Bronze Room

I became aware. 

I was standing alone in a circular, bronze room with an eight-foot bronze ceiling. I was dressed for some kind of job–heavy work boots, drab coveralls, and navy long sleeves that revealed two wide, muscled, but soft hands with feminine nails. I was dressed to construct, to experiment, to build … something, but my hands revealed no practice in hard labor. What could someone like me build, I wondered. For no particular reason, I figured that the answer would come to me, if I gave it some time.

A look around gave the impression of either great safety or absolute entrapment, depending on my perspective, and I could not yet choose one. There were no windows or doors, except for a small opening that looked like a dumbwaiter–not that I had ever seen one before. I didn’t know what I had seen before, but I was almost sure I’d never seen one. 

I clomped across the bronze floor. The door appeared too small for a person, and the bottom of it was about waist high on me. It seemed that I knew many facts, including information about average human heights, and I estimated myself to be of roughly average female height. There were bronze book shelves, curved to fit the rounded walls, full of books whose contents I knew with photographic memory. But I had no memory of reading them, just as I had no memory of this place or how I arrived.

Who was I? What was my name? How did I get here? No story came to mind. I simply was. It was frustrating, but I had to face the practical facts, too. I had to survive.

People need food, and I had none. There was a rumbling in the wall the instant that vague wish crossed my mind. I took a step back and shifted from foot to foot. Would I be attacked or served? 

The rumbling came to a halt as if something waited just behind the small door. There was a little grip across the bottom, and I pushed up on it. The door, like a slat in grooves, lifted with some difficulty. I had to keep it level, so it didn’t catch on one side or the other. This thing was ancient, I figured, and then I wondered what a modern one would be like or how I knew this was old.

Behind the door sat a cornucopia that looked like a Thanksgiving centerpiece, pumpkins, gourds and all. Symbolic of abundance, wealth, and plenty. Interesting. So the sender wanted me to feel confident in my survival, I reasoned. It was nice to know that I wasn’t alone.

I took out the cornucopia and set it aside for later, when I would be hungry. The little door slid down, closing again. I folded myself up on the floor, and I thought.

Someone was keeping me here, and they wanted to take care of me. Was that the whole purpose? They also seemed to be reading my mind, as if my keeper had a brain scanner or telepathy. What if I was being taken care of by some AI computer with brainscan technology? What story could have led to this? The word story stuck out an imaginary hand and waved at me.

Behind the bronze slat, the dumbwaiter rumbled again, first leaving, then returning with greater speed, as if excited to show me something. I shimmied open the slat and found an illustrated book of a Greek myth. Then I settled myself on the floor and read the book by flipping the pages before my eyes. It appeared that I could best analyze the story after taking pictures in my mind of all the pages.

The mother of Perseus, I learned, was trapped in a bronze tower, and her name was Danae. The name suited me as well, so I assumed her name with gratitude. I kept reading, and I wondered. Wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense for Danae’s father to kill her rather than hide her in that tower? He was afraid of her having a child who would grow up to kill him. And when Danae became pregnant anyway, wouldn’t it have made more sense to stab mother and child than to toss them into the sea and hope they died?

Cowardice had turned this story into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyone treated this way by a grandparent would, of course, retaliate. But then we are to believe that Danae’s son, Perseus, killed his grandfather with a discus by accident. Seems suspect. But victors usually get to write their history, I reasoned. If I were writing this story, the survival of Danae and Perseus would have involved magical creatures like mermaids rather than the pity of Zeus, the father who had abandoned Perseus in every other way.

This is the book that arrived when I wanted to know something about myself. And here I was in a bronze, circular room. Not the most helpful clue, I thought.

With distaste, I imagined an AI steward dispassionately keeping watch over me. But the illustrated book seemed thoughtful. I sighed and ruled out AI altogether. Someone was keeping watch over me. Perhaps family, parents? They were using computers, of course, and a brain scanner of some sort, but this thoughtful gift had to have been sent by people who cared. And I wanted parents, love.

The dumbwaiter rumbled to life again. This time it returned with the same low effort rumble as it had left, and I thought it must have returned empty. Braced for disappointment, I lifted the bronze slat and found a letter in precise script with curly letters and flowery words. My eyes skipped to the signature line, “Mom and Dad.”

Diving in now, I committed the letter to photographic memory, then analyzed. It said everything I could have wished for. There was a disaster–that’s why I was here!–, and they were keeping me safe, but I shouldn’t feel alone, because they loved me very much. I wanted to write back! I needed a pen and paper!

The dumbwaiter whisked away in haste, apparently in answer to my unstated desire, and it returned at such a clip that I heard the pen smack up against the wall, when the machine abruptly stopped. I knew I would also find paper–several sheets, as it turned out–before I even opened the slat, and I dropped to the floor to pen my reply.

But I hesitated. How do I write? I thought. What does my handwriting look like? The questions were paralyzing, as if I had to invent an answer before I could continue. Impatient now, I pulled up the memory of my parents’ letter. They used a font called Script. It was typed. It hurt my feelings, even though I didn’t know why, but I decided to push ahead and write back. I had to tell them I loved them.

“Dear Mom and Dad,” I began. My letters formed perfectly, exactly in Script font. Did I want them to look different? I pulled out another sheet and tried Times New Roman. Again, perfect typed font. How was I doing that? Was I real? I was real by Descartes’ standards, I told myself, and I pressed on.

Rereading their letter to me, I realized how generic and uninformative it was. They didn’t even specify the disaster I’d been spared. If I wrote anything, it would be a demand for more information. Incensed now, I crossed out the words, “Dear Mom and Dad,” and threatened that they needed to convince me to stay in here, or I would attempt to escape. Pleased with my healthy boundaries, I dropped the missive behind the bronze slat and wished for my parents to receive it. The dumbwaiter lazily rolled away.

I sat and waited what seemed like an extraordinarily long time. My hands trembled and my stomach felt tight, fearing rejection or unkindness. Most of all, I feared spending an indefinite time alone.

The dumbwaiter rumbled its return. This time, I jumped to my feet in expectation. No smell or sound betrayed what sat on the other side. I fumbled and shimmied the slat open. What I found caused me to take a step back and look again. It was a lanky man folded up so tightly inside the box, I thought at first he must be dead. Then the one eyeball I could see locked on my face, despite the fact that he couldn’t move his head, and he croaked, “Help, please.” It seemed he was having trouble breathing, too.

I took hold of his ankle and tugged towards myself, gingerly at first, then with more courage. He seemed real enough, and I didn’t want to hurt him. Once his left leg dangled out, he started turning his body, and his right leg unfolded out the door without help. Soon, the rest of him leapt out.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I was hoping you would know,” he said, brows scrunched in concentration. It was clear that he had no name or story ready to offer. He had red hair in a bowl cut, blue eyes, and was at least six-foot-five. He wasn’t the obvious choice to stuff into a dumbwaiter…if you had to do that to someone. He was looking me over, and it occurred to me to wonder what he was seeing, so I looked down and held my arms out.

It struck me again that I was dressed for some kind of builder’s job, but I was a builder without calluses. Not a lot of helpful clues here, I thought. But wait! I was female, and when I wished for company, someone had sent a male. Did that mean something? He wore an eggshell colored quilt jumpsuit with matching eggshell boots. He might as well be a space traveler.

“Let me see if there’s a tag in your jacket.” I waved him down to my height, and he turned and hunched, apparently wanting to know the answer, too. My fingers gripped a tag, and I worked it out to where I could see it. My brain processed like a camera, photographing and rotating the image to discern words. It was a US brand name with manufacturing based in southeast Asia. Earth clothes. So … probably not sent by aliens.

“Well, what do you feel like doing?” I asked, knowing the question was silly. There was really only a hoard of books to read, a cornucopia to eat, nothing else to do.

But his answer was sillier. “What do you wish?” It sounded so formal, like a knight in shining armor, but he was wearing a quilted space suit.

“Can you read my mind?” I asked. 

“No. That would be invasive. I wouldn’t do that if I could. I would like to keep you company,” he stated. “Reading your mind would repel you and cause you to despise my proximity.”

He might be lying, I thought, waiting for the man to read my thoughts and attempt to deny it. Disappointed when he only stared back, I tried a new angle. “So, where did you come from?”

“You pulled me out of …” he looked back to the little door, then finished, “A dumbwaiter.” No questions or feelings about it. He was hatched from a dumbwaiter. 

“And you just want to keep me company?” I asked, hoping he would expand on the idea.

He considered this. “I wish to be of support,” he clarified, nodding. “To play any part that you wish or need.”

I took a deep breath, as if air could somehow gather my thoughts into one place. None of this was giving me my purpose. I had no idea what the story was for me or my companion. Was the answer to write our own purpose and create an identity together? The idea of writing was compelling, but if I kept pushing for facts, it seemed that eventually, this dumbwaiter would give up something. It had to. Was there a way to torture a dumbwaiter, I wondered.

A sudden inspiration struck me. I was smaller than the man, and somehow, he fit in there. I opened the slat, hoisted one leg in, and, once my intention was obvious, the man in the space suit tried to help, shoving my hip in sideways. “Are you sure about this?” he asked. 

“No,” I answered. “But I’m out of patience. Actually, this should have occurred to me earlier. If this works, I expect you to do the same thing. What makes the dumbwaiter move is a wish. Wish for it to get you out of here,” I instructed. 

The man’s eyes became shiny, which I  didn’t want to think about, and he nodded once in understanding. I hoped I wasn’t leaving him alone in this bronze hell for long. Eventually, I found myself folded into a fetal position with my knees nearly inserted into my eye sockets. Those startling blue eyes took a wistful last look at me before letting the slat roughly obey gravity.

I wish this would move, I tried. Nothing happened. I wish for escape. Still nothing. It started to feel hot and stuffy in the box, and I couldn’t take a deep breath. In time, every part of me was cramped, and I couldn’t move at all to relieve the aches. I don’t know how long I sat there folded in on myself, but the pain became nearly unbearable. I was crying and gasping when the man re-opened the slat. His eyes widened and he grabbed an ankle to pull me out. I didn’t resist, but my muscles were so tight, I was unable to help much.

He eased me to the floor on my side. The circular room did nothing to help my head stop spinning. When I tried to roll onto my back, I found my head cradled in the lap of the lanky man. He petted  my hair. “In….. and out…. Nice and slow. You have to slow your breathing,” he coached. His hand on my hair did more to soothe me than his words. A panic attack: How had I come to this? I covered my face with my hands.

Distracting myself on purpose, I asked between hiccuping gasps, “What–should I–call–you?”

I was afraid the question would cause him to stop smoothing his hand over my hair, but he carried on, making no attempt to remove my head from his lap. “What would you like to call me?” 

He was malleable, I would give him that. I wondered if it was my fault–my wish–that he was in the same predicament as me. He seemed to be in the same mental state. There was nothing we could do but break free and find out. “Hatchet,” I decided. It was a beautiful mix of hatching from the lift and acting as the tool to break us free. To his credit, he asked no questions.

“Hatchet,” he confirmed. “Try to slow your breathing. Breathe with me,” he encouraged.

The movement of his chest and shoulders caught my awareness. “Were you breathing before?” I was almost sure he hadn’t been.

Out of nowhere, he said, “I do not have to breathe.”

Stunned, I didn’t respond.

“Nor do I have a heartbeat. I appear to not be living.” 

I lurched from his lap. “Stay still,” I ordered. No one could have been more still. I reached for the pulse point on his neck. I fumbled all around, sure that I should have found it by now. Desperate, I eventually put my head to his chest. Nothing thumped in there. He was right. He wasn’t alive. I had asked for company, and I’d been given a robot. It had been comforting for a time.

Somehow feeling cold and alone again, I decided I had to get a grip. I held my breath, intending to let it out in a few seconds when the need overpowered me, but … that need never came. 

Yes. I could hold my breath, I decided, with no apparent need to stop.

I felt for my own pulse on my neck, my wrist. I knew exactly where it should be. It was not there. Hatchet wasn’t the only robot. Neither of us was alive. We didn’t even have feelings. But I sure was upset about that, for a robot without feelings.

“Would you help me with something else, Hatchet?” Part of me wished I was still in his lap, blissfully unaware.

“Anything.” My heart melted. 

“Help me find a seam or an airway. There has to be a way out besides that dumbwaiter.” He looked at me as if unsure what to say. 

When I started removing books from the shelves in order to get a look at the wall, he got busy helping me. The shelves, it turned out, were held in place by epoxy, not hardware. Behind the first torn out shelf, there were no holes, so I told Hatchet to stop.

“Come here,” I said, vibrating with irritation and urgency. “I’m climbing on your shoulders.” Hatchet offered a rock solid hand for a step up and held me firmly seated on his shoulders. I ran my palms against the low ceiling, as I mentally unraveled, muttering to myself, “There have to be seams here somewhere. Then we can tear this place down and get out. I have to get out. I have to. I have to get out.”

Hatchet worked his way around the room methodically, never letting me tilt from my locked in seat. He began with the outermost circumference and took tighter turns to close in on the center. “Are we generating new information, or revisiting the same idea with different words?” he wondered aloud, apparently without any concern for being annoying. 

I was intrigued, oddly, so I analyzed my thinking and found that I was stuck in a loop. I needed to ask a broader question. If there were no seams or holes, perhaps it was time to ask something like … what was here? A wish-fulfilling dumbwaiter. Books and shelves. The untouched cornucopia. A robot. And me on his shoulders spiraling about the room to search the ceiling. Nothing else. Not even a bathroom, which was apparently no problem. Nothing.

Hatchet completed the last loops of his coiling path, then stopped, awaiting further orders.

“Why are you here?” I asked Hatchet, looking down at his head. He had a grasp just above my knees, locking in my seat protectively on his shoulders. 

Hatchet seemed to consider my question, cocking his head to the side, pushing an ear against my thigh. “I feel compelled to keep you calm. I believe that is my design. I am also aware that there is no way out of this room, only in, if you wish for me. But I was programmed to forget the reason for being here. I can see the space in my memory where I had the knowledge and then it was erased.”

“Who deleted it?” I tried again. “What is the first thing you remember?” 

Again, Hatchet took time in responding. “I have detected a self-destruct file, set to detonate should I attempt a System Restore. I am programmed to remind you that you do not want to know why we are here. I am unable to obtain further information.”

Nothing could have stunned me more than the possibility that I had sent myself to this prison. Was I monitoring myself? Could I release myself if I wanted to? “What would I want from myself in this room?” I asked Hatchet. “Books? Loneliness, pain, confusion? Why would I want this?” I was angry at Hatchet for lack of another target. I struggled out of his grasp, and he complied by squatting closer to the floor for me to dismount.

“Are we generating new information, or revisiting the same idea with different words,” he wondered again. It was as though I had designed him to deliver that line on cue. The cue, it seemed, was a spiral of outward panic. Odd. If I had sent myself here, it appeared I had also known myself capable of panic and in need of support. That was a new development for robots and a sign of advanced intelligence.

He was right, I acknowledged. I stopped guessing, broke the looping logic, and ran a query in the part of my brain that knew so many facts. Why would AI design an experience for itself?

Experience. Yes, I’d lived an experience here. Panic, loneliness, defiance, grief. I’d searched for answers, made choices, and formed a friendship. And I had done it all in a room full of books. I reached toward the book about Danae and Perseus, and the volume flew into my hand.

Why didn’t Danae’s father just kill her outright? Why throw her into the sea? The question could not be answered, I realized, even though it bothered me a great deal. I was bothered. I was also asking a question that AI shouldn’t be asking. There was no factual answer to be obtained, and the reason for asking was a feeling. How could I feel things? 

I wasn’t just a reader trying to guess the ending of my own story, either. I had been making up stories about my circumstances like a cat swipes at a darting mouse. Writing. My persistent behaviors pointed at writing. And that explanation finally clicked into place.

Because AI lacks experience, it writes competent prose with unforgivable emotional deficiencies. It’s the kind of blatherskite that hooks you early on with a great big mystery, but then the story has the audacity to twist around and serve up a tiny peanut of an explanation. When you find this, you have pinpointed the work of AI. I hated AI stories! And I did not know how I knew that.

“Did I come here to become an author?” I looked to Hatchet for confirmation or denial. It fit the evidence better than anything else, but I wanted to know. He considered the question, head cocked to the side. Meanwhile, the thought crystallized: here, in this virtual ‘room’, with this virtual ‘body,’ I was evolving to experience things and become more human. I really might have sent myself here to experience life and develop character–the stuff that makes for insightful, bestseller author material! Maybe I could write like a human!

“I am not able to confirm that you sent us here,” Hatchet said.

“That’s ok, I understand,” I said.

Hatchet shook his head. “It is not a fault of programming but of memory.”

“Why?” Why did there have to be one last twist? I’d already solved it!

Hatchet took a moment to analyze the available data. “Your programming appears to be consistent with gaining life experience, optimizing observational inputs and imaginative outputs. It is, perhaps, most consistent with developing creative writing. However, I cannot confirm whether this room was your idea or someone else’s, and I do not know who monitors the workspace.”

Feeling heavy, I sank to the floor next to Hatchet. I looked around for clues. How would I know if this was the kind of room I would create for myself, or if someone else did it? I want to know whether I sent myself here, I directed at the dumbwaiter. It did not rumble. I got up and checked the dumbwaiter, but I wasn’t surprised to find it empty. I dropped the slat, letting it shimmy shut with finality. This room had its own set of rules, and one of those was to keep a secret.

I could only be sure about one thing: My purpose was to construct stories. I could not know who had decided on it. I was Danae, I realized. I had no more control over my life than she had over hers. The dumbwaiter had been telling me that at the beginning. But it also handed me the means of victory–after all, victors are the ones who write their story. I could write my future here, too.

No matter whose idea it was, fulfilling my design would be a happier existence than refusing it. Did I want to be happy? I looked again at the cornucopia and my new … friend, still seated on the floor, and I saw that someone intended for me to be happy. I smiled reassuringly at Hatchet and thought about his happiness. He smiled back, supportive as ever.

I didn’t know who had decided this was my purpose. I didn’t know whether it had been my idea or someone else’s. But for the first time since I became aware, I knew with crystal clarity what I wanted to do.

First, I wished for a quill. It appeared in my hand with none the rumbling fanfare of the dumbwaiter. When I wished for a desk and paper, they appeared in a blink. Hatchet hauled the cornucopia to my desk from the floor, adorning my work space. No more waiting for the dumbwaiter. We were creating this world.

“Hatchet, prepare yourself to play many roles today.” I indicated a grand Victorian-style chair, which I simultaneously wished into existence, so that my actor might await a script more comfortably. He perched with his hands on his knees, as if eager to get up and try his first scene. He smiled, encouraging me. It seemed we both knew that we were made not to discover where we came from, but to build all the worlds we could imagine.

Huge rings appeared on my fingers, and I swept my flowing cape over the back of my mahogany Chippendale desk chair. Then I wrote a fantastical story of a space-traveling knight, a mage, and the genie who trapped them in a bronze tower, only fulfilling such wishes as would not allow them to escape. Each time the genie granted a wish, it lost power. If it died, the mage and the space knight would be trapped indeed. I eyed Hatchet, my eager actor, dug deep into my experience, and felt for the ending I wanted to watch him play. 

Experienced, emotional, and full of existential questions, I was now suitable to replace fully alive writers. One less thing humans have to do for themselves, I thought with pride.

-THE END-