Just some deep thoughts I got while watching "Deep Breath". And the clockwork droids and anything else are property of, well, whoever owns "Doctor Who". All I know is it's not me.
Humanity of a Droid
No one gave a second look, nor a first, in many cases, to the man in the dark overcoat and top hat that strode through their midst with a seeming lack of awareness of the very thing that held them so enthralled. No one could hear the whirring of gears over the hum of their own murmuring, and no one noticed there was a certain precise stiffness to his movements that hardly seemed natural.
The body of a dinosaur lay burning in the heart of Victorian London, a time when such beasts ought to have been long extinct, and were, and it was of no concern to them that a man with only half a face had passed them by, the metal frame of what lay beneath revealed where the skin had fallen away.
And they should have cared, for it was of dire concern to them that this man, this machine, was the very one responsible for claiming the lives of so many others in a similar fashion. But, what did it matter to them that this clockwork man prowled the streets at night; why should they care that he, it, preyed on them when they had this morbid display to captivate them until the beast's body burned down to ash?
Why should he care? Why did it seem the smallest spark of remorse had shot through circuits he did not always recall having?
He had destroyed a beautiful, ancient creature for no more than an optic nerve.
But, it was all necessary in fulfilling the purpose he had been designed for, and he had been just as compelled to burn it as the humans were to watch it burn. They possessed programming of their own, regardless of whether they chose to call it a heart or a soul; it was all the same in the end. One aspect of their programming that seemed to be universal across the population was the fact that they were easily fooled by what appeared ordinary, if only on the outside, while they became distracted by what was not, and no one paid him any mind as he headed in the opposite direction of everyone else, to return to the ship that remained ever trapped below the city streets, hidden beneath a restaurant humans went in, but never out.
They would repair the ship one day, he and the other droids under his command, though it had taken far longer than he had calculated when the majority of the spare parts at their disposal came from the humans that roamed London's streets. There was an abundant number of these parts, but they degraded far quicker than metals or alloys, and it could be difficult when two parts would decay in the time it took to obtain one. The same was the case for themselves, as their own functioning was a requirement if they were to ever return the ship to proper working order. That's why he had needed that man's eyes.
And once the ship was finally repaired, it would take them to the Promised Land.
But, from where had he gotten such an idea? Nowhere in his databanks did he recall ever being given such an objective, and droids were not meant to form goals of their own.
The clockwork man descended into the depths of the ship, and he removed from his coat the vial where he had placed the optic nerve he had recently obtained to give to the droid standing nearby before removing next the jar containing the eyes he would use to replace his own. They floated in a solution to keep them viable, but they would only last so long before he would need to seek out replacements yet again, but he had little choice when his original optic lenses had ceased functioning millennia ago.
He had killed a man for these eyes. He had incinerated the body to leave no evidence of what he had taken, just as he had done with the dinosaur, just as he had been doing for centuries untold.
He removed his left eye, the one exposed in the metal frame that was his true face, and replaced it with one of the pair he had taken little more than an hour ago, before he pried loose the second, this one not coming free quite as easily as the first, but once he succeeded, he paused in this gruesome task to gaze down at the object in his hand.
Humans considered it to be a bad thing to kill another. They considered a person who committed such an act to be "evil". They called it "murder", and he had since murdered 14,318,469 people since the ship had crashed.
The clockwork man remained still, save the constant turning of cogs within his mechanical brain as he pondered over this quandary, and he looked upon the other droids that passed by with the same stiff gait as he, but who seemed to lack the questions he currently could not find any clear answers to.
If humans considered killing someone to be evil, and he had committed this very thing, logic would dictate that he was evil. And for once in all his long existence, he did not know what to make of this.
It's a rather short story, but I thought it was pretty good. Right? Wasn't it?
Please review.