Robots vs. Fairies Read online

  Some of the older engineers thought differently, thought a missing finger or a truncated thumb was a mark of commitment to the work. They were relics of a different time, and while it might take a while for them to settle into comfortable retirement, she was willing to wait. The second the last of the old guard hung up their tool belt, the safety regulations around here were going to change.

  “What’s the emergency?” she asked, turning to the nearest engineer.

  Violet—the youngest bar one of the Park’s current engineering team, still bright-eyed and full of endless faith in the future—looked at her with wide, worried eyes and said, “Mr. Franklin is coming.”

  “Yeah, I know that. That’s why I was called out of the Glen.”

  “The man he’s bringing with him has a clipboard.”

  That was more unnerving. Men with clipboards came in three flavors: lawyers, accountants, and efficiency experts. Lawyers could be convinced to back off with magic words like “safety regulations” and “adherence to legal requirements.” They didn’t understand what went on in the tunnels crisscrossing the body of the Park like veins, pumping the life and vitality that was just as essential to the survival of the whole as blood was to a living thing. Accountants were harder, requiring access to supply sheets and maintenance logs that weren’t necessarily as accurate as they should have been. Thus far, the faked-up versions created for the Park shareholders had always been good enough to keep an audit at bay. But an efficiency expert . . .

  No efficiency expert could possibly understand the complexity of Mr. Franklin’s grand dream, because Mr. Franklin didn’t understand it himself. He’d put out the word that he was looking for miracle workers, and when a family with the relevant skills had answered the call, he hadn’t looked too closely at their résumés. Just the things they could do, the wonders they could cobble together at his command. He’d been asking the engineers for increasingly impossible things over the years, unicorns with eyes that glistened bright as any living thing, pixies that flew independent, unpredictable spirals around their tree. And they’d always found a way to do it, meeting his demands without hesitation or complaint, because they needed this place as badly as he did. They needed it to work. They needed it to thrive.

  They needed it to do those things without attracting the attention of men who would look at their paradise of rainbows and moonbeams and see only the hidden costs of each hologram and servo. They needed the freedom to be inefficient. Inefficiency was where the magic hid.

  Footsteps from the hall preceded the arrival of one of Clover’s cousins, who hissed, “They’re coming,” before jumping into position at his own workbench, grabbing for the nearest screwdriver.

  By the time Mr. Franklin and his clipboard-wielding companion stepped into the maintenance room, all the engineers were hard at work. Clover’s pixie was still winding down, so she was oiling the segments of an animatronic python, its scaled exterior hanging over the edge of the table like a discarded glove. Violet was polishing a unicorn’s horn. All over the room, similar scenes of busywork played out, each orchestrated to make a visual point about how absolutely vital the engineering staff was to the Park.

  “Hello, everyone!” boomed Mr. Franklin, voice overly loud and jovial. “I wanted to stop in and see how the work was going!”

  Clover wasn’t the only one to wince: the man with the clipboard did so as well, trying to conceal his discomfort with a grimace. He was taller than Mr. Franklin by an easy six inches, tan, with sun-streaked brown hair. He didn’t look like an accountant.

  Please be a lawyer, she thought—possibly the only time that thought had ever formed while on the grounds of an amusement park.

  “We’re always happy to have you, boss,” said Adam, putting down his wrench and stepping forward. He was smiling, but his eyes were sharp as he asked, “Who’s your friend? We aren’t prepared for a tour right now—there might be some proprietary technology on display in the private work areas.”

  “There always is, because most of my park is proprietary,” said Mr. Franklin, a chiding note creeping into his voice. He didn’t do any of the heavy lifting for the Park—just provided the money and the increasingly difficult design challenges that delighted him and frustrated his engineers. “Remember that, when you’re deciding what to leave out in the open.”

  “Of course, Mr. Franklin,” said Adam apologetically.

  He must have sounded conciliatory enough, because Mr. Franklin smiled and said, “No harm done. This is Mr. Tillman.” He indicated the man with the clipboard. “Mr. Tillman is an efficiency expert. He’s going to be with you for the next several days, making notes on what we can do to improve the overall experience of our guests. Remember, a working park is a happy park, and a happy park can’t help but be filled with happy people.”

  It was a testament to Mr. Franklin’s general air of obliviousness that he didn’t notice the way the mood in the room darkened the moment he said the words “efficiency expert.”

  On Clover’s workbench, the pixie caught fire again.

  * * *

  She supposed it was inevitable: If someone was going to be assigned to babysit the efficiency expert, why not pick on the girl with the fire consuming her workbench? She’d been a soft target, too busy beating out the flames to defend herself. By the time she’d realized what was happening, it had been too late for any of the easy excuses, and the hard ones could have resulted in Mr. Franklin realizing how nervous they all were. Not an acceptable outcome.

  “This is what we call the Enchanted Garden,” said Clover, gesturing at the moss-draped trees with their glittering bark and veils of brilliantly colored butterflies. “Note that the butterflies are currently stationary. Mr. Franklin wants us to have them flying independently by the middle of next quarter. We’re working on miniaturizing the necessary servos, and we hope to be done by Christmas.” Because we’re so damned efficient, she thought fiercely. You’re not needed. Go home.

  Once the servos for the butterflies were officially ready, they could “upgrade” the pixies. Mr. Franklin would be shocked by how much more freely they flew, and how much more rarely they caught fire. Most living things were substantially less subject to spontaneous combustion than their robot counterparts.

  “How many people pass through the, ah, Enchanted Garden daily?”

  “On a busy day, anywhere from ten to thirty thousand. We have a flow-through on the Park as a whole of between fifty and one hundred thousand people, more at the major holidays. Capacity for ticketed guests is two hundred thousand, which assumes one child below the age of ticketing for every four adult or older child guests. We’ve had to close admissions for fire safety reasons five times in the past year, due to overcrowding.”

  Mr. Tillman made a note on his clipboard. Clover decided to hate the clipboard. “So what I’m hearing is that under one-third of guests will pass through the Enchanted Garden on an average day. What do you estimate the cost expenditure for these, ah, ‘independently motile’ butterflies to be?”

  Clover forced herself to keep smiling. If she started scowling, she wasn’t going to be able to stop. “After we finish initial research and development, ten dollars per butterfly, plus maintenance costs.” Minus forty dollars per pixie in maintenance costs, since the pixies wouldn’t need it anymore.

  “And do you genuinely feel that this will improve the experience of the average park guest so measurably that it should remain a priority?”

  “Mr. Franklin wants it.”

  Normally, that answer could shut down or derail any criticism: Mr. Franklin wanted it. Mr. Franklin was beloved by children and adults alike, thanks to his innovative movies, his lines of affordable and amusing toys, his breakfast cereals, for fuck’s sake, and, most of all, his Dreamland. His glorious park that elevated the mundane into the magical, allowing people with the cash and the vacation time to spare to escape their everyday lives for something extraordinary. Mr. Franklin was a jerk and a bigot who didn’t understand that he cou
ldn’t always get his own way, but no one questioned what he’d built, and no one really wanted to argue with him.

  Mr. Tillman was apparently no one. He made another note on his clipboard. “I see. What are these flowers?”

  Crap. Clover hurried to put herself between the efficiency expert and the trumpet flowers he was gesturing at. “Specially treated plastic. They look real, they never wilt, and they put off a soothing aroma that keeps children calmer. It’s reduced shoving incidents in the Mermaid Grotto and Unicorn Meadows by seventy percent.” Which was important. Unicorns were essentially sharp, vindictive horses that didn’t care whether the person pulling their tails was a paying guest or not. Preventing goring incidents was key.

  “What about guests with allergies?” asked Mr. Tillman, suddenly scowling. “Have you considered that these flowers might be leading to health issues?”

  “Uh . . .” Clover froze, finally squeaking, “No?” Because they weren’t plastic, and no one human had ever been allergic to a Dryad-cultivated flower. But there was no way to say that.

  “This is environmentally very unsound. I’ll be discussing this with Mr. Franklin. Now, take me to”—he glanced at his notes—“the Mermaid Grotto.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said Clover, suddenly all smiles again. No one could look at the Mermaid Grotto and fail to understand the enchantment and wonder that permeated this place. It just wasn’t possible. “Follow me.”

  * * *

  Mr. Tillman specialized in the impossible. He stood impassively in the underwater viewing area, making notes on his clipboard while Technicolor fish swam by on the other side of the glass, playing peekaboo through the forest of rainbow kelp. Wingless pixies with sea-horse tails rode on the backs of majestically gliding tuna. Clover shifted her weight from foot to foot, hoping Mr. Tillman wouldn’t ask her any finicky questions about how the submerged pixies were mechanically possible. The answer was simple: they weren’t. She just had no way to explain that.

  He didn’t ask. Instead, he looked up, frowned, and asked, “Why is this place called ‘Mermaid Grotto’ if there are no mermaids?”

  “Oh, there are mermaids,” she said, so relieved by the question that she forgot to be cautious about her answer. “This time of day, they’re usually up top, watching the sunset.”

  Mr. Tillman blinked. “Watching the sunset? I was under the impression that there were no live performers in this part of the Park. The insurance rates for keeping women in the water—”

  Crap. “It’s a function of the rudimentary AI that drives them,” she said, hoping she sounded believable. “They move toward light, which allows them to surprise and delight our guests during normal operating hours. Once we bring the lights in the tunnels down to nighttime levels to save power, the mermaids go up. After the sun sets, their maintenance routines will kick in and take them back to their berths for the rest of the night.”

  “I’d like to see them.”

  Of course you would, thought Clover. “Right this way,” she said, and gestured for him to follow her along the tunnel—cleverly sculpted to look like it was carved from a living coral reef—to the stairs. “One moment.” She flipped a molded “shell” open, revealing a control panel, and punched a series of buttons. Lights came on in the stairwell. More importantly, at least for her purposes, the decorative pearls up on the viewing platform would be starting to glow. The mermaids would know someone was coming.

  Mr. Tillman didn’t say anything as they climbed the stairs, but she knew he was watching her, and worse, she knew he was taking notes.

  The stairs wound through the Grotto in a gentle spiral, shallow enough for children and older guests to climb easily, with viewing windows cut out at every interval, allowing people to have something to look at if they needed to stop for a brief rest. Clover tried to keep him moving whenever they encountered one of those windows. The last thing she needed was for the efficiency expert to start asking questions about the fish—and he would ask questions, if he got a good look at some of them.

  This isn’t going to work, she thought desperately. Mr. Franklin is going to catch on, and we’re going to lose everything we’ve made. We’re going to be driven back into the world to die. She glanced at Mr. Tillman, trying to read his expression.

  Mr. Tillman’s face gave nothing away. Whatever he was thinking, he was keeping it to himself.

  The tunnel shifted as they neared the top of the stairs, turning translucent, less like coral and more like the delicate shell of a chambered nautilus. It was designed to let ambient light through; during the day, the whole structure seemed to glow. Clover didn’t point any of those things out. This was a standing structure, and its costs had already long since been absorbed by the Park’s overall budget. Unless Mr. Tillman was going to call for closing the Mermaid Grotto entirely, the schematics of the entryway didn’t matter.

  They stepped outside, onto the viewing platform. The ground here was textured rubber, designed to look as much like sand as possible while providing a no-slip surface for the guests. A coral “wall” surrounded the central pool, tall enough that even the most ambitious of climbers would be caught before they could go over, low enough that all but the youngest guests could see the water. Holes were drilled toward the base for the very youngest, providing them with a mermaid’s-eye view. Pearls glittered everywhere, embedded in the walls on all sides, gleaming like stars.

  At the center of the pool was a faux-coral island, colored pink and orange and purple, like some sort of childhood dream. And on the island were the mermaids.

  There had been a few complaints about the Park mermaids. That they were “difficult to tell apart,” which made it harder for children to find their favorites: all eight had skin in varying shades of blue, with tails scaled in shades ranging from pearly gray to deep purple. Their hair was uniformly white, and their faces, while pretty, were not quite human. They fell solidly into the uncanny valley for many adult guests. The children loved them, and couldn’t spend enough time standing in the Grotto, staring openmouthed at the figures darting through the water.

  Even Mr. Tillman seemed taken aback when he saw them, stopping in his tracks and staring. He recovered quickly, however, and demanded, “What are those? They don’t look like Franklin Company mermaids.”

  “Skin tones don’t hold up well underwater; they start to look artificial within a week, due to algae buildup,” said Clover. The mermaids continued to lounge on their island, although several cast barely concealed looks at the pair. Stay where you are, Clover prayed. “And the hair is made up of microfilament wire. It moves in a natural way, without getting tangled the way that real hair does.”

  “You could save a great deal on maintenance costs by replacing the microfilament with molded plastic,” said Mr. Tillman, making a note on his clipboard. He still seemed oddly shaken. Maybe he was one of those humans who’d seen a mermaid when he was young and had never quite managed to forget the experience. “Most amusement parks of this size use sculpted hair for their animatronics, to avoid the expenses that you’ve been incurring.”

  Clover’s heart sank. She tried not to let it show as she said, “Most amusement parks don’t put the focus we do on realistic animatronic interactions. When children leave Dreamland, we want them saying that they’ve seen real mermaids, not that they saw a pretty robot that swam like a fish.”

  “But they are pretty robots. Whether they swim like fish, I couldn’t say, since their AI is apparently inadequate.” Mr. Tillman fixed her with a cool look. “Don’t forget that what you’re crafting here is not reality, Miss . . . ?”

  “Clover,” she said. “Just Clover. If you’d follow me, please?” She turned on her heel and stalked away without waiting to see whether he was coming. Mr. Tillman glanced back at the mermaids, apparently unsettled, before hurrying after her.

  The mermaids turned and watched him go.

  * * *

  In short order, Mr. Tillman declared the Unicorn Meadows “a waste of both space and resou
rces,” the Mythical Creatures Petting Zoo “unrealistic and unhygienic,” and the Sphinx’s Library “a dull accident of overambitious design.” Privately, Clover thought he would have found the Library substantially less boring if the resident sphinx had been awake, but as she’d get in trouble if she didn’t bring him back alive, she hadn’t pressed the alarm.

  Finally they were approaching the Pixie Glen, and Clover’s last chance to make this soulless bean counter understand the wonder the Park was designed to invoke. If he didn’t understand when he saw the Mother Tree, he was never going to.

  They passed through the curtain of branches that kept the pixies from getting out and spilling throughout the Park, and stopped. Clover snuck a glance at Mr. Tillman’s face and was relieved to see him wide-eyed and staring at the brightly lit little figures flitting around the tree. None of the pixies were on fire, even, which was a nice change.

  Then his expression hardened. “It’s the butterflies all over again,” he said. “Why do they need to fly so far from their base? They’re adding nothing to the area, but the expense has got to be—”

  Clover couldn’t take it anymore. “Are you kidding me?” she demanded. She spread her arms, trying to indicate the whole Glen at once. “How can you stand here and not see how magical and important this place is? Our guests come here to get their sense of wonder and joy renewed.”

  “Yes, and if we take out three of these attractions, the guests will be able to have their sense of wonder and joy renewed by a seven-story drop and a high-speed roller coaster. Attendance is down. I’m going to find ways to fix that. Unicorns are not the answer.”

  If you’d said that while we were still in their part of the Park, you’d be finding out just how much of the answer a unicorn can be, Clover thought, almost dizzily. Aloud, she asked, “Is that what you’ve been writing on your little clipboard? That we should be ripping out our attractions and replacing them with some mechanical monstrosity that will break down all the damn time, just because it might give guests a thrill?”