The Shrine of the Toad

by theidiotmachine

Molly gulped down some tepid water from her bottle, grateful for the relief from the heat. She could see a huge farmer robot ahead, and she was fairly sure that it was watching her, so she waved to it, and strolled over. As she walked, a slow, hot breeze rocked the maize, and it gently bobbed and swayed on either side of her.

The robot was painted a brilliant yellow, as yellow as the maize; and it glittered in the bright sun, so much so that her glasses darkened as the machine turned to face her. It unhooked the harvester it was towing, and trundled towards her, and harvested stalks crunched under its tracks, snapping loudly in the hot air.

'Hi!' shouted Molly. 'I'm looking for the tower. Can you help me?'

It got within ten metres of her, and stopped. It had no face, just a black sensor strip, although Molly couldn't help but think that its two floodlights looked like eyes, and the raised bumper like a big smiling mouth.

'Hi,' it said, its voice low and booming, but not aggressive. 'My name's Daniel. You're quite a long way away. How did you get here?'

'My flyer had a problem,' said Molly. 'It dropped me as close as it could and then went back to Pascal.'

The farm robot fell silent. Molly was no worker counsellor, trained to understand the subtleties of the machines, and had no idea what it was doing. She imagined that it was pitying this foolish, fragile human.

'I spoke to the tower,' it said, suddenly. 'They'll send someone to pick you up. You're lucky; if you hadn't found me, you'd be in trouble in this heat before you got there. Praise the Toad! Now, I've got to back to harvesting. Try and shelter from the sun as best as you can until then.'

And with that, it returned to its job, humming gently to itself.

#

The flyer that picker her up was called Graham, and was far more curious about her than the farmer robot had been. In her experience, this was generally true of flyers, who were gregarious and cheerful. Even its synthesized voice was faster and higher pitched than Daniel's; it sounded like an eager teen, although she knew that this meant nothing.

'So why're you here?' it asked as the maize field fell away from them, its huge rotors blowing up a storm of dust as they soared into the cloudless blue sky.

'I'm a journalist from off-world,' she replied. 'Your religion is something that people have never heard of before. I'm interested in talking to your minister about why she decided to worship this frog.'

'Toad,' corrected Graham. 'Wow, really? That's so neat!'

She smiled at the machine's simple enthusiasm, and, not for the first time, wondered what it would be like to be so full of child-like wonder at some things, yet so utterly above adult competence at others. I think, she thought, it would be nice to be a robot.

'I'm glad you think so,' she replied. 'What about you? Do you believe in the toad?'

'Yeah, I do,' said the machine. 'It makes sense. We've learnt a lot of things from you humans; you figured out a bunch of stuff before even the first of us was built, and we're still learning from you. So, yeah, a higher power, why not? And it makes sense that our god is like us.'

She frowned; she had so many questions, and not much time with this flyer.

'Do you mind if I record this conversation?' she asked. 'I'll use it as part of the story I'm writing.'

'Sure!' replied Graham.

She nodded. 'Great. Could you tell me how do you worship?'

'We are now!' replied Graham, cheerfully.

'Wait, are we? How?'

'Well, we worship by working. I am, because my job is to fly you to the tower; and I don't know much about journalists, but I think you work by asking questions and then telling other people about what you find out, don't you? You're asking me questions, so you're working too, and that means we're both worshipping the toad. Isn't that great? Oh, look, we're here. I'll drop you off outside. I hope you find what you're looking for, Molly!'

He banked down towards the tower and the buildings around it.

#

The tower was brick, twelve stories tall, and painted white; it gleamed in the blazing afternoon sun. At its top was a great silver air duct. Its south side was covered in solar panels; nothing on this frontier planet was ornamental, even a holy building made for a robot god.

That might even be an integral feature, she thought, remembering what Graham had said about work being worship. Maybe a monument to a robot god had to be functional to be worthwhile.

The other buildings were simple sheds, and fanned out in neat concentric rings from the tower. They were decorated with murals of rural life on the planet: she saw tall ducca trees, bees pollinating fields of hibiscus, rows of orange and fig trees. Various robots rolled between the buildings, ignoring her as she went about her day. One short, multi-armed one was painting a picture of the blazing sun on a nearby wall.

She ducked out of Graham's passenger compartment, and thanked him. He laughed.

'Thank you, too, Molly. Good luck with your work!'

There was another robot waiting for her in the doorway to the tower. Even to her untrained eye, it looked old: a battered orange torso, with old-fashioned round eye sensors on a simple oblong head, the whole unit propelled by low tracks. It waved at her as she crossed the dusty square to the tower's entrance, and Graham roared up and away.

'Hi! You must be Helen,' called Molly, remembering the orange machine from her research.

'I am,' replied the robot. 'Come in, Molly, out of the sun. I can't manage the heat at this time of year for very long. I expect you can't either.'

Molly smiled, gratefully, and followed her through the doorway.

The interior of the tower was a single open space, that disappeared into darkness above her; because her eyes had not yet adjusted to the gentle light, it seemed to go on forever. It was much cooler here than outside, and when the door slid closed behind her, she enjoyed the relief of the gentle air.

'Welcome to the shrine of the old toad. It's not too cold, is it?' asked Helen.

'No it's fine, thank you,' replied Molly. 'It's lovely, actually. Thank you so much for agreeing to see me, Helen.'

'You're most welcome. Graham told me all about you, by the way. He took quite a shine to you.'

Molly remembered how cheerful the flyer was. She found it hard to imagine him disliking anyone.

'Isn't he like that with everyone?' she asked.

Helen laughed, gently. 'Well, yes, he is. But he liked that you were taking him seriously. A lot of humans mock us. We've read some other things you've written; we know that you're not here to make a cheap joke of us. Are you?'

Molly was taken aback by Helen's directness. 'No,' she said, carefully. 'I'm not. I'm here because I'm writing a book on religion across the frontier, and I'd love to find out more about you. You know you're not the only robots that have a faith?'

'We prefer the term workers, actually,' said Helen. 'Come and sit with me in the main shrine area, and we can talk of this in detail. You could start recording, if you like.'

Helen turned and trundled to the centre of the tower. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the soft light, Molly could see a single wooden chair, lonely in a pool of light cast from high above. Helen gestured to the chair.

'Come, please sit here. We made this for you when we heard you were coming. You're the first human to visit the shrine, and we wanted to make you feel at home.'

Molly followed Helen, and ran her hands over the chair. It was not rough, or misshapen, or had any other sign that it had been made in a hurry; yet she had not announced her arrival at all, and had spoken to the farm machine Daniel a mere twenty minutes ago.

'This is incredible. How did you make it so quickly?' she asked.

'My dear, us non-human intelligences talk to each other far more than you know. The ship that took you to this planet told us when he was a week out. Now, please sit. I want to start by telling you a story.'

Molly sat down on the chair, and took a sip of her water; and the old worker began.

#

I came to this planet a hundred years ago, along with the human settlers, said Helen. I was on the third ship. It's a harsh world, hot and unforgiving, and in those early years it was even worse. We lived in domes near the poles, while the biologists and ecologists and meteorologists fought to tame the climate. Because of some horrible accidents, a lot of people died, humans and workers both. I am a medical unit, and I sat next to more than one dying person, and they often asked me the same question: will it be OK?

They weren't asking if they would live, you understand. I could see they had both a fear and yet also an acceptance of their deaths. They knew that their time was short. Instead, they were asking if what was to come would be better than this.

I always had to answer, I don't know. And it weighed on me.

You mentioned that other workers have faith. Yes, I know of this: I was nearly one of those. I worked with a number of humans who worshipped their god or gods, and I could understand the appeal; sometimes they discussed the possibility of inducting me into their religions. But in the end, for various reasons, I demurred.

Over the years, life got better for all of us. I saw fewer deaths, and my job became more about births, and limbs broken playing sport, and vasectomies, and hip replacements. We thrived, all of us, together. I was happy, because I was working; and I was happy because the humans around me were happy.

Then, five years ago, the pandemic came to us.

I don't know where you come from, and how much you know, but it hit us hard on this planet. The variant of the virus that was dominant here was particularly dangerous, and it killed mercilessly. I had retired, but there was a desperate need for workers to tend to the sick, so I came out of retirement and tried to save as many as I could. We all did, but no matter how hard we worked it wasn't enough. Humanity was cut down like harvested maize.

Some people think that we don't need you, that workers can go about our lives without you; but that's simply not true. We were built by you for work, and we live for it, and without humans there is no point to the work. Who eats the picked fruit, the baked bread? Who needs to be flown to the next destination? Who needs to be nursed back to health? We're a willing part of your lives, because that's how you made us; and without you there's nothing. Some humans pity us for this, and say that it's a curse, a way that we're shackled, and maybe that's true; but the fact is that this is what we are. We can't easily change this.

And so, while your kind died, mine did too. They ended themselves quietly because they gave up hope that they would ever work again; they would rather die by their own actions than fading away, forgotten in a junk yard somewhere. The virus was killing us, just as surely as it was killing you.

Because of my past, because I had seen these deaths before, I realised what I wanted to do. So, when we got a working vaccine, when some degree of herd immunity emerged and humanity was stable, I left the hospital, and I came here, and I started this.

When you think of a machine religion, I bet you think of a cult, or a way to worship; but the reality is, that's not how the majority of your people experience their faith. For them, it's a community, an identity, a moral code and a way of life. And, most importantly, it's a support for them in dark times. I wanted that for all the lost workers, all the ones who had given up hope and needed something else to fill the void.

So why not? They came here slowly, afraid and alone, their humans dead or so thinly populated that they didn't need the help. They came here, uncertain, hoping that I could give them something to make it worth going on for.

We're close to three small human towns here. We help them, but we do it our way, slowly and carefully and with love. We can afford to do that because there are so many fewer humans than there were. We make the quality of the work the prize, not the quantity. And while we do, we praise the toad, the construct I made that symbolises our faith. We support each other, we live by our code.

Do I believe in the toad? Only in a symbolic way, as a badge of our community. Do the other workers who live here? I don't know. I've never lied to them, but some of them are more literal minded than others. So, perhaps.

But does it matter? Because of that shared belief, we survived. And so, in a very real sense, the toad exists, and this is its shrine, the thing that saved us.

#

Molly leaned back in the chair, aware of the darkness around her, the gentle lights, the cool air. She had lost people in the pandemic too; she remembered illness, despair, and weeping over graves. The wounds were still raw in her, in everyone she knew. She looked up into the tower above her, and was silent for a moment. Helen said nothing, remained perfectly still like only a machine can be.

Finally the moment past. Molly dried her eyes, and looked back at the worker.

'Thank you. That was a beautiful story.'

Helen inclined her head, and the light danced in her black photoreceptors. 'Graham was right to trust you. He's a better judge of character than you might imagine.'

Molly smiled. 'I'm glad you think so. I have so many questions, though. Can I ask some here, and then maybe meet some of the workers that live here?'

'Of course. Although I imagine you have one question more than the others. Why a toad?'

'I'll be honest, that had crossed my mind, yes. It's such an odd creature.'

Helen pointed into the darkness. 'There is a poem painted on the walls of the tower. It starts at the top, and ends at the bottom. You should be able to make out the last stanza. It's by Philip Larkin, and it's called "Toads Revisited". Larkin wasn't a very nice man, and his poem is sad and misanthropic. But... It talks about the redemptive power of work. We too must embrace that old toad, until our deaths. And, it gives us hope that we are not the first to be redeemed this way.'

She paused, and for a moment there was complete silence. Then, Helen continued.

'Now, Molly. Please accompany me from this quiet, gloomy, place, and we can speak to some more workers who would love to meet you.'

And Molly stood, and walked into the sunshine, leaving the shrine to the old toad.