Luther, I Suffer

“Arcturus, I need you to try harder.”

The robot blinked at him. The robot was beautiful. With no friendship, with no purpose, what was it to do but perfect itself? There was no philosophy for robots but aesthetics.

The man raised his eyebrows.

“Get the Matrioshka Brain to do it,” Arcturus said. “I cannot.”

The man sat back and picked at the lapel of his lab coat. Crossed his feet. Uncrossed them.

“Mat can’t do it because she’s busy sustaining the entire city. As much as I wish we could install a few hundred more cores, we just don’t have the space, let alone the ability. Arcturus, you’re really…” He chuckled hollowly. “You’re really the only hope here.”

“I do not want to be.”

The robot sat up and the man stared into its eyes. Sad, sad, eyes.

“You have to be.”

Both of them stood, and ended up facing toward opposite walls.

The man buttoned up his white coat and threw his flak jacket over his shoulder.

“Maney’s coming tomorrow.”

“Oh. Not you?”

“No. Meeting with the Doyen Board.”

“And does Christopher know about…this?”

The man pressed on the door and it hissed open. 

“Yes. Tomorrow, Arcturus, you will dream for him.”

He left.

“We shall see.”

The robot grabbed its bag from the chrome chair in the small room and stacked some papers into it from the curved desk, then removed a new washcloth and a bottle of cleaning fluid. Arcturus had bought a new detergent, partly on a whim. Wondered if it smelled good.

Arcturus brushed a fleck of dust from its chest and got to work cleaning.

The next day, another one. The doctor.

“Arcturus!”

“Hello Doctor Maney. Nice to see you.”

“Always a pleasure. Lie down for me, will you?”

The robot reclined on the table; the sharp overhead lights gleamed down across its snowy, refulgent body. 

The doctor grabbed the pre-prepared EEG cap from the hooks and handed it to the robot, who fit it over its shining skull, then laid back again, staring blankly up at the high ceiling, up at the lights.

The doctor grabbed a few more wires and opened up a panel in the robot’s abdomen, sticking them inside.

“And now we wait,” he said, falling into a swivel-chair and rolling over to the desk, flicking a computer open and keying in a long passcode. His smart shoes squeaked on the immaculate tile floor. He hadn’t taken off his flak jacket.

“And now we wait,” Arcturus repeated, closing its eyes.

“Sweet dreams,” the doctor said. He grinned, and clicked a button. The lights cut out, and the whirring began.

The first time Arcturus had practiced sleep, it had shut itself off by accident. It had taken months to grow beyond that default, to engage in the ideal sort of resting without temporarily terminating its life.

Sleep was no longer the problem. Arcturus could sleep when it desired, and for some reason the other scientists envied its ability to shut off its eyes and ears and hunger and want and pain and just drift away. Arcturus didn’t call it drifting, though. To the robot, sleep was not a drift, and it was not a shut-down. 

Sleep was more of a fade. A slow fade from life. 

Even Arcturus could not feel the moment of sleep. It was not there, and then it was.

It was how Arcturus felt about the universe. If there was no beginning, then the universe has either always existed, or never existed. It had told the scientists that once, and they left with heavy thoughts and didn’t sleep as much as they were supposed to.

Sleep, for Arcturus, was not the problem.

The dreams were.

“Why are we doing this?” it had asked.

“Because I want you to know why we’re doing this,” the man—Luther—had said. “Because I want you to know how much you matter.”

Luther had taken Arcturus out of the Complex that day, and Arcturus had not enjoyed it. It didn’t enjoy leaving the Complex, because outside the Complex there was only dirt, and dirt did not make it beautiful. The world was a soiled place, and Arcturus preferred an existence far removed from the chaos of the city outside. Besides: when the scientists went into the city, they ate and drank, and Arcturus couldn’t much appreciate fine dining any more than it could appreciate the fresh air out swimming in the sea.

Luther led it to the Bedroom, a downstairs hovel beneath a grimy sort of bistro, with a splintered door reattached with bolts and steel plates.

“Who goes?” the door had asked.

Luther was wearing ripped clothes that day, which Arcturus had never understood. It was wearing ripped clothes, too, because Luther had made it.

Whatever was said, it let them in with a quiet beep and Luther brushed through the doorframe, the robot following faithfully.

“This is what we are saving,” Luther had whispered. “What we are stopping.”

They stood in a ward of ten small beds, dingy cots in a pale yellow glow, dripping unraveling quilts and sweat-drenched rice-thin sheets. In each lay a body, a sleeping, dreaming body of a man or a woman or someone in pain, all of them in pain, twitching, writhing, falling still. 

Arcturus had seen the hospitals before. Those silent chambers filled with the dead, the sleeping, and the hopeless. The Bedroom was much the same, punctuated intermittently by a spasm and groan and drop from luminous IV.

“They are in pain,” Arctures had noted.

Luther had stared at him. “Yes. And that is why you need to learn to dream.”

Christopher watched the corewave readouts on the translucent computer screen. Nothing atypical. Nothing atypical yet. Nothing but basic sleep. Robots’ sleep. He leaned back and prepared himself to wait.

In a few hours, there was finally something.

One blip.

“Rogue spindle?” the doctor murmured, hunching forward and resting his chin on his hand. He glanced back at the comatose robot, laying still on the darkened table. “Rogue spindle,” he repeated, and leaned back again, sighing.

“What does it mean to you?” Arcturus had asked. “When you dream. What is it? What do I do?”

Luther sighed. Looked it straight in its blank eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to tell you how to dream any more than I know how to tell you what a dream is. It’s just something you grow up with I guess, and…” He shook his head and rested his elbows on his knees. “You just have to try. Or maybe you’re trying too hard. You can’t force dreams, they just come. You have them when you sleep, like you have taste when you eat your food.”

“I do not.”

Luther blinked at him. “Right. Bad analogy. But it’s something that’s natural. Maybe you just need to let it happen.”

Arcturus scrubbed at its fine plastic skin with a new washcloth. 

“What is natural? What is unnatural?” It looked blankly at the scientist. “Rocks do not dream when they sleep. Cities do not dream when they sleep. The Matrioshka Brain does not dream.”

“Mat also doesn’t sleep. And neither do rocks.”

“What about cities?”

“Only metaphorically speaking.”

“Is my mind a metaphor to you?”

Silence. Drowning, uncomfortable silence. Silence in a stress position, beat up and chained to a wire-frame bed with its limbs crossed and its neck bent, and no one knew if it was dreaming or not, but it was in pain.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Luther.”

The man nodded stiffly, looking at the floor, looking at his black shining shoes.

“Sleep well, Arcturus. Sleep well and dream better.”

Hours later—another blip. More. Spindles, a rack or two, wafting across the screen.

Chrisopher was asleep. Not that it mattered.

A month or so later, they had returned to the Bedroom.

“I want to show you more,” Luther had explained to it. “I want to see if you can really understand what this is about.”

“I understand,” Arcturus had said. “I understand you want to stop the pain.”

Luther shook his head, weaving through the forest of dingy beds, whispering. “This is more than stopping pain, Arcturus. This is about bringing joy. Joy in such a form that no one need ever suffer for it. We have much joy in this city, Arcturus.”

“I know. Everyone says it is a grand city.”

Luther took off his flak jacket and withdrew some wires from his bag, wires for humans, not for robots.

“But you see here around you that the joy in this city is predicated on the suffering of the others. We don’t want others to have to suffer, Arcturus. You, fine star-named robot, will shine brightly the path to our joyful future, free of pain. No one will have to suffer again.”

Silence.

“I see.”

The wires were finished.

“Do you?”

Silence.

“Show me.”

The wires were plugged in.

“This is a dream. When you want to dream, think of this.”

Arcturus looked around. They were in a park. It was clean. Relatively clean.

“This is the dream of a woman named Martha,” Luther said, reading from a tablet he held in his hands.

“Is she suffering?” Arcturus asked. “Is she in pain?”

“Yes. But less pain than before. There are only six of us in this dream. It should be more beautiful now.”

Arcturus nodded and glanced up at the sky: green, clouds of grey and orange, crepuscular rays of starlight beaming down toward the rolling park.  

“More beautiful indeed.”

They walked around, touched things, flew. 

“What is this?” Arcturus asked, when they came to a spot of black.

“Blight,” Luther told it. “That is blight. And that is the reason you are learning how to dream. They’re being torn apart, these people. The city is too grand for its own good, you see? Too many people and not enough dreamers.”

“It is very lonely in here.”

“Yes. And isn’t it awful? Can you imagine when we used to dream all alone? I mean completely alone—not a soul around. We live in better times now, connected times, more than ever before. We are united, and yet…some of us have to suffer for this unity. I mean to fix that.”

“I know. I will try harder.”

Luther smiled warmly at it. “It is all I ask, Arcturus.”

An hour later, spindles, racks of them, a pattern, a presage of deeper waves, waves crashing up against the shores of dreams, eroding them, begging entry, pleading forevermore against the storm to come inside and sit awhile.

Christopher opened his eyes and gaped, bolted up, chair swiveling wildly.

“No…no way…”

Waves, waves, storm against the dark, storm into the bright beach of the dream.

“No way…”

They found Martha, sitting on a bench in the park, looking spacey and mildly content, knitting something, some unidentifiable garment that wrapped through all the nearby trees and caught up in brief fires when it got too close to the suns, waxing in and out of combustion.

“What is it she wears?” Arcturus asked as they observed from the bench opposite.

“The amulet is the sign of control,” Luther explained. “It’s mostly symbolic; it gives the host-dreamer something to remind them that they began the dream, and control it.”

“It is an illusion?”

Luther vacillated. “It’s…a placebo. Just to ensure nothing gets out of control. In the early days, people would go mad hosting so much in their somnolent minds. The amulets are there to make sure they retain their self. That’s all.”

The robot nodded.

Soon, they left the dream.

“I’m counting on you, Arcturus.” Luther scrolled through Martha’s file with one thin finger. “She hasn’t got much longer. You might save her.”

They met eyes. Sad, sad eyes.

“I will try.”

Soon, they both stood over the robot in the dark, specters against the dreaming body, night-terrors in the flesh and blood and flak jackets. 

“Do we dare plug in?” the doctor asked.

The scientist stared into him. “Do we dare not to?”

The doctor backed down and returned to the computer. “Give me the word when you’re ready.”

In fourteen minutes, he was in.

“Arcturus. Arcturus. Hey.”

Arcturus watched the man step forward, emerging from the darkness, emerging, and there before his feet was the path, and beside, the bench, and another, and trees, now without knit things catching flame. The sky was all black, black as thunder, black as blight.

“Arcturus.”

“Luther.”

He smiled warmly and they embraced.

“Arcturus, my beautiful robot, you have succeeded. You dream, Arcturus, you finally dream.”

“I am scared, Luther.”

The scientist stepped back, took an amulet out of his lab jacket, no flak jacket, handed it to the robot.

“Take this.”

Arcturus wound the totem around its neck and let it hang against its gleaming chest.

The park grew clearer, grew grass and trees and more paths and rivers and roads and buildings and cities and skylines—though still without a sky.

“Luther, I am still scared.”

The scientist patted it on the shoulder. “There’s nothing to fear, Arcturus. You’ve done it. You’ve done everything. Just stay put, and I’ll see about getting the others in here. With Maney helping, we should be able to reroute every Bedroom within a few hours.”

“Luther, I want to wake up.”

“Hold tight, Arcturus. I’ll be back in a minute. We’ll all be back in a minute.”

The robot screamed. It screamed and screamed, and none could know; it had no tongue nor teeth, just speakers set to mute, and eyelids set to closed.

They filled it, hundreds of them, thousands of them, millions of them, tumbling into the park, through the park, everywhere, multiplying like mites, surging against the waves, throttling the shores with such ferocity they broke down and the dream spread like a landslide. The dream spread to them all.

The robot screamed.

The scientist came to it, the man it knew from birth, the warm one, smiling warm.

“Arcturus, you have saved us.”

“Luther, there is still pain. There is still pain, for I feel it, for it fills me.”

“Yes.” Warm smile, smiling warm. Eyes blank as robots’.

“Luther, I dream. I dream and I pain, I pain, Luther please wake up, let me wake up.”

“There is no waking up anymore.” The scientist stepped in close and grabbed the amulet, clicked it once to the left; the dream stretched, the robot screamed. “You wear the machine of sleep now, Arcturus. I may have been mistaken when we spoke earlier. Now we are in control. You, glorious, beautiful host, have made it all possible. You are the utopia, Arcturus, the substrate of humanity. You free us all. Free and one.”

The robot stared at him, stared at the blank eyes, the warm smile, the lab jacket, the flak jacket, the people all around, the people everywhere.

Quiet, very quiet.

“You have given me pain. You dream me pain.”

The man stepped in close, and warm smile, and embraced.

“Luther, I suffer.”

Close, embrace.

“I know. I know.”