Always toward absent lovers love's tide stronger flows. ~ Elegies
I. – Summer 2000...
There is nothing I can say for what has happened to me in the last thirty-four years of my life.
John Rice typed this on the new gray laptop The Rockwell Daily had provided him.
Except that I have learned from many different people that have tried in vain to change my opinion on what things are. For example, have you ever looked to the sky and seen a plane leaving a streak across? You may very well picture a meteor or even a satellite if you will. But no matter what anyone tells me, I will always see my best friend in that plane exhaust.
Closing his cover and looking out at the bay atop the now unmanned lighthouse, the fifty-five-year-old journalist and war vet viewed the mist of blue across the calm water. Even in the twenty-first century everything looked normal. Except, of course, for the man himself.
"Well, Hughes." Hogarth said to himself. "Looks like you're back."
A small figure with long legs circled the arc of concrete, just as she had decades earlier.
"Is he coming?" Pygmy asked. The cat bot pushed her paneled face under his hand.
Hogarth looked her over as he always did with tired eyes.
"He'll be here," the man stroked her unvarnished forehead. At half a century old, Hogarth still thought of himself as reasonably attractive. His long, graying hair grew over on one side, a partial beard grew whisker-like around his face and he still remained well-muscled along his arms and legs from when he had been seventeen. Though there were two issues.
Pygmy looked at his vagabond clothing as she always did.
Coming with the recommendations he did, he wondered if she ever had thought he should dress up more. The transmuted droid crawled between him and the computer just to press herself to his board-flat abdomen. Hogarth smiled and ran his hand down her back just as he had for years. "I don't know what I'm going to say." he admitted to Pygmy at long last.
She looked up at him with her chick-colored eyes. "He loves you." his goddaughter told him. Hogarth still appeared unsure as he stared down at her purple face. She rested her head against his heart and then looked up at him happily, her lower shutters ascending.
He gave her one final stroke behind the ear before she slipped around the building.
Hogarth was just about to stand and go back into the lighthouse when a shadow cast by the rising sun made him turn to look toward his left. Just as yesterday, in a full body of patchwork metal, water rust and air oxidation, was the Iron Giant. In a blue flash Pygmy was standing at her thirty-five-foot height. Hogarth stood as well as father and daughter embraced one another before the younger of the pair sent her godfather an assuring look.
Once she left the two old friends turned to each other.
The tag line Thirty four years was now in full force.
Finally the Giant worked up the courage and extended his hand to Hogarth. Just as when the middle-aged man had been a teenager attempting to walk onto his friend's hand again, a small balance problem made him teeter. The Giant, however, caught his remaining hand.
"Gotta watch that bad knee," Hogarth commented, drawing attention away from the nub of left arm he kept wrapped in bandages. A rush of sadness unexpectedly hit the man and he spread himself open. The Giant brought him in closer when his yellow eyes lit his iron.
"I want to show you something." he said as he did this, unaware of his Titanic condition.
"Oh," the man backed away at the sea life clinging to his friend. "I… uh, was just going to say that if we're heading into the sea, I shouldn't take my laptop because it'll get wet and I-," as he rambled on the Giant made note of the problem, pushed the slimy sea creatures aside and brought his best friend close to his chest. He hugged him with his one free hand.
Hogarth got caught on whatever he was babbling about. "Ah pal, it's good to see you."
Ignoring the obvious embarrassment, the man hugged the Giant back.
"I've been waiting so long…" his baritone voice was almost in pain.
"Wait's over," Hogarth said as he stepped back.
They had no more words to say.
There was no guarantee that the wondrous transmutation would work between them now.
Instead, the Giant opted to show Hogarth another way.
II. – Portland, Maine…
Linda sighed. Arnold Garret Smith struggled under her cracked fingers.
Being a special needs adult meant the man needed round-the-clock care. If these disabled men and women didn't need to be repositioned they needed to be wiped, if they needed to be wiped then they needed their briefs changed. 'We can't call them diapers.' she thought.
The man with the bald head and triangular features, who hadn't been visited by his mother Jane in two weeks, was suffering from a disease where you forever appeared aged. It was so rare that only a few known cases existed in America. Letting her shoulders drop after she pulled the metal cord on the lamp off, Linda crossed the hall of the nursing home she worked at to take a look at the newest arrival. It was Arnold's own mother, bed bound in a coma from a car accident she had been in. Linda suddenly felt sympathy for the woman.
Here she was, fifty or so years old and taking care of a disabled adult who could not and would never function properly. If only the father had been around. The night nurse knew her shift was coming to an end and went over to check on the surprisingly youthful lady.
Jane's small face was smooth except for a few wrinkles around her eyes and cuts dotting her skin. Hair the color of honey fanned out over the side of her bed with gray beginning to peek out in a medium shade. Somehow Linda didn't think Jane dyed it. The color was too natural. In fact, everything about Jane Smith was too natural, especially her odd name.
Who, on God's green earth, named their kid an alias?
III. – The year 2231...
"Trina." Abba Arch Gungatung stroked the rough metal of her gilded throne. "How long has it been?" The large palace that had been constructed for her was wide and had arched openings running along it's width. Her cousin and confidante turned from fixing her droid.
"Quite a long time," the fifty-nine-year-old woman answered. "I told you that the purge of Pygmy left all 2201 droids extinct and that all remaining Giant clones help humans."
"Well," the Queen stood and swung her dark green robe around herself as she descended the stairs, smiling a bit. "That was their choice. That's what my father taught me long ago and so their sacrifice was for the good of our world." she moved to look out at her air-run city: Zephyron. "Without the humans and droids from Robocity we wouldn't have any of the resources we do. Without the Alpha and Omega we wouldn't have unity." she turned to Trina. "Without my father, we wouldn't have this city. And without my mother Trina-,"
"Yes, yes, we all know you think of the Giant and Gold as your parents."
The forever occupied woman still found equality among droids and humans unsatisfying.
"You can see what that has left me." She picked up a few new screws from her case for her green droid. Of course, everyone in Zephyron wore green. "One droid, no family, no anything… except for you." Trina directed a knowing smile up at a rather worried Abba.
They always played this game, even though it never went anywhere.
"Do you think my father will ever come back?" She knelt and handed Trina a silver tool.
"As he promised when you were six?" her cousin muttered, distracted. "Rather impossible if it's been this long, Abba. You have a kingdom to oversee. You've always had control of the fourth hemisphere of this world not because of your relation to the still infamous Garth Hughes but because of your direct link to The Iron Giant, because of your relation to your grandfather Archer. He was possibly the most respected man after the Giant in our time."
"Still," Abba viewed her empty throne room. "If my father returned to our time with the memory box, it's recorded information of past human knowledge could help us uncover the secret to humanity." she went on excitedly like a child. "We could proceed with my original project. The lost art of how to copy more humans could be found out. If only Father would bridge our two iron worlds, we could be united. Not only that Trina but
we could allocate our humanity to droids, it is what Tress wanted. Think of it Trina!"
The older woman sighed roughly and placed her droid's backside down, locking what was becoming rusty and harder to manage into it's fixed hold. "Abba," she looked seriously into the Queen's eyes. "You are thirty five years as of now. I know your father helped establish in your mind the idealistic nature of a princess ruling her kingdom, he even designed a small part of your kingdom into a treasured iron metropolis based on the
stories Taylor Evans told him, and all because he loved you. But it's time to face life
and the hard truths of it. Many lives were lost in the struggle to stop my cousin Kina,
to put an end to a madman in the 1960's and get two lost teens back to their rightful
period. What I'm trying to say is, there is no guarantee your father is ever returning."
"But the droids?" Abba backed away, unused to hearing her requests go unmet.
"They must remain droids, Abba." Trina said wearily. The wide green eyes her cousin
gave her only drove her to compound this idea more. "I don't want to see humanity go extinct anymore then you do, my cousin. But we have no means of knowing how we're
to keep it going. Our droids… my droid, for example, raised a whole generation. In this
congenial time frame we were not taught how to make more humans. But… we cannot
comply with your wishes to convert droids into humans." She left Abba to be by herself.
The green droid followed after Trina, the last of it's kind made to follow humans.
"I hope she doesn't bring this idea forward, just like Kina with her cyborgs."
Humanity was no longer doomed by external forces. Rather, it was doomed by ignorance.
To be continued…
~ Lavenderpaw ~
AN:
Now this story won't make much sense unless you've read The Protector. You can try however. Results may vary depending if you understand. You're still welcomed to read.