Stranded

by Mags L. Halliday

Artwork by Doan Trang

Hannah was focusing on Reggie, who was in pieces on the hotel bar, when every phone in the place pinged, and people groaned. That was the ferry cancelled, then. The icy rain was already hammering the windows, hurled by high winds. She'd best head back to the watch house soon, but she ordered a burger first. 

"Hannah?" 

Caitlin was standing at the bar. Her loose dark hair had threads of blue in it now, but she was otherwise no different to when Hannah had last seen her some fifteen years back. She even had a backpack by her boots and a bulky tote on her shoulder. They'd taken the same ferry to the mainland that day. Caitlin at the back rail, watching till the island vanished. Hannah at the front, impatient for the mainland to arrive. 

Hannah slotted Reggie's claws back in and clicked his exoskeleton into place. She righted him so his eight legs rested on the bar. Two green LEDs came on at the end of his stubby antenna, and the robot bobbed twice. Then Reggie danced briefly from side to side, snapping his pincers. Caitlin squeaked, then laughed nervously. 

"I'll never get used to AI bots," she said, taking a seat. "I always think they're watching me." 

Hannah latched the toolbelt back onto Reggie's upper carapace. "Reggie here is just an autonomous bot. He can do his own problem solving but only within the parameters I set. Unless you're a turbine or a cable, he's just not interested in you." 

Reggie had broken a swimming leg during routine work a couple of weeks back. The parcel of parts had arrived at the post office within the hotel yesterday, so as the forecast worsened, Hannah had driven over to get it. She'd need Reggie ready to deploy tonight. 

Caitlin ordered a coffee and checked her phone. She'd have to walk back to her mam's croft across the strand. Hannah knew the place, of course. There was no way she could cross the causeway on foot in this. The watch house was as close as Caitlin would be able to get. 

"Mam said you were back," Caitlin offered. She'd come over from the mainland since she was in the area for work. She'd hoped that face to face she could convince her mam to move to the mainland. 

Hannah snorted. There was no way that was happening. Caitlin's mam was a prepper. She'd moved to the isle, Caitlin strapped to her back, to wait out the millennium. She'd never been seen on the ferry since the day she arrived. 

As Hannah started on her burger, she watched Caitlin pull a notebook from her tote, along with some knitting. Caitlin worked some rows, flicking between the two yarns to create a small pattern. The notebook's gridded paper was marked with dots and dashes. 

"That's like the punch cards we had in the archives at uni," Hannah remarked.  

Caitlin grinned. "The peerie patterns all use just two yarn colours on any row. It really is just binary coding, you know. If you can do that," she pointed to Reggie, "you could do this." 

Hannah instinctively leaned back. She'd left to get away from the crofters, the crafters, and the back-to-the-landers. She'd trained in robotics, as far from her family's past as she could get. And then, unsettled in Taipei, she'd seen the posting back on the isle.  

Once, the submarine cables had brought dirty energy from the mainland, electricity lighting up the old cottages. One winter, when Hannah and Caitlin were young, the cable had been damaged, and the islanders had switched to their back-up generators. For five months. In winter. Vulnerable people had been moved to live in the hotel to stop them freezing before the repair ship came. 

Now a swathe of the mainland depended on the clean power from the turbine field west of the isle. If a cable was damaged by storms or hostile forces, Hannah would deploy her robot consortium to repair it in days, not months. 

The lights in the bar flickered. Hannah scooped Reggie up. 

"That's my cue: let's go." 

Hannah drove her truck carefully up past the standing stone and around the main peak. The rain splattered hard on the windows. Caitlin, in the passenger seat, held Reggie hesitantly. As they reached the highest point, Hannah looked towards the mainland, a thin darker line on the horizon. And the faint lights of the nearest port went out. 

At the watch house, the robots were restless in their covered pen, dancing from side to side. The sea was crashing in, a stormy high tide thundering onto the rocks. Hannah set Reggie down with the others and unlocked the watch house. She shed her waterproof by the door and quickly hit the buttons that would release the consortium of robots. They raced away, their tiny lights quickly lost under the churning sea. 

Hannah double-checked the automatic diagnostics and confirmed the robot crabs' mission to them. The consortium would take perhaps an hour to reach the break in the mainland line. Caitlin had followed her in and was tidying up the dripping coats. She offered to get some coffee on, and Hannah settled into her control chair. 

The readings showed the crabs had made it to the break, so she flipped on the live camera feed she'd installed into Reggie that morning. Caitlin brought over a chair and two mugs of coffee. A small, greyscale image appeared, and they could see Reggie's two claws. As other robot crabs were repairing the high voltage core of the cable, Reggie was working on the outer fibre optics.  

He had two fine cables in his claws, different shades of grey suggesting different colours, and was programmed to weave them together so they formed a sheath around the core. 

Then Hannah saw it, and saw Caitlin lean forward as she saw it too.  

Reggie was weaving the strands together neatly, methodically, and in the peerie pattern Caitlin had shown her in the bar. 

© 2025 Mags L. Halliday