THE LIES YOU WEREN'T TOLD

Nine: Past


And so Julien began to tell the truth, in a very slow fashion. He started at a strange place on purpose, one that didn't make sense even to him, at first. It was outside his own memories, a tale so old and so ancient that it was known by nearly every person currently alive in Ninjago, passed down from an unknown source many millennia ago.

"In the beginning, back when Ninjago was created, it was dictated that everything should have its opposite," he said, and immediately regretted having said anything at all.

Now he had to continue.

"It was also said that patterns from the past would repeat into the future," a second whisper informed. "And there would be no exceptions."

There was silence for a moment.

Just as suddenly as he lost his words, they came pouring from him in great jumbles that he could not understand, knots that he could not untie. He was hijacked by memories dying to resurface, to come to mind, to burst from his head and spread their seeds about the cosmos.

And just as suddenly as he began to doubt his sanity, his vision blurred and

faded, replacing itself with

deep

dark

cold

uncaring

black.


It slowly blurred back to a memory. The colors were old and worn, washed-out, lifeless.

There was a package on the table, a nearly-flat parcel wrapped in brown paper with an address stamped on it in black ink.

Julien's mother sat across from him at the table and pushed the package toward him. She had already examined the package, and the labels on it. "It's from your father," she told him, sighing.

This package was the first Julien had heard from his father in months. He picked up the parcel and peeled it open, withdrawing the contents in the process.

On top was a postcard with a picture of a sailboat on the open sea. Julien flipped it over and read the note on the other side.

Hey, son!

It's been a while since I sent you a note. I'm sorry about that – I've been trading with places really far from home a lot recently, and most of them haven't had good mail services, let alone ones that could deliver to Ninjago.

But I was able to stop briefly in Jamanakai before I have to move on around the north side of the continent, so I figured I'd get something for you.

I hope you enjoy this comic book! I won't be home for your birthday this year, but we can try for next year.

Have a happy seventh birthday!

Dad

Julien, now a bit sad, set aside the postcard and looked at the large rectangular shape underneath. Just like the postcard had mentioned, it was a comic book. The title read, in large, bold letters:

SLIME MAN vs. THE ROBOTS

The cover depicted exactly what the title read: gooey green Slime Man was in the very center of it, and around him were a lot of grey things that looked like snowmen, only they were snowmen made out of grey cardboard boxes with big red lights for eyes, as well as arms and legs made out of grey tube-things. Robots.

A small grin grew Julien's face, and he picked up the postcard and the comic and took them to his room.


The comic, once he had read it, wasn't as interesting as it appeared. Some evil scientist created a bunch of robots and set them loose on the city, and then Slime Man came and defeated all the robots by using his slime powers to short-circuit them.

And, of course, it wasn't very hard for Slime Man to short them, either. They had gaps in their metal plating an inch and a half wide, so he could just ooze in and have his job be done.

Julien was a bored child. He had nothing better to do, and a whole weekend to do it in.

So he took out his pad of paper and small box of crayons, and set himself to work.

He took the blue crayon out of the package carefully and examined it closely for no particular reason before he set the tip on the page and began to draw.

He started with a line parallel to the shorter side of the page right in the middle, and then, on the left side of the line, began to draw a large box with a smaller box stacked on top of it. After that was finished, he added two misshapen circles and a line in the smaller box. From there, he scribbled a few other lines that touched the main set of boxes, and kept adding little details to the picture.

Once he finished the right side of the line, he began to work on the left, adding a few words in large, scribbled text.

He was proud of his work.


After another two days of work, it was Monday, and time for him to head back to school.

In addition to some relatively pointless and far-too-easy assignments, Julien had in his book bag a rolled up piece of paper and a stapled set of pages.

When lunchtime came, he took the rolled-up sheet and the stapled pages and brought them outside to show his friends while they ate.

"My dad got me a comic book," Julien said.

"Which one?" one of the others asked.

"It wasn't a good one," Julien said, "but I made it better."

He unrolled the sheet and showed them the front page of the stapled set. The rolled sheet contained blueprints for a better version of the robots, and a description about how they were nice robots who wanted to make a perfect city.

The stapled set of pages was a twelve-page alternate ending to the comic, where Slime Man can't defeat the robots, they say that they're nice robots, they take over the town, and one of the robots becomes the mayor.

"Slime Man?" one of his friends asked.

"Yeah," Julien told them.

They laughed. They called him a nerd. They left.

They wouldn't have lunch with him the next day.


He was now the only man in the family.

Julien and his mother had not gone back to their beach since they found that his father was not coming home again.

He was thirteen years old.


He found another surrogate father after many years.

Julien was in college, trying to become an engineer. He wanted to follow his passions.

He never told anyone that he was also trying to let his father live through him.

The teacher for his first class walked into the room. He struck Julien immediately as looking so similar to his father, even though he clearly wasn't the man that Julien knew.

A bond had formed. He quickly became his teacher's favorite student. After class one day near the end of the semester, the teacher pulled him aside and asked him if he wanted to see something intriguing.

On that day, Julien found out that robots were real.


He graduated with a doctorate in Robotics Engineering. He was now 'Doctor' Julien. The title felt a bit odd, but he had a feeling he'd grow used to it.

For the first few years, he worked in the same lab as his teacher – now his partner. After a few years, they came to a mutual disagreement about what was possible, and went their separate ways, though they remained friends. Julien got his own lab, and began to work on the projects that would make his career. He started making a 'list of achievements' in a black scrapbook as he completed projects.

One of them – the very subject of the disagreement – lingered in his mind longer than all of the others. Just when he thought it was truly impossible, he had an epiphany.

Everything else was pushed aside.


He shoved the welding mask up onto his forehead, and the camera flashed. He flinched at the sudden light.

It had come from the doorway. Julien looked up and found his mother standing there, looking at the picture that had just printed from the instant camera.

"Yes?" he asked her. "What is it?"

She smiled. "I just wanted to have some photographic evidence that you still exist."

Julien looked back at his work, and the smile fell from his mother's face. "You know," she said, walking up to him, "There's a point where you have to step back and let it go."

He looked up at her. "I can't do that now," he told her. "I'm this close to success – this close. I need to finish this."

"You've been working on it for too long," she countered. "It's been seven years – you should do something else with –"

"I talked to it yesterday," he told her, looking down at the table. "I spoke with it. Not even in the chat program anymore. I hooked it up to its body, and it spoke to me."

There was silence between the two of them. Then his mother sighed.

"Just… remember that I love you, and that I'll always be there for you," she said quietly, setting the picture down on his workplace. "Live your life how you want to. Just don't forget about what's most important."

She left the room, and he returned to his work.


He turned it on, and watched with fascination as it opened its eyes and looked at him.

"HELlo," it said.

Julien wept with satisfaction.


He wrote in the scrapbook late at night.

Three words dominated the page.

I did it.

Nothing else was needed.


Over the next few days, Julien and his new assistant worked on various projects. Julien noticed little bugs every now and then. Once he saw enough of them that it deserved an edit to the programming, he changed them and gave the robot its first software update.

At first it had been a bit weary about the idea, but Julien reassured it. Afterwards, it was fine.

He knew that he had made the greatest invention in the history of the world up to this point. But Julien wanted to make it better. He wanted to improve it further.

So he began to change its software to act like a real human being. He tweaked the code, adding a line here, a section there.

First came the simpler things: happiness, sadness, and indifference.

Then came rage.

All the while, a little spy – a piece of harmless code sent from a 'father' and friend – watched his every move. It changed a single thing.

Julien did not find it. He did not know that it changed the world.


His creation had been acting the slightest bit odd.

Julien didn't really know what to think of it. He guessed that it was because the robot was beginning to experience new things that it hadn't known of before.

He didn't care to witness the downward spiral to insanity.

Julien took notes and watched.


It was half past eight when the final speaker of the annual Ninjago Technology Conference took to the stage, and all of Hall C, except for a single spotlight on the podium, went dark.

Dr. Julien knew his speech forwards, backwards, upside down, drugged, and sleeping. It was easier for him to recite it than it was for him to breathe now, or nearly so.

Today, he knew, was the day that his name would go down in history forever. Not just for a single award or several – he would launch the world into a new era.

Julien stepped into the spotlight and approached the podium. Without thinking, he tapped the microphone set on it, and was satisfied when he heard the slight feedback.

And then he began.

"In the beginning, mankind was a new creation, battling animalistically against the forces of nature and each other," he said. "And somehow, though most of the details have been lost to time, we took control of this continent of Ninjago, and kept it for ourselves."

And then, in a casual continuation, he followed with: "It was the beginning of a new age: the Age of Man."

The hall was dead silent. Julien quickly went on.

"Things stagnated for a while in that short-lived age: various tribes formed and fought. The legendary Serpentine, now believed to be fairytales, supposedly formed and then fell from grace around this time. But one day, one fateful day, one of the hunter-gatherer peoples of the region near modern Ignacia threw some seed on the ground, and watched it grow to bear crops. Thus the Farming Age began, several thousand years ago."

The audience seemed to be growing somewhat impatient with his history lesson. He scanned the crowd, and found his mother smiling at him from the far left end of the front row.

He continued.

"Soon, new things began to emerge in quick succession: towns, the wheel, transportation, roads, empires," he said, pausing briefly. "And, starting since the founding of the nation of Ninjago, we have entered a Modern Age."

Scattered murmurs spread like wildfire and then silenced themselves. They were growing bored, or interested, or both.

"But we have been in this age for a while. A long while," Julien said, calling their attention again. "Surely there must be a new innovation to launch us onward soon enough."

Silence.

"But what could this innovation be?" he asked the massive assemblage. "All of the easy things are gone: farming, the wheel, cities, electricity, the steam engine, government, flight, mass communications. The list only goes on. But there is a field we have only begun to explore the possibilities of: computers… and robotics."

More murmurs emanated from the crowd. Most of the people here had probably heard of his advancements in this field, and probably knew his name for that reason alone. An old friend grinned at him from the center of the second row.

"But to induce a new era," he continued, silencing the crowd, "a new technology must be very powerful, far ahead of its time, and have nearly infinite possibilities to open upon its creation. It must be a mountain over all others – a zenith that cannot be surpassed within many lifetimes. And in the vast realm of computing and robotics, that mountain – that zenith – is this."

He paused for effect. Dead silence choked the air as the crowd waited for his answer.

"The zenith would be… to create an artificially intelligent human being."

Gasps echoed through the room as people realized the implications.

"And so," he said, "I present to you the Zenith of Automatically Navigating Entity technology, in its initial form. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome my new creation, Zane!"

And with a swoop of his arm and a restoration of the rest of the stage lights, the audience burst into applause as his creation emerged on cue, approaching the podium to stand with him.

"Welcome, my fellow scientists, to a new era," Julien announced. "Welcome to the Age of –"

"Let mEE speak," the robot said, the tinny voice being barely picked up by the microphone.

Julien didn't remember planning for his creation to speak at any point during this, and momentarily debated denying it that honor, but eventually stepped to the side, figuring it couldn't do any harm besides make his presentation end a few minutes late. It would prove to all the doubters, however, that he really had created a sentient being.

It began to speak in slow, distorted words. "YOO hUMaNs sEEm tOO fEAr change. YOO lIKe tOO HAve A GUIde through nEW things. sOMEonE tOO sAY THaT sOMEtHIng iS SAFe ANd EAsy."

Julien did not quite understand what kind of point it was getting at, but he didn't have a good feeling about it for some reason.

"I wILL bEE yOUr GUIde ANd bRIng yOO tOO tHe unknown. WeLCoME tOO yOUR dOOmsDAy."

And then it burst into flames. It removed a long piece of sharpened metal from inside a compartment in its arm that Julien did not remember including in the original design. The robot stabbed at him with the blade, but did not cut him; instead, it succeeded in setting his coat on fire, and laughed darkly and robotically when Julien began to scream from the searing pain as the flesh on his shoulders and upper arms began to burn. It then jumped down into the crowd and began to mercilessly murder random people within.

The last image Julien ever saw of his mother before he fled the hall was of her blood, guts and brain matter being splattered on the wall.

The clock in the room stopped ticking at 9:01 PM, when the hands fused to the face in the heat of the destructive flames.

And then it melted altogether.


He was out of options now, if he ever had options to begin with.

Julien had no idea what to do.

So he fled.


He tried to stay in the shadows. He tried to stay out of the way. He tried to avoid everything that he remembered.

But the headlines followed him, and they wouldn't leave.

TRAGEDY AT TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE

Sentient robot rampages and sets building on fire; only thirteen bodies so far recovered

1000 CONFIRMED DEATHS

Many others injured or missing

MANDATORY EVACUATION

All citizens to evacuate city immediately, Mayor orders


Julien didn't plan to leave the city. All of this was his fault – he didn't deserve to leave.

The apocalyptic ruins, scorched and wrecked, were his new home. The streets were his hallways, the ruins his rooms. The smoky ceiling overhead blocked the stars sometimes in the night.

He had never felt so alone.

After what seemed like forever, Julien decided that he had nothing left to lose.

He returned to his apartment and gathered his few intact possessions – the black scrapbook, an old comic book, and two pieces of paper that he remembered well.

He looked around for something to hold them in. A cardboard box that seemed relatively intact and stable suited the purpose.

He piled everything in along with some food and found that it was too heavy to carry. He dragged it to the western edge of the city.

Snowflakes drifted down around him. He had nearly forgotten how long it had been. Clearly a few months had passed.

He stared out at the desert, lost in thought.

A noise came from nowhere.

A last chance became obvious.

The body of his creation felt like rock in the bottom of the box.


He dragged the box for miles across the hot desert. He walked for miles, going each day until he would fall from exhaustion.

Julien tried to count every step he took. He gave every step a name and a birthday and parents and children and a backstory and a life.

Then he dragged the box over them, and the thing inside ended them all.

He lost count at eight thousand nine hundred and forty two.


Sand turned to snow, and he kept walking.

Ice and rock stretched out as far as the eye could see.

Trees on the horizon.

Only trees.

Julien didn't know how long he had been walking nowhere.

He just knew that he had realized that he had walked into a tree.

The holes where he had dragged his steps went all the way down through the snow to the frosted ground.


The tree was hollow on the inside, with a large cavity in its roots. It was a large black hole, an empty void.

He shut himself inside.

Julien smiled in his personal hell.

He was alone.


Julien needed to know what went wrong.

He built a computer from scratch. It didn't work well. He didn't need it to.

The code was his life. The code was all he needed.

He didn't sleep; he didn't eat for days at a time. He didn't want to. He told himself he didn't need to.

He found the error.

A simple line of code that caused unending rage!

Julien laughed at the simplicity.

He cried.


His hell was now a home.

The spacious cavity had been divided into three rooms. Julien had given it walls, and doors, and everything else a home needed.

He hid the hell in the third room, and wouldn't let it out.


The denizens of the forest were not the least bit pleased with him. They ran at him, tried to attack him whenever he came out of the tree's cavity.

He named them Treehorns.

For the first time in many months, Julien tried to do what he was best at. He wanted to make something that could protect him.

Though the project was a success, it felt hollow.


The code scrolled on his computer.

Julien was editing it.

He was taking out flaws, making it better. He was making it impenetrable, incorruptible, and impossible to change.

The crown jewels – feelings – were anguished over. He debated even taking them out.

But he couldn't.

He made them smaller instead.


Julien counted down to his doomsday.

Five.

mistakes you've made

you were selfish

that is what killed them

Four.

things you don't deserve

like happiness

and life

Three.

times you evaded what you deserved

you're going to die

why are you still alive

Two.

choices you could have made

turn back while you still can

this decision will define you

One.

failure was all that was needed

to ruin everything you hoped for

don't make the same mistake

It was one fluid movement. He didn't allow himself time to think it through, to doubt himself.

Julien flicked the switch.


There was a creature staring up at him now: a living being with hopes and fears and choices to make.

"Hello, Zane."

It hadn't tried to kill him yet. As he showed it the world, Julein watched it carefully.

He wanted to know if it was yet another failure, a twisted mind trapped in a sickened body.


The first year was a second helping of hell.

Julien tried to force himself to not grow attached. He knew that at any sign of trouble he was supposed to kill Zane – it, he insisted.

He – it – was the only human contact that Julien had had in almost four years. It didn't help that – it – cared for him as much as he cared for – it.

It didn't help that it – he – kept Julien sane.

Julien gave up the inner struggle.

Zane was his son.


Perhaps it was repentance.

Julien didn't really know what it was, but he was feeling it.

Beyond this point, he wouldn't know whether his experiment failed or succeeded.

But he trusted Zane. Zane was his.

"And the only reason I'm about to do this… is because… I love you."

A smile, a single smile, a fleeting moment, a single touch, one world gone silent…

Another gone dark.


He was a slave now.

Julien did what the Skeletons needed him to do when they needed it.

They had stopped needing things.

He had too much time and too little to do.

He counted the days that passed, and made scratches, one for every day. He gave up after a while.

He counted all of the remaining parts he had. He built a security camera and a little robot that would do simple tasks for him.

He made blueprints.

Julien would gaze at them for hours at a time, wondering what his son was doing.

He wondered how much Zane had discovered.

He hoped that nothing had been dug up that wasn't supposed to be.

Sometimes he wondered if his son was coming for him. Sometimes he doubted it.

Sometimes he knew.

Julien knew that this was his final punishment. He would die here.

He was a monster.

This was his cage.


"I was afraid…"

He lingered on his wording. He needed to tell Zane more than he could say blatantly.

"If you found out what horrible things I'd created…"

He found that satisfactory.

"You would think I was a… monster."


And suddenly

he realized

he had returned

to the same place.

Zane was staring at him with an unreadable expression.

Then sadness replaced it.

His son ran from the room. The door opened and closed violently moments later.

Julien cried.


(A/N): On the list of things that are not okay... :D