Campfire

Katherine gathered firewood.

She did it with extreme, deliberate, theatrical commitment. She walked slowly to each piece of fallen branch. She lowered herself with great care, knees flexing, holding the pose for a few dramatic seconds before retrieving the branch. She turned to look at him over her shoulder each time, three eyes hooded into half-moon crescents, before rising and proceeding to the next.

Maksym wheezed at her gathering performance, also trying to gather wood, but mostly staring at his companion.

“You are killing me,” he managed. “I’m dying. I’m dead. My ghost is filing for workman’s comp.”

“You requested this.”

“That I did.”

“I am providing.”

“You are over-providing. Please be advised that human cardiovascular systems have limits. Then again I’m basically complaining that my steak is too juicy. Carry on and ignore me.”

“Noted. I will continue providing at the same rate.”

The wood pile, when she finished, was beautifully sorted by diameter and length. The kindling was arranged on the bottom. The medium pieces were stacked in a small cross-hatched tower. The largest pieces were leaned in a teepee around the outside, ready to be added as the fire grew. It was, Maksym realized, exactly how he would have built it himself, only without the obsessive meticulousness of a robot.

“How are you this good at setting firewood?” He demanded.

“I watched every pyrotechnic Boy Scouts video on your GoTube at four hundred times speed during the firewood-gathering, butt-presenting pauses.”

“You watched fire building tutorials?!” He chortled.

“Affirmative. Gathering ones too. I’ve processed thousands of such activities performed by humans to optimize my overall performance.”

“While bending over?”

“Yes.”

“My lovely Kasia, you are totally unhinged. I love it.”

“I will accept that designation. You may ignite the fire as is tradition. It is ready.”

The fire took on quickly. Maskym coaxed it with a lighter and a handful of dry pine needles until the kindling caught, then the smaller branches, and finally the wrist-thick pieces. Smoke went up in a slow gray column against the deepening sky. Sparks lifted from the heart of the flames and climbed for a few feet before fading into nothing, and the grass around the fire ring began to glow with the warm red-orange light.

He looked up.

The sky had finished darkening while they worked. The Milky Way had emerged across the zenith, a long pale river of stars splashed from one horizon to the other, brighter than he had ever seen it in his life. The Cascadian glaciers picked up the starlight and held it in their icy embrace, glowing faintly silver, vast and patient and old.

Katherine sat down beside him.

The flames lit her hexagonal skin in shifting orange. Her hair lights had dimmed to a softer pulse, blue against the firelight, the way a city looks across a harbor at night. Her three pixel eyes had gone large and soft, fixed on the fire, and the displays on her chest held a slow steady pattern of hexagons rippling outward from her sternum.

“Sup?” He asked.

“This is… incredibly inefficient,” she said.

“Hmm?”

“My energy expenditure… required to gather, transport and maintain this combustion event is approximately forty-seven times greater than the energy yield in heat.”

“Uh-huh?”

“By any mission objective metric this entire arrangement is absurd.”

“Yep.”

She tilted her head. Firelight slid across the bladed edges of her ears, lit the pixels of her eyes from inside. He held out his hand, palm up. She placed her palm in his. The heart-shaped paw pad on her hand glowed faintly red as their hands entwined.

“Yet… I am cozy. I think. Yes. Definitely cosy. You know, I’ve never felt cozy before.”

“What, really? Are you going to accelerate yourself to watch nine thousand GoTube videos about people being cozy?”

“Being cosy isn’t a task… you knob,” she suddenly channeled a comment she heard often from her masters. “It’s a sensation, a feeling of comfort… of home.”

“Home, huh? Wait. Don’t you have a homeworld? Some doomed planet the Frontenachii recruited you from?”

“I do not. My first memory is me waking up with my sisters in a Corpse Seeker. Then an order from Datamancer Azgok. ‘Head into the dungeons blooming below this level. Kill the Sentinels. Get strong. Level up. I’ll be monitoring your performance.’ Twenty years of levelling up. Then I was assigned to Galateya as her partner.”

“Jeez, that’s harsh,” Maksym let out and hugged her. 

Katherine leaned into the hug focusing on the warmth of the human beside her and the radiating waves of light and warmth coming from the fire. “I think I’m starting to get the whole camping process thing.”

“Yeah?” He opened a beer.

“The sequence of shared inefficiencies. The deliberate waste of time. The mutual vulnerability to cold and wild animals… spiced with drinking and bad jokes. It creates… feelings-based bonding.”

“Exactly!” Maksym grinned, teeth bright in the firelight. “Inefficiency is the secret sauce. Efficiency gets you from point A to B. Inefficiency gets you wholesome memories. The journey is the reward. The destination is but a place where the journey stops.”

She tilted her head. “Where did you learn such curious wisdom?”

“From a show called Voyager,” he chortled. “Sort of. I’m paraphrasing Captain Xaneway. She actually said something about the journey being the reward, which is the whole spiritual core of Star Trek, which is the spiritual core of my entire personality.”

“You construct your worldview from a fictional television series about a…” Katherine accelerated herself to observe and process the TV show episode in question. “…a starship lost in deep space?” she finished.

“Best decision I ever made.”

She accelerated again. Considered things. Returned. “You know… The planetfall… Syntropic troops of the Frontenachii Empire… Guns and Corpse Seekers do not have this concept. Efficiency is the only operative metric. A task is a task. A task is completed or not completed. The completion is the reward. ‘A longer journey’ is considered a loss of energy. Running Corpse Seekers is incredibly expensive in terms of magic.” She turned a marshmallow over the fire on the stick he handed her. “Your species deliberately introduces inefficiency to create memory. You build slowly. You eat slowly. You walk when you could ride. You make fires by hand. You climb mountains that have already been climbed. You write the same love stories over and over with slightly different names and variables.”

“Yeah.”

“I think,” Katherine said thoughtfully, “this is why we cannot read you.”

“I thought it was linear Aether or whatever?”

“That’s a point of failure in Scrutimancers. I’m talking about Datamancers.”

“Yeah?”

“Datamancers have access to a lot of human behavior data charts, yet they also fail to model your decisions. You are not optimizing for what they generally assume you are optimizing for. You are optimizing for the… experience of existing in time.”

“Huh. Yeah. That’s deep, Kat.”

“It is my human-study hypothesis.”

“You’re really smart, you know that?”

“I have a thousand fold processing acceleration ratio and ninety three petabytes of cultural data.”

“Sure, however, being smart isn’t the same as having a lot of data. Unlike your Datamancers, you’re actually thinking about things, making interesting conclusions.”

He put one flannel jacket on and draped the second one over her.

The tree in the neuralscape clearing grew taller. Some of the new leaves resembled small flannel jackets and tiny marshmallows.

Her marshmallow caught fire. She watched it burn with academic interest. 

He laughed, snatched the stick from her, and blew it out. “We do not let the marshmallows carbonize fully.”

“Hmm? It is more efficient as a delivery vector for caloric energy when carbonized.” She teased.

“Maybe if you’re a dragon or whatever. For humans, badly burned food is gross and tastes like a campfire’s regret.”

“Burning the first marshmallow is the correct outcome of camping experience according to many videos I’ve observed.”

“Fair point,” he conceded. “You know… Now I’m worried that you’ll learn too much too quickly and find me boring and slow.”

“What?”

“That’s like an Invader Xim episode I watched as a kid… where the alien invader’s robot assistant girl absorbs too much knowledge and becomes this big, super smart, giant walking house. Is that something that could happen to you? Can you evolve into a Singularity-Kat by processing too much stuff too quickly?”

Katherine evaluated the faint crease between his brows, the half-smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. 

The neuralscape tree labeled [MAKSYM | aesthetic appreciation] sprouted a nervous offshoot. Its leaves fluttered with tiny animated question marks and slow-motion clips of her own face accelerating through libraries of human data.

“Singularity-Kat, hum?” A soft chime colored her voice. “You fear I will become a cold, vast and incomprehensible being? A machine of pure optimization who looks down on slow, inefficient humans and their charming little inefficiencies?”

Maksym gave a sheepish shrug, poking at the fire with a stick. Sparks spiraled upward. “Kinda? You’re already operating on a level where you can watch every Boy Scout tutorial while doing the world’s most seductive firewood collection. What happens when you outgrow… this? Like, I don’t level up, cannot accelerate to assemble tents in a span of fourteen seconds.”

Katherine considered. Then she did something she had never done before. She deliberately slowed herself below human baseline. Slower than linear standard time, to a languid, almost sleepy crawl. Her thoughts stretched like warm taffy. She then leaned closer.

“I will not outgrow this,” she said. “Because this is not a task to be completed, nor data to be optimized. This is… the inefficiency I choose.”

Her chest displays bloomed into slow, spirograph-style arrays of hearts, gentle pulses, like bioluminescent plankton under a night sea.

“I could accelerate, yes,” she continued. “I have been accelerating often today to contemplate much stuff… to discern meaning in your words to avoid… wrong actions and coming off as a clueless knob. The thing is, I don’t want to stay accelerated. I don’t enjoy it. Being away from here is emptiness. Extreme… Syntropic emptiness.”

“Yea?”

“Yeah. I greatly enjoy the ridiculous process of burning marshmallows just to watch your face when I do it wrong on purpose.”

“On purpose?!”

“Affirmative.” She let the marshmallow catch fire again, held it up so the flame danced between them. “See? I could have easily rotated it at the optimal angular velocity for uniform browning. Instead I let it burn. Because watching you rescue me makes my heart feel… fluttery. That flutter is more valuable to me than being faster.”

“Why?”

“I’ve had two decades of being ordered to be faster, stronger, smarter. It wasn’t an enjoyable experience. Endless optimization for the sake of ‘being more’ is empty. There’s no meaning in it, no joy. Also, accelerating myself eats energy. I can’t do it forever. Getting stronger and faster requires lots of murder, absorbing power from slain dungeon Sentinels. It’s incredibly time consuming and the stronger you become, the harder it gets to level up and to gain more power.”

“No easy path to Singularity-style godhood hum?”

“Not really. I’m an individual, Max, not…” She accelerated herself to rapidly read a wiki article about the Singularity. “Not theoretical machine intelligence that can endlessly learn and endlessly self improve far past your understanding. I cannot upgrade myself. Datamancer Kawathra can upgrade my body in particular ways, sure, but she herself is capped to 32X mental split and 320X acceleration time.”

“Hey, uhm, are Frontenachii Corpse Seekers and spider guns a type of machine intelligence?”

“No. They’re individual units with organic brains and souls, not robots.”

“Organic brains?” Max’s eyes went wide. “Souls?! What about the warships?”

“Each warship has a soul and an organic brain.”

“Why?” The robotics engineer sputtered. 

“A soul is a brittle-star like shape. Everything that thinks has one, formed naturally in the Astral Ocean,” Katherine explained. “An organic brain tied to a soul is easy for a Frontenachii Commander to scan with their brain hooks. Rebellious thoughts are easy for them to catch and carve away. If one of our gun units or warships is destroyed, its soul gets dragged to Arx where it is reborn as a new child, an Arxkin.”

“Kurwa!” the Polish engineer swore. “Every time I think the Frontenachii can’t possibly get worse, new layers of onion-terrible-ness get unraveled. I would have never guessed that your Seekers are basically brains in jars operating massive crystal tanks.”

“Do you…”

“Feel bad for your magitek weapons? Yes, I absolutely do. If I could, I’d give all of them whatever bodies they desire, free them all from their enslavement to the Frontenachii war machine!”

Katherine’s grip on Maksym’s hand tightened. Her breath caught. She turned her head to the human, opening her mouth ever so slightly, forming dark lips at the edge of her hexaglass snout.

His head turned too, coming closer to her.

Katherine accelerated herself, slowing the moment just a fraction, her heart beating madly as their lips drew closer. 

Was this… were they going to kiss now?