"Everything good is somewhere else. I'm telling you, baby - everything." - Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
APRIL 3 2044
9:32 AM
It's still more than two hours until noon, but Hamegg can't say he's surprised when he hears the soft hum of the top-of-the-line hovercar pulling up outside. He could tell just from the five-minute phone call first thing this morning that Kusai would show up bright and early, but he'd have to be a grade-A moron to make a big deal out of it when business is already as bad as it is. With the way the wind is blowing right now, he's got to take every job he's lucky enough to land.
Besides, he'd be lying if he said he wasn't pretty damn eager to get a good look at this particular robot. It has to be one hell of a machine if Kusai is going to all this hassle to get it fixed up when he usually opts for the "dump it in the scrap heaps and let it rust away like a dead battery" route.
So Hamegg clicks off the television (it wasn't anything new, anyway — just another one of those tug-on-the-heartstrings broadcasts from Metro City with good old Bill Tenma front and center, crying about his lost little robot boy for the hundredth time this week — his darling golden child is still MIA in spite of the million searches that he's personally funded in the last five months) and hurries out of the workshop to stand under the bright April sun, with a hand over his eyes to block out the blinding light, just as the hovercar whirs open.
Chin high and shoulders back, his polished black shoes crunching on the metal and gravel and broken glass littered all over the ground, his bone-white face pinched up like he's got a lemon rind between his teeth, Skunk Kusai steps out of the vehicle with all his usual ice-cold elegance, and strides straight for Hamegg. He's got the end of a long, glowing blue chain clutched tight in one pale fist, and he gives the shackle a single sharp jerk that drags the mystery robot from the car with a clumsy, uneven kind of stagger—and a low, incessant groan, like an old cogwheel in serious need of some oil.
The piece of junk doesn't even make it two full steps out of the car before it crashes, with a heavy metallic thud, flat on its face in the dirt and garbage, where it twitches and sparks and moans in a tangle of red and blue wires pushing up between the rips in its torn skin like climbing vines.
It's… small.
It's a whole hell of a lot smaller than Hamegg thought it would be when he clicked off the call two hours ago — he can hardly see the robot itself through the dozen layers of black grime sticking to it like glue, but he doesn't need more than a quick glance to tell him it's about the size of a little kid.
It definitely doesn't look anything like the total powerhouse he had in mind.
It doesn't really look like anything worth saving.
It doesn't even look like anything that can be saved.
"So you see why this is an urgent job." It's not a question, but that's just the way Kusai is — drop everything you're doing right now, because my problem is more important and my problem is the only one that matters, and my problem is the only problem that's actually a problem — and Hamegg can hardly blame the guy in this case, when it's already pretty unbelievable that this pathetic pile of nuts and bolts in front of him survived the ride out here. "I don't think it can last another day in its condition."
"How long has it been like this already?" Hamegg frowns. Even a machine can't run on empty forever, at least not without lifelong damage, and if this one is even half as busted-up as it looks, it could very well be irreparable by now. "You know there's only so much I can do for 'em when they've been on the fritz for a good while."
"You think I've got the time to keep up with every single one of my robots?" Kusai huffs out a scoff, and fusses with the smooth, pressed-to-perfection lapels on his black silk jacket. "I'm a busy man, Hamegg. I just want this piece of junk back on its feet as soon as possible."
"I'm a mechanic," Hamegg mutters, but he keeps it low, under his breath, so Kusai won't hear. "Not a miracle worker."
With the state it's in, he'll be amazed if its system hasn't forced an emergency shutdown in some desperate, last-ditch effort to save its own life, but it's apparently still conscious (which means it's got some serious grit to it, so color him impressed) because, when he crouches down to prod the robot in the ribs, it lifts its dark, spiky head off the ground, just a fraction of an inch, and squints blearily at him through a pair dull, barely-open, and startlingly human—and startlingly familiar—eyes.
And he can't do a damn thing except stare right back, his mouth gaping open and his brain at a dead halt, white-hot shock lighting up every cell in his body because there is just no freaking way that the dirty, broken-down piece of crap on the ground in front of him could actually be—
"Astro?!"
It's pretty much impossible not to know all about how Metro City's friendly neighborhood Astro Boy dropped off the face of the earth last October, with the kid's face splashed all over the news almost every night, Bill Tenma's puffy-eyed, red-cheeked, tear-streaked face begging the viewer to please do your part to bring my son home — Jesus, that latest broadcast is probably still playing on TV right now — but he never actually thought the kid could be in any kind of serious trouble.
Astro is way too powerful for that.
But right now—with his mechanical body cracking open and falling apart like an overcooked eggshell, flashing with blue-white sparks every ten seconds or so, all those cables and coils coming out of him, that frayed clump of worn-out wires in his shoulder where the rest of the arm is only just hanging on, and his small face so caked with filth that Hamegg can hardly see anything except those eyes, big and brown and too human—he doesn't look powerful at all.
Astro doesn't look anything like the famous, fearless, superstrong superhero of Metro City right now.
He just looks like a lost little kid.
And that's a pretty crazy thing to think, isn't it, because Astro is obviously not a little kid, and if you just take away that annoyingly adorable exterior of his, he would be nothing but wires and circuits, and hundreds of thousands of electrical signals to form his motions and expressions and speech — a mindless, unfeeling machine that's borrowing the face of a preteen boy so he can act all sweet and innocent, look at you with those big brown eyes like a sad puppy, and preach pretty words about peace and love and friendship that he doesn't even understand because he can't feel any of that.
And more than that, he also happens to be a major pain in the backside, so stuck-up and self-righteous that it's no surprise who designed him — Astro is Bill Tenma's boy, through and through, and no doubt about it — and he's probably become even more of an insufferable brat now that he's got the whole damn world wrapped around his metallic finger.
And, just to put the cherry on top, it's all his fault that the Robot Games ever went down the toilet in the first place—his fault that Hamegg can barely hold his own head above the water right now, his fault that the kids down here ditched him to go and live the high life up in Metro City without a second thought, or even a single glance back at the world they were leaving behind, his fault that Hamegg is still crawling around down here on the Surface like a freaking cockroach, with nothing to his name except a handful of coppers and a whole lot of useless, rusted metal.
It's all his fault that Hamegg is still here.
Astro ruined his life.
(But—and here's the part he tries not to think too hard about—it's kind of thanks to Astro that he's still got a life at all.
If the kid hadn't swooped in and put a stop to that whole thing back in the arena, Hamegg would just be a stain on the stone ground or a smear on the bottom of ZOG's massive foot right about now, his soft human body crushed painfully under a thousand pounds of pure metal, wiped out in front of a million people who wouldn't have lifted a finger or lost a second of sleep or given half a damn.
Except Astro.
Astro gave a damn.
He saved Hamegg right when it looked like the end of the line for sure. He saved Hamegg when he didn't have to (and Hamegg knows he didn't have to, knows he didn't have the laws of robotics in his system, because Hamegg told him to fight, and he said no)—he could have taken the easy way out, he could have stepped back and let ZOG do the dirty work, he could have left that arena with clean hands and a clear conscience, he could have just let it happen, and at the end of it, he could have said I didn't do it, I didn't do it, I didn't do it, I didn't kill him, it wasn't my fault, and it wouldn't have been a lie.
But he didn't.
He stepped up, and he saved Hamegg's life for absolutely no reason at all.
And what kind of robot does that? What kind of robot is he?)
"Oh, yeah, I thought you might recognize this one." Kusai yanks harshly on the chain to pull Astro back to his feet, and the kid drags himself up out of the dirt with some shrill creaks and low groans that hurt just to hear. He looks almost lopsided, off-kilter in a way Hamegg can't exactly put his finger on, and he's got a blank sort of look in his too-big eyes—like a zombie, or a corpse. Like something that's already dead. "It was pretty famous up in Metro City for a while."
"Y-Yeah, I—" Hamegg swallows, and forces himself to refocus on Kusai, because it just feels too weird to see Astro like that, "—I remember."
Even if he hadn't come face-to-face with Astro for himself, he'd know the little guy at a glance, because the kid has been all over his TV screen since the day he blew up that massive Peacekeeper robot in Metro City around this time last year.
Usually, it was just a whole lot of blurry clips shot with shaky cell-phone cameras and clumsily spliced together — here's the famous hero rocketing around in the sky, and now he's saving the day, and now he's waving to his zillion fans, and now he's going rollerblading with his friends, and now he's drinking a soda, and now he's on his first day of sixth grade, blue backpack and bright smile and big red boots — but every now and then, his face would pop up in stark, startling clarity, all lit up with blinding silver flashes as a hundred thousand reporters snapped photos and shoved mics in his face and fired off questions like bullets. Astro would stare around at the crowds with wide eyes, like he had no idea what to do, before he'd finally paste on a plastic, practiced smile, and stammer out some bland, noncommittal remark.
It feels more than a little crazy to see somebody so powerful, so invincible, brought down to such a humiliating low.
But now this kid could be his key to a better life.
Hamegg thought he'd make his fortune off Astro last year, when he put him in the Games, but maybe this is that ticket straight to easy street that he's been waiting for: if he can fix Astro up, and get him back on his feet again, then he can name any price he wants, and what else can Kusai do except pay it? No man in his right mind would ever let a robot like this one slip through his fingers.
Sure, Astro did him a serious favor back there in the arena, no way around that, and he's obviously got some pretty unnatural levels of altruism hardwired into him, and he can behave with a kind of eerie similarity to a real human kid sometimes, but at the end of the day, he's not a real human kid, and it won't do any good to treat him like it. He's a machine, and his only purpose is to be bought and sold and traded, just like every other robot on the market.
Sucks to be him, but that's just the way it goes for robots.
And if he hasn't figured that out yet, then that's on him.
"Yeah, this is—" Hamegg clears his throat and powers up the sliding door with a firm stamp of his shoe on the creaking wood, stepping into the workshop and heading over to the table to clear it off with a quick sweep of the hand. "This is the one who screwed the pooch with the Games last year, actually."
"Oh, yeah, I remember hearing something about that. Bad luck." Kusai tugs on the chain again to pull Astro along behind him, so hard that all the links rattle and clang, and the kid lurches like Frankenstein's monster over the threshold and into the shop. "In that case, you'll be happy to know that disobedience won't be a problem here. This one has learned the consequences of defiance very well. You can be sure of that."
"Glad to hear it," Hamegg nods, patting the warped worktable with the palm of his hand. "Let's get him—it—up here, and I'll take a look at it."
For a long minute, Astro doesn't move an inch — he just stares and stares at the far wall right in front of him, brown eyes blank and empty — before Kusai jerks the chain so sharply that the kid loses his footing, stumbling and staggering and finally slamming into the back of the workbench with a nasty crunch, so loud and sickening it makes even Hamegg wince in sympathy.
But Kusai apparently doesn't notice (or, if he does notice, then he just doesn't care) because he's already begun to bellow commands, his voice echoing around the room and bouncing off the walls as he hollers for Astro to "Get up on the goddamn table!"
Astro doesn't really look at them full-on, but he tilts his spiky head just a fraction of an inch toward them whenever they speak, a tiny frown hovering at the corners of his mouth like he doesn't quite understand what they're saying. But he obviously does understand because, when he gets back up, he limps pitifully over to the table in slow, shaky steps — tentative, uncertain, experimental, like he doesn't trust his own eyes, or the ground beneath his feet — and he keeps one hand glued to the wall the whole way there.
Like he's trying feel his way across the room.
Like he's trying to make sure everything is where it's supposed to be.
Like he doesn't trust his own eyes.
Hamegg frowns, glancing over at Kusai as the sudden suspicion solidifies itself in his brain. The system scan will tell him everything, of course, but morbid curiosity is one hell of a drug, and he's not about to turn down a chance to hear everything he can about this bizarre situation. "Can it see anything?"
"No, I don't think so," Kusai shakes his head and pulls his tablet out of his pocket, tapping on the screen so the blue-green glow floods his face in a wash of sickly aqua light. "Its optical systems were functioning at seven-point-three percent yesterday, and the number has probably dropped since then."
"Seven-point-three?" As a professional mechanic, Hamegg has seen way worse than a robot that can't see (though seven-point-three is seriously pushing it), and if it was just a simple case of blindness, he could probably brush it off and forget all about it. But when he adds in everything else, it paints a picture that he just can't wrap his mind around. What the hell happened to this kid? Who the hell beat him up so badly? "Jesus, Kusai, can he hear anything?!"
It's supposed to be a rhetorical question, but he probably should have known better.
"Not really," Kusai flicks a bored glance over the top of his tablet. "You'll have to speak loudly and clearly if you're trying to talk to it. But there's not much point in that. Between you and me, I don't think it's got a whole lot of brains."
Jesus Christ, no wonder the kid didn't seem to recognize Hamegg when he saw him: because he didn't actually see him at all.
Astro finally pulls himself up onto the table, after a couple failed attempts, with a light thump of his metallic body and a long groan from his stiff joints. The second he's settled, he leans back against the wall like it's the only way he can stay upright—like he just used up every last ounce of energy he had left, and Hamegg realizes, half a second later, that he probably did.
"How long would you say you'll need for repairs?" Kusai punches in a string of buttons on the tablet keypad, all business as usual.
Hamegg glances down at the kid on his table — all busted up and barely awake, his big brown eyes blinking slowly, and his little face as blank as it's been since he arrived here. No matter the way he tries to slice it, Astro is in seriously bad shape. But the quicker he gets the job done, the higher he can drive the price.
"A week," he says, finally. "Maybe two."
Even that's pushing it a little — he can already tell it'll be a job and a half just to fix up those cables, tangled and twisted and hacked to pieces as they are, jutting out like broken bones bursting through the skin, and that's not even touching on the fact that he's blind, and pretty damn near deaf, too — and he's got a sinking feeling this isn't even the worst of it. Astro is just so covered in crud that he seriously can't see anything except the glaringly obvious.
Where the hell has this kid been?
"Oh, that works out great, then." Kusai taps out one final command on the tablet before he hands the gizmo off to Hamegg. "You'll find all the necessary documentation on here, and I'll pick it up when it's ready."
Hamegg jerks his chin down in a quick nod, leaving the tablet on the cluttered workbench to clasp Kusai's hand in his own, and give it a firm shake. "You'll have it back good as new. That's a promise."
"Glad to hear it." Kusai pulls his long spidery fingers back to pluck pointlessly at his lapels again — probably just itching to scrub the stink of Poor Person off as fast as humanly possible — before he turns around and glides back out the door to his waiting hovercar. "Give me a call as soon as you've got it ready for me."
And then he climbs into the car, the engine purring like a contented cat as it comes to life and carries him away into the clear blue sky.
Just like that, the workshop is empty again, and dead quiet except for the faint clicking and humming and whirring of a thousand spinning cybernetic gears.
Hamegg looks over his shoulder at Astro, but the kid hasn't even wiggled a wire since he got up on the table ten minutes ago—now he's just gazing straight up at the low, sloping ceiling overhead with his hands clasped over his bare stomach, flat on his back and eerily expressionless, stiller than a damn statue—so he turns back to the tablet instead, where miles on miles of tiny black text glare out at him from the glowing screen.
It all looks pretty standard at a glance—designation #7517, active since 04/07/43, collected* 10/23/43, unusable upon collection, rewiring and reprogramming required immediately and, right under that, on the very next line, rewiring and reprogramming complete on 10/26/43, all systems updated, LOR software installed and activated, UKS chip installed and activated, internal tracker installed and activated, external KURI PIR activated, 18+ SAI software installed and activated—
Hamegg stops dead, right there in the middle, and he rereads the whole sentence in its entirety, a little slower now to be sure he's got it right: Rewiring and reprogramming complete on 10/26/43. All systems updated. LOR software installed and activated. UKS chip installed and activated. Internal tracker installed and activated. External KURI PIR activated. 18+ SAI software installed and activated.
But the text stays exactly the same.
And he's got a sudden, crazy urge to rub at his eyes and look over that last sentence again, just one more time, but he already knows what it says, and another read-through isn't going to change that. And what does he care, anyway? This isn't anything he hasn't seen before. This isn't the first robot in the world who's ever had to service some humans, or gotten loaned out to the Hotel for a side-hustle, and this isn't even the first one of Kusai's robots specifically who's ever had to service some humans or gotten loaned out to the Hotel for a side-hustle, but—
—but the ones that look like little kids shouldn't have to do that kind of shit, should they?
Maybe it's just all those old hang-ups of his, coming back to life at the worst possible moment — he's never been too crazy about the concept of the SAI software to begin with, for a whole lot of reasons that really aren't anybody's business but his own, so he can admit that maybe he doesn't have the most impartial perspective in the world here — but he really doesn't think it's totally unreasonable to say that child sex robots shouldn't be allowed to exist at all.
Jazz always says it's fine, because it means real kids don't get hurt, and Hamegg knows he's right, but that doesn't mean there's not something seriously wrong with the group of freaks that created the demand for these kinds of dolls in the first place.
Hamegg swallows hard around the sour revulsion in his throat, and skips to the next paragraph.
For optimum function, this robot requires standard maintenance and upkeep, regular oil refills, regular IS-13 refills, regular IX-91 refills, and eight hours of inactivity in a twenty-four-hour period. This robot subsists on renewable energy, and its power source is easily removable and accessible, concealed within the sternum.
Yeah, Hamegg already knows all of that. He poked around pretty deep in Astro's system last year, just before he put him in the arena with the others, and he can still remember that little orb of bright blue light and crackling electrical energy — the way it pulsed and pounded like a real human heart, humming out a slow and steady song that surged and swelled to fill up the whole room, the way his own body had eased up to match the smooth, flowing rhythm.
He'd never seen anything like it before.
He'd wanted to take it. He'd wanted to snatch that little glowing ball straight out of the kid's energy chamber and hold it in his hands for the rest of his life, put it in his mouth and swallow it so it could live inside him forever, carve out a hole in his own chest and stuff it in there just so he never had to spend one second without it.
He had wanted it in a feverish, frenzied way he had never wanted anything else in his whole life.
And it had scared the absolute hell out of him.
Yeah, Hamegg knows all about Astro's power source.
He finally puts the tablet down on his workbench again with a thud and heads back over to the table, rolling his flannel sleeves up to his elbows on the way.
It's too bad he can't give the kid a quick wipe-down with some soap and water before he gets to work, because he'll barely be able to see what he's doing with that thick film of mud and muck clinging to the pale skin like barnacles on the hull of an old ship, but he's not about to take that kind of a risk with all this delicate circuitry exposed, so he's just going to have to do the best he can. At least Astro doesn't have any clothes that he'll have to remove—just his little red jet-propulsion boots, a pair of black underwear melded onto his metal body, fused to the skin, and a standard-issue KURI ring locked tight around his throat, silver steel still glistening faintly under all the dirt as it blocks his powers up inside him like a dam on a rushing river—because it would be a nightmare to try and undress him with all those wires coming out of him.
Hamegg runs a hand lightly over the bare chest, his fingers cutting clean tracks through the heavy layers of black filth as he searches for the hatch that hides the spinning sphere. Astro doesn't startle at the touch, but he does blink his too-human eyes in silent reaction, slowly turning his head to look at Hamegg—or a spot about two inches to the left of Hamegg, anyway—and lifting a small, shaking hand, groping and grabbing blindly in the empty air for a minute or two before his fumbling fingers finally latch onto Hamegg's wrist, and squeeze tight. Like he can tell what's about to happen here, and he's trying his best to stop it, or at least, stall it for as long as he can.
And Hamegg can't even blame him, because Christ knows he'd be scared out of his damn mind if it was him up there on that table, deaf and blind and dying.
But this is Astro.
And Astro is a whole lot of infuriating and annoying things, but predictable sure as hell isn't one of them.
"Thank you," he says, quiet and polite, like Hamegg just held open a door for him, or let him cut ahead of him in the checkout line at the supermarket. Like Hamegg just did something nice. Like Hamegg just did something for him.
"Uh…" Hamegg clears his throat, and raises his voice a notch or two, loud and slow so the kid can actually hear him with those messed-up ears of his. "F-For what?"
"You called me Astro." He doesn't say it so much as he chokes it out, hoarse and scratchy and rough—rasping, and grinding, and painful, like broken gears stuck on their own metallic teeth—but his mouth stretches in a sad, strained little smile that looks like it's hurting his face. "No one's done that for a while."
Oh, yeah, Hamegg did do that, didn't he? Loud as a freaking jet engine, too, so there's no way Astro didn't catch it, even half-deaf as he is.
Hamegg should tell him that he shouldn't get used to it, because it's definitely not happening again. He should tell him that he shouldn't get used to it because he's going right back to Kusai in a week or two. He should tell him that it was a stupid slip of the tongue, and it's not like he actually meant it. He should tell him that machines don't even have names, so he should count himself lucky he ever had one at all. He should call him by that four-digit designation number in his file, just to make sure the kid knows exactly where he stands here.
But the quiet drags on and on, and in the end, he doesn't say any of those things at all.
He just opens up Astro's chest, and yanks out the glowing sphere.
The kid goes completely limp on the beat-up table, his brown eyes flashing bright blue before finally drifting shut, with one last flutter of long black lashes—and then, just like that, he's gone, so peaceful and relaxed that he could be sleeping if it wasn't for all the wires still sticking out of him, and the dirt caked all over him.
Now that the light isn't outshining everything else in the chamber, Hamegg can see these white stains splashed and splattered all over the inside of it — hardened, almost, a stiff and flaky crust of dried liquid—
Oh, god.
It's semen.
"Jesus," Hamegg whispers, through numb lips, in the dark and quiet of the workshop, staring down at the mangled and mutilated body sprawled out on his table. "How the hell did this happen?"
OCTOBER 23 2043
10:49 PM
The smell of smoke is still sticking to Astro's artificial skin like glue by the time he finally leaves the bank, and the pitch-black sky is choked with thick clouds. Sometime in the last hour, the light all-day drizzle picked up into a steady, beating rain, but Astro just stuffs his hands in his jacket pockets and sets off down the long, empty sidewalk, his head tossed back to feel the cold water running down the sides of his face and dripping off the ends of his spiky hair. It's nowhere near as good as flying, but the funny thing about rocket boots is that they don't exactly mix too well with heavy downpours like this.
Besides, he'd probably sink like a stone if he tried to blast off right now. All the million different disasters around the city in the past two weeks — that explosion at the museum, that stick-up at the corner store, that shoot-out at the cinema, that chemical leak at Synergy Labs, and just now, that freak breakout fire down at Metro City Federal Bank — have really worn him down, and he's not so sure his powers will hold up any longer without a bit of a break. And he's not so sure he could fly in a straight line, anyway, when it's already kind of a miracle that he's putting one foot in front of the other without collapsing face-down on the pavement.
At least he'll be able to squeeze in a couple hours of sleep when he gets home. He has to get up tomorrow morning at five o'clock, sharp, or he won't have enough time to help Orrin make breakfast before he has to rush off to school (not that Orrin ever really needs help with the household chores, exactly, since he was designed and programmed specifically for the purpose, but it's not fair that he has to do it all on his own, so Astro lends a hand wherever he can, which… hasn't been very often lately, with the thirty-eight different distress calls he's dealt with in the last three days alone) and then he has to get to school at six o'clock, sharp, or he won't have time to take that make-up test Mr. Hirota said he could when he missed the geometry midterm exam last week when he had to go and help the police locate the bomb hidden on the Metro City subway, and disable it before it could detonate.
Being a superhero and a sixth-grade student at the same time is nowhere near as easy as it sounds, that's for sure.
But it's more than worth it. The job is more than worth all the late nights and early mornings and long hours, all the school absences and missed midterm exams and make-up tests, all the last-minute emergencies and weekends on missions instead of weekends with his friends, because he gets to help people. And he wouldn't trade that for anything.
It might not be as easy as it sounds, but it's the best job in the whole world.
Astro stifles a yawn behind his hand and plods slowly along the sidewalk, with the dark empty road stretching out endlessly ahead of him, and the soft glow of the streetlights every ten feet or so, and the faint, far-off rumble of late-night traffic on the other side of the city, dull and distant even in his superpowered ears, as the digital clock at the back of his brain automatically counts out the minutes: 10:52… 10:53… 10:54…
The hour has just rolled over to eleven when the hovercar pulls up next to him, whirring to a halt just half an inch away from the curb, so close that he could reach out and touch the cold chrome if he cared to. He didn't bother to adjust his vision from emmetropic to scotopic before he left the bank, so it's too dark to make out the model or the color of the car, but a faint tingle of recognition goes off in his brain, and he just knows he's seen this exact vehicle somewhere before.
The tinted window rolls down, and the driver sticks his platinum-blonde head out.
"Hey, Astro!" Mr. Kusai (oh, come on, kiddo, now you're making me feel old! just call me Skunk, for God's sake! no need for all that formality!) calls out from the front seat, tapping his long fingers on the steering wheel. "What are you doing all the way out here? It's getting late. And it's a school night, too, isn't it?"
The exhaustion of the past two weeks is still weighing him down, like he's carrying the city on his shoulders all over again, but Astro automatically smiles back, his sour mood lifting just a little at the chance to talk to Skunk Kusai for a minute or two — his dad's new genius intern at the Ministry of Science is one of the coolest people he's ever met, hands-down, and also one of the only people he knows who doesn't treat him like a mindless machine, or a walking, talking museum exhibit, or some big-shot celebrity, or an annoying little know-it-all kid.
"There was a pretty bad fire down at Metro City Federal," Astro tips his head in the vague direction of the bank somewhere behind him. "Everybody made it out okay, though. No one was seriously hurt, or anything like that. Just some minor burns, and smoke inhalation here and there. The paramedics are taking them all to the hospital just in case."
"Damn," Mr. Kusai lets out a low whistle, shaking his head. "That's got to be rough. Thank Christ we've got you looking out for us. I don't know what we'd do without you."
Astro flushes hot under the praise, reflexively ducking his head to stare at the pavement beneath his boots instead. Seven months in the superhero business, and he still has absolutely no idea how he's supposed to handle moments like this — sure, it's nice to know the people appreciate him and his efforts to keep the streets safe, but the last time anybody thanked him for his work around the city, he got so flustered that he blurted out merry Christmas to you, too, so now he can never go back to that particular department store ever again.
"I-It's the firefighters we really have to thank," he says, finally, and it only comes out a little bit like an embarrassed squeak. "Honestly, they did most of the work. I just… helped out."
Mr. Kusai frowns, but he doesn't argue. "Well, I hope you're headed home soon. This is some nasty weather we're having tonight, and they say it's only going to get worse."
"Yeah, I'm on the way back right now," Astro glances instinctively toward the penthouse, more than ready to be back in his own bed, but he's still too far away to see it through the heavy sheets of icy rain coming down. "What about you? What's got you out on a night like this?"
Mr. Kusai's face clouds over with the faintest shadow of sadness, but his voice is perfectly steady when he speaks. "They're trying out a new treatment on my mother this week, so they want to keep her overnight for observation. I didn't want her to be alone."
"Oh." Astro nods, a pang of sympathy hitting him full in the chest. He can't even imagine what a nightmare it would be if Dad or Dr. Elefun got diagnosed with late-stage leukemia, and it seems kind of like a miracle that Mr. Kusai can still function when his only family is dying. "I-I'm sorry. Maybe this one will help her, though. I mean, it's stronger than the last one, right? Maybe it'll cure her."
"Yeah," Mr. Kusai mutters, but he doesn't look convinced. "Maybe."
Just then, a crack of booming thunder rips through the air, and a bright white bolt of lightning streaks across the black sky, lighting up the night for a second or two before it abruptly fades out again. Astro winces at the sudden noise, and the unwelcome reminder that he still has to get back home before he can finally call it a day.
"Well, I—I guess that's my cue," he tilts his head back to look up at the dark clouds above him, and shoves his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt again. "I'd better get back before Dad wakes up and finds out I'm gone. It was nice to see you, though! I hope your mom feels better soon!"
Mr. Kusai goes very still in the driver's seat, his dark eyes narrowing and a little wrinkle creasing his brows. "Are you telling me that you didn't let your dad know where you'd be? Jeez, kid, the poor guy will be worried sick if he wakes up!"
"Uh…" Oh, great. He totally forgot Mr. Kusai is his dad's intern first, and his cool college-age friend second. "W-Well, I—I mean, I just—he'd already gone to bed when I got the call about the fire, and you know how hard he's been working lately on that secret project of his at the Ministry… I just wanted to let him sleep. I-I don't like to bug him about little stuff like this when he's already so busy, and he's got so much on his plate, and—"
"All right, all right," Mr. Kusai takes his hands off the wheel to hold them up, palms out, in unspoken surrender. "Take a breath, Astro, I'm not going to turn you in. I mean, don't go making a habit of it, or anything, but…" he shrugs, puts a finger to his lips, and winks. "It can be our little secret. Just this once."
"Thank you, Mr. Kusai." It comes out much closer to a sigh of relief than an actual coherent sentence, but he's pretty sure he gets his point across, anyway. "You're a lifesaver, really."
Mr. Kusai laughs, a stark and sudden contrast to the grief from a moment before. "Well, so long as I'm aiding and abetting your juvenile delinquency one rebellion at a time, why don't you hop in, and I'll give you a lift back to your dad's? There's no need for you to walk all that way in the rain."
Oh. Astro blinks, too stunned to fully process what's just been said to him. No one has ever offered to give him a ride before.
And that's totally fine, obviously. It's not like he's ever really cared one way or the other, because he can always just power up his boots and fly wherever he needs to go, no problem, and anyway, everyone knows robots don't ride in cars — people ride in cars, and robots drive the cars.
But it's—it's actually kind of nice to be asked.
Like he's a person.
Like he's a human.
(Astro doesn't really know why he's so surprised when this is what Mr. Kusai does: he treats him like he's special just for being him, no state-of-the-art software or world-saving superpowers needed, and it shows in the way he talks to him, and listens to him, puts his own work aside to pay attention to him even when he's crazy busy, helps him with his history homework whenever he gets stuck, tells him all about the latest in-progress projects at the Ministry (or, the ones he's allowed to tell him about, at least, because that one top-secret tight-deadline robotics enterprise his dad has been working himself half to death on is still a hard no, apparently), tells him about all the leading theories in particle physics and the recent breakthroughs in biochemistry, tells him all about his early childhood years on the Europa outpost, just past Jupiter, before his mother's poor health took them to earth instead, and one time, he let Astro look at the collection of cosmic keepsakes he picked up in outer space, and he let Astro hold a real Martian rock, red as the planet itself, and when Astro tried to put it back, he shook his head and said you can have it.
Mr. Kusai is always doing this.
Mr. Kusai is always treating Astro like this.
He doesn't really know why he's so surprised.)
But.
"But…" he hesitates, glancing down at his drenched blue jeans, his favorite NASA sweatshirt sticking to the skin of his back, his hair slowly plastering itself to the side of his head as the spikes steadily lose their shape under the constant barrage of rainwater, and it's not that he wants to say no, because he really, really doesn't, but it wouldn't be fair to say yes and ruin Mr. Kusai's nice car, would it? "But I—I'm all wet. I'd probably mess up your seats if I got in."
"You seriously think this is the first time anyone has ever gotten in my car with wet clothes on? No way, kid." Mr. Kusai huffs out a little laugh. "Trust me when I say, the leather dries out pretty nicely in this old thing. You don't have to worry about that."
A small smile pulls at Astro's mouth, but he still shakes his head, because— "No, really, you shouldn't have to go out of your way for me. I-I mean, you've got to go to work tomorrow, remember? And I can get back on my own, anyway. I'll be okay, I promise."
All of a sudden, the grin on Mr. Kusai's face and the sparkle in his eyes flicker out, and his tone shifts into something firmer and more serious. "Astro, I'm not leaving you out here in the middle of the night—and the middle of the worst storm we've had all season! I know what you're capable of. I know you can get back on your own, believe me. But that doesn't mean you should have to."
Astro is quiet for another minute or two, wavering back and forth — he doesn't want to walk home in the rain if he can avoid it, but he also really, really doesn't want to be an inconvenience to Mr. Kusai — before he finally nods, and comes around to the other side of the hovercar, sliding into the passenger seat and pulling the door shut behind him. He tucks his hands in his lap and presses his knees together so he doesn't accidentally hit or kick or break anything with his superstrength — he hasn't messed up with his powers in months, of course, but it's always better to be safe than sorry. "Thank you, Mr. Kusai. This is really, really nice of you."
"No sweat," Mr. Kusai shrugs, rolling the window back up and hitting the big green button on the dashboard, so the lock clicks into place, before he tosses Astro a small, teasing smile. "Just save the city again tomorrow, and we'll call it even."
Astro laughs, a sound that hasn't left his mouth in days. "I mean, my schedule is pretty packed, but I guess I could squeeze it in. Since you asked, and everything."
Silence falls over the two of them after that, but the quiet is just as comfortable and relaxed as their conversations. While Astro savors the gusts of warm air blasting through the dashboard vents, drying out the water still clinging to his skin and soaked into his clothes, and tries his best not to fall asleep now that he's finally off his feet for the first time in hours, Mr. Kusai carefully adjusts the rearview mirror, shifts the vehicle back into drive, and eases slowly away from the curb.
But they've only gone a couple of miles down the dark, storm-slick road when Mr. Kusai frowns, his pale face tinged faintly red in the glow of the traffic light outside, and glances over at Astro. "Hey, do you hear that?"
Astro wrinkles his brow and quickly adjusts his auditory function, pushing it up until the rush of noise gives him a migraine, but it's just the usual hustle and bustle of Metro City in the middle of the night: the steady patter of the rain pounding on the roof over their heads and the pavement beneath their feet, the roar of the thunder still rumbling furiously outside, the low hum of countless hovercar engines speeding past, the faint buzzing of neon signs advertising their bars and hotels and gas stations, the clicking and whirring of machinery as thousands on thousands of robots roam the streets, and the constant, flowing tide of chatter and laughter from people just living their lives.
He can't come up with even a single thing that could possibly put such a worried look on Mr. Kusai's face, so he finally gives up and just shakes his head, dialing his hearing back down as he does. "Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. What does it sound like?"
"Like a robot," Mr. Kusai says immediately, confidence coloring his voice loud and clear. "A robot that's having some trouble with their engine, I think." He eases the car forward an inch or two when the light turns to green, but he's biting his lip as he stares out through the rain-streaked windshield. "Astro, I-I think it might be you."
"Me?" Astro instinctively presses a palm into his chest to check the pulse of the Core under his hand. It feels as steady as always, every beat exactly two seconds after the last one, and he certainly can't hear whatever Mr. Kusai can, but he'll be the first to admit he's not exactly the expert on robotics. And Dad picked Mr. Kusai specifically from more than two hundred other applicants to be his intern. The guy obviously knows his stuff, and Astro trusts his opinion on this way more than he trusts his own.
Mr. Kusai abruptly pulls off onto some random side-street, just a blank stretch of black asphalt with no other cars or people as far as the eye can see, and puts the car back in park so he can turn to face Astro full-on. "Can I take a quick look in there? I don't think it's a good idea to just leave you like this overnight. Whatever it is, it sounds bad."
A quick look is actually the last thing Astro wants to do right now, if he's telling the truth, because he knows from prior experience with his father that it's never "just a quick look" with robotics engineers, but he nods, anyway, tugging his damp NASA sweatshirt over his head and folding it up in a neat square of white fabric on his lap. With a quick push of his fingers in the center of his chest, the power cavity pops open, and the radiant blue glow of the Core floods the dark car.
Mr. Kusai unbuckles his seatbelt and peers into the chamber with narrowed eyes, his mouth dragging down at the edges in a definite grimace. "I mean, I don't see anything… but it's too hard to say for sure with that light…"
"Um," Astro says, around the familiar twisting feeling in the pit of his stomach like a nest of hissing snakes has just settled in there, around the echo of it's just a machine it's just a machine it's just a machine and I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry, around the freezing-cold fear that he won't wake up ever again, because Mr. Kusai isn't like that. Mr. Kusai would never hurt him like that. Mr. Kusai is trying to help him. Mr. Kusai wasn't even there that day at the Ministry when his dad deactivated him. Mr. Kusai had nothing to do with any of that. Mr. Kusai is a good man. "Y-You can take it out. If you need to."
"Seriously?" Mr. Kusai levels him a searching look, a furrow forming in between his blonde brows. "You'd be okay with that?"
Astro forces himself to nod. "Y-Yeah, I mean, it's—it's fine. You'll put it back in when you're done, right?"
"Of course I will." Mr. Kusai frowns. The crease in his forehead gets deeper. "What else would I do?"
Astro doesn't answer that, but the tension in his tired body eases up a little, and he sits still and silent in his seat as the long fingers close gently around the spinning sphere in his chest and draw it out in slow, hesitant increments. The very last thing he sees, before the energy loss finally overtakes him, is the Blue Core clutched in Skunk Kusai's cupped hands.