As I mentioned in the “Love Death + Robots, Volume 3 Review” post over a year ago, I wanted to rewrite part of the “The Very Pulse of the Machine” short film to make it a little more effective in communicating what (I think) was the depiction of choice and risk. There are other themes, naturally, but that was the protagonist, Kivelson, was facing.
This is a very, very rough idea, but it gets the basics across.
This rewrite applies to the film version of the story, not the short story of the same name, by Michael Swanwick, though I believe the film and story versions closely align. Keep in mind Swanwick is an established author with a 40-year long career, and I’m an unpublished nobody.
This part here is a rewrite of the first act:
Astro-prospectors Kivelson and Burton rove across the surface of Io. Now at the tail end of their current outing, they hadn’t secure many promising samples for auction except for a few unusual silicates from the base of a mountain. The sample hints at a large deposit of valuable forsterite crystals underneath the mountain.
Kivelson drives the rover towards their lander, about 25 miles ahead, while Burton sits behind her in the cabin. Burton reads from her tablet the concluding lines of Romeo and Juliet aloud, and notes how elegantly Shakespeare depicted the two warring families’ reconciliation after the “star-cross’d” couple’s suicides. Burton believes this scene gives some meaning to the tragedy. Kivelson scoffs. If Romeo wasn’t so ready to off himself, he would realize Juliet wasn’t actually dead. And Juliet, after awakening to find Romeo dead, just needed someone to smack her out of her obsession.
Burton agrees, but offers that the couple took risks, however foolish, and the payoff could have been greater were the situation just a little but different. “Overthinking can get you killed. Sometimes you just have to switch off your brain and take the plunge,” Burton says.
The rover’s dashboard beeps out: there’s a temperature spike detected deep below the Ionian crust. Kivelson says it’s probably some crustal sulfur agitation, usually not dangerous, but good to keep an eye on because—Burton interrupts her, telling her to stop the rover. Burton spies outside her window a tiny outcropping of rock: an anomaly from the widespread silicate sand they’ve encountered so far in the region.
Here we get a small window into Burton’s life philosophy, which ultimately gets her killed moments later: Burton goes EVA to capture a valuable mantle sample, when the sulfur eruption happens.
And for the climax of the second act:
Kivelson, at a sharp outcropping of a cliff near the rendezvous point, acknowledges the hailing signal from Orbital on her suit’s forearm interface. Her oxygen tank levels are at 10% and dropping rapidly, but that’s more than enough time for a safe extraction.
Dreamily, she watches the speck of Orbital’s spacecraft crest over the peak of a nearby mountain and break through the otherworldly streams of blue. Io had made visible to her the patterned electromagnetic streams that only a machine created long ago could create. A machine that perhaps held the impossibility of a consciousness within it.
“Join,” the voice of the machine tells her. “Merge.”
“What will happen to me?”
“Death. Immortality. Rebirth. Nothing. Unsure. Experiment.”
The valley below, now filled with the glowing blue electromagnetic energy—a phantasmagoric sea of living energy—brightens, as though in invitation.
“This is Orbital. Come in, Kivelson.”
“Go ahead.”
“T-minus 60 seconds until touchdown,” the voice of Orbital crackles in Kivelson’s ear. “Standby for extraction. What’s your status, over?”
“Change of plans, Orbital,” she replies. “Sorry to do this to you, Kevin. Extraction only for Burton’s remains, over.”
“Say again, over,” Orbital shoots back.
“Our conversation is blackboxed on the ship, but I’ll leave my neurochip with Burton, so there won’t be any doubt. We have a mantle sample here in the cannister. Probably enough for you to retire on, if you play it right. Please give Burton a good funeral. She doesn’t have family. Martha Kivelson, out.”
“Wha—”
There was no coming back from this, now. Kivelson cuts the comms link off and ejects the small chip from the side of her helmet, holding all of the communications, bio-readouts, and lunar trajectories since she and Burton started the expedition. She places it in one of Burton’s belt pouches.
Kivelson glances over at the cannister, her sacrificial beast. In a silent moment, she mourns for a comfortable, wealthy future that she will never realize.
“I don’t have family, either,” she says to herself.
“Family,” the machine breathes to Kivelson. “Family. Us.”
“We’ll find out,” Kivelson says, as she rises and steps to the edge of the cliff. “Maybe Burton wasn’t crazy after all.”
She closes her eyes, leans forward, and lets Io’s gravity draw her down to the waiting blue sea of energy filling the valley below. She never hits the ground but keeps falling, feeling her mind being stretched and pulled apart, not losing consciousness but being swallowed and consumed into something else. With eyes still closed she sees all around her, all at once, an environment she could not explain but one she rapidly begins to understand. Beyond, in the cloudy distance of the energetic waters of a machine wrought by a technology long forgotten, the murkiness begins to clear and there emerges a small light. The light spreads; was it getting larger or was she floating closer? Tendrils of the light thread all around her into a cocoon, and something within the light direct before her gently begins to throb: the very pulse of the machine.
In the original story, Kivelson’s struggle is only primal; she’s figuring out a way to survive after the explosion. There is also an accompanying minor conflict in that she has to figure out if she is hallucinating or not, which is resolved (ambiguously) in the end. The ending also has her make a no-brainer choice: she’s going to die anyway, so tossing herself off the cliff into the “sea” she perceives is at the bottom isn’t too weighty of a sacrifice.
In my rewrite, Kivelson scoffs at Burton’s philosophy of taking a greater risk for possibly a greater reward. Burton was able to grab a valuable mantle sample, but at the cost of her life. Kivelson could evacuate and live off the proceeds of the sample for research, so in that sense it would pay off. Through her travel to the extraction point and conversation with Io through Burton’s corpse, she comes to realize that maybe the material gain isn’t as valuable as the possibility of living on past her natural life through merging with Io. Then comes the crucial decision: should Kivelson board and live a guaranteed life of ease and comfort, or take the risk of living on indefinitely with a planet-machine versus committing plain old standard-issue suicide? Even if she wasn’t hallucinating the fantastical visions or the Io conversation, there’s still no certainty of how she will end up after the merge. Io said as much to her.
Kivelson’s fate was only material to the meaning of the story. The real meaning is the question of whether or not Kivelson’s final decision was worth the risk, and that’s up to the individual viewer to decide.