Keepers of the Automata Read online

  Chapter 3 – Messy, Inefficient and Painful

  “I’ll never understand why the housing authority insists on building a balcony onto every housing stack apartment.”

  Bryce coughed again into his handkerchief; and though he feared to do so, he peeked at the wet contents expelled from his lungs. It was raining, and though the awning that covered the terrace of his nineteenth-floor apartment sheltered him and Rebecca’s manuscript from the raindrops, it could not filter the moisture from the air to prevent the toxicity from dripping into Bryce’s breath. The handkerchief held none of the red phlegm that warned him his lungs collected too much tainted moisture, but Bryce sensed his lungs would burn into the night if he spent much more time reading upon his balcony.

  Byrce would not be the only housing stack resident to foolishly sit on his balcony in the sickening rain. Perched upon another housing stack just across the street, another nineteenth-floor balcony directly faced Bryce’s apartment. Little more than ten feet separated those terraces, for the state housing authority built all their apartment stacks as closely together as possible. A glass door slid open on the opposing housing stack, and a gnomish man dressed in a sleeveless shirt and black boxer shorts shuffled onto the other balcony. The neighbor lifted a hand to wave at his neighbor, and Bryce saw that the hairy, little man gripped one of the Western paperbacks written by the Gary Tate automaton in his other hand.

  “What are you reading, friend?” The man shouted across the divide to Bryce.

  Bryce timidly held up a page of Rebecca’s manuscript. “Oh, I’m just reading something a friend of mine has written.”

  The gnomish man frowned. “Say, why would you waste your time reading something like that?”

  “It’s really pretty good.”

  The gnomish man scratched his head and dropped into one of the cheap, plastic chairs held on his balcony. “I suppose I should take your word for it, friend, but if it’s any good, then why didn’t it come from one of those lovely robots at the bookstations?”

  Bryce shrugged. “I suppose I just wanted to read something different.”

  “Different?” the man scoffed. “Why, don’t you know that no two books written by the automata are ever the same? I’ve read dozens of Gary Tate Westerns, and I never get tired of any of them. The one I’m reading now is about a girl kidnapped by the Indians, and of the posse that goes after her. Now, have you every heard of a story like that?”

  Bryce had read close to a dozen other Western paperbacks from the robot Gary Tate centered around that very plot. He suspected many others existed. But Bryce didn’t argue with the man. He didn’t want to be distracted from Rebecca’s manuscript, and he felt another moist cough gathering in his lungs.

  “No, I suppose not,” Bryce shouted back at his neighbor. “I’ll be sure to get back to the bookstation first thing after I finish this reading favor for my friend. Excuse me for leaving, but I need to get out of the rain.”

  “Of course,” and the gnome of a man planted his eyes into the pages of his book.

  Bryce carefully wrapped the rubber bands around Rebecca’s manuscript without spilling any of his mug’s synthetic coffee onto the white paper as he retreated into the apartment before the moisture had the time to further burn his lung tissue. He sighed. He had only hoped to read the remaining pages of Rebecca’s manuscript within the wasting world’s natural light.

  Rebecca’s magical story exceeded Bryce’s grandest expectations. It was an epic tale, a story that subtlety blended elements of science fiction and fantasy, a manuscript that soared beyond the low word limits followed by the bookstations’ automata. Rebecca wrote of an elegant tower rising in the middle of a glimmering, alien sea. Grand star-hopping passenger liners travelled to the tower’s planet, where tourists frolicked in luxury while revolution brewed among the laborers who called that tower their home. There was romance. There was tragedy. Rebecca’s words inspired emotion, and empathy, within Bryce, all without the body of a serial killer’s victim discovered in chapter two, without any of the predictable love scenes of chapter six.

  The story made no effort to follow the established plotlines offered by the bookstations’ automata. It didn’t follow any template hinting at motive, means and opportunity before revealing a culprit in the second-to-last chapter as Joe Spade did in his detective novels. It didn’t mention a single high school prom dance or championship game as was included in anything written by Jackie Luebbers. There was no demon running rampant through the chapters to harvest gore and blood like the monsters Mary Hecate employed to satisfy her readers, and there wasn’t so much as a single gunfight to appease those who gave their tickets to Sheriff Gary Tate. The conflicts in Rebecca’s story seemed subtler, and they simmered along every sentence so that the eventual climax felt more profound. Sometimes, Bryce felt the pages rushing by him. At other moments, the tempo to Rebecca’s writing slowed, helping Bryce to absorb the details that shaped that manuscript’s world. Rebecca’s story was everything, and nothing, of what was offered by the automata. It fit into no tidy shoebox of a fictional genre, nor would images of its characters be so neatly carved into the shape of plastic figurines or painted on tin lunchboxes.

  Bryce enjoyed the imperfections that were abundant in Rebecca’s effort. Rebecca seemed to simply ignore typos. There were batches of words she consistently failed to spell correctly. Entire sentences and paragraphs were crossed out with red ink, and all the sloppy notes and comments scribbled in the margins fascinated Bryce for their insight into the Rebecca’s writing process. It only took minutes for the automata to compose each of their books. Customers hardly had the time to share a conversation before their favorite automaton dispensed a customized paperback book into their hands. But Rebecca’s writing efforts looked messy, inefficient and painful for all the scribble and mistakes filling those pages, and Bryce admired her craft all the more for it.

  He hadn’t finished the first chapter before he knew he would return to Rebecca’s repair shop. Her words made him hate those automata more than ever, but he would accept whatever tool Rebecca required him to employ for the chance to read more of her work.

  Bryce’s smile widened as he read through that manuscript within his small apartment. The synthetic coffee didn’t taste so bitter. The itching of his skin calmed. The world again felt like a place worth saving.

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