ISSUE #14 | EXCERPT, "THE GARDENER"
Robbie stopped for a second, and looked at the wriggling thing. It was ugly, but he didn’t know it, being only made to understand aesthetic beauty—symmetry and color saturation and fullness, as it related to vegetation. This thing was smaller, something pathetic, though he couldn’t understand that either.
It sat in a pile of twigs, flapping around. Something circular, once broken? Debris from a tree, a pile of feathers and eggshell—nothing moving except this one thing. It was squishy and pink and seemed to always have its eyes closed, a little beak reaching up and snapping silently at nothing.
Robbie understood that it was an animal—but checking his information banks, did not identify it as any kind of garden pest, and so he did not recognize it. Not knowing why, Robbie bent over to touch the thing.
It flapped harder for a second, tried to flip itself over off its side. Its eyes still closed, Robbie could not understand what the creature was trying to do, if it tried to do anything at all. Robbie gave it another poke.
“Vweet!”
Robbie stopped for a second, and lifted his hand.
“Vweeet!! Beeet!”
It kicked up a few tiny footfuls of dirt, scratching on the ground. Robbie still did not know what to do about it. He searched his memory banks and programming, looking for any hint of what could be done about this pink, fleshy thing. Circuits fired, wires crossed, strings of binary—nothing appropriate came up. What attitude should he adopt? In what way was he meant to regard something like this?
So far out of his experience?
Two wires crossed.
1001010111111111111011012
Is that so? Robbie thought. He didn’t know where the idea had come from. Somewhere inside him, circuits had come into contact that were not designed to do so, logic gates contradicted each other. CPU interpreting a message it had never processed before.
Spot illustration by Sam Rheaume
Robbie bent over the creature a little more gently and cupped it in two hands. It fluttered and contorted in his cool palms, and he walked over towards the toolshed.
Robbie took a rag from a small table in the corner of the shed, spotted with old oil stains, and he curled it up into a comfortable clump. He placed the rag-nest on the table, near the window where the light was still coming in. When that was settled, he placed the naked thing gently down into the center of it.
Robbie watched it try to settle into the clump. It was still visibly uncomfortable, still flapping around, though much less so than when it was lying on the dirt. He took another step back and stared at it for another minute.
1001010111111111111011012 made no sense to Robbie on a literal level. It broke the six digit pattern that all of his other functions were mapped to, allowing room for something like ambiguity, multiple conflicting messages. When Robbie saw the creature, he understood it as 100110, growing—keep safe, as well as 011001, non-veg—remove from patch. Robbie did not know what to make of the contradiction—keep safe, disregard. There was nobody who could repair whatever part of him had sent it.
And yet, he had done what was right as well, hadn’t he? A new kind of task had come up, and he executed it to the best of his understanding. A growing thing being left to grow, debris removed from soil. This is what was required of him, wasn’t it?
Nobody could have explained to Robbie, nor could he have understood, that it was a random message. He couldn’t have been expected to act on it within the bounds of what he’d known.
Robbie looked at the creature for another minute, then returned to his work.
Logan A. Marrow is a speculative fiction writer from Upstate New York, who has written for publications as wide-ranging as the horror magazine Thuggish Itch to the political art collective Do Not Research. He frequently uses the pen names “Lucas A. Marlowe” and “Leonard MacAffee.” Recently, he has been featured as a finalist in 2000 AD’s annual comic writing competition, and he is in the process of refining the manuscript for his first fix-up, a collection of short stories set in a beatnik burgerpunk dystopia. He can be found on most social media as @majordanby1.