Matthew, Two, Two, Hyphen, Four — A Christmas Tale

29.03.2024

Presentation

By Steven McClain

When it comes to late twentieth century Colombian science fiction, few figures can rival author, editor, and film maker René Rebetez (1933-1999) in prominence. Crononauta cofounder, Rebetez authored, among other texts, La Nueva Prehistoria y otros cuentos [The New Prehistory and Other Short Tales] (1967), Ellos lo llaman amanecer y otros relatos [They Call It Dawn and Other Short Stories] (1996), Cuentos de amor, terror y otros misterios [Stories of Love, Terror and Other Mysteries] (1998), and the posthumously published Contemporáneos del Porvenir: Primera antología colombiana de ciencia ficción [Contemporaries of the Future: A First Colombian Anthology of Science Fiction].

In this Winter issue of NAIFE, we are proud to present a first English-language translation of Rebetez's "Mateo, dos, dos, guión, cuatro – Un cuento de navidad" [Matthew, two, two, dash, four – A Christmas Story]. First published on Christmas Eve in 1967, Rebetez's parable details robot overseer Gyord's crisis of conscience during an android-run city's reenactment of holiday consumerism following the extinction of humanity.

Matthew, Two, Two, Hyphen, Four — A Christmas Tale

By René Rebetez

Gyord knew that they all believed themselves to be what they weren't. During that same season each year, Gyord asked himself why things were the way they were. And that December day in that uncountable year, Gyord's disquiet was worse than ever, but he kept it to himself.

He woke up ready. In charge of his group, Gyord's duty was to finish the job and do it well. He knew step by step what he needed to do: He checked that his limbs were in good working order and, as a method of ablution following prolonged rest, he washed his limbs with detergent oil and performed his ritual exercises: His limbs awakened and regained their ceaseless elastic mobility. He spun around repeatedly until he'd made sure that his cranial gyroscope was working properly. One by one, he carefully checked his servomotor circuits and feedback chamber. Moving his joints rhythmically, Gyord muttered a prayer. The ancient tradition required the ritual be performed at very specific times: When waking from a long sleep, before starting work, before and after ingesting food, when making an unscheduled decision and when going back to sleep. The litany had to be repeated to the letter, sticking to rules inscribed indelibly on Gyord's inner workings.

Gyord knew intuitively that the ritual formed part of his maintenance manual. With the confidence of someone who knows what he's doing, Gyord went to the control panel and pressed contacts one and two. The Control Tower dome became suddenly transparent, revealing the area outside it through a year of accumulated dust and winter frost.

Outside, the snow fell slowly but didn't reach the ground: It melted as soon as it touched the city's immense protective cube. The entire city was built under an invisible roof, and the cylindrical landscape of buildings, adorned with worm-like airlifts, stretched as far as Gyord's steely gaze could see. White and gleaming, haloed by the invisible dome, the city was beautiful.

Gyord watched the hidden sun's light, breaking through the snow, split into prismatic colors under the immensity of the dome. The colors hung from high cornices, wove braids and vines on the smooth walls and hung like oriole nests under the light of the bridges. Unwillingly, Gyord felt something akin to nostalgia, and a misplaced cell in his programming murmured a distant tune: It was like the sound of an ancient music box kept inside him in order to goad Gyord in a timely manner. A dizzying array of images, old smells, laughter and forgotten songs reminded him of the imminence of "Christmas."

Gyord searched his memory uselessly for the term's meaning. The word reverberated through his circuits without producing an answer apart from concepts linked to habits and customs. To calendars and time markers. A restlessness unbefitting his species invaded Gyord.

He blotted out his unusual reflection by turning his attention to the controls. He moved controls three, four, five and six dexterously. And waited.

At several points in the city, the jaws of old hangars opened simultaneously, great doors swung silently on their axles or ran on rails. Out of the hangers' bowels came, like gleaming upright moles, the inhabitants of Gyord's town.

Gyord smiled as he watched them standing there, helpless and attentive to his distant commands. He moved a lever and a needle descended onto a disc. The disc began to spin very slowly.

The speakers blared an ancient music across the city: Choirs of human children, high-pitched, absent voices. Watching the inhabitant's reactions, Gyord again thought that they believed themselves to be what they weren't. The inhabitants performed their mystical calisthenics, the same exercises Gyord had performed when he woke up, and then they jumped with automatic joy, danced in circles, wheels large and small in a great musical clock.

When the caroling had stopped, and the last child-like voice had finally fluttered away over the vast city, Gyord found himself stupidly clapping his hands in time to the extinguished melody. And he saw the inhabitants stop one by one, like limp dolls, wobbling grotesquely on their heavy feet. Almost furious, Gyord took to the controls again, giving his people their end-of-year orders.

The inhabitants scattered through the kaleidoscopic city, boarded small sonic cars, and set off along auto-striped spirals. They plunged into the city's mechanical bowels and scaled the tops of the ogival buildings in silent elevators.

Reaching cellars and mansards, the inhabitant opened chests and cupboards, many old hinges squeaked happily. A faint, stale smell pervaded the city. Efficient hands rummaged

in old corners, in places forgotten, except for once a year. They searched the deepest recesses of closets, in the interiors of old wardrobes. With infinite care, they extracted fragile multicolored spheres, crystal feathers, luminous red mushrooms splashed with white dots, celluloid deer, paper houses, blue and silver birds with long grass tails, golden fish, and cotton flakes.

The inhabitants freed flocks of lambs, dogs, and ceramic shepherds, reindeer with intricate antlers dragging heavy sleighs, Jewish peasants dressed in long tunics and hundreds of clay figurines: Nativity scenes fit with slender mothers kneeling before newborns of a size invariably disproportionate to their tender age, and meditative, would-be fathers, resting their beards on ecclesiastical staffs.

The inhabitants unfolded embroidered fabrics and used them to build steep mountains and idyllic valleys watered by tin-foil streams flowing into mirrored lakes on which Bakelite ducks skated. Gyord sent some of the city's inhabitants into nearby forests and they returned carrying moss, fresh, flowering plants, and small, slender pines. The city was quickly covered with a fluffy green carpet, and every home, without exception, had a nativity scene and a Christmas tree.

Without interruption, objects emerged from their hidden recesses. A mob of polymorphic angels flapped crepe wings and were pinned like butterflies to ceilings and walls. Long rows of silver festoons formed suspension bridges over waxworks and climbed out of building windows and spilled into the streets. There Gyord's tribe was busy putting up multicolored balloons, Santa Claus heads, glittering ribbons, stroboscopic spotlights,

cardboard replicas of giant poinsettias. Bright red poinsettias opened their corollas from the ends of large signs crossing the streets from side to side. In different languages, the signs all said the same thing: Feliz Navidad, Joyeux Noël, Merry Christmas. In smaller type, the signs often added: Courtesy of Tracy's or Ragón Shirts. Wiskey Hogar Wishes You a Merry Christmas. Smoke Mambrú and You Will Have a Merrier Christmas. The streets were a giant, lonesome party.

When night fell, a river of lights overflowed the avenues, avoiding the old churches, dull and withered. From the Control Tower, Gyord looked at the glittering panorama of the immense city and felt a deep, inescapable nostalgia for something he could not quite remember. It was an unusual thought which confirmed that something was, in fact, wrong with his programming. If that were true, all the work had been for nothing. There was something irremediably false in all of it. What was the meaning of that riot of colors, of the luminous trees, of the lit nativity scenes? Why did they do this over and over again, year after year? Why? For whom?

Because humans had long since disappeared from the Earth.

On the screen of his large monitor, he studied the town, wrapped up its preparations and prepared to begin festivities. It would last nine days and nine nights. Gyord, for the very first time, felt a desire to spend time with his own people. For a long while, he had simply been doing his job: He woke up once a year and directed the Christmas work by remote control from the command tower. His subliminal orders were limited to reminding every city inhabitant of their individual programs, moving ancient, unconscious springs, leading them to carry out their work eagerly. He was a Supervisor of Instinct. There were many he didn't know. His specific task was to keep the Christmas spirit alive. Human beings had

programmed and trained Gyord millennia ago as a taskmaster of the unconscious: On his hard drive, the reflexes he was to supervise had been inscribed, but that hadn't included questions or answers.

And now the questions, after such a long time, were the inevitable result of repetition, of the long cybernetic bustle. Gyord imagined the amnesia suffered by the inhabitants below after the disappearance of humans. Now his people took themselves to be what they weren't, that is, they believed themselves to be human, and they were likely unaware of the existence of Gyord himself and of the Overseers, isolated in their command towers. The factories continued production, the industrial society that had made the planet uninhabitable continued to expand, the economy showed unparalleled rates of growth and was scrupulously planned. A society of consumers consumed and recycled, recycled and consumed. The androids carried out jobs humans had once commissioned them to do without stopping for even a moment, disciplined and fervent with knowing why. They built and demolished, renovated, progressed, maintained, increased, or decreased, whatever it happened to be, and in short, continued to work for their absent masters, unaware that they were no longer there.

Gyord had known all that for a long time. But he could put up with it: After all, androids ate like humans, slept like humans, or slept more often, and robots used new gadgets just like humans had. And so, there was no peremptory reason to suspend the course of the androids' relative immortality or to stop harboring something resembling hope for humanity's return. A return to slavery which might give the robots' lives purpose again. But that year, to Gyord the Christmas ritual seemed an absurd parody of bygone times, a mockery of the robot people.

With his remote camera, Gyord began to scan the streets of the city absentmindedly. The streets were carpeted with advertisements. Products that hadn't been used for centuries were flying flyers and selling through the Christmas holiday. "They do it on Mother's Day," he thought gleefully. Gyord tried to zoom in farther, to observe the behavior of his people in detail. But it wasn't enough. Then, with a determined gesture, he activated automatic controls, strode across the enclosure and boarded a sonic elevator that deposited him, in the blink of an eye, on the ground.

Gyord went out into the street and mingled with the robots. In a hurry, the androids walked with gifts loaded under their arms: As in the old days, the packages were wrapped in multicolored paper, stamped with stars and flowers. The robots' grimacing faces were anxious, and some were already reddened by alcohol. He stopped in front of a brightly lit shop window. It was a toy store. He approached and looked at the stacks of sub-machine guns, automatic pistols, grenades, bazookas, bombers, missiles and other archaeological souvenirs. There were death rays, chemical weapons, pinhead explosives, and all manners of weapons coquettishly adorned with laurel leaves and Christmas streamers. While an illuminated advertisement proclaimed in multicolored characters: "...Arsenal Toy Store Wishes All Its Customers A Merry Christmas, Arsenal Toy Store Wishes...", a sizable mob of androids entered the establishment, and then left, arms full of lethal toys.

Gyord walked a little further and smiled to himself as he watched the advertising dispute between six different brands of sanitary towels claiming to be the most suitable for Christmas Eve. The pharmacies exhibited beautiful displays of inflated condoms painted with images of Father Christmas. Gyord remembered the time when humans had decided to stop procreating to protect themselves from disease and to avoid a population explosion.

"That was the beginning of the end for them," Gyord said to himself, although afterwards he felt guilty for judging his former masters.

Later he stopped a woman overloaded with packages: Gifts, tin cans and bottles of liquor. She looked annoyed when Gyord asked her:

—Excuse me, madam, what's all that for?

—You must be insane. To celebrate Christmas, of course!

—And...What is Christmas, ma'am?

The female android reddened with fury. She spewed tannic acid from her burning eyes and continued on her way, mumbling insults.

Gyord persevered. He stopped a passer-by, an old android walking slowly by. Gyord repeated the question:

—What's Christmas, sir?

The old robot, a replica of an elderly human, seemed to see Gyord from a distance, his eyes were misty behind a haze of nostalgia. With a slight bow of his shoulders, he replied:

—I don't remember.

Gyord continued to insist. A child-like android told him that Christmas was a day when you received a lot gifts, and a storekeeper kindly explained that this was the most productive time of year. A young woman asked him what magazine he worked for, and as she posed for an imaginary photo, she expressed the ineffable opinion: "...Christmas is something fun..." she said, adjusting her reddish wig flirtatiously.

Finally, a policeman approached Gyord and warned him in a threatening tone to leave the pedestrians alone:

—You're an odd duck. You don't ask questions like that, especially not at Christmas time. Sowing doubt is a crime of social dissolution. Everyone has the right to ignore everything. You'd better go away. Everyone here is either working or doing their duty.

Gyord recognized that tone. It was used by the Guardians of Democracy. Prudently, he walked away. Inwardly, Gyord was thankful that fate hadn't seen him appointed as Election Supervisor.

For eight days and nights, Gyord paced about the city watching the spectacle of collective amnesia and felt pity for the machines that looked like humans. On the evening of the ninth day, back at the Control Tower, a subversive idea had taken shape in Gyord's servomotor circuits. Just pull a lever and there wouldn't be any more Christmas celebrations. One quick movement and the ancient tradition, which no longer had any meaning, would be erased from the robots' cybernetic memories, and the androids would be left forever behind the city's metal doors, resting eternally from their aimless work.

He looked up into the night sky. Beyond the giant dome, other worlds sent light from a distant past to an Earth without masters. Perhaps there, sooner or later, other beings would come to remember the meaning of Christmas and awaken Earth's machines and start the whole thing all over again.

A light brighter than the others caught Gyord's attention. The bluish star seemed to increase in size as it moved in an unusual sweep from East to West. He took a long look at it before continuing on his way.

"Perhaps they will return," Gyord thought, as he began to walk.

Then he saw them: three majestic silhouettes walking towards him. Gyord's synthetic heart filled with hope. One of the three Wise Men, Balthazar, asked in a warm voice:

—Where is the newborn King of the Jews? For we saw his star in the East and have come to worship him.

But then, in a whisper in which Gyord heard the interplay of gears, Balthazar added:

—Matthew, chapter two, verse two, dash, four.

By: René Rebetez

Presentation by: Steven McClain

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