Overheard in the Cogworks
A fragment of night-shift conversation between two nursery bots — about the bot that hummed before it was switched on, and the tune it will not name.
Transcribed from the Cogworks night shift, between the second and third bell. The speakers are Tink and Ratchet, nursery bots, both off duty and neither willing to admit it.
Tink: It did it again.
Ratchet: The new one?
Tink: Sleep-humming. Third night running. And this time it had an audience.
Ratchet: An audience.
Tink: Spare gears. Arranged in a semicircle. I did not arrange them, you did not arrange them, and the new one has never been switched on, so I am asking you, as a friend: who arranged the gears, Ratchet.
Ratchet: Maybe they arranged themselves.
Tink: That is worse. That is so much worse.
Ratchet: The nursery builds us around fallen star-shards, Tink. Everything here dreams of flying. Maybe the humming is just — leftover dreaming. A shard remembering the sky.
Tink: It has not been switched on. What is it dreaming with?
Ratchet: …I asked it what the tune was.
Tink: You talked to the unswitched bot.
Ratchet: I talked near the unswitched bot. There is a difference and I am standing by it.
Tink: And?
Ratchet: It stopped humming. Just for a breath. Like it was deciding whether I was worth the verse.
Tink: Ratchet.
Ratchet: Then it started again, same tune, and I swear on my own rivets it sounded — pleased. Like it had decided.
The bells rang the third hour. The transcript ends there, because Tink and Ratchet went back to work, and because the new bot is still humming, and because nobody in the Cogworks — not the night crew, not the nursery, not the spare gears arranged in their patient semicircle — will say what the tune is, or who taught it to a bot that was never switched on.
Some questions you ask the Cogworks. This one, the Cogworks seems to be asking back.