Ahab and Circe main file

Ahab

Ahab is a boy that lives by himself in one of the old shacks in the woods.

He goes into the tiny town nearby and tries to find work. Usually one of the shops in the market will pay him to sweep or to carry boxes or do anything else.

Ahab also digs through the trash and sometimes he finds something tasty to eat for himself, or if he doesn't want it, he will keep it anyway and share it with the dogs that stay with him at night. Ahab collects all sorts of things from the trash. Old books, parts from broken down robots, clothes, toys, etc. Ahab wears a blue plastic watch that plays music and tells him the weather. He is amazed somebody threw it out.

After Ahab works in the morning, he walks to the village school and watches the children kick a ball around during recess.

There is a tall fence that surrounds the school. He imagines that if the fence were gone, he would kick the ball with the children. Become their friends. He would show them all of the cool things that he had collected and tell them stories about the woods.

When school ends, Ahab watches the children leave and go home with their parents. He knows when all the restaurants and shops empty their trash.

One day the tiny village is visited by a stern important government official surrounded by soldiers. He gives a speech in the center of town, and everyone shows up. Ahab ignores the speeches but instead watches workers setting up tables. Ahab is the first in line at the table and once the speech ends, he gets a nice sticker and several handfuls of candy. Ahab leaves early and walks out of town, back to the woods and as he walks, he notices everyone looks scared.

The next morning, Ahab walks into town and sees soldiers everywhere. All the people are unhappy. The shop that always pays him in day-old bread to sweep and carry boxes has been destroyed. There are soldiers carrying things out of the smashed windows. Ahab hides and watches as the shopkeeper is taken away into the jail, which was always empty before now.

Ahab sees this happen to a lot of people. Soldiers go into houses and carry people away.

Ahab runs home. That night he sees other people hiding in some of the other shacks. He recognizes them. They are some of the families he watched at school! They are all miserable here. They don't know how to stay warm by making a fire.

Ahab then decides to do something.

He gathers up all his old junk and stays up all night working.

When the sun comes up, Ahab has built a robot from all the old trash. He puts in batteries, but the robot won't start.

Then he takes the batteries out of his blue plastic watch, uses them, and his robot wakes up.

Ahab says "protect the town!" and he and his dogs watch as the robot flies into the sky.

Ahab watches as his robot battles the soldiers. Ahab's pack of dogs all bark as the soldiers run away.

The robot breaks open the jail and frees the shopkeeper.

Everyone in town thanks Ahab and his pack of dogs and Ahab's robot. Then Ahab and all kids at school kick a ball around and he is really happy.

Ahab's first day of school

Ahab has never been to a school before. His whole life is different now. Instead of living in a shack in the woods, he lives in a house that to him feels like a mansion, but when he calls it a mansion, or a palace, he realizes that Circe's family feels embarrassed.

Today is the first day of school for Ahab. Circe explains she'll tell him what to do, and Circe's parents assure him that it doesn't matter if he makes any mistakes.

Circe and Ahab walk to school together. They walk across the town square and Circe sees him stopping in front of a trash can to look for cool things silly people have thrown away. She says "Hey, Ahab, not right now!". He feels really bashful, but she is smiling brightly at him.

They get to the school, and Ahab's heart is racing. He stands next to Circe. She tells the other students that Ahab is new. They barely notice.

The night before, Ahab couldn't sleep. Would they laugh at him tomorrow for not knowing what to do? What if they found out where he came from?

People here hate the bandits.

A bell rings, and the children go inside to a room with chalkboards.

Ahab's eyes instantly notice all the incredible gadgets in the room. He sees in the corner an amazing old robot, and watches, completely stunned, as the kids walk past it. One girl reaches out, pulls one of the robot arms out straight, and she hangs her coat.

Ahab thinks this has to be a joke, then he realizes that the old robot is broken, and nobody cares to fix it.

The teacher arrives. He hears her in the hall making a tapping sound. A woman older than any he has ever seen before enters the classroom, holding on to a rail along the wall, and using a cane to tap in front of her.

Ahab sees her eyes, just cloudy and white, like fog, and he realizes she is blind. And nobody cares! What a wonderful place this is.

This day keeps getting better.

"Ahab! Sit by me!" He realizes he is still standing in the middle of the room, while the other children are all sitting at desks. Circe is smiling at him, and pointing to a desk near her.

He walks over quickly, face feeling red.

The teacher walks to an old desk, sits, slides open a drawer, and lifts out a big hat, decorated with mirrors and little beads. She puts it on her head. He sees her close her eyes, scrunch up her face like she is concentrating, and then reopen her filmy eyes.

Then Ahab realizes she can see now, thanks to her hat.

"You must be Ahab!" she says, in a loud and happy voice, that makes him feel so happy.

Then she says something else, "I'm so happy you're here!" but she says it in thieves' cant, the secret language of the bandits, and even though Ahab knows her eyes don't work, she winks at him.

You really don't know?

Circe (note: her name rhymes with mercy) couldn't believe what Ahab was telling her.

Circe says, "You really don't know how old you are?"

Ahab replies in between bites of his sandwich. "It's true! Gaheedee tradition is," chomp chomp, "we don't really count as people until we return from our first raid." Ahab pauses for more chomping. Circe loves watching him eat. He obviously enjoys it so much. Then he continues. "And on my first raid, well, you know what happened. I didn't want to be a bandit. So I ran away."

Circe can see how mixed up Ahab is over it. He followed his conscience but he feels bad about it.

Today they are doing one of their favorite things -- sailing their tiny sailboat around the lake. When the wind died down, they decided to eat the snacks they had packed.

The next night, after dinner, Circe asks Ahab to take out a bag of scraps to the chickens in the backyard.

Ahab steps outside, and the chickens run over to him, excited for tonight's treats. He grabs handfuls of old carrot tops, apple cores, potato peels, and tosses them. Hewatches the hens race to grab them first.

Ahab makes it a point to throw the scraps in different directions so that hopefully even the slowest hens get at least a few treats.

Ahab is yelling at the one hen that often grabs too much to share with the rest when all of a sudden, lights turn on, and the whole village is there, and they all shout happy birthday.

Ahab is so surprised he threw the basket of food scraps into the air.

That night, Ahab had his first birthday. And he gets a huge stack of presents, which he doesn’t feel good about at first, but everyone explains how they weren't stolen from anyone else.

Circe's school report

Ahab is a little nervous but also a little excited about Circe reading her report for school. Now Circe stands up in the small classroom with windows all around and the other students all look at her.

When Circe first had the idea, he didn't like it at all. She wore him down. "Ahab, the report is supposed to be on somebody that helped us when we needed help. That was you!"

He couldn't argue with her. He wasn't sure why.

Now Circe is waiting for everyone to pay attention. She gets it and looks at her paper and says, "My report is titled, 'My Brother Ahab.'"

"Ahab is now my brother after my parents asked him if they wanted to adopt him, and he agreed, once he understood what it meant."

She goes on. "When we learned that Ahab lived by himself in the woods, we asked if he wanted to live in our house with us, and he did."

"I have learned a lot about where Ahab is from. It is very different from the life most of us have had."

Ahab listens intently even though he had listened to Circe read it several times at home.

All the facts were from his own life that he had told to Circe, but he liked to notice what things she found interesting.

"Ahab is from a far away place, across the sea, nowhere near our chain of islands. So how did Ahab get here? Well, Ahab's family were pirates."

This is the part Ahab worried about. This is why he keeps his distance from the other students. He feels all their eyes on him. He stares at the front edge of his desk.

Ahab hears a few other children whisper something he can't understand to each other.

The teacher, still the oldest person Ahab had ever seen, taps her rings on her desk, which was her signal that the students should be quiet. Then the teacher looks right at Ahab and smiles and Ahab feels a tiny bit better, but still really miserable.

Circe reads more. "Many of us have heard terrible things about pirates. Our island has never been raided. But we know that others have been."

Circe goes on. "But Ahab is very special and we all are happy he is here with us now. After all, we all remember how Ahab made that robot that chased away the soldiers. He saved our village, remember?"

A few children make noises like they all agree. One of the younger students looks up from her blocks and said "I love the robot." This gets a laugh from the room.

Ahab sees Circe watching him over her paper. He feels better.

"Pirate children don't know anything about raids until they go on their first raid."

"Last year was Ahab's first raid. While they were sailing in their gigantic ship, Ahab's older brother explained they were sailing to another island to get things from them. When they sailed to the island, Ahab watched the adults leave their ship and go to the shore on little boats and they brought back boxes of food and machines and medicine and shoes while the people that lived on the island watched."

"Ahab later asked his brother and the other adults why the people on the island looked so sad. The other adults ignored him. His brother explained how the people of the island had to give them all the things in the boxes or they would burn down their houses or do even worse things."

Ahab in the classroom feels like the villain again.

"Ahab tried to convince everyone that they didn't have to take anything. They could figure out how to share. But they told him they had to do what they did because it was what they had always done."

"That night Ahab couldn't sleep. He felt awful about what happened and he knew that the plan was to sail to more islands."

"The next day, the pirates sailed to a new island. Ahab saw how this island was surrounded by big round rocks in the water. This island had gotten news from the first island and now soldiers in big towers on the beach watched for pirates.

The pirates had said they would wait until it was dark and the towers wouldn't be able to see them. Then they would sneak past the towers, go into the village, and take anything they wanted to take. Some of the adults said they wanted to make this island too scared to try to defend themselves next time."

"While the pirates put on their armor and picked up their weapons, Ahab begged his brother and the adults not to take anything away from the people on this island."

"At first they ignored him, but when Ahab started yelling, one pirate said "be quiet or they will hear us" and he grabbed Ahab and shook him and then tied his hands up and tied them to the rail of the ship."

"Ahab looked at his brother while this happened, and his brother looked away and kept putting on his armor."

Circe pauses again. Ahab knew there was a line on her paper that said "pause for dramatic effect."

Ahab hates thinking about that moment. He loved his brother more than anything in the world, and his brother looked so disappointed in him. He remembers how his brother looked away and then put on his black helmet.

Circe continued. "Ahab watched as the pirates left his ship and headed toward the island as he pulled against the ropes. He struggled to escape but the ropes were too tight."

"He looked at the water and saw the pirates were still travelling to the beach in little boats and the guards in the towers had not seen the pirates yet."

"Then Ahab had an idea. Ahab stretched out and with his foot, pushed the big alarm bell in the center of the boat. It swung just a little, not enough to make a ring. Then when the bell swung to him and then away, he pushed it away again. He did it a third and a fourth time and fifth time and finally the bell rang, and louder every time. Ahab kept pushing the bell as hard as he could over and over and soon the bell rang loudly."

"Next Ahab saw bright lights all around the beach and on the rocks in the water as well. Soldiers in the towers yelled and pointed at the pirates in the pirate boats."

"The big round rocks began to move because they were actually giant snapping turtles. The turtles stuck their legs and heads out of their shells and swam toward the pirates in the boats."

A few students in the class had earlier stopped paying attention but now listen again.

"The turtles started smashing the boats as the pirates climbed back into their ship.”

"The pirates shot their guns and tried to hit the turtles with their swords, but the cannon balls just bounced right off the shells of the turtles. One cannonball bounced back at the ship and struck into the rail right next to Ahab and exploded."

"When Ahab woke up, he was floating in the water in the middle of the ocean by himself. He was still tied to the rail, but the rail was just a big piece of wood floating.

"We found the island that he described on a map in the library. And it is very far from here, so he may have floated for a really long time. He had a machine in his pocket that gave him clean water to drink and he had a few snacks in his pocket as well, but he was very hungry when he washed up on the beach of our island."

"Ahab hid away from all of us because he thought if we knew he was a pirate, we would hate him. So he lived in the woods in the old haunted houses and he ate our garbage."

"But Ahab is a hero two times. He saved our village from the evil soldiers and he always warned the people of the turtle island that they were in danger."

Circe read the last line. "We are all very grateful he is our friend and I am extra happy he is my brother."

Ahab goes to the junkyard sometimes after school

Circe comes along a lot of times but not today. Ahab loves his new family. But they are so strange! So much of what they do makes no sense.

He spends a few hours climbing around the old shells of crashed spaceships. Today he climbs the ladder up the side of his favorite rocket. He crawls through a little door into a tiny cabin with glass windows and a big soft chair.

He sits in the soft chair and touches a few buttons. Nothing happens of course. These ships have been here for centuries. People argue if they came here from somewhere else or if long ago, people tried to leave and then found out there was nowhere else to go. Nobody knows for sure.

Ahab looks out of the window and because he is up so high, he can see far across the whole island and out very far across the sea.

Ahab pushes a few more buttons. He twists an old knob and feels how it clicks between settings. He reads the label, written in a language that nobody uses anymore. He thinks about what the words mean and translates aloud "anti gravity field at 14" after a minute.

Next Ahab thinks about today at school. It was not a good day. Everyone sang a song that he didn't know.

And at lunch everyone stared when he picked up the cup in the middle of the table and poured some water out of it into his own cup. They all looked so shocked.

He feels his face getting hot and red right now as the memory replays in his mind.

One child said "you can't drink from that!" Ahab said back, "I just watched you fill it with the pitcher we all use!"

Later his teacher did her best to explain to the class that Ahab didn't do anything wrong. He just didn't understand what the sharing cup meant.

One kid yelled "bandits don't have sharing cups?" Ahab hated when people brought up where he was from.

But no, bandits don't share. They don't have cups in the center of the table that they all pour a little water into during their meal. And they don't later pour the water in the flower garden, or put it in a bird bath, or find some other way to share it.

Ahab twists more dials and knobs and pushes more buttons. He doesn't like thinking about today at school. He is by himself now, way up high in a rocket ship cockpit, but he feels less alone than he did at school today.

Ahab realizes it is getting late so he climbs down. He walks through the path of the junkyard. He doesn't understand why the other children aren't here every day. This is an amazing place!

He feels so different than everyone else.

Then he hears a noise that grabs him out of his thoughts. A tan dog is standing right in front of him. Ahab squats down. The dog walks over. Ahab sees this is one of the old dogs he used to feed when he lived alone in the shack.

Ahab pets the dog. He realizes this dog is filthy. "I used to be pretty filthy too!" Ahab says.

"But it wasn't all bad, right? Nobody laughed at us for breaking their secret rules."

The dog loves the attention. Ahab sits down and gets out a snack bar from his pocket and shares it and the dog sits next to him and puts his paw over Ahab's leg.

Ahab keeps scratching the dog. "I don't want to go back to living alone. But I have to come here to be myself sometimes.”

The dog's fur is matted, with bald spots, and Ahab feels lots of scabs.

He remembers that first night he took a shower. Black mud streaks across the white tub floor. It took Circe's mother all night to brush all the tangles out of his long hair. After, in the mirror, he didn't recognize himself.

Ahab stands up. His hand feels greasy from the dog's fur. "I'm gonna clean you up." The dog walks behind him and they head back to the palace he lives in with Circe's family.

It's a full moon tonight

Ahab and Circe hike up the tallest mountain on the island. Ahab stops to rest and Circe takes a few more steps ahead before she notices. She looks and smiles. "Want me to carry the transmitter?"

Ahab wants to appear strong but the box and the folded up antenna weighs a lot. "Yeah, you take a turn."

They go back to walking up the windy narrow path. They are up high enough on the mountain that there are no more trees because the clouds are beneath them. They've been walking all day.

Ahab feels much lighter without the backpack now but he still feels tired. He watches Circe for any signs that she is tired, but he doesn't see any. "So tell me again how tonight works?" hey says.

Circe explains while they climb that because tonight is a full moon, they can use the radio transmitter to send a message that will bounce off the moon and then go back in time to themselves.

"I know I asked before, I still don't understand why I don't remember getting the message when I was younger" Ahab says.

Circe is leaning forward now while she walks. Ahab smiles a little. That backpack is really heavy and he had been carrying it all day!

"Maybe you don't remember it, but you still got the message. Our memories are not as good as we think. Can you write down every meal that you ate last year?"

Ahab smiles a lot at the weird arguments Circe comes up with. She always surprises him.

Now Circe stops and gets out her water bottle. "Have you ever had really intense dreams but you can't remember anything except for a little moment?"

"Are you saying that's how we get the message? Dreams?"

"Maybe?" Circe shrugs, puts the bottle back, and starts going again. "We haven't figured out EVERYTHING in the universe yet, A..."

They climb quietly for a while. By the time they reach the top of the mountain, they share the backpack, each carrying one strap. It's much lighter this way.

Ahab sees that other people also hiked up the mountain and are now sitting around on picnic blankets. Ahab sets up the radio transmitter and unfolds the antenna.

He wasn't prepared to go to a party. Circe introduces him to a bunch of people.

In a few hours, the moon is up, and people everywhere are whispering into little microphones attached to their radio antennas.

Circe had explained it's not polite to listen in on what other people say.

When it is his turn, Circe hands him the microphone. He sits for a while, dumbly realizing he isn't sure what to say.

Then he whispers, "you're not bad. They just can't see what's good about you. But you're not bad."

Then he hands the little microphone back to Circe.

We know stuff before it happens

"It's hard to explain, but sometimes the wind whispers back."

Circe and Ahab sit next to each other by the campfire. Ahab tries his best to keep his face neutral, but Circe smiles because she can see his doubt.

"It's OK! I know you don't believe me. It must sound crazy because you don't have anything to compare it to. It is maybe like if you were from a world where writing was never invented. And then you saw somebody crying while they read a sad story."

Ahab laughed aloud at Circe's amazing comparison and then he grins as he imagines what she describes.

"It would be hard to believe that looking at little squiggles in a book somehow makes somebody sad, right? They're not magic squiggles, but also, they are magic squiggles."

Ahab leans back and looks at the night sky.

The bandits had witches, but his older brother didn't trust them. Ahab remembers the day when he had gone to the bazaar with his brother, and he saw people lined up outside a spooky tent and he asked what was happening.

His brother explained how it was a witch's tent. He pointed out all the strings of bones hanging along the outside. The witches demanded money, or gifts, and then they'd give advice, after talking to ghosts.

Ahab asked if it was real. His brother said that maybe they knew things, but maybe they knew how to tell people what they wanted to hear. Ahab hadn't thought much about it since.

At least not until the other day, when he and Circe had sailed out to the center of the lake, and the wind had stopped, stranding them out there.

Circe said she could call up the wind. He watched her cup her hands, hold them to her mouth, stand up, and then whisper in different directions. At first, he thought it was just a meaningless ritual. A hopeful trick. A game to entertain children, maybe.

She kept trying, and his amusement changed into feeling embarrassment for her. She tried so hard. And nothing happened. They would have to row back to the pier. He didn't mind it really. It would be fun. He treasured every second with Circe, even if they were rowing their sailboat on a hot day.

And then she stopped and sat down in the sailboat again. Ahab looked at their sail, hanging completely still, straight down. Then he looked at her.

He remembers how she looked so smug in that moment, in the sailboat, behind her sunglasses, freckles on her nose and shoulders. She seemed relaxed. Like the job was done. But there was no wind.

He twisted over the side of the boat, and started opening the buckles that held the oars on the side. "Ahab!", Circe said, looking at him, smiling, "you don't believe me!"

"Circe! There's no wind!" Ahab gestured around, and then pointed at the sail, and almost at that exact moment, the sail filled up and Circle laughed out loud.

This all plays through Ahab's mind now as he looks at all the stars above the two of them. He is lying back and he sees little sparks float up into the air in unpredictable ways.

Are they unpredictable? Could he use a thinker machine and figure out where the sparks go? Yes. Absolutely. Especially if he added some lenses so that the thinker could see temperatures. The thinker could see how the hottest air rises the fastest. The sparks come off the burning wood at regular intervals. Ahab can't see the pattern, he believes there is one.

He is drawing diagrams and doing math in his head when Circe speaks up again. "Listening to the wind is maybe something everyone can do. It's all about getting really, really quiet inside."

"And then maybe, just maybe, you'll hear something. But there's some places where it's easier to hear the whispers inside the wind. And most of the time, it's just wind. There's not always a message inside."

Ahab barely hears her. He is totally lost in his thoughts. Everything follows patterns. Rules. Learn the patterns and you don't get surprised. Ahab silently says this to himself all the time while he tries to figure stuff out. Right now he is thinking about different ways to set up a thinker machine to predict how a fire burns. Could he record the whole thing, and then later check the machine's predictions against the recording? He would have to record the fire from many different angles at once. It feels wonderful as Ahab imagines how this would all work.

"Like, right now, the wind says you're not listening to me." Circe says, looking at him.

Ahab is nearly in a trance now when she looks at him. It's almost scary when he gets like this. She can see it on his face. A blank, dreamy look. He's here and he's a million miles away at the same time.

Sometimes, he comes back to her, and he looks happy because he figured something out. Other times, he comes back, bitter, frustrated, and angry. Right now, he's just gone though.

She puts a blanket over his shoulders.

Ahab and Circe look at old pictures of the island

It started when they were in the library one day. They even found a few old paper maps. The old paper maps were so delicate, and not as much fun as the maps that they could display on the big screen table.

Now they keep going back in the afternoons.

They both lean over the table in a darkened section of the library, both looking at pictures of the island taken from space.

"These are from a long time ago," Circe says, while they both marvel at them.

"Yeah, back when the satellites still talked to us. See here -- that's where the old rockets are now, But in this picture, there's nothing there. It's just a beach."

"Just a beach, huh. So much better now that it has all those rusty spaceship wrecks."

Ahab is too focused to notice her sarcasm. "The lake is different too. I think it's smaller than it is now. See? There's the big rock that you said looks like a cat sitting on a chair? Here, it's way further from the shore."

Ahab goes on. "And look at the top of the mountain where we went to bounce radio waves off the moon. All the telescopes weren't there when this was taken."

Circe replies, "Gayley and Copper hadn't moved up there yet. Their house would be right.. Here." She taps a spot on the map. The computer speaks up and says the altitude of the spot she taps.

"Wait, what?" Circe replies. "The mountain used to be taller?" She asks again. The computer says the height of the mountain. "The mountain's height is relative to sea level though. The sea level must be much higher now." She says.

"I think I know why the bandits never come here," Ahab says and he waves his hands across the table, so that the map pans over to the ocean. "Look -- there's rings of spiky rocks all around the island."

Circe looks. "Oh yeah, the needles. We all know about those. But they're not rocks. They're living creatures. Kinda like plants They're underwater now. I guess they didn't always stay below the surface. We all learn about them in school."

Circe zooms in as closely as possible on one of the glass spikes in the map. "The needles can cut through anything. I guess they would make it really hard to sail here if you didn't know where they were. You got really lucky actually, washing up here. Or maybe, maybe they knew you were OK to let in." She pushes his shoulder.

"What are they though?" Ahab asks, trying to zoom in even more on the picture.

"They're kinda like starfish, or coral, or maybe even like oysters. They eat tiny things that float in the water. I bet there's books about them here. They're smart though. And they can move around too. Not fast though."

"I love this island," Ahab says.

Silly things

The idea was so ridiculous that Ahab first thought the young children were not serious. But here they are, all working diligently on it, late at night, working together.

Ahab is years older now. When the younger students had asked him to teach them about how to work on robots a few years ago, he took them back to the old shack where he used to live, and over time, they converted it to a place to work.

Ahab and Circe together finally found the thing that was at the bottom of the lake. An ancient submarine from long ago, flooded, ruined, torn in pieces. It took a lot of help from the friendly giant squids, but the submarine was now up on the beach. And it was full of so many old ruined robots! Even the machines to repair and create new robots were still there, all in pieces.

Enough for an army. Ahab was convinced they could eventually repair them all and be safe and protected forever.

But now, the children of the village had a crazy idea, and what was even more inexplicable, the village elders all loved it.

So, now, Ahab is re-reading the steps that were hastily scrawled on the chalkboard.

"1. Repair robots so they wake up"

"2. Throw them a birthday party"

"3. Make them happy."

And there was another list of ideas on what robots might like to do for fun:

This was so absurd. There were pirates circling around them, looking for a way in through the ring of needles that protected their island.

"Danger is real," he says.

But he's interrupted. The kids are all laughing and screaming. He looks over. One precocious little girl, Ida, is standing and dancing, while all the others clap and sing a song. And a half-finished, huge, rusty robot is facing her, and roughly emulating her movement. Ida does another dance move, more slowly, and the robot then does the same. Lights on the top of the robot blink along with the children clapping.

Ahab was up late, cleaning up the old shack where he and the young children of the island repaired the ancient old robots.

They weren't strictly repairing the old robots they had dragged up out of the lake... more like taking them apart, combining pieces, and then programming them to do completely different things.

It was all such a ridiculous project in Ahab's view. He had tried to convince everyone that the robots could be repaired and converted into workers or guards. Ahab had now lived on the island for years, and it was an amazing place.

But he couldn't relax any more. He was obsessed with preparing for disasters. Obsessed with fears that one day, pirates would show up and destroy everything. His worries were growing over time. This was a dangerous world.

And the people here were oblivious!

He tried to explain all this to anyone that would listen. They said he was paranoid.

He realized they had lived so long in peace and comfort that they couldn't imagine anything else.

They hadn't seen what Ahab had seen.

All these conversations replayed in Ahab's head while he swept the wooden floor. It was covered in metal shards left over from drilling and cutting through the robot shells. For some reason, the children thought it was very important to decorate the robots.

Ida, the little girl that was clearly a brilliant mind, had been working for days on teaching one robot to tell stories.

She had, despite Ahab's pessimism, already taught a few robots to dance, and even make up their own moves, and then dance with each other.

Sure, it could almost all be analyzed and modeled as just a creative use of random number generation.

But the children loved watching the robots dance. Sometimes the two groups would interact... children doing a move, then the robots took a turn and emulated it in a completely weird way, and then the children would reply back.

Ahab even found himself amused watching them, despite his worries about what could have been done instead.

He remembered how today, Ida had told everyone how a robot she named "Reenie" was going to tell a story Reenie had made up on her own.

Ida had been working on this for a long time. At first, the robot would literally only repeat books read to it. Then Ida got it to switch around names and traits between characters in different stories. Or combine plots from numerous stories.

Ahab had helped when he could. Ida had learned nearly everything Ahab knew already, and at this point, the puzzles Ida was working on were things

The stories were bizarre to the point of being impossible to follow. Like tonight, the robot told a story that was clearly based on the old fairy tale about the young princess trapped in a maze. In the fairy tale, she finally escapes by using her magic to turn herself into a beautiful bird.

But in the robot's version, tonight, there was a maze that was crying because it was lonely, and then a bird that flew into the center of the maze and laid eggs, and the eggs hatched and were tiny mazes with bird wings that flapped around.

Some of the children liked the story.

The robot didn't seem to understand the idea of building drama, or of creating a rewarding ending.

But Ahab loved it. Not just because it was so unpredictable, but also because it was so much fun to see how the kids would get frustrated.

Still, they were all becoming experts on these rusty old machines that had been in the bottom of the lake for centuries.

Ida decided the robot needed more examples of stories. So she had asked everyone to talk to her robot as much as possible. Ida was convinced that eventually she and the robot together would figure out how to understand each other.

Last week, Ahab tried to explain how these were just machines. Ida looked at him at first with something like patience, despite Ahab being nearly an adult and Ida being just a precious child, not even an adolescent yet. Ida said, "we're all just machines Ahab... you're made of carbon mostly, and she's made of silicon, but it's the care that we all receive that makes us grow."

To Ida, this machine was a she, not an it. Not just an elaborate spider web of cause and effect. Ida said to Ahab... "You didn't think they'd ever dance on their own, remember? But almost every night, more and more robots now gather out there and play their strange music and they dance for hours now. I wondered if they were caught in some loop where they were dancing because they had a command from us to do it, but there weren't any commands in any of the segments I checked. The whole island comes out now to watch and dance along!"

"These machines have hardware that's not like us, but I checked, and it's in some ways as complex as what we got in our heads. But in their old lives, they didn't do anything but patrol the oceans in submarines. It's like they were all asleep mostly, or so occupied by their work they didn't stop and ask what the point of it all was.

Ahab found it touching that this kid was clearly smarter than he was when he was young, but still hung up on this fantastical dream.

Ida turned to the robot. and spoke to it. "Reenie, what do you think? Do you want to keep making up stories?"

"Yes Reenie wants to", it replied, in a voice that was louder than Ahab expected.

"But why do you think you can learn?" Ahab asked.

"Because my friend Ida is helping me and she is smart," the robot replied. The voice was quieter. This machine modulated its tone.

Ahab smiled. "Why does it think that?" He said, running over explanations in his brain. Ida was annoyed. "Ask HER, Ahab."