X's Introspection
Katie Montminy
(Brain. Body. Gun. That's all I am – parts.)
It resounded like thunder. A recurring thought that gained newfound gravity in the unclouded clairvoyance of a sudden nightly waking, when his mind was empty of all its many conscious concerns. It jarred his tranquility with its irreconcilable truth.
Or was it truth? He had been dreaming lately, a fact which, since it was a preposterous and blasphemous notion that a machine should be dreaming, he had kept to himself. Deep-seated memories floated like leaden bubbles from the heavy past he bore – a vast darkness where every last thing he felt and witnessed was recorded for the rest of time.
The faces of those who had come before him, then gone before him, haunted him most. He knew there would be many more, but the knowledge didn't make his reality any easier, and his heart grew heavier with each passing day. He was destined to fight, and fighting knew no end to his suffering, or that of others.
(Why do I fight? Why couldn't I choose peace? I was the first to have choice.)
That night, he'd watched past events replayed against his will, filling him with a familiar despair. Just as they had before, they left him to utter loneliness once again.
A brief glimpse, and probably his earliest memory of all, was all he knew of his creator, Dr. Light, in life. And even then, the mechambiotic fluid of the pod – the mechanical womb that had held him for some 30 years – had obscured his view of the man. Yet he had heard his name that day for the first time, as the doctor's warbling lilt passed through the liquid – a muffled but unmistakable name, before he went back to the depths of slumber.
"X".
Years passed before he would remember that day, when he was finally rediscovered as a relic by a new doctor – Cain. He was fascinated by X, yet rather than treating him strictly as a specimen, he grew fond of him as one would a human child, and eventually came to depend on his helpfulness. But X would find messages recorded by his creator that served as a bittersweet reminder that a hologram would be all he would ever know of his era, and his creator, and he longed to know more about his true purpose.
His first days of 'life' were the only moments of true peace he could recall. Before the present chaos, a unanimous sentiment of unity saw Reploids, the mass-produced humanoid service robots that now carried his features, and their human masters working together towards a veritable utopian society.
But it was not of such platitudes that he dreamt.
The peace was cut short by the uprising of Reploids gone 'Maverick', and he and Zero, an experienced combat robot, were summoned to quash evil. Zero had been his dearest friend, though very much his superior for a long time. It hadn't stopped Zero from becoming a mentor and protector to X, his stalwart guardian.
Zero now existed to him only in memory and the dreams that jogged it. Nightmares more often than dreams, since they always ended in Zero's demise at the hands of Vile, or, more appropriately, in his self-sacrifice to save X from him. He relived the horror, from the clang of metal-on-metal as Zero was pounded by the iron fists, to the final tremulous steps that led him to Zero's broken body after the battle. And though he wasn't 'alive', he bled, spoke last words as X knelt beside him, and left him in the utter loneliness that X now faced every day.
In his weaker moments, he resented Zero for leaving him. He bore a reminder of him on his arm – the arm cannon he had handed him before he faded away – and swore that it sometimes ached with grief and sorrow as though it were of flesh.
The loss overshadowed his every move and thought and feeling. But he was very scarce on the subject in day to day matters, instead leaving the demons in his mind to come to play as he slept. His actions were met with unending pain, his cause becoming more and more obscured, and on nights like these, he lied awake wondering if the side of right he so upheld was worth it all.
(I am more than a machine. They know I chose this life, I know I chose it. So why do I question it?) At this, his eyes sprang open.
(Perhaps this is what it means to be human?)