Another chapter, this one involving a nice pirate and a bitchy robot. Enjoy!
'OF THREE; THE MAN, THE MACHINE, AND THE LOST BOY, IT IS THE LATTER THAT WILL GUIDE MEN INTO THEIR NEW PEACE.'
To Otto, it sounded like a bunch of baloney.
But that baloney was joined by the other components of a factual lunch when Captain Ghazali-Johnson explained the boy's appearances throughout history and how he had a talent for fixing things. Otto thought about this fact for a bit, before he couldn't take it anymore and had to ask.
"Where are my…" he didn't know what to call them. "My friends?"
Doctor Fielding explained:
Due to the fact that neither Tuddrussel nor Larry were necessary for the prophecy, Captain Ghazal-Johnson and Joo-Joo had chosen to only abduct Otto.
Hearing this, Otto was torn between anger and panic. He did the only thing he could think of. He walked out and didn't look back.
Larry had always tried to keep Otto from the bloodier parts of history. When Georges Danton's last wish was fulfilled, the robot had blocked the boy's view of the revolutionary's head. Larry had fought with Tuddrussel to make Otto stay on the satellite when there was a mission on the French side of World War I.
He didn't understand why he protected the child, being as the boy already knew the grizzly details of the missions. But his Hart told him to do it, and not even the sophisticated software of his motherboard could explain the discomfort he felt when he failed to shield Otto from something a kid his age shouldn't have to see.
So, when Tuddrussel told Larry what he had seen in the infirmary, Larry was considering shooting himself out of the airlock with a jetpack to go get Otto from the clutches of these pirates.
When Larry remembered that no Earth ship was stocked with jetpacks, he turned down the influence his Hart was having on his processor.
He had a job to do now. And that job, as humiliating as it seemed now, was to help himself.
Tuddrussel was out of commission until the doctors deemed him stable, more mentally than physically, enough to return to work.
Larry was rather happy to have this opportunity to work solo, though he couldn't slip under the radar of his old… acquaintance; Elkhart.
It was odd, though, because Elkhart was different than Larry's memory had ever characterized him. He was… needy.
The first thing the Admiral did when Larry was rebooted was question him, moving from usual mundane questions about his primary function to more important problems like how he had been shorted out. Larry, having had his security camera eyes online even when the rest of him was gone, was up to date on Tuddrussel's white lies about the robot, and he played along because it was the safest thing to do.
On the subject of his shorting out, Larry could only speculate that the medicbot he had been with was infected with a bug from the pirates and had been reprogrammed to short out other robots when an electrical pulse from the rogue ships came within a certain distance of the bot.
Larry finished rattling off this last part when he looked at Elkhart again.
The human was seated across from him with his recorder device in hand, looking at the robot with the look of a man trying to make himself read through something despite fatigue. Slowly he nodded, looking away and drinking in the robot's theory.
Elkhart ran through its pro's:
Logically sound.
Very plausible given what was known about the technology on the rogue ships.
Simple enough to work.
Con's:
He wasn't sure this prototype L-3000 wasn't reprogrammed by the enemy.
"Thank you," Elkhart said, standing.
Larry was thrown through a loop.
"Ye-you're welcome, Admiral."
As the officer turned to go Larry saw him do something he never remembered him doing when the robot was younger: he yawned, stretched and gave a long sigh.
And so Larry set out on his new mission: Making sure he didn't screw up the peace negotiations.
Mr. 3000, the young and shiny of the two Larry's, had been doing an excellent job with the little he had to go on. Elkhart had yet to release the information he had gleaned from the two mysterious victims of the station's run-in with the pirates, leaving 3000 with little more than lukewarm issues that had been settled already.
Things like the costs of certain fruits, pet policies, little things that gave the impression of Earth-Knull-relations being good they were only really okay at best.
When Larry came into 3000's domain offering help, 3000 wasn't sure if it was Elkhart's idea of a joke or if this old robot was actually going to be useful.
Larry, however, proved to be just as productive as 3000, if not more. What work there was for a robot of his advanced years to do he did well. He was sensible and productive, effective to the point of being restless when there was nothing to be done. In three days of working for 3000, Larry had succeeded in winning over the head wife of the Knull Ambassador, and was working on the other two.
3000, deciding that he was being put the shame, deleted his compatibility software for linking with other L-units.
Larry, remembering suddenly having deleted these files, kept away from 3000.
Tuddrussel stayed in his bed, strapped mostly, and seethed at his enforced laziness.
Otto couldn't find any privacy with the pirates. They were everywhere, naturally, but they were also obsessed with him. He would finally find a good place to get a moment alone, only to have some shaggy sailor come up smiling and introducing themselves or asking for insight about just about anything. Otto would always say the same thing; Sorry, I can't help you.
It was an easy thing to live with them, they provided everything he needed. He had a room, full access to the mess hall, leave to roam any part of the ship he pleased, and the doting admiration of the entire crew.
For the few first days he was able to avoid the three men in charge of the fleet, but on his fourth day with the pirates, he ran into Captain G-J.
They were in a hallway somewhere on the western wing of the flagship, coming from alternate directions. Otto saw Ghazali-Johnson before the latter saw the former. Faced with the decision of whether he should run the other way or just confront the captain now, as he inevitably would have to do, Otto remembered something Tuddrussel has once instructed him to do.
'Cowboy up, Otto.'
The boy repeated this phrase over and over as he approached the captain, moving like a brooding little locomotion down the hall.
Captain G-J, surprised that the kid was being so forward, stopped where he was and watch the boy approach. He wanted to smile, but stopped himself. Even his smile, however infectious it tended to be, wouldn't help this.
It would, he was willing to bet, make things worse.
Otto stopped a few feet from the Captain.
"We need to talk." He squawked in a voice that had been locked up in him for about a day.
G-J made a vague gesture with his head and hands.
"Sure, kid. You wanna, uh, find a place to sit?"
Otto, though miffed by the captain assumption that he needed to be baby, did want to sit down. He nodded, trying to contain his discomfort and pull off a good Clint Eastwood impression at the same time, and turn down the hall.
The two of them eventually found themselves in a less used room of the flagship, a room originally meant to hold a dignitaries but, not, nothing more than a glorified attic with a big window. G-J pulled a big chair out of the piles of discarded stuff for Otto, and a smaller chair for himself.
Otto didn't mind the attention, at the moment, because he was busy trying to understand how the space he looked at out through the window was the same space that was outside the windows of the satellite he called home.
G-J, watching the boy silhouetted against the bright black pincushion void, understood very suddenly why Joo-Joo called him the 'Lost Boy.' He took a few cautious steps up to the kid and tapped him on the shoulder.
"Uh, kid?"
Otto jumped and turned, snorting to try and breathe his composure back into himself as he wiped the tears from his face with first his hand, then his wrist, then the whole of his forearm. He tried to look at G-J angrily, but could no more look intimidating then raise his head.
The captain ushering him into the chair, pulled a seat up in front of the kid, and acted like the father he had never got the chance to be.
When the tears were all dried up, Otto couldn't even force himself to look mad. He still had a bone to pick with G-J, but the captain had pulled out everything that had made others like him; his memorized joke list, his witty (if corny and a little old) sayings, his infectious smile and more than any other thing, his ability to just talk sadness out of people.
Otto, rubbing at his tear tracks with the heel of his hand, thought G-J should have been a therapist.
G-J, rubbing his eyes and trying not to cough, thought for the seventy-fifth time in his life that he should have been a father.
The two had their talk.
Otto tried to explain what Tuddrussel and Larry meant to him. Not understanding it too much himself, he summed it up in the best words he could think of.
"They're—They're my family. I—just. I don't, can't. I can't live without 'em." It came out in much longer a time than he wanted, but when it was out it hung heavily over the two of them, falling over Otto like the heavy winter coat his mother had dreamed of squeezing her bundle of joy into once he was a toddler.
Ghazali-Johnson felt it pull on his beard, push on his eyelids, his fingernails.
He patted Otto's shoulder and talked before he thought about it.
"If we'd known, we would've brought them too, kiddo."
Otto baulked.
"But—but, you know about the time stuff. About-about-about me and time and-and-and how do you not know about them?"
G-J didn't know what to do besides shrug.
"Joo-Joo never mentioned anyone else showing up."
"But—in that prophecy thing—it talked about three people."
"Yeah, but that's always in prophecies. It's never one, there's always a three in there." G-J shrugged, thinking out loud, "I think people just like three's."
Otto sat and thought of a minute, remembering Joo-Joo weird milky eyes. His stomach twisted around and he felt his lunch drip down the walls of muscle.
He didn't like this.
As much as I hate to say it, this is going to be the last Time Things update for some time. This summer has been great but with the school looming ever closer, I won't have the time to work on something extra. But rest assured, the story will not be dropped and I will try to get more updates out this year, instead of having another drought until next summer. Hope to see you guys sooner than later!