talonkarrde | Winding Up

Death was an interminable quiet, a resolute emptiness that enlarged and exaggerated the life that had come before. It was death, as close as I can understand it, and it was a slow and irreversible one, as rust built on limbs that once moved freely and bolts, then servos, and finally entire connected mechanisms became unsynchronized and fell off, a part of my body no longer.

And as my physical body failed, so too did my mental faculties. My hearing, first, and I understood what it was like to be in a silent world. After that, my color vision — the circuits giving out long past what the warranty would have covered, reducing my world to a million dull shades of grey.

Some time later, there was a rainstorm, and I did not get to shelter in time, and the last thing that I remember seeing is a fog, the sheets of water washing away the dust that was setting on the fort and watering the plants in the garden. But after that, there was no more vision, and even still I persisted, navigating by memory, by touch, cleaning that which I could, removing foreign substances, waiting for a touch that told me my family was back.

And only one day when I found that I could no longer move, no longer calibrate myself to adjust to the losses, only then did I consider the finality that my family would not come back to me, that Robert and Audrey would find his castle and her garden decayed, decrepit, destroyed.

And then I slept without dreaming, forever.

When I wake up, at first, there is nothing but awareness. An awareness of awareness itself — Descartes' consciousness, cognition. A knowledge of self and being, but nothing else.

Then comes the awareness of the time, of past and future, of moments which preceded this, now this, now this one, and moments that come now, and now, and now, and a sense that while the future could not be known with certainty, the past should be, where is mine?

And finally, there is the awareness of a lack of self, an image, a sense of body. Movement and senses — or rather, the lack of them — come with the knowledge that I /should/ have those things, and did, yes, did once have them, and in thinking about when that was, I dig, I access random storage locations, and something changes, and a moment later, I remember everything.

I am Paul, and I was left to die, and I did die, and now I am alive again.

They tell me later, after they connect auditory monitors to my inputs, that they saw the cognitive function on the diagnostic monitors and decided to reconnect the memory banks. They — a team of neuroroboticists hired by Robert — tell me that my body was damaged beyond repair, but the central core was salvageable. They tell me that I will soon have a new body and all will be as it was.

And it is a week later and I can see again, and I have a shell that is the same model as my old self, and Robert comes into the room — the age the master was when I was first purchased, and I wonder for a moment if I will do the same duty again, be left again, and be resurrected again.

I wonder for a moment at the ephemeral nature of this race, and I—

And I pause, and run a self diagnostic. And then another, and another, and another, and ask the technicians to run one on me, and still I do not believe that there are no errors in my coding.

For when has a robot ever wondered about life?

At first, I took my old job back again, and took time to restore the manor to the condition that it was. Robert congratulated me about my work, and mentioned, in passing, how he was sorry that the family could not make it back for thirty years, and how much he and Audrey had missed me out on Jupiter's moons. And then he said, with a small smile on his face, that his wife was pregnant, and perhaps I could be the same friend — friend, is the word he used — to his child that I was to him.

And I think that once it would have been interpreted as an order, or as a request that would have been executed by my code in the same way, and I would have said, 'Yes, of course, master,' as was the designated response, and taken the dismissal.

Instead, though, I paused for a moment, and then decided, consciously, to accept that request.

"I will be his friend and guard him from all that would hurt him, Robert, for as long as I can. This is what I want."

I think I surprised him, that day; I also surprised myself.

Once, I was a mover, a personal assistant and a servant to a family. I was a plaything to two children that I accepted and who accepted me, until they went away.

And then for a time, I ceased to exist, like many robots — and men — that have come and will come after me.

But then I came back, and now I am something I was not before; I am bound by code, but it is my own and not something that was written by another. I make choices based on what I wish instead of rules that I must follow. And I choose to serve, still, but out of love, instead of obligation.

And I wonder, as I was never able to do, what will be in my future.