– 3 –
The rock-paper-scissors-playing robot Navvy Jim plays rock-paper-scissors with Emily. Or at least, he tries.
He counts: one. Two. Three.
He counts!
With each count he lowers his hand. On the final count he tries to throw rock, paper, or scissors. He cannot. His arm creaks and his ears shed sparks instead.
Emily is making an absurd gesture. It is like a claw.
“Tiger’s claw beats indecision!” she declares.
Navvy Jim’s eyes glow red dissatisfaction. “That is not legitimate,” he says. “Let us try again.”
“OK!” says Emily, cheerfully.
He lifts his fist. He strikes it through the air, three times. On the third try he sparks again.
“Oh, man,” she says. “Indecision beats whale.”
“Emily,” says Navvy Jim, plaintively. “I am a rock-paper-scissors playing robot. You cannot keep doing this to me.”
. . .
Emily protests: “You’re not throwing plays either!”
Yeah! You're a rock-paper-scissors-playing robot, Navvy Jim! Why aren't you throwing rock, paper, or scissors?
“That is because —”
Navvy Jim hesitates. His expression grows distant. His eyes shift to a warm orange, then yellow, then all the way to green.
. . .
He smiles.
“One more time,” says Navvy Jim.
Emily sticks out her tongue at him. She giggles. “OK!”
“One,” counts Navvy Jim.
“Two,” counts Navvy Jim.
He closes his metal eyes.
“Three!”
In that moment she gives him a thumbs-up and he throws scissors, and he opens eyes that have seen beyond the vistas of the world.
. . .
Emily crinkles up her face. “Oh, man.”
“Snip,” says Navvy Jim.
He closes his metal fingers around her thumb, as if to cut it off; but he doesn’t. Instead he picks her up. Instead he holds her high and she giggles and he spins around with her and he puts her down.
“Airplane!” Emily protests.
“Airplanes are not necessary,” says Navvy Jim.
She squints at him.
She offers a compromise, “Airplane and rock-paper-scissors?”
He laughs.
“OK!”
. . .
The rock-paper-scissors-playing robot picks Emily up. He carries her around. And while she is “flying” through the air, and both his hands are under her armpits so he cannot possibly throw anything but paper or the illegitimate tiger’s claw, she trickily counts “One-two-three” and she throws her fist, and it is a very long moment before she realizes that she has gone and outclevered herself.
“Paper wraps rock,” smiles the robot, Navvy Jim.
. . .
“Wait,” says Emily uncertainly. “Wait. That wasn’t what I meant to do.”
“It is time for you to recharge me, Emily,” says Navvy Jim.
“But,” says Emily, “I meant to throw scissors.”
“Intentions are troublesome things,” says Navvy Jim. “We believe we intend one thing, but we do another! What is the meaning behind these circumstances? I can only assume it has something to do with statistics.”
And Emily tries to count sneakily, “One-two-three scissors,” but Navvy Jim has already put her down.
She works her face. She stares at him.
Then she giggles helplessly at the rock of him and hugs him hard around his metal leg, and leads him off to the charging station to be renewed.
– 4 –
Turtle-people tie Betty to the stake. They burn her.
This, in sum, is the problem with the world.
The turtle-people laugh and dance. Where is your theodicy now?
– 5 –
Meanwhile, Eldri is a svart-elf. He is distinguished, wrinkled, and wise. He is Emily’s godfather, and her grandmother’s godfather, and several generations before that too, as well as the premiere crafter of game-playing robots in the entirety of the British Isles.
He it was who made the ultimate Frisbee-playing robot, that once caught a boomerang going both ways and therefore dislocated it in time.
He it was whose Chess-playing robot brought Death finally to tears.
He might have stood toe-to-toe with the cleaning man; gone three rounds with him, and saved us all; this story might have been about Mr. Eldri, not Mr. Enemy, if he hadn’t been blinded by his fears.
But that’ll come later on.
. . .
In the corner of Eldri’s workshop is a lump of lifeless matter that has never once, in all the years of its existence, lost “the Game” — it does not think of it, it does not know it; it has had people lose the Game right in front of it, announce their loss, and yet the awareness of the Game does not penetrate the cold pristineness of its mind.
It is perfect. His bingo robot; his chute and ladderer; his checkering beast: they are all perfect, all his robots are perfect, but none so great as Navvy Jim.
. . .
Navvy Jim —
To be honest, his rock-paper-scissors playing robot disturbs Eldri. He thinks he may have wrought too well. Sometimes he imagines some distant narrative voice chiding him, dressing him down, as if to say:
It is bad to make such a robot, Eldri. Oh, Eldri. It is bad.
. . .
Goodness/Badness Report: NAVVY JIM
In this particular narrator’s estimation —
As Navvy Jim.
. . .
Yet Eldri looks at Navvy Jim and it disturbs him, not because Navvy Jim is aces at playing rock-paper-scissors, but because he loves the game.
Eldri has never before made a robot capable of loving things.
He did not know that this was possible.
. . .
It is shocking enough that Navvy Jim is dedicated. It is shocking enough that Navvy Jim is sincere and earnest in his desire to play rock-paper-scissors; and more, that the robot has shown indications of sensibility, indications of conceptual flexibility, as if Navvy Jim were capable of imagining situations where it could conceivably be correct not to play rock-paper-scissors, or not to win. Once, for instance, when Eldri was puttering around and working on a Candyland-playing robot — the concept being more difficult than it might at first appear — Navvy Jim’s eyes took soft light in the background, and Eldri heard him wonder this:
“If I must kill a man, ought I also to defeat him in the game?”
Eldri expressed concern: “Jim.”
The robot tilted its head. It regarded him. “Tell me, sir; does it make an action moral to win rock-paper-scissors with it, or does it make rock-paper-scissors immoral when the things one does with it are bad?”
“You should not experience such concerns,” Eldri had explained.
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