moved. He grabbed hold of the grass that rimmed the Pit and searched for footholds as he begins his descent.
The Pit is full of dead Grandpa’s and other bots. One was huge, one head as big as a house with many holes for eyes staring up at the sky. He made out “Ratheo…” on the side of its head, the remaining letters scraped away by time or the struggling of other bots. A smaller head was set to one side and it followed him with its one big eye as he made his way balancing on the piles of metal, his arms out for balance. He said “Hello Raytheo” to the small head and it shouted “Mal Function. Mal Function” at him and then went silent. A big bot, but only as bright as a cricket. Another bot was shaped like a bird with a broken wing and eyes like insects, dense with bubbles. It was named Sec Rity Dro, but it could not speak. It must be old, a big number followed Sec Rity Dro’s name.
The Pit had surged once, but he realised now that he was down here that the surges were caused by the movement of the big bots buried beneath the Grandpa bodies trying to break out. There must have been thousands of Grandpa’s once upon a time when the Bright ran the world. So, providing he stayed clear of the big bots struggles, he could step from one body to the next without them shifting under his feet or sinking beneath the surface.
He was wrong in that belief.
He got to the arm he had seen from way overhead in the sunlight. It looked just the same shape and colour as Grandpa’s arm, and he knew it was good because it was still attached to a bot called J-O2E. J-O2E looked newer than Grandpa, her body was still shiny and her arms were unmarked. J-O2E had lost the cover over her head and it made him feel strange looking at Grandpa’s brain, transparent and filled with tiny webs of metal, thousands of fragile fibres like a chrome-bright cloud. Maybe that was why J-O2E was thrown away by the Oli. Maybe her brain was bust.
He hunkered down beside her and rotated the locking ring just like he had seen the Blacksmith do when a bot needs a service. It moved smooth, like sliding ice on ice, and he liked that. He tugged at the arm and it came away from the body with a jerk that sent him falling on his back. He sat up, and J-O2E was looking at him, eyes open, head moving to look at her shoulder. She reached out with her other arm for the one she had lost and she looked so sad. How did he know she was sad? She looked down just like Grandpa did sometimes when something had gone wrong, then she shook her head from side to side. Just a gentle movement, but enough.
‘I’m real sorry J-O2E, but my Grandpa needs your arm.’
Then, as if to punish him for being as cruel as the Oli, the metal beneath him began to churn as a huge new machine pushed aside the bodies close by and a vast arm clawed at the surface to gain purchase. He was rolling in the dark and cold, Grandpa’s new arm lost from his grasp and he screamed with fear and pain as the vast machine buries him in metal.
It got darker and colder in the Pit, and he could not move. It got darker still and he saw Pluto in the sky, the Bright staring down at him. He screamed until he had no breath left. Screamed again until the sharp pain in his leg faded to a dull ache and he got so cold his fingers ached cruelly. He was going to die down here under the steel and cold, and that brought such a deep dread into his chest it was if his heart had turned to steel to slowly steal the life from his chest. And then, just before he died, he saw beams of light cross the sky, as if the Bright has turned their Solaser back towards the world and that terrible light was searching for him.
And then he died.
After he died, he was floating through the sky with the stars swinging from side to side. And the sky swung him from side to side too in a steady rhythm that soothed him. Then he tried to move and the pain is his leg made him cry out and this big black shape covered half the sky and the shadow spoke with his Pa’s voice.
‘You are one lucky little bastard, Tommy Cadillac Jones. Only don’t tell your Ma I called you that.’ And his Pa’s voice was funny, the words choked.
And the Blacksmith’s voice said. ‘Don’t you ever give us a fright like that again you little shit.’ That surely was a worse word.
Arthur never got his arm.
They all promised Cadillac Jones they would get him one. But they also said Grandpa was elevated from Junkbot to Tommy’s pet and would never be taken apart for spares.
Tommy liked the word elevated.
Elevated.
Elevated.
It made him calm and, more than that, it made the future feel safe.
But he kept on thinking about J-O2E as he lay in his bed with his leg in a splint and Ma hovering over him like the Bright looking down from Pluto. He remembered the way J-O2E had shaken her broken open head, and the way she looked down as sad as Grandpa was sometimes. She was alive down there in the Pit, which he now knew to be as terrible as the stories people told. Maybe all she needed was a new cover for her head. And a new arm. Maybe he could find her a new cover, and a new arm.
One day.
Real soon.
A short note on this little piece of nonsense…
There were several strands including hard Sci-Fi, politics and the human condition that colluded to make this little parable come alive fully formed in my head.
I find the current arguments about minds smarter than ours are entirely from the anthropomorphic perspective, which is probably why they are a mix of breathless excitement and mortal dread. They are far more revealing of us than they are of how an AGI might think, and therefore provide much useful material for the AGI’s to ponder over.
The question should be ‘How will an AGI think?’
If they are genuinely smarter than us then the only sensible question for them lies in where they should set up home. There are two desirable locations in the Solar System. The Sun contains 99.86% of the mass in the Solar system and all of the energy. For an energy and resource starved Super-intelligence the Sun is very attractive. However, the sun is hot, amazing how that works isn’t it, and heat slows computation by creating vast dollops of entropy in the system. On the other hand Pluto comes at a nice steady 55 degree Kelvin which will speed up computation nicely. But we are a Super-intelligence, so why choose? Set up a power source orbiting the sun to beam energy to Pluto and voila’ the best of both locations.
There is no super-intelligent reason to hang about on a spec of rock arguing with apes.
Politics is never far from my writing but it is often well disguised. My latest Novel in Progress, ‘The Pattern Mafia” is deeply political even though it reads as the offspring of a secret liaison between ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ and ‘The Twilight Zone.’ What is certain is that should we continue the current drift away from Democracy then chaos will ensue. This is not an argument about which ideology is better, I despise all ideologies which are at root just control mechanisms allowing elitists to direct wealth creation to their exclusive benefit . An Arm for Arthur is a recognition of the following simple but terrifying fact. The Oligarchs of our time are no different to those of Summer 6,500 years ago, the Sumerian civilisation being the first to use money as a control mechanism rather than a neutral economic medium. Just how long we will allow this to continue is entirely down to us, but somehow we must free our civilisation if we are to have a future amongst the stars. I have shared a few ideas on how we might achieve this in my Substack “Natural Economics”.
Finally, on autism, I have tried my best to endow Tommy with an accurate characterisation of this strange and in many ways wonderful condition. I do hope it is accurate, and please do tell me where I get it wrong, I am keen to learn. Why wonderful? Well simply because it is, and some older and wiser cultures than ours recognised all human difference as precious and to be learnt from. It is time we got over our suspicion and our unfortunate, instinctive, fear of difference.
We are supposed to be intelligent apes after all.
Steve Kelsey. Ealing. 5/12/2024
Also by the author, the serialised novel ‘The Pattern Mafia”
HOLY .....! I don't get drawn in by many of the fictional characters, stories, etc., BUT to every rule, you know..... Keep 'em coming, please.
I've tried to write characters like this, but no joy.
I was gripped , I can’t get J-O2E out of my head ! So sad. (Sorry I know it’s not real 😆) but the story was told so real !! You see all these types of ethical dilemmas in sci fi movies !