The thing about fucking off to the woods is that unless you are a very particular, very rare sort of person, it does not take long to understand why people left said woods in the first place. Houses were invented for excellent reasons, as were shoes, plumbing, pillows, heaters, washing machines, paint, lamps, soap, refrigeration, and all the other countless trappings humans struggle to imagine life without. It had been important—vitally important—for Sibling Dex to see their world as it was without such constructs, to understand on a visceral level that there was infinitely more to life than what happened between walls, that every person was indeed just an animal in clothing, subject to the laws of nature and the whims of chance like everything else that had ever lived and died in the universe. But the moment they pedaled their wagon out of the wilderness and onto the highway, Dex felt the indescribable relief of switching back to the flip side of that equation—the side in which humans had made existence as comfortable as technology would sustainably allow. The wheels of Dex’s ox-bike no longer caught on the broken crags of old oil road. Their heavily laden double-decker wagon no longer shuddered as they willed it across chaotic surfaces rent by the march of roots and the meandering of soil. There were no creeping branches catching their clothing, no fallen trees posing problems, no unlabeled forks that made them stop and stare with dread. Instead, there was cream-colored paving, smooth as butter and just as warm, lined with signs people made to let other people know which way to go if they wanted to rest and eat and not be alone.
Not that Sibling Dex was alone, of course. Mosscap walked alongside them, its tireless mechanical legs easily keeping pace with the bike. “It’s so … manicured,” the robot said with wonder as it studied the seam between road and forest. “I knew it would be, but I’ve never seen it for myself.”
Dex glanced at the dense ferns and web-laced wildflowers spilling over the edge of the road, barely held back by the highway’s border. If this was what passed as manicured, they couldn’t imagine what Mosscap was going to make of, say, a rose garden, or a public park.
“Oh, and look at this!” Mosscap hurried ahead of the ox-bike,clanking with every step. It stopped before a road sign, placing its hinged hands on its matte-silver hips as it read the text to itself. “I’ve never seen a sign this legible before,” it called back. “And it’s so glossy.”
“Yeah, well, we’re not in a ruin,” Dex said, panting lightly as they crested the last of a mild incline. They wondered if Mosscap was going to be like this with every human-made object it encountered. But then again, perhaps it was a good thing for someone to appreciate the craftsmanship of a backroads highway or a quick-printed road sign. The creation of such objects took just as much work and thought as anything else, yet garnered little praise from those who saw them every day. Maybe giving such things credit where credit was due was the perfect job for someone who wasn’t a person at all.
Mosscap turned to Dex with as big a smile as its boxy metal face would allow. “This is very nice,” it said, pointing a finger at the text reading STUMP—20 MILES. “Wonderfully neat. Though a little prescriptive, don’t you think?”
“How so?”
“Well, there’s no spontaneity in your journey, then, is there? If you’re focused on moving from sign to sign, there’s no opportunity for happy accidents. But I suppose I’ve rarely had clear destinations in mind before now. In the wilds, I simply go places.”
“Most folks don’t wander between towns without a concrete reason for doing so.”
“Why not?” Mosscap asked.
Dex had never really thought about this before. They steered the bike in the direction the sign indicated, and Mosscap fell into step alongside. “If you have everything you need around you,” Dex said, “there’s no reason to leave. It takes a lot of time and effort to go someplace else.”
Mosscap nodded at the wagon trailing dutifully behind Dex’s ox-bike. “Would you say this carries everything you need?”
The phrasing of this was not lost on Dex. What do humans need?was the impossible question that had driven Mosscap to wander out of the wilderness on behalf of robot-kind, and Dex had no idea how Mosscap was ever going to find a satisfactory answer. They knew they’d be hearing the question endlessly during however long it took them both to travel together through Panga’s human territories, but apparently, Mosscap was starting now.
“Materially, yeah, pretty much,” Dex answered, in regards to the wagon. “At least, in an everyday sense.”
The robot craned its head, looking at the storage crates tied to the roof of the vehicle that rattled with the internal shifting of yet more things. “I suppose I might not want to travel much if it required taking all of this with me.”
“You can get by with less, but you gotta know where you’re going,” Dex said. “You need to know there’s food and shelter where you’re headed. Which is exactly why we make signs.” They gave Mosscap a knowing glance. “Otherwise, you end up spending the night in a cave.”
Mosscap gave Dex a sympathetic nod. The hard climb to Hart’s Brow was more than a week behind them, but Dex’s body was still feeling it, and they had made no secret of this. “On that note, Sibling Dex,” Mosscap said, “I can’t help but notice that the sign says it’s another twenty miles to Stump, and—”
“Yeah, day’s getting late,” Dex agreed. Twenty miles wasn’t so bad, but creamy highway or not, they were still deep in forest and had yet to see anyone else on the road. There was no reason beyond impatience to continue pressing on in the dark, and though Dex was looking forward to being in a proper town again, stillness and rest sounded preferable in the moment.
They pulled off the road at a simple clearing built for that exact purpose, and together, Dex and Mosscap made camp. The two of them had fallen into an unspoken rhythm with this in recent days. Dex locked down everything with wheels, Mosscap unfolded the kitchen on the wagon’s exterior, Dex fetched chairs, Mosscap started the fire. There was no discussion around it anymore.
As Mosscap fussed with connecting the biogas tank to the fire drum, Dex pulled out their pocket computer and opened their mailbox. “Whoa,” they said.
“What is it?” Mosscap asked as it secured the metal hose to the gas tank’s valve.
Dex flicked through message after message after message. Never in their life had they gotten this much mail. “A lot of people want to meet you,” they said. This wasn’t entirely unexpected. The moment Dex had regained satellite signal after climbing back down the mountain, they’d sent messages to the village councils, the Wildguard, the monastic network, and every other contact they could think of. The first robot to reach out to humans since the Awakening wasn’t something to be kept secret or left a surprise, Dex felt. Mosscap had come to meet humanity as a whole; that was who Dex had informed.
It made sense, Dex supposed, that everyone had written back.
“We’ve got a lot of invites from the City, ...
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