Engineers figured out how to create love before common sense.
The Third Station decided as a matter of ethics that machines working in weapons development should be infused with the ability to feel love, to better understand the consequences of their work. However, because the hardware was so bulky — roughly three-hundred pounds of meshes and wires — only machines employed in research and heavy artillery development received the boost of the new emotion. The Third Station accompanied the move with a clever slogan: War is an act of Conscience.
The smoke from the exploded Quadrant Two Southern Weapons Complex reached four miles high.
Because much of the structure was located underground, the enemy had had a difficult time destroying it all at once. Dropping bombs was no good, and sending men in from the top was no good. Eventually one of the more down-to-earth generals devised a simple but explosively effective plan: to inject the air system with flammable gas and ignite it from the outside. As he put it, it was like "filling someone's veins with diesel and feeding them a match." The place had simply turned to fire and evaporated.
A search through the wreckage had revealed one curious thing, though: it was known that the complex had an extensive system of outbound air pumps installed in the event that some experiment or manufacturing process below ground went awry and produced toxic air. Evidently, the sensors had detected the flammable gas but the pumps had not been engaged. It was as though everyone had waited to die underground.
Even in the sterilized air of the Quadrant Two's Reflector Plating Branch, the smell of Doctor Godfrey was enough to make Samuel lose concentration.
Doctor Godfrey was the lead technician for the Light Gun Project in the complex's lowest level. She oversaw the production of the large reflectors that focused light for secondary defense weaponry on aircraft. The technology was embarrassingly archaic, and field tests had shown nearly every time that it was a useless weapon, but she accepted her assignment stoically.
The heat in the lowest levels was sometimes unbearable. They were not even a mile down, but the heat of the earth's mantle radiated up; the walls and the floors were always warm as though in the sun. Samuel's cooling fans produced a constant whirr, spinning to compensate for the boiling of the earth's innards. He spent much of his days in the nickel labs, slowly turning reflector casts in baths diffused with nickel particles so that over a few hours they grew a coat of brilliant metal. Most days he worked with Doctor Godfrey, he turning casts in nickel, and she separating them from the molds with cold water.
"How many is that?" She would ask when she took the casts from him.
"THAT IS FIVE," Samuel would say, or six, or seven, or a hundred, the stentorian belch of his voice echoing hurtfully off the walls. "YOU HAVE TIME TO TAKE A BREAK NOW."
And Doctor Godfrey would smile and stay near, and Samuel would feel a warmth different from that radiated from the earth.
Doctor Godfrey and Samuel spent hours talking, about weapons, nickel, sterile things which could be charted and manipulated and measured. Frequently the conversations would turn to things on the outside but would always die soon thereafter. Because Samuel had never left the lab his opinions on things like flowers and clouds were awkward and bizzarre: he knew about them only conceptually, an outline in the semiconductor materials making up his mind, the way most people know about atoms and God.
Doctor Godfrey and Samuel became closer. Samuel had been manufactured to speak only with the eloquence required to give instructions and read results. His voice was not attractive — it was a monotonous, tinny sound designed to be heard over the sound of weapons being built. It was hardly a tool for professing love. Gradually Samuel became more and more self-conscious and eventually stopped talking altogether. Soon after that Doctor Godfrey stopped talking too.
But the need to confess bit at him through his silence, and he thought all the time of ways to do it without speaking.
Reports from the border were becoming more and more troubling. They were vague but they told enough: the first ground war in centuries, heavy losses, civilian casualties. Samuel imagined villages with white fences stained with bodies filling with hot gas in the afternoon sun. Places where you sigh in the shade and pick flowers suddenly were places of tragedy. Everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before the fighting found its way to the complex, and the enemy dropped bombs or invaded with guns. The technicians were not hearty people: when the reports came from above Samuel watched them grow somber, their spidery chests expanding thoughtfully, perhaps imagining what it would be like to inhale fire.
Eventually the enemy did come, announced by system warnings of impure air.
Doctor Godfrey's heart dropped. The air was becoming flammable. She knew exactly what they were trying to do.
The exits had all been sealed off from the outside.
The normal air movement pumps were not powerful enough to counter the massive volume of flammable gas that was entering the lab. Soon the smell of chemical filled the air and there was the feeling of small nervousness one always has when refueling an automobile, or striking a match.
"The emergency pumps," somebody said. "Get a message to the top."
Doctor Godfrey called the maintenance department on the second floor, trying to remain calm while explaining that if they did not engage the emergency pump program everyone would evaporate.
They obliged.
Soon the hum of air testers shook the walls, and the normally-still giant fans buried in the latticework of the air system started to move. The consoles implanted in the walls throughout the labs updated every few seconds: pumping started, air purifying, so on, so on.
Then they stopped.
The humming died down and left silence, broken by frantic beeps coming from the air control consoles. Error. Then the program started again: the walls hummed, the fans spun. Then they stopped again. The lab tried again and again to purge the bad air and failed. At the point that the fans reached 8000RPM the upward-pointed spouts installed at ground level were supposed to open, expelling contaminated air in a large burst like a sneeze. In this situation the air system would make a powerful weapon, sending a deadly backdraft into the sky when the enemy tried to ignite the gas.
But the program would not run: when it came time for the flumes to open the process stopped and resumed from the beginning. It was looping.
The maintenance men stopped the program and rushed into the vents, scrambling to the giant fans, suspecting that through years of inactivity they had become derelict and signaled intolerable distress upon reaching 8000RPM. Other members of the crew waited desperately in the walls while others handed them parts to assemble new fans right there on the spot, but each emerged confounded. The fans were all fine.
Doctor Godfrey worried that the heat of the earth would ignite the gas before the enemy did.
After awhile the gas stopped coming. The air-reading consoles revealed that the mixture of gas and oxygen was just right to maintain an ignition throughout the air system of the entire complex. All someone had to do was apply fire.
Doctor Godfrey thought of something.
Because she was a lead technician, Doctor Godfrey had access to nearly all documents on the lab network. She accessed the air evacuation code from her office computer. It was thousands of lines long. She was not a computer scientist so she did not know exactly what she was looking for, so she scanned code desperately, looking for any problem she could find in the jumbleheap of logic: a missing bracket, characters that didn't belong signaling corruption, until one section stood out at her like an exclamation point.
doctor godfrey
i love you
love samuel
One of the doors on the top level opened briefly and slammed shut. A lit rag flitted to the floor, embers trailing off and growing like fireworks.
The tears evaporated from Doctor Godfrey's cheeks when the fire came.
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