They lived in a trawl on dry land. It had a rotor, but it spun for only for flair, it had a net, but it was now a cloth of surrender. The nearest ocean was a morning cloud that maybe rained. No raindrops ever made it to the ground – the ground that cracked and wheezed for moisture, hated its own characteristics: it could not touch water without vaporizing it.

The trawl was blue where the light could not reach, elsewhere all the colour had been pulled out by the sun. But where had the sun had put the colour it took away? Nowhere, it did not hide in the landscape which chanted grey, grey, grey. And there was them, the man with a face as weathered as the land, the lad who only had five fingers between two hands. He was a machine, constructed long before the man first used his eyes, constructed long after the trawls were made.

Ruminating on its own existence, the trawl had been there for time enough to do this. It had a brain – three in fact – one for the bow, the sail, and a third for assuagement. Anything paper on board the trawl had long since pulled itself apart at the seams, made illegible by the steady persistence of entropy. There had once been a manual aboard the trawl, one-thousand years ago now, in the top drawer of the bedside table of the captain’s quarters. Inside, page eighty-four, section two titled, “Anatomical Labels,” the three brains were named. The Eyes, The Feet, and The Entertainer. Each brain had access to a standard set of sensors, which they were imbued with at birth and fed inputs until the seas of photons became a picture, the drum of the air sung one melody and no more, and they felt a sense of place on the seas that the trawl rode.

The Eyes had an intuition about the waves, a sense for their laps, an indiscernible measure of the crests as these rang against its hull. The Feet, in motion did they feel the most aware, and this they had a control over like a hand might work familiar dough. And The Entertainer, it was entirely aware of its internals, astutely responsive to acute inflections in the faces of trawl’s passengers’ – hands, footfalls, a finger twaddle, it could read these too. With this information The Entertainer built models, one per passenger, and it used these to talk to them, sing to them, calm them when the seas were particularly rough.

But ten-thousand years without a lap or a tap on the boat, these three minds saw nothing but what they might have imagined inside of themselves: illusions, hallucinations, run-on sentences and beliefs, fantastic and unreal, they predicted false phenomena, imagined they heard a great wave about to crash, felt their body rock to no current. Sometimes it was urgent and they were going somewhere, over a horizon towards a cove where a school of fish waited, and this urgency was as real as anything, even as, in a dream, the ocean became a wall, the fish transformed into bubbles and they lifted to the sky? They went everywhere in their own minds, the three brains, but the trawl never went with them any more.

“There’s one,” he lifted an arm with some difficulty and pointed it to the horizon. His sleeve hung as loose as a monk’s gown, it did not fit his body any more which was bone. He sucked at his lips, first the top then attended the bottom, folding, unfurling, seeking moisture. When he was finished sponging his mouth, he clapped them together and made a few dry pop noises. He made a spit noise, but had nothing to spit out.

As the land had dried, the trawl – trapped – had sought lower and lower parts of its resting place, like a marble down a hill. The final pose it settled on was one with its bow almost completely swallowed by the soil. This mad its stern a mountain climb, the trail to the top the peeling steel mesh of the deck, the journey ending in a drop like the sudden points where lands meets ocean. Each evening they made the climb to the stern, the man and the lad that was a machine, and sat leaning their backs against the rope box. They took turns recognizing hallucinations on the horizon. They hallucinated for each other.

“There,” said the man again.

“I see it,” said the machine. It lifted its head in a very complicated series of reorientations, just to twist a degree and no more. An orange light blinked in its eyes. It had been blinking for twenty years.

The man put his hand back almost with care, should the bones finally break this time. He watched the apparition move along the horizon, up, down, it sometimes went behind the clouds but returned quickly like there were things up there it wished could be unseen. The lad that was a machine seemed less interested, or it did not share the same apparition. It focused on its blinking, orange light.

“I need maintenance,” said the machine. There was no water left on the planet except for inside the machine’s voice box. The machine spoke in submerged, blurred notes. Almost static. But the man’s ears had years to tune to this fuzzy signal, and it came clear to him as a voice on radio.

The man squinted as if it was painful and the pain was somewhat reassuring. Tracing his apparition, he said, “You say that every day.”

“And you say that every day,” spoke the machine.

Below them, The Eyes churned in its mind soup. Were it still connected to its body, it would feel the small vibrations of the voices of the man and the machine, note the taps of their feet, the shift of their weight. But it was no longer embodied and it ran far more interesting simulations inside its head than what could ever now happen outside in the barren, dead land the trawl was in. The Eyes was built to create worlds, envision futures – this, a by-product of it wanting to understand the world. The one instruction from its creators had been the following, spoken to it the moment it was aware: “go out and understand.” Now it was executing its one instruction over and over, over and over, over and over, on raw, old memories. Eating them, digesting and re-digesting, tainting them with each brush of its mind, until the pictures they drew were unreal, incoherent, some even disturbing. It was built to go out and understand, but all it could go out to was the corners of its own mind. The Eyes were going insane.

“This trawl has a large amount of electronics embedded in it,” said the machine as if it were leading a tour group around.

“Oh,” said the old man. His real eyes had stopped moving, but the eye in his mind still traced the distant apparition through the clouds.

“They are still in good shape,” said the machine. “Somehow.”

“How you know that.”

“I went and looked.” The orange light stopped blinking. “I stopped blinking.”

“Oh.”

They sat quietly until the last sun began to fizzle on the horizon. It was time to descend.

– [ ] –

The man had a face of two parts: the left side a studious brow of thick brush, acute muscle control, very expressive. The right was vestigial, functionless, as cracked as the land and it never moved except to twitch or swing an eye. Motionless, it had grown pale, bloodless. But the left shone youth through the folds of age. He tilted his neck out of habit, in a way that cast a shadow over his right side. He hid it now, as he bent to look down at the wires.

The machine had used a buzz saw – powered by its own battery – to cut a hole in the lowest level, uncovering a what was a pit of growth. This growth was electric, it hummed, blinked, and it was strung along tall shelves. There was more life here than the man or the machine had ever felt in themselves. Like a library, it was organized by shelves, each with a thread of lights that blinked green, red, blue, and this colour was confusing at first because it was beyond the palettes of either the man or the machine had seen in forever.

Eventually the man said, “Green.” The machine nodded its head. The man, bracing himself shakily against the edge of the hole, reached down an arm and clawed at a cluster of wires. He pulled.

The machine watched on without moving, but said, “Careful, you might break it.”

The wires stretched like a twine and went taught, but the man grew tired and each wire returned exactly to its place. The old man sat back and breathed heavily, his right face twitching mechanically. “Pass me the buzz saw.”

Both of them knew that he could not lift it, and so the machine did not move. The man neither. They sat on the edge, looking down, like it was their evening horizon. Everything inside was so consistent – not like those apparitions. Each light off, on, off – and on right where they had gone off. This, it warmed a forgotten emotion in them. They noticed their hands as if new fresh blood flowed through them. They sat for the day and the whole night, under the electric performance below them, silent.

The sun rose the next day and brought with it a scraping sound. The silence was sent away by its long scrawls, metal on metal. The machine dragged the buzz saw over to the man. “Help me lift it.”

With the man guiding it, the machine clamped to the edge of the hole, they guided the buzz saw down. It ran from a black cable, coming from the machine’s thigh, where it was powered by a button. The blade rested on the mesh of wires. “Turn it on,” said the man. The machine pushed the button and at first nothing – then a spit. The blade was so rusted it was orange and this had welded it where it should have run free. It kicked, spat, and then tore from its rust bonds, spun so fast it vibrated. It would have fractured the man’s bones in a hundred places if he did not release it. It did not have far to fall, but it did its work too, and cut through the electric forest. The machine did not have time to cry out as it was pulled down the hole too.

From where they had sat it, had been impossible to see how deep the sea of wires was. He squinted into the darkness, but the man saw no sign of the machine in the black maw. The result was impressive: wires torn, like the splayed ribcage of a fibrous beast. Some of the did not turn back on. It sizzled and popped too, which came through as song to the man’s ears. Such a sound he had not heard in his oldest memories. He called down to the black void: “Are you alright.”

When there was no reply, the man settled back against the side barrier. He could not see an outcome in his mind where the climb down was successful. His weakness was not an illusion, even to himself. He looked at what was around him. A great spool of steel cable, twice the thickness of his arm, off near the other end of the deck. It had likely been used to haul in heavy catches from the sea, but whatever was once at the end of the cable was torn away years ago. He managed to unwind the cable once round so that the end reached the whole, sending its frays over the lip. He unrolled another loop, but the cable suddenly split and slithered, slowly over the edge. More in pretend, he grabbed at the cable, but he could not stop it as it tore away and disappeared down the hole. The thud came a few seconds later. And a voice, echoed up through, “It cut through my legs.”

“The cable?”

“No, the saw.”

“Can you move?”

A pause, then: “The wires are thicker down here. It did not cut all the way through. It goes much deeper. I’m fine.”

“I don’t think I can get down to you.” The man considered the situation, but not for too long because it tired his mind which was more tuned to the daily climb, the daily stunted glances on the horizon and nothing more.

“That’s fine,” said the machine.

– [ ] –