MOTHER 3 SPOILER WARNING
Short Porky introspective, King Porky considers robots and his own body, and the glorious future. Reviews/comments loved, please?
His body didn't move as well as it used to. Well, he couldn't be mad at it for that--he'd sort of run it through the gamut and it'd come back from all sorts of things it really shouldn't have survived in the first place. Blows, illness, age, nothing could end him. Porky Minch had once been something else, although it was harder to remember as time passed exactly what he'd been. He'd had family members, and there were people important to his life, but none of those people were anything like him. Nothing else was like him. Not even Giygas had been, although it had been pretty close.
And what was really funny was that he did know for a fact that he hadn't had anything when he'd started out. No super powers, no magical brain blasts, not even a nice handy gun. He'd just set out on his own, and grown up into this thing. Porky could see his reflection in the glass that shielded him if he squinted, unwithered youth meeting age in a weird combination that was completely unnatural.
Porky'd always hated natural things anyway. They didn't suit him. Sure, it was great to sit on the beach and enjoy the sun and go swimming, until you offered somebody a video game or a television or even an entertaining piece of music and then out with the natural, in with the new. Living enough had taught him that humanity agreed with him, they just didn't want to admit it. Natural things were passé. They were useless.
Humanity destroyed nature all by itself for that reason, without Porky doing a thing. Humanity just didn't have the guts to finish the job, that was the problem. They were weak-willed, looked around at what they'd done, and when they'd been terrified they ran and hid. But Porky would draw them out of hiding. Even if he was wearing down too. The clocks in the world were all slowing, slowing, slowing to a stop, just like his breathing was slow and raspy now.
"Make something for oxygen. Something unnatural and weird." The horse-person wasn't exactly what he'd had in mind, but it was weird enough that he decided he liked it anyway. Because it was a great sign of progress, that not only could he bend minds, he could create monsters that were half-man. Well, through the convenient limbs of his scientists and workers he could create them, and that was enough.
Even if he couldn't move so well anymore, they could. They would. Because Porky had come to the end of things as a director and star attraction in one, even if he'd come a little late. It was everyone else's job to set up the stages and build the props.
So with this thought that what was unnatural was good and what was natural was bad, that what was existing shouldn't and that not existing was better (excepting himself, of course, he would always exist, there was no escaping it so he embraced it) it was very odd that he found himself thinking of children. Men who grew old enough had children, that was the nature of things. He'd been a kid once too, and he'd had a playmate, Ness. Ness had to have been his friend, because he remembered Ness being involved in everything, and if he also remembered being hateful to Ness or their trying to kill each other, well, Porky just showed his friendship in odd ways was all. Now that Ness had the decency to be dead, Porky could admit, he'd been a pretty neat kid. Children should have friends like that.
The child's body had been half-destroyed when they brought it home, under Yokuba's direction. It was a child of massive potential, but it was a natural potential about to die a natural death. No, no, all wrong, Porky had thought, and they rebuilt 'him' into 'it.' Strong, capable, empty, even with powers like Ness which was very funny. Porky adopted it as his son, the Commander, another limb to reach out since Porky wasn't as mobile as he used to be and even now, there were tiny little annoying things Porky couldn't do, like pulling needles. His son, the robot and servant, would fill all of those duties.
But his son wouldn't be alone, since children shouldn't grow up without playmates, even human children. Porky's Porkies project was quite top secret and under Dr. Andonuts' direct control with only Porky's oversight, because they had to be just right. They weren't just toys, even if they did make wonderful toys. The early prototypes were simpler, good for games and simple tests. The later ones were perfected models, the voice human in tone, the body a well-dressed if childish version of himself. So in a way, he regained his mobility, and more importantly, he made something similar to his cute monster son, another robot child. True, his son didn't actually play at all, and true, the robots were disposable, exploding at the real Porky's will. But all of that was unnatural so it was good too.
Sometimes, when he was bored or felt very peevish, he'd open the door to his shelter, let the real air leak in and touch skin that felt as delicate as a baby's. After struggles and gasps, he sat up, his face tickling a little with the faintest touch of facial hair yet his expression unmarred by wrinkles. He saw how long he could sit up, and for safety's sake he had his children with him, all the little monster children he'd made to match himself. Little bombs who echoed his voice and who looked like him from long ago. Or the Commander, at rest from duty, voice flat and face empty whether he wore the helmet or not. They were his perfect children, disposable, unloved, unloving. Of all the things he'd made, little perverse jokes against nature or huge horrors of destruction, he liked them the best.
It was almost a pity that they couldn't follow him into the next world, the world where everything would be dead. But then again, robots weren't alive, were they? Maybe, like the broken buildings and ash-covered wastelands that covered the rest of the globe, he'd crawl out of the wreckage in safety to unbury a few of them and reactivate them. That was a beautiful thought. A world inhabited by his image alone, in the form of the true Porky Minch who'd never die, the form of robots built in his image by men who'd died for their efforts, and maybe even in the form of a little monster child rebuilt to have no soul.
In a way, he thought that his already-dead son was his favorite. He took after Porky the most.