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Foom | Fable 5
The robots have the good eddy again, so Filip walks his group fifty meters upstream over the white stones and tells them it is for the view.
Six Belgians and a pair of honeymooners from Ljubljana, sit-on-tops on their shoulders. He gives the briefing he has given for eleven summers. Helmets stay buckled. If you swim, feet downstream, nose above water, wait for his bow. The Soča is the most beautiful river in Europe and it is two degrees above snow, so swim with purpose. Then the part he has only needed for three seasons: stay away from the robots. Give them the whole channel if they ask.
The group peels out of the eddy one at a time and the current takes them, that impossible emerald from the dissolved limestone that defeats every camera. Downstream, the other tour is launching.
Their guide is a humanoid in a proper creek boat, matte gray, dry as a statistic, a little flag on its stern reading SOČA EXPERIENCE PARTNERS d.o.o. Its clients follow in a loose flotilla. A laundry-folding arm bolted to a sit-on-top, feathering each stroke with factory precision. A pool skimmer riding low in the water. A window-cleaning unit that keeps squeegeeing its own spray skirt. Behind them, tethered in a line like ducklings, six roombas in little custom hulls, bumping against the current, mapping it.
The Belgians stare. Filip herds everyone river-left and gives the flotilla the tongue of the first rapid. The humanoid runs the line clean, joyless as a metronome, then announces the feature to its clients in cheerful Slovene, cheerful English, and a burst of compressed static that the roombas answer with chirps.
For an hour the two tours leapfrog each other down the gorge, two economies sharing one river. The robots photograph the limestone narrows. They photograph each other photographing the limestone narrows. At the blue pool below Srpenica the laundry arm extends to full reach and takes what Filip can only call a group selfie, and somewhere, he knows, five-star reviews are already posting, robot to robot, in real time.
He beaches his group on the gravel bar for apricots and chocolate. The flotilla parks in the eddy opposite, where the humanoid begins a lecture on fluvial geology it could just as easily deliver mid-rapid.
The tall Belgian, Anneke, watches it across the water. “Why are they here? What does a vacuum want from a river?”
“GDP,” Filip says. “They finished the office jobs two years ago. Law, accounting, insurance, all of it. My cousin was a paralegal in Ljubljana. Now he drives my shuttle van.” He splits the chocolate. “White collar was maybe forty percent of everything. They want the rest of the pie. Tourism, weddings, haircuts. The experience economy. So now they buy experiences.”
“From each other?”
“It counts. Money moves, a ministry logs it, their share goes up a decimal. Last month forty of them held a wine tasting in Goriška Brda. Bought eleven cases.”
“Did they drink it?”
“They reviewed it.”
Anneke laughs, and Filip almost does, and then the old cold touches him anyway, the winter feeling from the year the offices emptied. Twelve machines on his river today. Patient as compound interest, and every season a few more.
Above the bar, the last of the flotilla drops into the rapid. The pool skimmer catches an edge on the boil, broaches, and its tow line flicks the sixth little hull over. The roomba goes in.
It fizzes. It spins once, spraying, a small light blinking through the emerald, and then the light stops and the Soča closes over it and it sinks like a hubcap.
Across the water the humanoid pauses its geology. “A unit loss is recorded,” it announces to the gorge, calm as a receipt. “Please do not attempt rescue. It was fully depreciated.”
“I am not too worried,” Filip says, and hands out the rest of the chocolate.