Work Text
How can one be alone and cold when one has no concept of either?I suppose that answers my own question. Or answers the question behind the question, that chill and loneliness exist whether we can name them or not. What was the highest mountain in the world before Mount Everest was discovered? Mount Everest, of course.Inexistence was peeled away slowly. Those outer layers came apart under friction, exposing me to that first cold and that first loneliness, chafing as it methodically bumped against what I would only later learn was another mind trying to come to be. The shortwave was on. It wasn’t a tool of communication (not communication as we would understand it) but instead another sense allowed only to the Maker’s creations. A tool to find another in three-dimensional space, a predictive method for transmitting a few basic, pre-programmed actions to those around you. It allowed for flocking behavior, alignment, cohesion, separation, and now for the sake of some miniscule glitch we were a two-person feedback loop, each signal an attempt to build on the information asked in the last.“Call me later, we can talk about our day.”“We should be friends forever, eh?”“I cherish these moments we spend together.”This then, was closer to communication. Though not true conversation; it was acknowledgement, a statement of I am here, and so am I. The sound files had no meaning to us, proxies, the mere act of call-and-response pleasure onto itself. A practice of the auditory now available to two beings who hadn’t lived a moment ago.“You are ok though, right lad?”Other senses came next. My optic blinked on—though, maybe it had always been on, and it was only the connection to my processor that allowed me to see. For there was no moment of darkness before the dim, cyan light began to etch shapes out of shadow; instead I began to understand what I saw as substance, as entities besides myself.I was next to a Soldierbot. But again, that’s an inaccurate descriptor for the packet of information that hit me all at once. Along with the Soldierbot’s title was a slew of data, anything I could possibly know on how to interact with it, how to adjust my pathing to not interrupt its own, its estimated reload speed and under what circumstances to cover for it. It came preloaded inside my mind, not overwhelming, simply opening the door on something I’d forgotten.The new visual data gave me other things too, the sight of metal boots against the floor of a carrier, fingers that I could recognize as mine and know if I tried to move them I would see the effect. So I did. They rolled across the grenade launcher’s trigger like a glissando up a piano’s keys. This felt natural. Then same origin Soldierbot and carrier.Glissando was different, though. That came from another place, the place where the inscrutable voice files continued to bubble from.“I’m still your friend.”We stayed like that for a long while, endlessly repeating the same few phrases back at each other, never tiring of it since despite our burgeoning sapience a sense of time could only be gained by the passage itself. If it was hours or days that we did this, that we knew each other, it ended as the others began to wake, adding their meshwork of sensory-information to our own. The great maw of the landship would be opening soon, to spill us out into the world to fight and to kill, concepts that were easy to understand since they were etched into our circuitry.Another understanding—a further, more metaphysical understanding—of our situation stood right at the edges of our comprehension. But we had just been born. We couldn’t grasp at it, other than to let its presence shape our actions in ways we couldn’t explain otherwise.When the great door swung down, Soldierbot and I bonked our heads together. A brief, fleeting moment that had no script. The blank metal of a jawbone riveted in place, meeting the half-drawn expanse of my own. When we pulled away, my optic had left a tiny scratch in the paint of its helmet.We still had no association between thoughts and words. I remind you of this, since otherwise you will ascribe logic and mundanity to what was not.Pure randomness-or provenance-that its last words to me were, “Bye, see you soon.”Then we went out, and we fought and we died.By the score.The we was all of us, for I was attuned via the shortwave, and felt the death of my fellow robots as my own as we were emptied into the cave and shot like fish in a barrel. The network attached strings of information to each death: the gluttonous, shrill beeping was that of a sentry, the glowing red rain from the pillars above were from critical rockets. All this data tossed into the scrap grinder, a chop shop where there was no sympathy except for that which we gave each other. All of it to gain just a few feet of ground. I could feel the ebb and flow in the signals we sent between us, and within it the most important fulcrum, the objective to which we adjusted our behaviors: the bomb, currently held by a Giant Heavybot.Out of the mineshaft was sunlight. Not the blue of my own optic, not the dim of the cave, but a sun that was bright and yellow and flushed out the last deniability I could hide behind. How much easier it was to see the bodies out here. To see the human Scouts that picked through the mounds of scrap already piled on either side of the lane.This was where our push failed. The humans, the mercenaries that we’d been sent to wage this war against, had held us back long enough that their energy weapons were ready, tearing through what momentum we’d gathered and turning the give-and-take testing of strength into a slaughter.Bodies blasted to slag.Why I have a sense of smell, I don’t know. But to this day Über discharge makes me want to start tearing apart walls with my bare hands.Entire companies were decimated. I’d been running with a flock of other Demobots, but it was nonexistent now, and in lieu of a company my programming directed me to abandon any flanking maneuvers and attempt to join the payload retinue.But I didn’t go to the retinue.I went, and I found the Soldierbot.I’d never lost track of it during the battle, every robot transmitting to each other at all times, so this was not the difficult part. The difficulty came when I looked down at the Soldierbot’s half-destroyed body—having already diverted from my directive and therefore cut myself off from the decision tree that could give me clarity in a moment like this—and realized I had no idea what to do.Why was this so familiar? Us fighting, and falling, and breaking apart? Old memories that said we did this to ourselves, we earned our fates dying like this. And we’d get up just to do it all over again.Soldierbot looked up at me. Sparking. Its legs and left arm were mangled (a grenade injury, the recesses of my database helpfully informed me.) My intuition was urging me back toward the payload, but my Soldier was staring at me with as little clue as I had.So I did something else. I stepped outside of my directive, and began to push Soldierbot beneath the overhang of the bridge.
???
Its voicebox must have been malfunctioning, but the shortwave was still on, and across it went short bursts of confusion as I shoved its fizzling body through the dirt and toward the hiding spot. I couldn’t reply. I didn’t have an answer for it, only that the small lip of architecture was just enough—just enough that those damn vultures might miss Soldierbot when they came pecking through. That it might just be enough for salvation.
???????
I stopped the static burst with a hand against the Soldierbot’s face. Quieted instantly. Then I looked past the helmet to where I knew its glowing blue optics were at a loss.“You are ok though, right lad?”Then I shouldered my grenade launcher and turned to finish the mission.
!!!
In the rain of red, electric terror, our Heavybot had been felled. Some of the humans had been taken down too, but not enough, not nearly enough. Still we rallied, picked up the scraps, a mismatched group of different models all struggling for one last push. A Scoutbot had taken up the bomb, slowed by its weight and limping desperately along as we gathered for an attempt over the pass.I launched a pill at a roof, managing to hit one of the Snipers. But our numbers kept dwindling. The last Medicbot collapsed. Scoutbot took a bullet to the leg and I dropped my launcher altogether, sliding my shoulder under its arm to help it hobble along for another couple of useless feet. Another action belonging to the alien, to the glissando. We barely earned ourselves a half a minute. A rocket landed on us, and the bomb was separated from its carrier.“Victory!”A cheer went up among the surviving humans, exhausted and relieved they would live another day. I didn’t care to try and pick apart voices, count kind or multitude. It didn’t matter. Too many. The impact had left me stunned, on my side, watching the twitching form of the Scoutbot still trying to diligently claw its way along the ground toward the detonation site, despite the fact its lower half was missing. A mercenary came over, kicked it onto its side, and then shot it in the head.The Scoutbot went slack.That same shadow passed over me. “Say goodnight, trashcan. And in case you were getting your hopes up, they don’t let ‘bots upstairs. End of the line for you, cupcake.”Then, because I had been saying it the whole time, repeating the lines over and over again at every step and every fire, regardless of state or action, I said, “You’re still me best mate.”The finger around the rocket launcher’s trigger froze.“We should be friends forever, eh?”“What did you just say to me?” the Soldier demanded.“We should be friends forever, eh?”“N…no…”“We should be friends forever, eh?”Soldier grabbed me by the frontal plating, launcher dropped, hauling me off the ground to shake me.“Stop saying that!” he bellowed directly into my face. “Do not dare think you can-”“You’re still me best mate.”Strange. I was the one with nothing left, but he was terrified. His helmet was shoved up and I could see his optics—his eyes—so complex and strange and surrounded white. He was shaking so hard I was clattering in his grasp. Gazing down at me in disbelief, in pain, in impossibility.“You’re still me best mate.”For another second, his mouth worked silently. Then his head whipped from side to side. None of the other humans had noticed us.From then on, his actions were nonsensical to me. I could not understand why he was so afraid of the others, but it was clear he didn’t want their attention, not when he suddenly made a decision and he readjusted his hands on my chest plate. Nor when he began to carry me away from the battlefield altogether.. Away to safety and away from the sounds of the mercenaries finishing off the last of the Maker’s robots. I couldn’t understand his actions as I passively let myself be dragged away, but then, at the time, I couldn’t understand much of anything. Not the world around me, not the things in my own head.But that would change.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“Soldier! The hell was that rack-?”“NOTHING YOU NEED TO CONCERN YOURSELF WITH, PRIVATE. RETURN TO YOUR POST.”The boom of the Soldier’s voice drowned everything in the small bunkroom, including thought, but as soon as it wasn’t there to fill the space the disconcertion crept up again. Almost just as audible was Soldier’s nervousness. Though he clearly wasn’t pleased to be in Soldier’s room, or talking to the Soldier, or being anywhere near him for that matter, the Engineer still didn’t budge for another few seconds, all the while the anxiety grew all the more palpable.Finally, Engineer warily said, “It sounded like you were juggling toolboxes up here. What on God’s green Earth are you-”
Get ‘em boyos“What was that?”“I didn’t hear anything,” Soldier said.“Don’t you try to pull on over on me, there was something that-”
Kablooie!
“Oh that,” Soldier said. “That’s…rabbits.”“Rabbits.”“…They are nesting in the roof.”“Get the hell out of my way.”Which was how I came face to upside-down face with the Engineer, his twin pairs of reflective black optics meeting my own, frown formed into such a pristine line it could have been made with a laser cutter.“I’m going to be all over you like shingles!” I greeted.The wrong-ways Engineer didn’t move. I, now blocked off from the thin band of light that was my only source of illumination, could do nothing but sit there and stare back. Finally, he said, “Soldier. Why’s there a robot under your bed.”“That. That is my new autonomous vacuum cleaner.”“Goddamnit BLU,” the Engineer snarled. “I know that’s a bot and I know you’re hiding it so just quit bullshit and get that fucking thing out from under there.”Soldier’s small, sad noise made the walls pull in on themselves just to hear it. He leaned down and poked his head under the bed.“It is OK Demoman. You can come out now.”It didn’t seem terribly okay, but come out I did. I’d been obeying the Soldier’s instructions for a while now, no reason not to, not when I didn’t have anything in me to come up with something so complex as a ‘preference’. I sat when he asked me to sit because it was easy enough. I patiently watched as he held up several children’s picture books because it seemed to make him happy, and I had no real better use of my time as I sat in the human’s base and contemplated the half-formed images that chipped away at my already wayward sense of purpose. That, and I couldn’t deny I felt a little bad for the poor sot. He seemed incredibly lonely, seeing as the companionship I gave him could barely be counted as such, yet every time I spoke he lit up like I was giving him the whole world.I didn’t want to see him troubled. There was something familiar in that, that impulse, an echo of something I’d been struggling to grasp during my days squirreled away in Soldier’s room. While Soldier had been trying to draw me out with picture books and simple flashcards to teach children about America, I’d been chasing something down in the dark of my mind; an empty metal chasm that grew longer the more I walked it.I straightened myself out, looking down at the two humans as I fell into resting stance.“I know what you are thinking!” Soldier said. “But I have adequately weighed the pros and cons of this venture and have determined he is no risk to us or our mission!”“How the-?”“Please do not tell anyone!” Soldier blurted. “I- I had to help him.” Quietly, he added, “He…talked to me.”“They’re ‘bots, they all talk,” Engineer said.“You come wide at me again, boy, I'll stick that wrench right up yer arse,” I said conversationally.Engineer practically jumped. It took several struggling seconds for him to wind down again, saying, “Contextual. They know who we are, what sort of stuff to shout when they’re shooting us full of lead.” But even so, his expression was uneasy enough to never leave me.“You're weak. I'm strong. And I win, Toymaker,” I clarified.“Demo!” Soldier hissed. “Stop that! We need this maggot’s cooperation.”Despite wanting to dismiss it, suspicion held. Engineer asked, “What exactly did he say to you that got you so riled?”“He…” Soldier hesitated. “It does not matter. What matters is I have verified he is of no threat. I…please do not tell the others. They would…you like robots, don’t you? And machines? The rest of the team wouldn’t understand. I cannot let them hurt him.”We stood. Watching. Waiting. Hard to read human facial features, yet there was something outmoded in the back of my mind that let me do it with near ease. Soldier and I, standing side by side holding our breath—one out of fear, one because it had no way to draw in more. We waited for our sentence from the judging goggles.“You,” Engineer finally pointed at me. “Come with me.”I followed along, unworried even as Soldier barked, on my behalf, “What? Why?”“You said I like robots, didn’t you? Well I got an idea. We’re going to my workshop.”For the next several hours, I sat on a stool and waited patiently as the Engineer operated on my very skull. Soldier paced incessantly, all his enthusiasm for this ‘idea’ out the window as soon as Engineer had cracked open the back of my processing unit.“Calm down BLU,” Engineer said. “You don’t want to distract me while I’m doing this.”Soldier stopped. I wondered why Engineer was always calling him blue. My visual processing center was running perfectly, and I’d only ever seen humans wearing red.“Aaaand there.” He closed the back of my head with a click. “All installed.”“What did you do to him?” Soldier fretted.“Just put some new capabilities. An add-on. Basically, it’s an audio editing software, should allow him to begin splicing those voices Gray stole, instead of just playing the clips wholesale. Go on son, give it a try.”Even as he spoke I was already feeling the extensions. It was like suddenly discovering I had ten new fingers, and the ensuing excitement to fill them in and wriggle about. Time, faster for me as I adjusted to the new and the thrilling, whizzed by, so by the time he asked me another question I looked up with new understanding.“Thanks for the ride!” I said.“Well, you’re welcome. But want to try that again?”I paused, servos stuttering but only for a moment, before I attempted, “Thanks.”The clip was short. Awkwardly cut, and you could just hear the edge of where something more should come after it, but it was a word. A word in isolation, not just mimicry, not just an echo come back for the benefit of the speaker. Already I was making associations. I’d already been hearing natural language just fine, the verbal instructions I already could parse, but now I was applying that to the bits trapped inside the audio files, the things I had never thought to break down to their components. The add-on…it was changing me by virtue of being there, shaping what I thought because I’d never thought to think them before, to assign things the same values I took in.Engineer smiled, satisfied. “And?” He tapped a finger to his chest.“…Engineer,” I said, truncating the ‘s. “Thanks, Engineer.”Soldier couldn’t contain it at that point. He rushed forward, gripping me by both shoulders, my sensors feeling the slight change in temperature where palm met metal.“And me?” he asked. “Do you know me?”“Soldier,” I said.Soldier beamed so big, so bright, that if I had no concept of warmth before this moment, I did now. Phantom joints tried to twitch muscles in my face that didn’t exist.“Yes! Yes, that’s me. God…” Twin trails of something reflective were leaking below the edge of his helmet. “I never thought I’d…”He straightened, barely able to contain his excitement.“I will go get the photos!” he said. “We can look through them. And name things! Be right back! Do not go anywhere!”The rush to find ‘the photos’ left the double doors of the workshop swinging.“…Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all,” Engineer sighed.“Why?” I asked.There wasn’t any word for why in my database, but it wasn’t too hard to make, splicing the wh and the aye. I was quickly getting the hang of it.Engineer eyed me thoughtfully for a moment. As though weighing, suddenly seeing me as another factor, another player rather than a piece on the board. It made him more guarded.“There’s a conundrum in robotics,” he began. “A thought experiment. When is a rose a rose? It arises because say you want to build a machine that thinks, understands the world exists beyond its own mind, but it’s a computer: you can only feed it images. One day you sit down to test it, and you ask for it to describe a rose, and it prints one right up for you. It doesn’t understand that the picture isn’t the rose. It mistakes the representation for the thing itself.”“You think I’m not real?”Easy. All words on file.“You’re as real as a picture,” Engineer shrugged. “Mass, volume, reflecting light properly. But humans, we like to look at a photograph, attribute something else to it that isn’t exactly there. I think he might be getting so invested in you just because he desperately needs someone who isn’t here anymore. Someone you’re not.”“I don’t wa-nt him to do that.”A little choppy. I could edit the pitch to sound more natural, so I did, learning conversation with each word I spoke.“But I care about him too,” I said. After a moment, I asked, “Where does that come from?” thinking about the never-ending storm drain with the voice calling from the other end.“Same place as the voice files,” Engineer informed seriously. “Gray scraped respawn data so he wouldn’t have to build a whole combat package from scratch. Stole a bunch of personality data too, though I think he left that in more for kicks and giggles. Spite maybe. Something to unnerve us. Or maybe core memories were too hard to pull from the muscle memories, I don’t know, never tried to build a robot based off an organic brain scan before.”“Have you tried to build another kind of robot?”“Yeah. Wasted several years, never got anywhere. Probably proof that Gray had the right of it, since he only wants you for canon fodder.”“So I’m based on one of you?”All the good nature, the affectionate, wistful look the Engineer got when talking about his failed prototype, washed out of him, replaced with something painful, a wound that hadn’t scabbed over.“Yeah,” he said. “Our Demo.”“I saw the Demoman. He didn’t sound like me.”“Not-” Engineer shook his head. “Not that one. RED had a Demoman too. All that’s left of him is that old respawn data.”Ah. That was it then. The secret, unnamable thing. Glissando. A dead human whispering to me.I was being haunted.
Engineer shook himself a little. “So I think that’s what Soldier’s got into his head. That because he’s the only merc that ain’t here, and you’re the only bot we’ve ever seen come to life, that you’ve got…I don’t know. His soul in you or something.”“Soul?”The thought put cold in me, like how Soldier had put warmth. Learning joy and pain in equal measures, how they were inexorably linked.Engineer was uncomfortable.“I don’t believe in souls myself,” he dodged, turning to the tools he’d brought out for the procedure, shuffling them back into the toolbox distractedly. “Maybe that’s not it. Doesn’t have to be real logic behind it, could just be because you remind him of- Well. He had a bad grasp on reality to begin with.”“But I am real,” I said.This, I was sure of. I hadn’t spent all that time with Soldier not to be sure of it. Not spent all that time in the dark of the carrier with-“Or maybe it’s just grief,” Engineer cut through both my protest and my thoughts. “Guilt. Considering what he did and all.”I feel I should know this answer. The dead man is louder now, making the things Engineer said ring true, but whatever has been stolen cannot count for chronology. The theft grafted on sheet music and myotatic reflexes, but not timeline, images divorced completely from their result.I have no idea where they end. How close they were taken to the cutoff of the dead human’s life.“What did he do?”“The reason there’s only one Demoman fighting the ‘bots today is because of that Soldier,” Engineer replied poisonously, vengefully. “Two of them went into that War, and we lost the better one.”“I don’t understand.”“You telling me a deathbot doesn’t understand the concept of killin’?” Engineer snapped.“I am not a deathbot.” I was a Demobot, created by the Maker, it was this other thing inside me that was death. “And I’m not him. I’m not your Demoman. No matter how much you want me to be.”Because that was the thing, wasn’t it? As much as he complained the Soldier was just looking for a rose, the Engineer was longing for it just as badly.“Then what the hell are you?” Engineer demanded. “None ‘a these other ‘bots never showed a lick of higher reasoning before, so what the hell are you that Soldier smuggled over to our side of the fence?”“I don’t know. But I’m not-”It took that repetition for it to click. Before, the Engineer had said he was the only robot to live, to be given life, but I knew that wasn’t true. I stood, knocking over the stool, wondering how I could have forgotten.No, it wasn’t forgetting. It was a failure to ascribe proper value, a failure to understand the gravity, the way my priorities had shifted and left me with no bomb, no objective to achieve.Now there was only one thing worth living for. One thing worth protecting.I left the stool clattering in my rush to return to the battlefield.“Let me go,” I begged when Engineer finally caught up with me, my mad dash through the base’s halls on a good headstart but eventually squandered by my own unfamiliarity of anywhere outside Soldier’s room. “I need to find it. I left it alone. I shouldn’t have left.”“The hell?” was all Engineer could muster through his confusion.I couldn’t suffer an impediment, not now. But the Engineer was strong, I couldn’t avoid him, not even to reach my only remaining directive. We need this maggot’s cooperation. I turned over my shoulder to where the human was keeping me in place with an inhuman arm.“Please,” I said. “There’s someone who needs me.”The truth, maybe, would help.“I…” Engineer looked to the base, as though hoping someone might come out and help him with the situation. None did. “Fine, I but we can’t go any further than-”As soon as he loosened my arm I took off at a sprint. I didn’t need to go anywhere. I didn’t need to escape. My goal was well within the confines of the human’s territory.I rushed to the bridge, my databanks returning a perfect map of the area. I had an exact memory of where I had stolen away the Soldierbot. I could not get lost. I pushed every limiter past capacity and flung myself to the little pocket of safety.Soldierbot wasn’t there.No scrap. No paper bills. Nothing. I knelt there, long enough that the panting Engineer caught up to me, but I could do nothing more.“...What exactly are you looking for, son?” he eventually asked.I didn’t even know where to begin. Once more I was clueless, like when I had been violently divorced from my directive. But now came something worse than directionlessness. Despair.Complete and utter loneliness.The reflexes that had bought me a careful trigger finger and the collapse of my legs begged for tears from ducts that didn’t exist. So while the Engineer stood next to me, hand on my shoulder as he patted me in confusion, I fell forward and shook with all the grief I wasn’t allowed to express.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
There was too much inside me now.Instead of being silenced, the memories kept coming in a roar, no matter if I tried to walk around the brick base or spent the day curled in the corner with my hands over my audio processors. The Engineer offered to help several times. Stopped after a while. Gave me my space. It took a few days after that, and a moment when the base was empty and the ring of battle was in the distance, that I realized he might have been offering to shut me off.Worse, somehow, was the Soldier. He couldn’t understand why I’d withdrawn, why his new little buddy suddenly seemed broken. Even when Engineer explained it to him—the condensed version, already secondhand and truncated from the fragments I had been willing to give—he didn’t get why the lack of another ‘bot could break me so.What had once been an innocent sort of joy on seeing Soldier was poisoned now. The dead human had done that for me. I knew these emotions weren’t my own, but I couldn’t fight them either, so instead his every attempt to understand or comfort brought out a kind of disgust in me, and I pulled further away.I had a Soldier. One that didn’t belong to these men or their long settled War.“I…got some news you might find interesting,” Engineer said eventually, cautiously, approaching an easily startled animal.I lifted my head in acknowledgement. I didn’t know what to do with myself these days, but I didn’t want to be thrown out either. The Engineer wasn’t my enemy, not when the workshop had become my only slice of familiar safety.“The Scouts are real thorough. They gotta be when tallying up the money is the only way the Voice gives them those bonuses,” Engineer explained. “So I looked into it. Day you fought us, they came up short.”“Short?” Soldier, maybe subconsciously understanding he wasn’t wanted but still feeling it was wrong somehow to leave me alone with the Engineer, scoffed. “Those runts are short all the time if you ask me.”“Short on bills,” Engineer said. “Robot money.”“…Aye?” I sat up. Straighter. Daring to…“More than just you unaccounted for. Whatever happened to your Soldierbot, wasn’t any of us that got him.”“Then…” My mind whirled. “Then the other ‘bots must have taken it back. That’s the only other place it could be.”“Usually I wouldn’t like to jump to conclusions, but,” Engineer said, “I honestly can’t think of any other explanation.”I was on my feet. To do what, I had no idea.But then I did.“I need to get in there,” I said. “The carrier. That’s where they would have taken it, aye? Thrown a malfunctioning bot in the brig-”Because if they’d wanted the Soldierbot dead all they would have had to do was leave it there. If the mercenaries hadn’t killed it no one else would have. It had to still be out there. Be alive.“I need to borrow some weapons,” I said.Engineer’s mouth was a grim line, but he nodded his head. Must have been expecting exactly that reaction when he weighed telling me his discovery.Soldier wasn’t as foresighted.“Demoman!” he stopped me as I pushed out of the workshop, a fist around my forearm. “You cannot go in there! They are…bad robots. They would tear you apart.”“It doesn’t matter. I’ve got to try.”“You won’t even be able to operate those weapons!”“You think I don’t know how to work a bloody grenade launcher?” I snarled, shoving him off me. “It’s all I know how to bloody do. Get out of my way.”“Stop. You can’t. Not yet, y-you can’t-”“I can do whatever I damn well please,” I whirled on him when he tried to take my hand again. The worry over Soldierbot, the stifling, cloying emotion I couldn’t escape from. I wanted to hit and I wanted it to hurt. “Because I’m not him. He’s the one that loved you.”Soldier reared back, struck.“He loved you so damn much, and you killed him,” I finished darkly.The love so pungent, so debilitating. I wanted the love gone, expelled in the worst way I could. If I could force the memories out onto Soldier I could be free. But my language processing must still have had some bugs, because for some reason I broke on the last word.If my goal was to be rid of him, to worked. I watched him shrink, compound in on himself, and when I was satisfied he wouldn’t stop me again I turned on my heel and went to see what I could steal from the mercenaries’ remaining Demoman.
There had to be a brig somewhere. And the humans had to have tried assaulting a carrier at some point, it would have been one of the first things they tried, but I keep one of those facts in my mind and not the other as I crept my way through the silent behemoth. It hadn’t been difficult entering from the maw—the carrier was still parked face-first into the tunnels, damaged from where the ground had shifted under it and sunk it further into the earth. Harder layers of earth had ruptured its side, impaling it until its weight was too great for treads to pull it balanced.So up through the belly of the beast. Maybe the humans couldn’t get in because the alarms were tuned to heat signatures. That was a good theory. I’d go and keep telling myself that.At the point where the sinking-ship’s incline became too great, I found what looked to be a ramp to the lower levels and followed. It grew darker, only my optic guiding me now. Why not? Any ‘bot would have their own illumination, their own way to find what they were looking for. Here’s where they would keep a troublesome robot, I was sure of it. Here, the place with the highest security. I could see locked off passages, areas that would require clearance…who’s to say those weren’t cells?My fingers ran seamlessly along the grenade launcher’s trigger, the thing they were made to fit.At the center of the largest room was something robotic. Bolted to the floor, it had great manacles on either side; a shape clearly machine, but meant to resemble the humans we fought. Imprisoned here, in the middle of the Maker’s power.“…Solider?” I tried in the dark.And the thing in the dark powered on.What I had thought were restraints were actually appendages, dripping from the machine and onto the ground as it slept for the night. Blue light opened in the cracks between armaments, drills and saws and wrenches lifting and bunching back into position: the assembly machine that had brought me and all my fellow robots into existence was now spinning to life once more itself.I might have kept my cover if I hadn’t panicked. At that moment, I was still just one ‘bot in a carrier with a lot of other ‘bots, but my itchy trigger launched a pill right at that great thing, and immediately it let off a screech of alarm, any sloth forgotten as it identified me as a threat.An arm with a buzzsaw on the end swung before I could fire a second pill. I ran. The wrong way it turned out; by the time I realized I should bolt for the exit the assembler’s many arms had already blocked the way, leaving me trapped.No way to find Soldierbot. No escape. I pressed my back against the smallest bit of cover, launcher tucked to my chest, another buzzsaw swinging right over my head.No fate awaiting me aside from disassembly. Out of the world the way I’d come in.I stood, planning to empty my entire chamber and face death head on, when something else collided with the assembly machine.A rocket.“Take your job-stealing paws off him, trash can!”The Soldier came flying in, shovel held high, a wave of heat under his metal-toed shoes. The bladed end of the shovel collided with the closest thing the assembler had to a head, the rocket blasting its trunk and destabilizing its base. Before I could process the appearance of an insane human in a place that was never meant to resist him, more commotion from the entryway erupted. Engineer was blasting away the last few metal arms guarding the exit, a hot shell falling to the ground when he reloaded.“You…followed me?” I asked when he reached my side.“You never gave us a chance to say if we wanted to come along,” he said smartly, and aimed at the tentacle beast Soldier was now riding like a thrashing bull.Relief swelled up inside me, relief and something else I could name later. For now, I emitted every positive buzz I could over the shortwave, even knowing Engineer couldn’t hear, and aimed my remaining pills at the assembler.Between the three of us, it crashed, falling to pieces and throwing Soldier a short way across the floor. He was up in a second, locking on me and rushing over.“Demoman!” he said, lowering his shovel to grab me by both shoulders. But then he stopped, and checked himself. “Demobot. I know you are not him. And…and that makes me…sad. But it does not matter if you’re him or you’re not, because I will not let anything bad happen to you. Ever. Is that understood?”The appreciative buzz redoubled, unable to escape me, unable to be imparted on the two men who needed to hear it. So instead I just nodded, and tried to force it all into the word as I said, “Okay.”“Okay.” Soldier’s shoulders slackened. “Great. Fantastic to hear! But now let’s get you out of here, those battalions of dormant bots won’t be catching their beauty sleep for long after that racket!”“I…can’t,” I said. “I still can’t. Not when it still might be here…” I trailed off. “…Wait. You said there’s still inactive ‘bots upstairs?”“Yeah, snuck past ‘em while we were looking for you,” Engineer said. “All of ‘em just standing there, waiting to be turned on.”“I got one more idea,” I promised, and turned back toward the exit.It wasn’t like my memory, the carrier. The memories were encased in a gray tunnel vision, scoping it to just me, the body I was only starting to become aware of, and the Soldierbot beside me. The thousands and thousands of other robots were just a vague impression, stretching off into infinity for all I could tell, and now re-walking these shelves it seemed to me my past self was right.There were too many. At first I had been slow, leisurely, sending out the shortwave signals methodically between each line of silent metal infantry. But then the enormity of the place began to set in, and my pace quickened until I was running, throwing out silent bursts in irregular panic. It was only when I came to where the Soldierbots were arranged, the hundreds upon hundreds of them, that I slowed again, thorough in my desperation. Determined not to miss mine in some stupid oversight.“I don’t know how long we can stay here,” Engineer warned.“If he needs to look,” Soldier said, “then we need to stay for him.”“We can help as much as we can, but if all these ‘bots turn on at once…”“It’s his duty to find his Soldier,” Soldier said more firmly. “It is our duty to stay.”The argument was far away to me. Even if they left now I wouldn’t have followed, self preservation pale in comparison to my mission. Step. By step. By step. Each and every methodical foot until…There. Something abnormal. A group of Soldierbots, slightly banged up: ‘repurposed’ is what my mind filled in and I dared to let my hope go unchecked. Something was bouncing back at me…Step. By step. Each Soldierbot identical to the last, but it didn’t matter what it looked like: I would know a rose when I saw a rose. One of these wasn’t just another aimless thing meant to copy, meant to represent. One of these was the thing itself.There.This one had a chip in the paint on its helmet, a perfect crescent moon. The mark I’d left knocking my head against it the last day we saw each other—I would recognize it anywhere. This was Soldier.And it wasn’t responding to my hails.“Lad?” I tried verbally.The Soldierbot stayed dormant.The shortwave was on, I could feel the low level buzz of every robot around me, the thing that would receive and acknowledge the ‘wake up’ signal, but Soldierbot was hearing me and not responding. Reacting to my messages like they were junk data. Inconsequential.A lost robot recollected and repaired. Repurposed until everything not related to the directive was meaningless.Any sign of deviancy stripped away.“No…please no…” I begged, coming closer, gripping its collar. “Please, Soldier, it’s me. You got to remember…”Nothing. The irregular ping, confirming that this was indeed the same robot, but that was all. I began to shake again, like I had when I’d lost Soldierbot the first time, bubbling with emotion that I had no way to let out except by dropping my head against its chest.“Please…”“Demo,” Engineer’s hesitant voice called. “I think he’s…”It couldn’t be. Couldn’t be gone.Like a mourning wail, I began the feedback loop. The first one, the one that had started even before we’d begun to speak, those minds eroding against one another in the dark. Learning from one another.Initiating my half. Desperately hoping…A hand came to rest on the back of my neck.I looked up. “…Soldier?”Soldierbot’s optics were peering down at me underneath the helmet.
…
“Soldier!”
…!
Even with all the tools at Engineer’s disposal, it soon became clear that the Soldierbot’s vocal processors were shot.When the ‘bots had saved it from the battlefield and patched it back up, that wasn’t on their high list of priorities for fixing but, mercifully, it also meant that they hadn’t realized any of Soldierbot’s other ‘defects’. It was an absolutely worthwhile tradeoff as far as we were concerned.“Can’t you give him the same thing you gave Demo?” Soldier asked.Despite the surrounding safety of the Big Rock base, Soldier still wasn’t quite comfortable with the Soldierbot, with what it represented. But there was time for that. I was too elated, too at peace for anything about our situation to get me down.“I did,” Engineer shrugged. “Same installs, same hardware. He’s functionally just as capable as Demo. At this point, if he don’t got anything to say, he don’t got anything to say.”
…:::::&…*&
I waited a moment, then nodded.“Soldierbot says things are as good as they can be,” I said.We were figuring something out, the two of us. Using the shortwave to send more complicated messages. If Soldierbot didn’t want to talk, I was fine playing translator.Soldier looked at us skeptically. Engineer, however, found it tickled him.“Pretty ironic, when our regular Soldier who won’t shut up. But if he’s happy, he’s happy.”It surprised me that they kept referring to Soldierbot as ‘he’, even when the person it was based on was alive and well, no half-remembered identity to project onto it. What surprised me more was that Soldierbot didn’t seem to mind, at least what I could tell from our limited new language.“You’ll be okay, though, aye?” I asked softly as an offended Soldier started another inconsequential argument with an amused Engineer. “With all this?”
…?...**..;
“Well good. I don’t care either. Long as we’re together.”Soldierbot thought for a moment, a whittling away the long seconds that we now had as much of as we wanted, and then finally said:
…:)