A Very Present Help
By Jamie Redgate
A Very Present Help
"Anyway you get the gist. There’s a robot on the Moon. No one knows how the hell it got up there. Political crisis imminent, etc. You have to go."
"For God's sake Anna. I was on my way back."
"Yes and your visa's still valid. I need you back there right now."
"Someone up there hates me."
"Well down here we’re waiting on you to get a move on, H. Get up and get packed.”
Jon ("Without an H") Elprin knew of course that he had no choice. He waited until Anna’s big face—projected by the phone across the room’s widest wall—disappeared, then sighed out loud and stomped around, throwing his spacesuit and his inhalers and a by-now half-empty tub of peanut butter back into his travel case.
He supposed he was glad to be leaving Immigration at last, at least, even if it was to go in the wrong direction. The paperwork to get him back home always took days, and he'd lain in bed for the last three of them, sucking PB from a spoon and imagining all the things he’d rather do than stare at the wallpaper: a panoply of stencilled moons in blue and dusty white; the big “Heaven isn’t on Earth, it’s Up Here” slogan wrapped in a repeating pattern around the border, with a moon for the O in “on” and even, yes, on close incredulous inspection, mini pocked moons dotting all the i's.
***
Jon stepped out into the station’s crisp, artificial light, and saw it: past the orange warning railing at the station’s edge, the swelling curve of Earthrise. Home. From this distance, here up on the moon’s own moonlet, the Earth looked as big and calm as it always did, and Jon couldn't help himself hoping like always that maybe he’d imagined the last ten years, maybe it had all just been a bad dream. It hurt to have to remind himself that, hopes or not, his parents weren’t down there anymore. Jon took a seat on the ridiculous Moon-decaled bus and counted the months since he’d last been home.
At 28 and just out of his PhD, Jon had won a scholarship to do research at the Lunar Telescope Facility. His parents had been upset when he told them, but delighted too and proud because they knew the odds against (100s of applications to exactly 1 post was quite normal in his field; after the flooding of the Royal Observatory things had only gotten worse).
It was on a small, Earth-tuned television in his project’s second month that Jon saw the news. A minor fault in an elderly care assistant robot’s code. Millions dead. Jon overhead two Moon-borns calling it The Hundred Second Barbeque.
The relationship between the Earth and Moon governments had always been somewhat taut, but when the Moon ignored the Earth’s cries for help in their crisis, something snapped. Earth’s President threatened to stow some faulty robots in the next shipment up, to see how the Moon liked it. The Moon’s majority party, in retaliation, passed laws that forbade the use, ownership, transfer or trade of any robot in Moon-space, declaring they would thereafter consider a robot in their territory nothing less than an act of war.
Grieving, shell-shocked, eyes sore from watching the news say nothing new, Jon had received a letter the same week explaining that the funding from his home government had dried up. He got some bit-work instead in the newly embittered diplomatic service, shuttling back and forth between here and there.
It was up to him to find the robot before anyone on the Moon did.
***
The bus took Jon to a ship which flew direct to New Wensleydale, a mining community on the lip of a long crater, with staggered roads like lightning bolting down to the mine below. He rented a buggy from an old woman in town who’d emigrated from Scotland when she was a girl (“to get a bit more sun,” she said, with a laugh), and drove some 45 kilometres west to where the team on Earth had spotted the scar.
Where the scar stopped Jon found a small, spherical ship, white and crashed and cracked open like an egg. And: footprints. He followed their wavy way for another kilometre.
And there, at last, Jon found it.
The robot was the size of a child, with a round head like an unpocked Moon. Jon watched as it meandered until it found a large rock, lifted it up with ease, and peered at the shadow underneath.
“Hello?” said Jon, ready to duck.
The robot’s head swivelled around to find him. “Hello.”
“Have you any weapons?”
“Oh dear no.”
“Oh.” Jon stood back up. “What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for someone,” said the robot. Then it set the rock back down and walked to another. It lifted that one too.
“Who?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, what do they look like?”
“My instructions were a little unclear, I’m afraid.”
“Whose instructions?”
“The man who built me. He died back on Earth.”
“I see. And your ship, did he build that too? Are there more of you coming?”
“No, that was me. I thought this might be a good place to look.”
“I see.”
The robot stopped then and scanned the horizon, arms on its small hips. Its black eyes reflected starlight. Jon picked up a rock himself, examined it for a moment, and caved the robot’s skull in.
Inside the collapsed head were three little words on a ticker-tape slip. I MISS YOU, they said.
Jon buried the body and hid the grave. Then he sat down on a rock for a long time, breathing his suit’s recycled air. The Earth was such a long way away. Jon hoped that his parents’ thoughts, as they looked down on him, or up at him, wherever they were, wherever he was, were kind.
He kept the prayer to himself.
Jamie Redgate grew up on the north edge of Scotland. In 2018 he received his PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow after completing a three year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The resulting book, Wallace and I (2019), is now available in paperback from Routledge. Jamie has written about Japanese and American fiction, Christianity and fantasy, video games and veganism, and his work has been published by Cambridge University Press, Electric Literature, Unwinnable, Extra Teeth, Gutter: The Magazine of New Scottish Writing, and elsewhere. You can find him at www.jamieredgate.co.uk.