He found him on the street near the dumpsters, a bloody mess and not moving. He'd never understood why they'd made A.I. bleed. The damn thing nearly gave him a heart attack. He'd thought it was a boy at first. Then again, anything that looked human might cause the same mistake, especially in the dark. Most people were probably so used to the units they didn't freak out, assumed anything laying out by the trash was probably just some broken machine.
This line of thought led him to wonder if anyone actually injured on the street wound up bleeding out because no one bothered to check if they were human and get help. Icky line of though; he tried to push it away. Surely, most people would check, as he had, they just wouldn't get freaked out until they were sure it was somebody.
This wasn't somebody, and really he should have just left it. It was just broken trash. Still it seemed sad somehow, just to leave it, and it had been a high-end model once. The high-end models were life like, they bleed if you cut them and bruised if you hit them. Axel still didn't know what the point was of that- why make an A.I. that could bleed? Pain sensors were one thing, didn't want your toy damaging itself, but why make it look hurt. To alert the owners when they were being to rough or just as a way for designers to show off how life like they would make the things?
He wound up dragging the A.I. up to his apartment and cleaning it off. It was soaking wet from the rain and pretty beat up, but maybe he could salvage some parts at least. Maybe that's why they made the things bleed, discourage tampering, make it feel too macabre to peel back the skin. Encourage customers to get replacement parts from licensed manufacturers only, and have repairs done at official dealers.
He laid the thing out on the tile; he could mop up the red stuff later. It wasn't actually "blood". This was just a machine. Nice piece of wok though, he wondered what it had been for- it was small, and pretty, but a bit old to be a child-surrogate. The dolls for wannabe parents who couldn't afford real kids or preferred children that didn't grow up and could be turned off when you got tried of parenting. People filled their lives with all sorts of games, they played at roles and loving and being loved.
But yeah, too old to be a kid-bot. "Parents" liked them young, still cute and innocent. No one would pay to have a pretend teenager. So maybe it was just made to look androgynous, the pretty sort of shape between male and female, soft features that made him look young for a guy. But what role was it supposed to play, pretend boyfriend for a teenage girl, baby-sitter for some couple with actual brats? And who had done all this damage?
Maybe it had broken and the owner decided to take out their frustration on the A.I. Hit it until it worked again like an old radio, then stab it when it refused to turn on? Maybe it hadn't been so bad when it had been dumped but some kids had found it and decided to mess around with it, 'did you know some A.I.'s bleed? Really? Yeah, let's check it out?" Kids trashed a lot of things just for the hell of it.
Despite being nice, Axel could tell it was an older model, at least twenty years if not more. Maybe it hadn't been broken at all and had just become obsolete. The thing with tech is it constantly had to be replaced, its value dropped the instant a new model came out. Nothing was meant to last anymore. Nothing saved or treasured.
Maybe the last owner saw no better use for the old model than to trash it then throw it. There was a certain joy to destroying you were getting rid of anyway. When he was in school and couldn't sell old textbooks at the end of the year Axel liked to burn them. Why not? The new edition made them pretty much worthless. A broken machine, smash it and toss it. But seeing an old A.I. like this bothered him, and not just wondering if it had been conscious with its pain sensors on when this had happened.
A.I. were meant to make you happy, meant to be loved. He'd never loved his textbooks, far from it for certain classes. An old computer was just useless junk; especially if the thing was so far gone you couldn't retrieve your data. Nothing wrong with destroying worthless things you never really cared about.
"Whoever did this to you thought you were pretty worthless." And maybe he was and Axel was wasting his time and getting his apartment messy for nothing. He ought to drag the thing back to the dumpster. Let it be incinerated or torn apart and recycled. No sense holding on to something no one wanted.
Maybe because it looked so human he wanted to help it. Pick up the broken thing and cradle it. Take care of it, worthless or not, it needed someone there, even if it was just a lie. The skin would repair itself in a few hours once the power was back on. He'd try charging it up and seeing what he could do.
In the end he managed to get it working. Well sort of- the memory was fried. He should have expected as much. It was always the first thing to go, if the bots were damaged or overwhelmed they just sort of shut down their consciousness and wiped themselves. Maybe it was their way of protecting themselves, better to know nothing than so much pain. Memories that someone had loved you, but didn't anymore, and you were worthless now or in the process of being destroyed.
When a bot memory wiped the damage was usually too great to overwrite. Sometimes you could, but he didn't have the tech for that anyway. As a result, once he turned it on the thing just sort of stared at him. It might have been creepy. Empty blue eyes just starring like that, but something about its face just made it seem cute or sad or both all at once. He supposed he could try teaching it. It seemed to retain information well enough.
He tried to find replacement parts, but since they no longer made that model they were hard to come by. In the end he found a whole other unit of the same model, not identical – this one was female, but color and external details aside the inside hardware was the same. He figured that if Roxas broke down he could use the spare to transplant some parts.
Then he came home after being away on business a few weeks and found that Roxas had turned on the spare and taught it to speak. Roxas called it Xion, and belong Axel was thinking of it as a her, the same way he'd started to call Roxas him. Axel never thought he'd be pathetic enough to play at relationships with A.I. but the thing with the damaged models is they seemed to forget they weren't real or at least didn't seem to process what that meant. So if they could play at feelings, at loving him, then maybe he could play at caring for them.