Unbeta'd, V. Rough Wall-E ficlet for Kelley

[x_losfic]

The beginning is not easy. Which in itself is a quiet revolution, because everything was, for some seven centuries. Effortless. Thoughtless. Things take planning now, and work. Things take, every process a needy mouth, every action a consequence. It’s overpowering, frightening, and the freshness of frustration quickly pales before all the work they have before them. Many of them disdain the Earth and return to the Axiom, floating in their deck chairs like the hundreds of thousands of satellites that clutter the atmosphere, sullenly slurping at their beverages, watching the smooth glide of the ships’ properly functioning robots.

But they cannot un-know. They are never again as untroubled as they were before. They grow to hate the planet—foul, dirty thing anyway. And cocooned away from her squalorous, clamoring majesty, they try to crawl back into the dark.

Even those who choose to embrace the Earth are not wholly comfortable with it—would not be even if it were the multicolored paradise of the videos. They have never before thought of themselves as ‘survivors.’

And so much of that patchwork is eradicated—BnL was a global firm, but Axiom left from Los Angeles, and whole races and cultures are buried somewhere under the mounds of refuse. They have only seen New York, but Captain McCrea, who is beginning to understand the tight, weary, scientific language of his predecessors, has reviewed the files, and though his belief in Earth is boundless, be cannot find it in him to hope that she sheltered any of the children who remained at her side.



*

M-O begins to clean. It takes him a while to recompile his programming to accept that the dirt is the ground, but when his protocols accept, after interfacing with the Return Protocol’s OS-override, that some microbes are necessary to germination, and some harmful, without any instruction he prioritizes the soil. Slowly, painstakingly, he cleans a plot of land. Captain McCrea notices his work and becomes curious. He follows behind, clutching a delicate little sample jar in his large fingers, and gingerly scoops up a bit of the dirt where M-O has been as if it is precious. The next day after power-down M-O notices that at the plot adjacent to his workspace there are more robots like himself. Some are newly assigned, some are fresh and shining in the way only the latest robots ever are, to M-O’s discerning eye. M-O knows that what he is doing has been judged good, and he is satisfied.

He pushes his apparatus into the dirt and removes the foreign contaminant. The other M-O units silently watch, their procedural learning circuits taking in his activity, and, in a moment, replicating it. They bend to the soil like reapers, and are secure in their purpose.



*


Captain McCrea learns to hold hands from Eve and Wall-E, who learned it from Hello Dolly, and one day he thinks to carry Wall-E (the little box of him trembling with curiosity) to his Captain’s Chair and carefully loop a wire into Wall-E’s input socket. The computer told him the wire’s color was ‘cherry red,’ when he’d asked, but their first crop of cherries was darker than this, and not as sweet as ‘cupcake in a cup,’ though the computer assured him cherries were sweet. He’d liked cherries though—the thick texture, the stain of them on his fingers like the residue of an overturned Slurpy Drink, the unaccustomed weight of one on his tongue—though not the seed, that he’d nearly choked on, the computer might have warned him there’d be a seed in it.

The coiled wire—which the computer, when pressed—specifies is more the color of Maraschino cherries—which it elaborates, when asked, are so named because they used to be preserved in Maraschino Liqueur, which came from Croatia (a man’s voice at the press of a button, ‘Reh-puh-blih-kah Her-vaht-sah,’ and sometimes he wants to cry for the dead languages almost as much as the tongues that spoke them, the lives lived in Croatian and Mongolian, the Hindu dialects, the Appalachian accents, which are preserved in beautiful dead fragments like pressed butterflies in a computer bank he never before dreamed of thinking incomplete, and Captain McCrea wonders if the world was different in Croatian and how he will ever know), the coiled wire—

He has to stop himself when he wanders like this, because there is still so much to do. The only thing a life of inactivity taught him was how not to think, and he uses the knowledge now, when he doesn’t think of how impossible saving Earth will be. Like water, the Proverbs section of the computer tells him, won’t boil when you watch it. It’s impossible to think on your limitations and still defy them.

And from the hard drive to that red, red wire to the memory banks of little Wall-E flow thousands of musicals. The Captain, having looked at Eve’s memories, knows the little robot has somehow come to love these unlikely assemblages of tropes and books and refrains. Captain McCrea has somehow come to love the robot, and to want to make it happy. And Wall-E, having downloaded the Hammerstein and the Sondheim, and all the endless show tunes, hugs the Captain’s leg in thanks. And is happy.

At some point the robots became partners rather than servants, and the Captain, who looks back on his relationship with the Autopilot with an uneasy memory of bondage himself, does not begrudge the change. Earth is their home as well. She is the source of their iron, and she is their directive. The humans and the robots have this in common.



*


Captain Burt McCrea holds hands with Mary. Who holds hands with John. Who holds hands with Burt.

Burt finds Mary a book of fairy tales in the archives to read to the children, who are still so blissfully happy when she touches them, when she holds their tiny hands, after an infancy of nothing but contact with the Nan-E, that she knows it must be right to hold them so the sun shines on their tiny faces and makes them giggle at the warmth and squeeze shut their tiny eyes, right to say their names and touch their still-soft heads, supporting the skulls firmly, as the Nan-E instructs, and call them by their names. She practices.

“Abigail, I love you.” She coos to one of the brood, a tiny black girl, with powder-soft skin and a soft, dopey little smile. “Abby,” she presses her nose to the baby’s. The baby tries to suckle her cheek, and Mary laughs, “Silly Abby, yes I do.”

John mostly takes care of the children. He is considerate and thoughtful, once he puts his mind to being. Mary doesn’t know what she wants to do. She helps John, and so does Burt, and of course the Nan-E is there, watching her charges in a wider, more dangerous world than she is used to with a ferocious protectiveness. She gets paint from VN-GO, and tries, on the side of a building, to draw Burt and John. She is frustrated when it looks nothing like them—she never drew as a child, she did not know to make sketches before attempting a composition now, she does not know the human form. She wants to do something, but her inability to turn the wonder in her mind into an artifact she can show the people she loves makes her sadder than she ever knew how to be on the Axiom. But it’s a rich sadness, born from her fondness for John’s smile and Burt’s eager curiosity, and she wants the ache of it.

Mary’s answer comes when Burt, who with Wall-E has found a trove of data cards in the New York Public Library, brings uncollected handfuls of them back for her to marvel at. Among them is a Norton Complete Poetry Anthology, circa 2100. Haiku teaches her to approach the strangeness of the natural world—short and digestible, the cultivated attempt to regain all the naïve wonder she has for the plants, which are beginning to grow again from the Axiom’s seedbank database. On the advice of a man dead a millennia, she plants a cherry tree, and with him she cries at the delicacy of the blossoms, the living and the dead together bound in transcendent awe by the Earth’s renewed inexorability.

Painting failed her, and so Mary begins with words. Her granddaughter, who will attend a revived Columbia, and do her post-Doctoral work at the New-New School, will, in her dissertation, liken the quality of Mary’s work to the shoddy show that was Soviet art. Mary’s granddaughter will call the work developmental, a bit of the path towards reclaiming human knowledge, rather than anything of artistic merit in its own right. But there will be, in the concluding paragraph of that dissertation, a note of unadorned, unashamed pride in Mary Mackintosh, who learned to love to read when books were memories. Who braved the first summers under the threat of the dust storms. Mary Mackintosh, who walked the Earth, and who held her granddaughter in the sunlight with old arms, still strong enough to heft a baby, and said, “I love you Eleanor.” Eleanor will not remember this, or suspect that the passion behind her papers was Mary’s before it came to Eleanor. And yet it will be.

One awful day in those first summers, when a dust storm eradicates all their orchard, Burt tells Mary it’s too much, he only dreamed they could do this. Does she ever resent him for doing this to her? Does John?

She folds her large, soft hands around his own, and gives him all the truths she’s practiced and learned and borrowed. I love you. I believe in you. We promised ourselves, and we promised the Earth, and we have to make promises mean something. And miles to go before we sleep.



*


Apparently, according to Burt’s research, Axiom’s computers carried out a program of selective breeding when human initiative failed. In the Axiom’s controlled conditions, it wasn’t apparent that the people floating around on chairs had the potential to be quite intelligent. There’d never been a reason to develop an intellect before Earth.

But Burt begins to research, and Mary is driven to express something, and John wonders if he’s the stupid one. But he likes teaching himself and then the children to read, learning to run when they do, getting healthier as he plays their games with them.

He slices apples for their lunch—the first crop of apples in centuries, and listens to Burt, who excitedly explains why the chemicals in lemon juice will prevent their browning, (when they get around to growing lemons). John doesn’t really pay attention, but he likes Burt’s enthusiasm—he’s a calmer sort, himself, but he enjoys the charge Burt and Mary give a room. He likes to think he centers them.

Distracted, he lets the knife slide into the meat of him palm just a little, and screams. The pain is extraordinary, for someone who’s had so little experience with discomfort. Burt rushes around the table, “Here,” and he’s taken off his shirt and pressed it to staunch what seems to them an incredible flow of blood. “I’ll get M-O,” John offers, “The computer says a cut can ‘get infected.’”

John chuckles a little at his own stupidity, and Burt thinks him very brave, and kisses him. The three of them, Burt thinks, suit each other very well. He likes John’s strength, and he loves how clever John is with the children, and he’s in love with John’s laugh.



*






*

Comments

[gothic-hamlet.livejournal.com]

*LOVE.*

(Mwaaaha, I'm so glad Kelley got you to write this.)

[x-los.livejournal.com]

That bitch got me when I was crying and vulnerable coming out of the theater! AUGH! My one moment of vulnerability, and she seized on it!

[blinkidybah.livejournal.com]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH I LOVE THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS

[x-los.livejournal.com]

Mission Accomplished!

[aralias.livejournal.com]

totally unexpected (you write for other fandoms? what is this?) and reallyreallyreallygreat and lovely.

i particularly like all the stuff about the cherry red wire and how the captain gets carried away thinking about it in the longest sentence ever and then that's there for a reason and he breaks away and you say something insightful about thinking about things too much, and it's great. really.

i feel its missing an ending though, maybe, because whilst the ending here is wonderfully expressed and short and sweet, it does exclude mary - unless that's what you were wanting to do in which case well done there.

oh and this is very good also : She wants to do something, but her inability to turn the wonder in her mind into an artifact she can show the people she loves makes her sadder than she ever knew how to be on the Axiom. But it’s a rich sadness, born from her fondness for John’s smile and Burt’s eager curiosity, and she wants the ache of it.

well, all of it is. great writing that you probably knocked out in a spare hour between shifting mattresses.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

Omg, and sometimes even original fic!!

Ahaha. I bet you were like 'damn, another of Erin's long ass sentences" AND THEN THERE WAS A REASON! Awareness of ones own ridiculous writing pecadilos and subversion thereof: it's the latest thing.

Yeah, that ending just kind of ...stops? I didn't want to exclude Mary, and I thought tagging her in that last paragraph might bring her back without overbalancing the story to be all about Mary, because she gets so much space compared to John, but no--it doesn't really work. :(

Hey now, two hours! :p I have to stay awake all night in this parking lot in the ghetto guarding furniture (if the power on the laptop holds), so do pop on to say hello!

[gritsinmisery.livejournal.com]

OMG.

*love, love, love*

[x-los.livejournal.com]

heh, thanks thanks thanks.