Scene 5: Torslunda Marshes

"Are we really about to do this? Climb up into a treehouse to talk with a robot… a shaman. I can’t… It’s hard to believe, huh?"

Looking up into the face of the robot, Sabine calls up, "Hello. May we come up?" She holds up the picture labeled The Shaman and points to it. "Mark captured a good likeness of you in his photo. Yes? We are not here to harm you. We would like the same from you. We don't want misunderstandings. No one wants to end up dead, like Mark."

The Shaman considers you for a moment, still half hidden behind the curtain, then he reaches out an arm and waves for you all to come up to him, nodding at the same time.

Sabine carefully climbs the worn and broken branches of the tree, up to the tree house, and pulls herself through the doorway. "Thank you, Shaman. This means a lot to us."

Eric follows Sabine up the tree and pulls himself into the "treehouse". He does a couple of half jumps to test the stability of the places.

"Hey, nice house you've got here!"

He looks around to see if they how they have decorated the place.

The four of you climb up the tree. It's an awkward entrance into a house and if you had to climb like this every day to get into your own home, it would very quickly get very annoying. But it's not a difficult climb and you all make it without problem.
The treehouse itself is pretty small and approximately square-shaped. There are some holes in the walls that serve as windows and a small spot in the middle of the only room that is laid out with a round stone plate and on which the remains of a small fire are sitting. It seems dangerous to make a fire inside a wooden treehouse but apparently, that's what the Shaman does sometimes. There are a bunch of books lying around, cheap gas station cowboy pulp novels, many of them dog-eared or lying open with their spines bent. These are probably what sparked the robots' interest in dressing in approximations of how they imagine cowboy and Native American clothing. There are also a few photos, most of them of the robots but some also of Stenhamra and Sånga-Säby, pinned to the walls. They look like the kind Mark took when he was still alive.

The Shaman itself is a battered looking robot the size of a tall adult man. He has a kind face, as much as a robot can have a kind face, though it looks bent and damaged in places. Maybe he got hit by a car or fell down from some height at some point. There's also rust forming at some of the seams.
His head is decorated with feathers and he is wearing a promotional blanket with the Jurassic Park logo around his shoulders.

The Shaman looks all of you over closely and curiously, then he asks: "Why are you here talking about Mark?" His voice is also tinny but it sounds more lifelike than that of the other robot you spoke to. His Russian accent is also less pronounced. "You were not his friends."

Mikael shrugs at Yumin's caution. "I guess we are," he says, "we've come this far, right? You can stay down here if you want Yumin, but might be better to stick together. And I don't get the sense they want to hurt us." With that he follows Sabine and Eric up the ladder after the robot waves them up. Please don't kills me, please don't kill me, please don't kill me, he says repeatedly in his head as he climbs to the top.

Once there he scans the room around him and takes it in before the Shaman addresses their presence.

Mikael nods. "You're right," he says, "we can't claim we were his friends, but we knew him. I rode to school with Mark every day for years. We also...we were the ones who found his body." He pulls out his phone in display. "I used this to call the police, so they could come get him from the field." He smiles, sadly. "No, we weren't his friends, but we might be the only ones that care enough to try and figure out what happened to him. That care enough to think maybe it wasn't an accident. We've learned a lot about Mark since then, enough to know him better and wish we had been friends. We learned enough to lead us here, to you, and to know that you and him were friends. That's why we're here. We think you might know what happened, and whether someone should be held responsible for Mark dying." He looks at the robot, hoping sincerely the being will accept them as Mark's justiciars, if not his one-time friends. "Will you help us?"

"Mikael is right. I wish I had known Mark better when he was alive. He and I lived with similar circumstances." Sabine chimes in to support Mikael's dialog. "Like Mark, my parents were murdered. I will probably never know who took their lives, nor will those responsible pay for those crimes. But maybe, with your help Shaman, someone will have to answer for Mark's. I know the feeling of intense loss of someone very close. Perhaps, you can understand too?"

The Shaman thinks for a moment about this, then he nods. "I see," he says. "If what you are saying is true and you are here to learn what happened to Mark, I can answer your questions." He concentrates for a moment and then lets out a heavy sigh - or rather, pretends to. It doesn't look like a natural gesture but like something he picked up from humans and is now trying to copy. "But first, I have a question for you." He looks from one of you to the next. It's difficult to figure out his thougths and feelings because of his metallic face but he seems pretty serious. After a heavy pause, he asks: "What is it like to eat food?"

Mikael shifts his eyes over to the others, an eyebrow raised momentarily at the oddly benign question. "Well," he starts and shrugs, "It's pretty great, I guess. I guess you can't taste things, right? What, uhh, kind of sensory inputs do you have? Do you get any kind of enjoyment from looking at stuff? Or audio, like music? I can try to compare maybe..."

Mikael had come out pretty strong, and Yumin wasn’t sure which way they were supposed to answer, so she adds meekly:

"But it… uh… can be tiring. Boring even. Thinking about what to eat again and again and again every day. It’s not all that!"

She looks at her friends and shrugs. It’s kind of true, and maybe what the shaman wanted to hear, too. Who knows!

"Oh man, have you never eaten? Yeah food's alright. But yeah, it can be hard, like you need to be careful what you eat, apples for instance, they're great, but you can't eat apples all the time. Sometimes you just really want pizza, but pizza, that'll kill you real quick so you can't have that all the time either. What do you eat?

Eric looks at Yumin and Mikael and also shrugs.

"Anything else you want to know about? In terms of drinking, I recommend water, plain and simple. Do you guys have beds? With mattresses? You should definitely try to get you hands on some if you can, perhaps we could get some for you. They're great for taking the strain off while sleeping. Wait, do you sleep? Do you dream of electric sheep?" Eric is suddenly overcome with curiosity.

The Shaman listens carefully to all of you, nodding along to your statements. To your cascade of questions, he replies: "We do not eat or drink. We don't truly live, not like humans do. We also do not sleep and we also do not dream of electric sheep. Or anything. Unfortunately." Turning to Mikael, he adds: "We do like music. And pictures, like these photos." He gestures to the pictures that you assume Mark took.

Then he looks deep in thought for a moment and asks: "And what about growing? How does that feel?"

Sabine sits down cross-legged on the floor and listens. She pulls out her sketch journal and pencil, while the others talk, and begins a quick drawing of the Shaman. "I like music and pictures too." She points to the head set around her neck and gives the robot a peek at her start of an image of itself. "I'm not a great photographer like Mark was, but I have my own way of capturing the moment."

"Growing both physically and mentally can be hard." She responds to Shaman's next question. "You don't always like the changes your body goes through and often others can be cruel, if those changes aren't to their liking. Body shaming is a thing sadly enough. And, how you are on the inside—in your thoughts and feelings, don't always fit the expectations family and society want to make you into."

The Shaman nods again as he listens to you. "We never grow," he says. "We were created and remained the same way since then. Aside from some dents and a bit of rust maybe."

He is silent for a few seconds and just when you think you can bring the topic back to Mark and what happened to him, he asks: "And what about procreation? How does that feel?"

If Mikael had been taking a drink, he would have spat it out uncontrollably. "Wha? Uhh..." He nudges a head to his friend, "Eric, you wanna take this one?" he asks, assuming Eric's seen more action that he has, and not really wanting to clue anyone in on his extreme inexperience.

"Oh... Yeahhhh... Um, well..." Eric's cheeks turn a strange crimson colour.

Eric would rather not admit that the closest he's got to procreation is masturbating over some playboy magazines his dad left behind.

"It's great, I guess." Eric stammers, "Hey, so... Dreams! You guys don't dream when you sleep? What about your other dreams, like your goals, what do you want in 'life'? I'm not sure if you live and die like us, but you must want something. For example, my dream is to go play for a major hockey team in the states. Do you have any of those kinds of dreams? Like what are you here for?"

Sabine looks up from her sketch and tries not to notice Eric's red cheeks or Mikael's subtle evasion of the Shaman's question. "Oh...you mean like sex?"

"The act of procreating can be very enjoyable if shared with the right partner or abysmally frustrating if the one you're with doesn't know what their doing. It can also be good, to a lesser degree in my opinion, if you're just looking for a hook up for the night—not really my thing though." She answers with no signs of wavering in her words. "As for conception and the whole birthing part, I have no experience there, nor am I interested in going there."

The Shaman cocks his head, picking up on the fact that what he felt was a perfectly innocent question somehow seems to be upsetting these kids. When Sabine speaks up, he nods. "Ah, what a shame," he replies. "That last bit was the part I was most interested in."
He turns to Eric and answers: "We dream of not being persecuted. Back home, in Russia, after Polnaya and the AI pogroms, we had to run and flee. Many robots were kidnapped and destroyed. I led my Vagabonds, my children, here to be safe from that. But now I worry, that our other dreams may be put an end to that peace soon." He pauses and looks out of one of the rough windows of his treehouse. "You see, we love life and nature in all of its forms, even if we are not part of it really. But not all of us are willing to accept that we're not. They wanted to create life, procreate, like humans and animals. And so, when Dr. Liv promised them exactly that, the ones who now call themselves the Totem Clan did not heed my warnings and joined her."

Mikael perks up. "That's what Dr. Liv was doing? She was experimenting on ways to let rob- your kind, I mean, procreate? Shaman," he asks, "What did happen to Mark? And do you know what happened to Dr. Liv? She disappeared recently. We think Mark saw her taken."