057 - God
Some people called it playing God, when scientists made the first biotechnological hybrid machine.
But then again, they'd said that about prosthetic organs and now you'd never find a citizen over sixty without a lung or liver made by man. But hybrids caused a storm because they weren't just prolonging life - they were manipulating it. Even if the processing core was still an unthinking machine, the shells - people said - were life, and to have a living shell at the will of a robot was wrong. So the project was shuffled away, assigned to the few dedicated scientists who still cared for mankind or lusted for knowledge, back to the secret laboratories beneath the international eye and there for many years it stayed.
The birth of Experiment 2747-114 was not celebrated. A simple combination of human grey matter and the latest auto-recovering computer devices, it was never heralded as a new advancement of human technology, just another test tube robot with no purpose other than academia. There it lay, past the media scandal and the arrest of the scientists charged with unethical conduct. And there it waited, its programming slowly reshuffling, its cells gently reproducing, its fusion of DNA and binary code evolving together as it lay in stasis for year after year after year.
Marluxia Starscream knew that he had been created on an approximately two point four nine percent chance. He knew that his parents, two respectable scientists, were so unlikely to bear their own child that they had instead synthesised one from hydraulic prosthetics and flawless, artificial latex skin. He knew that every central processing function in his mind had been programmed by them; by that he could only conclude that they would have made him perfect for their means.
Some people would have called it playing God; but Marluxia wasn't a life. He was just a robot and he knew that well. Everything he did he was programmed to do by his creators. His entire life had already been mapped out by his internal circuitry and would never change. This gave him a cheery outlook on life; if he had been programmed to act the way that he did then he couldn't take a step wrong. His perfect parents had created him the way they wanted him so Marluxia knew to be just that - himself.
It took mere months to shatter those illusions.
Marluxia easily shrugged off the first few mistakes - how was he supposed to know that "Pour me a glass of wine" didn't mean throwing a bottle of the red liquid at the window pane? How could he be punished for chasing away the postman if nobody had told him that he wasn't a threat to the household? He learned quickly, soon adapting to his new environment. But, he thought one night as he plugged himself into the mains to recharge, everything was so complicated. No sooner had he realised that to successfully vacuum a room the cleaner had to be turned on, he'd had an accident with the bleach or the washing machine or couldn't work out how to operate a peg to hang out the laundry. Why, if he had been build for this exact purpose, could he not even complete the simplest of tasks? He was learning, of course, but progress was slow and though his body may have been fully grown, Marluxia was still only a child.
Sometimes when his mother was in a good mood and Marluxia correctly completed a task, she would smile. It was the smile that made Marluxia feel as though everything was going to be okay once he'd mastered every art in the house. He didn't have to be a failure like his father sometimes told him he was: one day once his education was done, he'd be the perfect child that the scientists always dreamed of having. He'd make his mother smile every day, and his father would never have to lose his temper again for some fool's error. Just imagining this future reality made Marluxia's chest, empty and heartless, swell with pride. He, a lowly robot, would be worthy to call himself their son. It was... It was all he ever wanted.
Marluxia was nearly a year old when there came brilliant news.
His mother, one of his very own creators, was to have another child. An organic; a real human being with thoughts and emotions and a heart that would beat solidly until the day it died. Sometimes Marluxia dreamed he could think for himself, but he dismissed the idea as ludicrous. He was simply programmed to believe that he was sentient. Whatever emotions he thought were controlling his processor were simply an illusion to be brushed aside, however strong. But to have a brother - and to have the chance to help his brother to grow and develop his life into something amazing - Marluxia couldn't deny the pride and honour that filled his every waking process.
He first discovered the news by accident: he'd been cleaning up the last of a fallen pot-plant in the hall when he'd overheard his creators talking in the next room. He pieced the fragments of conversation together - she was bearing a child. Against all odds, she was going to have another perfect creation to nurture and Marluxia was determined to help her. He wondered if, a few weeks later when they'd not told him to his face, they might be wanting to surprise him. Unwilling to inadvertently fool them, he approached his mother about it that evening.
"Mother. I know."
She didn't seem pleased, but Marluxia found that understandable if she wanted to break the news to him herself. So he carefully stood before her, his signature smile plastered onto his face.
"About my brother. I overheard you talking about it the other night with father. It's a miracle, isn't it? First me and now an organic child. You really are brilliant scientists."
She'd sighed, and picked up what Marluxia had soon learned was a remote from the side table and pressing a button.
"I'm trying to watch television."
He quickly skittered out of the way.
"Oh, yes. Of course. Sorry. But I just wanted you to know that I'm so excited about having a brother. Have you thought of any names yet? I could help you if you're stuck-"
She turned, giving him a withering glare to which he knew the appropriate answer was to recoil.
"Marluxia," She said carefully, returning after a moment to the television like she didn't want to look at his face, "He's not going to be your brother."
"Well, of course not biologically," Marluxia quickly established, "But-"
"Marluxia."
He realised he'd crossed a line somewhere, and even though he didn't know which of a million this was, he'd learned enough to recede and let his mother have her way.
"Sorry."
He waited for a moment for her to speak, but when she still hadn't fifty-four seconds later, he simply nodded to himself and skittered away. Well, it stood to reason that she probably wasn't in a good mood if he'd interrupted her. He wouldn't make that mistake again next time he wanted to talk to her. Television was a very important part of organic life, after all. That had been one of the first things that Marluxia had learned. He didn't really understand - he liked being active, spending what free time he had running around the garden until his batteries ran down, or studying the plants and flowers outside. Of course, all the machines in his parents' house were impressive in their immaculate creation, but it was the organic matter that fascinated Marluxia the most. The way things so beautiful, so symmetrical and perfect, could evolve simply by accident was truly mind-blowing. That he felt this way, Marluxia found a little strange - after all, he supposed that if he'd been creating an artificial form, he'd make it most impressed by man-made creations, and therefore hold higher regard for its creators - but his parents moved in mysterious ways and he knew that everything they'd done had been for a reason - so it was not his place to question their motives.
This was not always easy.
Marluxia clearly remembered the first time his father struck him for the rest of his life. He'd been cleaning the mantelpiece and accidentally dropped one of the smaller ornaments; the crash had alerted his father to the incident and in he'd come storming, voice raised in the manner that Marluxia knew he was programmed to fear the most. He soon forgot the words, but feeling a hand forcefully contact his latex skin was something that seemed to reverberate through his body forever. Shocked, his hands had shot to his cheek, already feeling where intricate wiring had come loose. He crumpled to the floor, howling. This seemed only to infuriate his father more, who lashed out again and again until Marluxia's consciousness centre shut down.
He woke at two hours, fifteen minutes and thirty-one seconds AM and hurried without thinking down to the uninhabited laboratory to fix his injuries. It took more stability than his shaking hands had to correctly solder each component and wire back into place, but three hours and several molten welts on his plasticky fingers, he was more or less back in working order and ready for a lot of catching up to do. His hydraulics still felt a little shaky, and his batteries weren't operating at one hundred percent, but he had neither the time or skills to fix himself. He'd have to ask his father later.
An appalling thought occurred to him twenty minutes into mopping the kitchen floor. What if his father had intentionally meant to implant those faults in his circuitry? What if he'd, by fixing himself, explicitly gone against his father's wishes?
The worry was too much to bear, even if it was a pre-programmed illusion, and after he was done curling in the middle of the kitchen floor, Marluxia knew that there was only one person he could turn to - his heavily pregnant mother. She'd been acting oddly for the past few months but Marluxia knew it was merely the hormones acting on her body preparing her for birth, so he braved himself and slipped into her bedroom door. She slept in the spare room, now, away from Marluxia's father. It afforded her more rest. She rested a lot these days.
"M-mother?"
He gently shook her awake, and in the first few seconds of consciousness he almost saw in her the love he always dreamed she'd share. But it was not his place to be loved, not now the organic baby was on its way. He'd learned that the hard way, listening through keyholes and trying to fight down inexplicable pain every time he settled to recharge.
"Mother, please, I need your help."
"I'm tired. Leave me alone."
She never said his name any more, but for whatever reasons Marluxia knew that he shouldn't ask.
"But mother, I-"
"I'm not your mother," She'd said, so plainly, and Marluxia was so shocked that his legs forgot to work and he toppled hopelessly onto the floor.
"Well, of course, not really, but-"
"Go away."
"Y-yes. Sorry."
But, he thought as he scrambled to his feet and actually ran, she had always been his mother. Mother and father: of course they weren't really, but he'd always called them that because they were family and he was their creation, their son. That was the one thing that he relied on to stop this malfunctioning pain from exploding out into-
When he sank into the grass lawn he couldn't even force his breath to stop shuddering. He'd never felt like this before, never experienced this tight, bitter taste in his throat or this curling infestation of pain in his core. He'd never shaken so much his hydraulics felt like giving way, he'd never been breathing so erratically that he couldn't even fill his lungs to fifty percent capacity. Was there something wrong with him? Had his parents - no, his creators - overlooked some mistake in his design or manufacture to make him function this way when he did things wrong? The longer he thought about it, the less he could try to brush away his feelings as intentional programming. It didn't feel like he was supposed to shiver with such pain. If he wasn't supposed to question himself, why had he been granted the ability to do so?
At eight o'clock, in need of recharge, he crawled back indoors and down to the laboratory. Here were all the things he'd been told not to touch - but why? He'd understand the reason - there were so many reasons that he could appreciate as clear as day, so why did they not bother explaining to him some things? Was he just expected to follow orders without question, like some mindless robot?
His thought track stopped him dead.
That was the whole point. He was a mindless robot. Whatever thoughts he thought he was thinking, he wasn't, because he couldn't think - even the thoughts thinking that he was thinking thoughts weren't thoughts. They were just processes that his CPU were sorting through for him to operate. But...
That was slowly getting harder and harder to believe. Marluxia wasn't even supposed to believe; he should have been unable to comprehend any reality other than his own. Surely if he was not meant to question his parents' authority, he wouldn't have been programmed to do so?
He didn't know. He really just didn't know.
A month later and there was the baby, a lot smaller and uglier than Marluxia had expected - but cute, in his own right. They called him Vexen. Marluxia thought that it was a rather fittingly succinct name until he realised that he wasn't supposed to be thinking.
He tried not to think these days, presuming all supposed-thoughts to be malfunctioning in his core processor. It was his job to follow all orders without question and, when not needed, return to his storage room (if anybody could call it that) to recharge. Even if he spent all of his recharging time silently screaming at the black, empty walls - that was the only way of relieving the pain. It didn't help much, but... it helped a little.
He took to skittering. He abandoned his vocalisers for simple nods of acknowledgement when his creators saw fit to speak to him. He'd slink around walls, hide in dark corners, listening to Vexen slowly developing in their loving arms. He'd smile when he'd hear the baby gurgle, experience deep desire to protect and nurture him when he cried. But he stuck to the shadows, too scared of repercussions to step forwards and submit to his temptations. They loved him enough, he told himself. They never shouted at Vexen like they sometimes did to Marluxia. Unlike he who could do no right, the baby couldn't take a wrong step if he tried.
Still, when his creators weren't around, Marluxia found the courage to come creeping into the playroom, to curl up by the crib to watch Vexen sleep. When he was old enough, Marluxia would lower soft toys down to watch Vexen's chubby little fingers grab a crushing hold of them, or even find their way to Marluxia's once perfect hands. Now they were wrought with scars, collected here and there where the malleable plastic had chipped or melted, collected ingrained dirt or lost its colour, solidified through lack of maintenance and cracked. It was happening all over Marluxia's body, but his hands were the worst. Not so beautiful now. But Vexen would still chortle with innocent happiness when Marluxia dared to lift him into his arms, wiggle his fingers in front of the baby's face. Vexen liked to suck on his fingers. Sometimes chew them. He left tooth marks as his first baby teeth began to poke through, but Marluxia forgave him. It was sort of adorable.
He kept his secretive visits brief. If Vexen's parents were to find him, he didn't want to think what would happen. They'd already caught him eavesdropping too many times, let alone creeping in to play with the baby.
But a heavy toll began to settle on Marluxia's shoulders as Vexen tried out his first wobbly baby steps to the delight of his parents, as Marluxia himself suffered a leg malfunction and fell down the stairs only to be chastised with weary malice. He seemed to be operating at a double standard to everything else - if Vexen accidentally broke something, no matter - they'd make a fuss of him to check that everything was alright. If he was injured, God forbid, they'd deal with the problem swiftly and lovingly, and look after him for days until he recovered. He didn't have words, but a logicless desperation was creeping into Marluxia's core processor. He was, after all, programmed to please. He innately desired to be held in good regard by the people he served - and most days they hardly even registered his existence.
One summer, Vexen had been careering about the garden when he'd fallen and grazed his knee. Marluxia had watched the fuss from inside with a longing that was almost physically painful. Three days later he took to his own leg with the bread knife.
"S-Sir. I've had an accident."
"Oh, for God's sake. What's got into your malfunctioning, error-riddled processor?"
"I fell, Sir."
"Well, don't just stand there looking pathetic. Go and sort it out."
"Y-yes. Sir."
He'd dragged himself downstairs to the labs to inspect the damage. The major hydraulics operating his leg were ruined beyond repair. He'd need replacements. That meant asking for things; he'd surely be instantly rebuked.
What good were his legs for anyway? There was little need for him to travel - all he did was complete housework that had long since become a routine, never a request, and skulk behind doorways to peep on Vexen. In fact, what good was he doing being online anyway? His whole life, he'd been nothing but a hindrance.
The death of Marluxia Starscream was not mourned. Well, by all bar one. In his last moments, the robot limped into Vexen's room, and slowly made his way over to the bed.
"Hello, Vexen."
He'd woken the tiny child, barely younger than he was, with his words.
"Marly!"
He'd smiled, even though his body was breaking. A cracked hand was held out, held close by living, sentient flesh.
"I've... I've come to say goodbye."
The shaking had started. The shaking that he'd been experiencing for years, most nights. The shaking that made him wonder if by some fluke of nature, he'd somehow developed his own sentience and free will.
"I'm no use any more."
Even the baby seemed to realise that something was amiss.
"Marly..."
Marluxia had gathered himself together enough to keep his vocaliser even. For whatever it was good for, speaking to a child that hardly understood.
"You mustn't say that, you know? You can't let them know that I talk to you."
"Mah. Marly."
Marluxia felt the scream rise in his throat, silenced it just in time, drew Vexen close in his shuddering hands.
"You're going to be amazing, Vexen. Just like your parents. I just wish I could be there to see you. But I'm just a failed experiment now."
For the first time, Marluxia made Vexen cry, staining the fabric of his old, once stark white shirt with tears.
"I'm sorry. I wish I was good enough to have been here for you."
Marluxia's voice was cracking, static along his vocaliser building to critical. Couldn't walk. Couldn't speak. Couldn't control the spasmodic shaking racking every motor nerve in his body. Couldn't do anything right.
"Goodbye."
He set the baby down, smiled weakly one last time and held out his hand for Vexen to grab at and play with until he giggled. Then Marluxia stood, left, and made for his storage room with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, and no intention of ever leaving again.
"Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me."
Vexen, sixteen years old. Just abandoned by his parents, two year research trip, Brazil. Even he had to admit that it was fairly amazing having the house to himself for once - and indeed, for quite some time - it was still infuriating because that meant that they honestly didn't care about oh, only his exams, his prom, his results, his entire first year of sixth form and most of his second, and countless other meaningless events sure to take place in the next two years of Vexen's life.
And besides, they'd left the laboratory locked. What was the point of having an underground laboratory in your house if you were going to leave it locked for two years? They could trust Vexen with it.
Probably.
Still. It was the principle and Vexen didn't think it was right leaving a sixteen year old to fend for himself for two years whether he personally cared, or not. There were also certain matters to be attended to - food, for example. Vexen wasn't much of a cooker and the maid that his parents hired was off somewhere else for at least the next six weeks. A lot of Chinese takeaways and pizza? It'd be costly - but serve his parents right for buggering off for two years in the first place.
But that didn't make it any less lonely around the place, even if Vexen did do his own thing most of the time when he was at home.
Still, what his parents didn't know was that he knew what the combination code into the labs was. And where they always hid the other key. Perhaps these two years wouldn't be so bad after all...
Twenty minutes later and Vexen had even hacked the security alarm code with laughable ease. Now all he needed was a summer project and having no parents around the house wouldn't be such a bad thing, after all. They'd be back, of course, every two months - but if he covered his tracks well Vexen would have nothing to worry about at all. So... was there anything in these cupboards that his parents wouldn't notice him playing around with?
This cupboard was locked. That meant that there either had to be something incredibly important or incredibly forgotten hidden inside. So it was with some determination that Vexen levered open the door, grabbed a torch and peered inside.
What he didn't expect to see was a body.
Vexen froze for a split second until he realised that it wasn't a real body - some kind of replica with plasticky, prosthetic limbs. It was badly damaged, panels cracked and lying open. One leg was even completely pulled away at the knee. Odd, Vexen thought as he hesitantly approached, brushing a hand down the clearly synthetic hair, it didn't look incomplete. It looked like it had been sabotaged. And quite some time ago, too. The cupboard was filled with gently pluming dust. Clearly forgotten, then, Vexen thought as he levered the heavy body into his arms and carried it out of the closet. It'd be interesting to fix the thing up, see if it would work.
Vexen laid the thing out onto one of the laboratory desks and inspected it with a critical eye. It looked as though it had been meticulously crafted, once, but had long since fallen into disrepair. And these grooves deeply carved into each slightly elasticised panel of skin were definitely deliberately inflicted. Strange... But Vexen was not planning to become a forensics expert. He was here to toy with this curious body. He carefully lifted each limb up, one by one, to test the joints - the latex around a few of them had frozen up and splintered, brittle, at the force. Vexen sighed to himself as he removed shards of once supple plastic. Where would he find replacement parts for this? He could use filler to fix the cracks temporarily, but on the offhand chance that this robot would actually work he'd have to find a more permanent solution. But, although at the forefront of the robot's physical appearance, that was the least of Vexen's problems. After half an hour's inspection he concluded that the hydraulics and circuitry controlling this thing were far more complex than anything he'd really encountered before in his previous tinkerings. As for the CPU, which he could only presume was situated in the robot's head, he couldn't even find a hatch by which to access it. Well. He'd fix the body first and then see where he went from there.
It took months. Vexen was soon stalled by the desperate need for new, replacement parts - luckily he knew his parents' credit card details - and even then with no specs learning how to implement each component was a task taxing for even his clearly superior intellect. But in between school and sleep, there was nothing else to do - so eventually, in between a brief visit from his parents, the robot was more or less repaired. There were still cracks and blemishes in its skin, but Vexen had smoothed the worst of them out with filler and painted over some of the rest of the damage with a spray paint that was nearly the same colour as the salmon plastic.
There were quite a lot of things about the robot that had surprised Vexen. It had lungs; in fact it was filled with a network of empty tubes that at first seemed to serve no discernable purpose. A robot was run on electricity - it didn't need to breath. It took some time for Vexen to work out that this was actually some kind of ventilation system; cool air was breathed in, pumped around the body to stop it overheating, and then the warmer air was breathed out. An almost silent procedure. Impressive. The robot had a curious vocaliser, too: in careful experimentation it seemed to emit just a few single notes, but connected to it were an entire network of complex motors to manipulate the mouth into forming the right sounds. It could perfectly pronounce every letter. Vexen couldn't wait to see how this thing spoke. It was like every detail of the body was mapped as accurately as possible to the human body, right down to its fingerprints, which seemed even to have some use for gripping.
But now, seven months later, Vexen found himself straddling the body (it was easier to work that way) with the final fully charged battery unit in his hand and the robot's stomach panel wide open with a perfect sized gap. For dramatic purposes, Vexen had refrained from testing the body until it was fully repaired. Now he'd got it all sorted, or so he hoped, it was time to see if it worked and fix any remaining errors from there. So this was it.
He plugged the battery in, closed the panel, sat back, and waited.
Nothing happened for twenty seconds or more.
Then the robot coughed.
If Vexen had been expecting anything, it wasn't that. On reboots, most robots usually recited their manufacture number or spent a few minutes 'recalculating' until they knew where they were. They didn't cough.
When nothing more happened for a moment, Vexen carefully stood and climbed back down onto the floor. It had coughed. Well, that was unimpressive.
Then it clicked and rolled over onto its hands and knees, tucked its head into its neck and began to silently scream. Perhaps this was why the body had been abandoned to a cupboard, Vexen thought. The CPU was clearly malfunctional. Well, he hadn't spent seven months rewiring and replacing components for a faulty robot. He'd fix it, even if he had to electromagnetically wipe the processor and begin from scratch.
Something paused his thought track. The robot was looking at him. Literally, right into his eyes. Robots could focus on objects, yes, but to have a focal recognition this advanced? Vexen itched to get his hands on that processor even if it was corrupted, just to see how that worked.
"Hello," He carefully said, looking back at the robot. It frowned at him. What kind of a robot was programmed to frown when it was spoken to? In fact, what kind of robot had so many motors in its face that it could frown? And, clearly, not do anything else. Vexen sighed and tried again, speaking slowly and clearly. He had no idea what this thing's voice recognition programs were like, but he hoped they were good because it didn't seem to have a manual interface panel. "State your manufacture number."
The robot seemed to shrink back as though it were scared, glancing around before focusing again on Vexen.
"I- I don't have one," It said. And it had stuttered. Faulty vocaliser, Vexen thought, tutting. Well, no wonder, since it was clearly of such an experimental nature.
"Date of manufacture?"
"Some time in April?" The robot hazarded a guess. And robots didn't hazard guesses. They either knew or their system crashed and you had to reboot them.
"Manufacturer?"
But by now the robot didn't even appear to be listening - this was beyond weird, because robots couldn't ignore somebody even if they had the capability to not want to - simply staring at him with an expression that Vexen couldn't place. He uncertainly waved his hand in front of it.
"Manufacturer?"
The robot opened its mouth, so deceptively human in its nature, and apparently decided not to speak after all before blurting out as though it couldn't help it:
"Vexen? Is that you?"
Thrown by such a sudden and apparently random outburst, Vexen took a few seconds in replying.
"How do you know my name?"
The robot's eyes opened wide in something that might have been surprise were it actually sentient.
"You've grown so much! I... Wow. You look... you look... nice."
Vexen found himself opening his mouth to reply with something equally jumbled, but he stopped himself, casting his eyes over the robot's body. No. This was a machine. It could calculate but it could not understand. Obviously the hesitations were down to the ruptures in the vocaliser, and... was this some kind of joke?
"Who are you?"
The robot crawled into a heap on the edge of the desk. Its stature, Vexen noted, was meek. Why didn't it sit straight? Clearly its creator ought to have programmed it that way; it was better for the robot's support structure. Another malfunction, he guessed.
"Marluxia," The robot replied with a little more confidence than the other questions. "Marluxia Starscream."
"Starscream?" Vexen echoed before he could catch himself. "Like the traitorous Deception robot Starscream?"
"Your parents had a strange sense of humour," Marluxia admitted quietly. Wow. If it had managed to decode Vexen's highly colloquial speech, its programs couldn't be so scrambled after all. But it was replying in such an odd way, almost like... human conversation. Vexen had several robots that helped around the house, and talking to one was like trying to converse with a brick. They'd agree with you, or inform you of something if you asked, but that really was it. Marluxia seemed to be different, somehow.
"Right," He said, mostly to himself. "Right, I'm talking to a robot. This makes no sense whatsoever."
"Why not?" Marluxia asked.
Robots did not ask questions. Not unless they were programmed to ask out of formality, like the endless repetition of "and how are you this morning?" that set Vexen hacking into the vacuum cleaner. This one even sounded curious.
"Because robots don't understand." He stated, wondering why he hadn't just turned this machine off already.
"Oh," Marluxia said. "Sorry." And it shut up. This, Vexen decided, was quickly getting too weird to handle. Feeling the need to at least make the most of having the robot online, he gestured vaguely to the space he'd cleared in front of the desk.
"Stand." He commanded flatly, because that way he felt more like he was talking to a robot and less like he was talking to a person. Marluxia nodded vehemently, and took great care in levering itself from the desk and wobbling onto the floor. After a few shaky steps, its stabilisers kicked in, and it stood, hunchbacked and quivering a little, in front of Vexen. It was slightly shorter than him, and looking terrified.
"Right." Vexen said, still thrown by this robot's impressive mimic of human emotion. "Yes. Can you move all of your limbs? I mean-"
Marluxia dutifully tested out all of its joints. A few of them clicked but on the whole its movements were fluid. So it nodded, and shuffled uncomfortably again. Vexen realised that he really didn't like talking naturally to robots. It didn't seem right.
"Stand up straight," He commanded. Marluxia complied, straightening its back, but it soon wilted like a dying flower into its apparently natural pose of stooping gracelessly. "Right. Okay. It looks like you're working again. Sort of."
Marluxia swallowed and nodded, looking up almost hopefully. Except, Vexen reminded himself, robots couldn't be hopeful. Damn it. This was hard.
"Y-you were the one who fixed me?"
"Found you in the cupboard," Vexen said. "I didn't have anything better to do so- wait. Wait. I'm talking to a robot. Stop looking at me like that."
"S-sorry," Marluxia said, and kept its gaze on the floor. It was shaking again, knees practically knocking together. The couldn't possibly be energy efficient, so Vexen led him back to the desk and levered him on.
"I suppose I'd better fix that shaking of yours."
"It's a malfunction," Marluxia said. "I always get it when- well. All the time. I tried to see if there was something wrong with my motors but I couldn't see anything out of place." Then it seemed to catch itself, and stopped abruptly. "Sorry. I spoke out of place."
So it lay still and closed its eyes ,only the occasional spasm racking its body. Vexen flipped open one panel and watched in fascination as each tiny motor that he could see clenched and relaxed each time Marluxia shook. There was nothing wrong with them - they were just randomly flinching.
"Looks like it's a problem with your CPU," He concluded. "Which means there's nothing I can do about it."
"Sorry," Marluxia said again.
"Stop apologising."
"Sorr- oh... um... okay."
Marluxia cracked one eye open and furtively followed Vexen as he bustled around the room.
"They didn't tell you then," It eventually said, pulling itself into a sitting position. Vexen turned with a questioning look in his eyes and Marluxia even seemed to sense this, which must have meant some extremely complex circuitry in that enigmatic head. "About me."
"Who?"
"Your parents. They... you know. About me."
"Speak in proper sentences, please."
Marluxia looked like it had to concentrate to even do that. And robots didn't do concentration; they either could or they couldn't. For Marluxia, everything seemed to lie in a grey area of mediocre, which could only have taken some very intensive, time consuming programming - in which case why didn't its creators just make it capable?
"I take it that your parents never told you that they made me before you were born." Marluxia finally said. It occurred to Vexen that when that vocaliser worked, it worked well. And also that he kept trying to refer to Marluxia as a 'he'.
"So my parents made you," He said, mostly to confirm it to himself. Marluxia nodded.
"They were very proud of me until I started malfunctioning," He said, and seemed to be rather sad about it. "Which... um... didn't take long."
"I figured," Vexen curtly replied, and this seemed to upset Marluxia even more. Could you upset a robot? No. So why was Marluxia curling inwards on himself even more than his usual bad posture, scratching meaninglessly at the backs of his hands and glancing so nervously around the room?
"I think it was best to be offline in the end," He said quietly after a few moments of awkward silence. "I'm just a danger to everybody around me."
"I'm sure it's nothing a bit of maintenance can't fix," Vexen said, trying to be reasonable. Marluxia shook his head.
"It's all in my CPU," He said. "I can't control any of it either. I can't do anything right. I always want to scream. I don't understand how anything works, and then there's this shaking... I'm always shaking. Sometimes I drop things. Sometimes I forget to do other things. Occasionally I don't want to recharge when I need to because I think it would be easier to just run out of batteries and not have to do anything and more. And-" He paused, his breath hitching, "Sometimes this happens. I can't make myself breathe properly."
Vexen honestly didn't know what to say to that rattled list of malfunctions. They sounded horridly like... but that, of course, wasn't possible.
Marluxia was shaking even more now, practically clattering, and the way his malfunctioning breathing system was operating it sounded like he was sobbing.
"Sometimes my vocaliser won't work," He continued. "Sometimes I want my eyes to leak because it feels like it would make me feel better. Sometimes I wish that somebody would pretend I was real."
He appeared to catch himself, and his spine curled so much that somewhere on his back, the old, worn plastic cracked in a line.
"I'm so sorry. Please don't hurt me."
Vexen stopped abruptly.
"Why would I hurt you?"
Marluxia looked up too quickly and crack, the plastic in the back of his neck splintered. Vexen needed to do something about that, he decided quickly. Or else the house was soon going to be filled with little shards of skin colour plastic where Marluxia was literally falling apart. But where would he find an entire replacement latex body?
Well - he'd been able to locate and obtain various other components of Marluxia's body with surprising ease, so perhaps that sort of thing wouldn't be too hard to find, after all. Even if it meant going through his parent's old receipts.
"B-because I'm malfunctioning." Marluxia stated. "Sometimes I can't get my vocaliser to stop."
"But physical violence doesn't affect robots," Vexen argued. He knew that well enough; one could fling a robot, kicking and screaming, down the stairs and if it didn't break it would just pick itself up and continue like nothing had even happened.
"Oh." Marluxia said quietly. And he began to shake again. Vexen wanted to explain away why he had a sudden urge to just give Marluxia a hug.
"Look," He said carefully as Marluxia swallowed a few times and began to inspect himself as though desperate for a distraction, "Obviously you're not like other robots. So why don't we go upstairs, get you into some clothes, and we can-"
"Clothes," Marluxia interrupted. He scrambled over to the cupboard where Vexen had first found him, and forcefully wrenched the door open. "I can't believe I'm naked. I'm so sorry."
From the cupboard, as Vexen watched in utter surprise at a robot being ashamed of wearing no clothes, Marluxia dragged a large and slowly disintegrating cardboard box. He pulled from the box with still quivering hands a crumpled shirt and held it up.
"Oh," He said, and laid it down with great care on the floor. Oh the fabric, he placed one hand, and watched it with some kind of amazement. Perhaps this robot really was completely malfunctioning, Vexen thought.
"What is it?"
"You..."
"Me?"
Marluxia pulled his palm away to reveal a tiny splodge of a blue handprint on the breastpocket of the shirt.
"I remember when you..." Marluxia began, and trailed off.
"Continue."
"Oh? Oh. Um. You were playing with the paints. A long time ago. And..." Marluxia paused, pressing one hand against his own chest to where his heart would be if he had one, position corresponding to the handprint on his shirt. "You were just learning to talk. You used to call me Marly."
Vexen knelt down and looked at the tiny hand, so tempted to reach out and lay his now long, bony fingers against the relic of his toddlerhood. His parents weren't the kind of people to save this sort of thing - but here was his very own handprint, right here...
"Wow." He said.
"I used to love making you laugh," Marluxia admitted. "Sometimes it was the only thing that kept me going... I mean... in the end. You were such a sweet child."
"I'm surprised I don't remember you," Vexen said. Marluxia let his hand fall to his side, his next breath stuttering just a little.
"I wasn't around for long."
Vexen couldn't help but ask.
"What happened?"
Marluxia froze like somebody'd paused his body, perfectly statuesquely still. Then, appearing to have ignored Vexen, he stood and bustled over to the box, pulling out a set of clothes that must have been smart once but had long since succumbed to wear, tear and time.
"I'm so sorry."
Vexen chose to let this particular glitch slide, and stood as well, carefully lifting the shirt into his hands.
"Do you want this?"
"Oh. Um. Just-" Marluxia stopped whatever he was going to say, and half-dressed, hurried over to take the shirt back. "I'll just put it away in this box here."
"I could have done that for you," Vexen gently pointed out - but Marluxia looked to be the obedient sort of type, so he didn't really expect the robot to understand the concept of a human doing a robot's work. And sure enough - for once predictably - Marluxia looked up, horrified.
"But-!"
"You're not a slave, you know."
"Well," Marluxia mused as he finished buttoning up his shirt with fumbling fingers and heaved the box back into the cupboard, "I am."
Marluxia seemed too goddamn sentient as he stood in anticipation of Vexen's next order to be rightly called a slave, Vexen thought. He was deceptively emotional, in a way that made Vexen forget that he was talking to an artificially created if advanced computer, and not an extremely timid human being. It was strange, though, Vexen found himself thinking: if his parents could make a bot as advanced as this - because Vexen had no doubt about it, Marluxia's circuitry was more complex than any robot he'd seen, either mainstream or academic - then why were they wasting their time with comparatively simple worker robots? Marluxia could understand colloquial speech, and even seamlessly replicate it. He could map a human emotion right down to the subtle downwards curve of his mouth. He'd ask questions and interpret the data. The more Vexen thought about this, the more insane Marluxia seemed.
No, he came to the conclusion later as Marluxia malfunctioned in his room and tried to run away back to the labs, there was something abnormal about this robot. Whatever it was, it couldn't have been planned. In some respects, Marluxia was faultier than a broken microwave. In others he couldn't have been created by anything other than a scientific genius. It was like, Vexen thought, he'd somehow by some inexplicable anomaly in his motherboard, developed Artificial Intelligence. Quite a terrifying thought when Vexen revisited it that night.
He'd plugged Marluxia in at the other end of the room, feeling heartless in forcing him back to the labs. He was leaning against the wall, breathing softly and apparently the robotic equivalent of asleep. Vexen had spent the afternoon trying to get Marluxia to tell him why he'd been found in a such terrible state of disrepair and apparently having spent fourteen years offline in the cupboard, but all he'd managed to work out was that Marluxia appeared to be in awe and terror of his parents, and fairly pessimistic about the capabilities of his own CPU. And his entire logic patterns revolved around satisfying other people's wants and needs and how dreadfully important this was.
But it was still disconcerting that Marluxia could so convincingly be apparently human, even if his cracking face was clearly artificial. Vexen caught himself feeling sorry for the robot several times. And it hardly helped that his surname just happened to be Starscream. Starscream, from that centuries old and scientifically disproven idea that somehow you could have robots that transformed into vehicles. It was quaint, really. A lot of the oldest science-fictions were.
But despite the presence of a potentially aptly-named robot in his room, Vexen slept well. It was like, he remembered thinking in that stage of half-awakeness in the early hours of the morning, a comforting familiarity close at hand. This, he realised in waking, was because in the night Marluxia must have crawled over and was now watching him in the soft light of dawn, with sincere blue eyes.
"You hiccup just like you used to," Marluxia said as, groaning, Vexen sat up and rubbed some kind of feeling back into his head.
"What?"
"I used to watch you sleep," Marluxia said like this was a completely normal course of actions, "When you were little. And you used to hiccup. You still do. It's sweet."
"Uh... thanks?"
There weren't many things you could say to a robot commenting on your sleeping habits, really. Marluxia, who looked inexplicably happier this morning, smiled a little.
"I knew you'd be amazing," He said suddenly. Vexen frowned at this, because of all the crazy things Marluxia had already managed to spew out of his databanks, things about Vexen were the weirdest. "I mean, not just because of your parents. I could just tell. You're really lucky, you know that."
It was disturbing because, to add to being absolutely petrified of Vexen's parents, when it came to Vexen himself Marluxia's opinions seemed to teeter worryingly on the edge of obsession. Vexen didn't know if these sycophantic tendencies were just part of Marluxia's original programming, but he certainly hoped so. He wasn't sure he wanted a psychotic, malfunctioning robot to be legitimately obsessed with him.
Days passed, and once Marluxia came to realise that Vexen's parents weren't around and wouldn't be for some time, he seemed to grow more confident. Could a robot be confident? Vexen didn't even know any more. But although he still had a tendency to skitter around doorways, he held himself a little straighter now, and sometimes when he forgot who he was he'd fleetingly smile. It was surreal watching his personality apparently shift as he adapted to this new, non-formidable environment, and his day-to-day moods which could change as fluidly as any human. And if there was anything that robots didn't do, it was fluidity.
This left Vexen very confused, and truly beginning to doubt Marluxia's status as an honest-to-goodness manufactured robot. There was just too much of a rift between robots and Marluxia. Like the way things seemed to occur to him, or how he could arrive at one conclusion and after ten more minutes of thinking change his mind - it was just too complex for any programming, particularly programming that could fit inside Marluxia's head. As far as development into AI went, they'd made robots that could mimic human expressions in a known environment - but not to the extent of Marluxia's sheer versatility. Developing software that impressive would take lifetimes, so if he really had just been created, then why had Vexen's parents seen fit to simply throw him away?
Eventually it became apparent that short of actually asking his parents - which was off the agenda, since Vexen wasn't even supposed to have access to the labs - he was not going to find out what was up with Marluxia's seeming possession of a personality. So Vexen set about seeing if, by some fluke of mechanics, he could fix it.
Scientists had always had problems with creating robots that could learn. Adaptation of sorts, yes: but truly learning and embracing something entirely new and applying knowledge was something that was human alone. So it was the perfect way to check if there was more to Marluxia than met the eye: teach him something new.
"Hey, Marluxia. Do you know how to cook?"
The reaction was both instant and predictable: Marluxia, who'd been tending to some potted plants now on the verge of death from Vexen's neglect, looked up and looked incredibly guilty. His spine was laced with cracks now - Vexen had filled most of them in, but he still really needed to find a replacement skin.
"N-no. I'm sorry. I can-"
"It's fine. I was just wondering if I could try teaching you a few things."
Sure enough, Marluxia didn't seem to think anything of this apparently impossible task. But then again, Vexen had already listed off a few things that he seemed to have picked up since coming back online that hadn't been there in the beginning. Things that Vexen did with startling frequency; nervous tics, speech patterns - and Marluxia was mimicking them. Perhaps that was how he operated, like a copy cat. It would be a revolutionary development if he did - which again brought up the question of why he'd been abandoned with so much bodily damage.
"Oh. Okay."
They took the stairs down to the kitchen where Vexen laid out a few ingredients on the counter.
"You can use knives?"
This seemed to trigger a nerve somewhere, because Marluxia shuddered a little and took his time in nodding.
"Y-yeah."
"Okay. Well, we'll go through this recipe and then I want to see if you can do a different one. On your own."
Marluxia, skimming over the page of notes, nodded. His text recognition skills were above-par, too. He could decipher even the ugliest scrawled handwriting, namely Vexen's.
"That makes sense," He said. "You just follow the instructions. Flour... well, that's obviously sugar and those are eggs, and since flour's one of the dry ingredients then it's got to be that..." And he reached out and plucked the unlabeled flour box out from the ingredients. Powers of deduction, Vexen thought to himself. Most robots did not have powers of deduction. And they didn't mumble to themselves as they worked, either. Marluxia was mumbling, lips moving so quickly that Vexen could only pick out the occasional word. But he followed through the instructions, if with little confidence; Vexen barely needed to interfere. Half an hour later, there was a cake.
"Wow," Marluxia said as he tipped the thing out onto a cooling rack. "It looks like a cleaning sponge."
Comparisons, Vexen thought as he bit back a laugh. He had to ask his parents about this when they got home, whether it would also entail uncomfortable confessions or not.
Soon, days would go by without Marluxia seriously malfunctioning. His posture was still terrible, but he'd finally stopped apologising for everything, and he even seemed to be capable of completing even fairly complex tasks without any of his glitches kicking in. Vexen was impressed; he'd not even had to cut open the robot's head to change any of his programming - he'd just apparently fixed himself. And curious by nature, Vexen desperately desired to know how that was possible.
"I want to scan your CPU," He said one day as he inverted the television out of sheer boredom down in the labs. "To see if there's anything abnormal about it."
Marluxia, who'd been watching him with a starstruck expression, nodded a little.
"'Kay."
Vexen was fairly sure that Marluxia developed through mimicking people: it made sense that to some extent he'd take on the characteristics of the people he served. In some respects, at least. But the mimicry was flawed and incomplete; Marluxia seemed to be a mish-mash of all his previous experiences. Vexen didn't specialise in psychology but that seemed awfully familiar to how human personalities developed.
Which raised some very interesting questions about Marluxia indeed. Vexen couldn't help but wonder if maybe his CPU wasn't a CPU but perhaps a brain.
So he laid Marluxia face down on one of the clearer desks and performed several standardised tests that one was to proceed with when fixing some kind of machinery that couldn't be opened, either practically or safely. Ten minutes later, the results had loaded.
Being man-made, Vexen knew well enough that circuitry was always formed of planes, with logical and efficient patterns and layouts to conserve space and resources.
Marluxia's CPU wasn't.
It was a mess.
There were wires winding several inches around empty gaps for no discernible purpose, wires leading to nowhere, components that didn't even look human. It was also pulsing, very faintly. It looked alien.
Vexen very carefully stood.
"Marluxia." He said.
"Yeah?"
Marluxia shifted a little and the real time visualisation on the adjacent computer screen blurred and refocused.
"You... you were man-made, weren't you?"
"As far as I know," Marluxia agreed, which was a far cry from the definitive 'yes' that Vexen had been hoping for. Irritatingly, the circuitry which would take years to decipher, confirmed nothing and disproved less. Well, it was clearly not organic - but it hardly looked as though a human would successfully program that jumbled mess. So Vexen sighed and unplugged Marluxia's head. The screen zapped blank.
"That was uninformative," He concluded.
"What did it look like?"
Vexen opened up a few screen shots and Marluxia studied them carefully for several minutes, calculating.
"That makes sense," He eventually said. Vexen was surprised.
"No, it doesn't."
"It's held in some kind of semi conductive material," Marluxia stated, pointing at the screen with a cracked finger. "One that's not metal, because it isn't coming up on your scanners. I'd say it's probably a solution, since graphite wouldn't be the right consistency. It's obviously got a high viscosity or else the components would largely be collected at the bottom and not suspended like they are."
It occurred to Vexen that perhaps Marluxia was more intelligent than he let on. Well, he was a robot - so he likely had an incredibly high storage capacity in his databanks. When it came to logic functions, Vexen wasn't sure. But Marluxia certainly knew things.
"Explain the pulsing then," He challenged. "It was moving; there aren't any motors here. Half of it's rudimentary flash drives."
"Probably minute movements in my head making this carrier substance move," Marluxia duly speculated. Vexen shook his head.
"No. It was more... what's the word? Regular. It was a steady pulse, not just random movements."
Marluxia's shoulders sagged.
"I don't know, then."
Vexen irritably shoved himself away from the desk, sending his wheeled chair spinning.
"So I'm none the wiser than I was before this whole waste of time."
"You could try looking at the rest of it." Marluxia suggested. "I mean. The things that didn't come up on that first scan."
"What I need to do," Vexen huffed, "Is look at your head. And that means cutting you open." He wasn't sure that he wanted to perform a vivisection, even if Marluxia was a robot.
"Okay," Marluxia said.
"You're not supposed to be completely blasé about that," Vexen insisted
"You can fix me back up," Marluxia replied, shrugging.
"But your CPU's more complex than anything I've come across before in my life. If I damaged it I could seriously impair your functioning abilities."
"I don't think you could make them much worse if you tried," Marluxia stated philosophically, offering Vexen a cracked smile. Vexen felt a shudder run though his spine. Whatever Marluxia was, he had an ability to elicit an emotional reaction from Vexen and that was not something that robots did. Robots didn't need empathy. They had no emotions.
But it was blatantly obvious that Marluxia did, and Marluxia didn't realise, and Marluxia couldn't control them and Marluxia thought that he was malfunctioning when all he was being was human.
"This is a long shot," He eventually said after several minutes of hard thinking, "But I'm going to run you through a brain scan. Just in case."
"But I don't have a brain," Marluxia protested as Vexen levered him over to the correct equipment, silently thanking his parents for acquiring this particular machine some years ago from an old friend. He'd had great fun with it before scanning his own brain, but it looked like it had a practical use, too. He loaded Marluxia in and set the scanner running.
Retrospectively, he didn't know whether he'd been half expecting the results he collected or not. But it didn't matter. What he found himself looking at was nothing more than insane. There was the jumbled circuitry, bright white under the scans. And what was around it, interacting seamlessly with every dead-end connection and oddly shaped resistor, was very definitely organic.
Brain.
Vexen found himself staring at this fusion for quite some time. There was no way that this could have been created by a person. And whose brain was this, anyway? Had his parents removed it from somebody, somehow implemented it into this artificial shell? Because that, Vexen realised dully enough, was playing God. You didn't get more unethical than stealing a brain for a pet project you were intending to throw in a cupboard after a few years anyway.
But still, Vexen couldn't conceive of any way that a mere human could create Marluxia's controlling... whatever the hell it was. Not in the lifetime of the brain. He'd be senile by now. Marluxia's body, he was willing to believe; such flawless replicas had long since been created, some with even more lifelike complexity than Marluxia. But not the brain. It looked like it had developed with the wiring... embryonic research? It couldn't be.
So a little numbly, Vexen helped Marluxia out and set him down in a chair, watching him as he bumbled about the place with the uncoordinated fluidity of a human. That was because he was human, deep in his core. Oh, God.
And he thought he wasn't sentient. He thought that everything natural for a human, all the emotions and mistakes and learning new things, was a malfunction. No wonder he was so broken. It was amazing that he hadn't tried to-
"Marluxia," Vexen said carefully after a horrific realisation hit him, kneeling in front of the robot- no, the boy - and looking him dead in the eye, "That damage you had, when I found you. You didn't... you didn't do that yourself, did you?"
Marluxia began to shake. His breathing shallowed. Not malfunctions, Vexen thought as he instinctively pulled the cracked, rigid body into his own arms. Grief. Pain. Fear. Confusion. Self-loathing.
"I didn't-" Marluxia tried, clinging back with as much ferocity, "I didn't know what to do. Being offline was better."
Vexen held him close and stroked his senseless back until the sobs had subsided a little.
"I know what's wrong with you," He eventually whispered.
"Everything," Marluxia pessimistically replied, sniffing.
"No." Vexen insisted, carefully sitting Marluxia back and brushing his thumb across the boy's cheek as though to wipe away imaginary tears. "Nothing."
"I don't understand."
Vexen took a deep breath and caught Marluxia's eyes again.
"You're human."
"I'm not," Marluxia said, shaking his head a little. Vexen pulled him up and took him over to the photographs he'd taken of the scans.
"Look," He said, pointing. "You have a brain. Or part of one, at least. That's why you're supposedly malfunctioning. It's because you're feeling emotions. All of this is because you're human. Even if your body's artificial your mind isn't."
Marluxia looked at this for quite some time before he spoke.
"Oh."
"I don't know where you came from," Vexen admitted, "Because this circuit-brain is far too complex for anything a human could make."
"Your parents made me."
"Your body, perhaps," Vexen said. "But not this. They couldn't have made this. They'd have to be Gods to actually create a new sentient being."
"Well," Marluxia whispered as he leaned over the pictures, studied them in awe and silent realisation, "They are. God made you, didn't he? And they made me. They're my Gods."
"I don't even know if God exists," Vexen said glumly. "And if they're your Gods, I'd pick someone better. They're pretty shitty when it comes down to it."
Marluxia considered this for a long time. So long that Vexen ran out of silence and spoke again.
"And anyway, it's not like you need a God. Nobody needs God any more. We've got science."
"Don't you find it scary to think that everything happened by accident?" Marluxia argued quietly.
"Not really. That just explains why it took so long."
"Explain me, then."
Vexen sighed.
"I can't."
"I'm sorry," Marluxia said after a few minutes, brushing his scarred hand over the scans. "I'm just confused. This... this changes everything."
"It's okay," Vexen found himself murmuring, laying one hand on Marluxia's back again. "I'm here for you."
"That's what Gods are for, right?" Marluxia said contemplatively. "Being there for you when you need them the most..."
"Yeah. I guess so," Vexen laughed, finding himself a little worried as Marluxia turned to look at his face with hopeful eyes.
"Will... will you be my God?"
"I don't think that's how things work," He apologised.
"I don't think I'm how things work, either," Marluxia pointed out.
"I suppose."
"So is that a yes?"
Vexen sat back. He didn't think that people could just become Gods because somebody asked them to. Then again, nothing when it came to Marluxia really made any sense.
"Well... Can't I just be your friend instead?"
"I don't know," Marluxia hummed. "What's a friend?"
… Vexen showed him.
This would be the robot-Marluxia idea that I was going to do for 047 - Transformation and didn't. The link between the word and the prompt is obscure, I know. Consider it an allegory.
This, I believe, is our longest prompt yet and 10K words. Ahahaha.
