JMJ
Chapter One
That Typical kind of Prologue
Two years is a long time to be alone. At least Melody thought so. She was not sure if she had been around in the world long enough to postulate such things.
She had stood so still dreaming of a better time and place that her power had been reserved. For exactly two years, two months, two weeks, two days, twenty-two hours, and twenty-two minutes. It seemed like as good a time as any to move again. The pattern somehow instigated it. The number "2" had never quite left her mind for all that time, but there was really only one place to go.
Besides, even having been on half-sleep mode she was dangerously low on power now. Batteries did not last forever. The sewer passages looked the same. "Timeless" was probably the word humans would use, but she was not human. She could detect the subtle differences in her surroundings due to the passage of two years despite herself.
There was the secret door, though. She went in with as much ease as though she had never left. At least physically. There was a chill that was only in her mental processors. Something that mimicked human emotion but was not human. It was not the fear of coming back to Dr. Locus after so long of being away. It was an alarm from within her body that something was amiss.
"Daddy…?"
Her voice echoed emptily.
Well, she thought, it is very possible he doesn't even live here anymore, but this is the backup lair. Maybe this one was compromised too?
She looked around, peaking into rooms with equipment lying about just as though someone was coming right back after a coffee break, but there was no smell of coffee or a burnt out coffee machine even if there was a half eaten Danish on a work table being nibbled at by rats.
She shooed them away and picked it up.
It was cold and dried out. The air down here was crusting it rather than molding it.
"Hello?" Melody asked quietly.
Cockroaches skittered somewhere out of sight; though she was used to the echoes down here enough to pinpoint with perfect robotic accuracy where they were.
Was it fear she felt? Or was it something else.
Timidly she reached out a hand just as a little human girl might in a dark fairy tale for the door at the end of the main room, but just as she touched it, she heard a voice.
"I wouldn't go in there if I were you…"
Melody jumped and spun around, looking with alert exactitude left and right, up and down. She saw no person. No robotic verve. Nothing but what looked like part of a black tarp amidst other pieces of machinery. No. It was not a tarp.
Melody cocked her head slowly and tiptoed over to the strange mass. It was black like a wetsuit and looked a little like one too. With a quick scan, she realized that it was motorized in nature, digitally wired, and very possibly with artificial intelligence. More slowly than before, she cocked her head once more.
"What are you?"
"A miserable outcast the same as you," said the suit.
"Did my… did Dr. Locus make you?" asked Melody.
"He agreed to help me. To upgrade me. He promised many things to me, but those promises turned out to be the empty promises of someone who doesn't want to be sane," said the suit very hollow and empty.
The emptiness reverberated in Melody's inner-workings in a way that struck a chord. She could not help but feel pity for the thing. Another being hurt by Dr. Locus' madness? Perhaps at one time he had been sane. It could be that sparkle of her maker's own remaining splinter of sanity that tore Melody inside out in her desire to be normal amidst the madness she was raised up in.
"What is your original function?" asked Melody.
"I was created to help," said the suit. "I was created for symbiotic strength. I was created to be wanted, but my original creator was worse than Dr. Locus in that she did not care that the one I was bestowed to did not appreciate me. I tried to find my in the world, but the world did not want me. I thought that Dr. Locus wanted me when I had been damaged after my wanderings for a soul mate like the lost souls of Humanity's lore."
"I'm sorry," said Melody folding her hands together as in honor of the dead, and she closed her optics for a moment.
"Are you Dr. Locus' creation?"
"Hmm?" Melody bounced up again blinking widely then regretfully as she pushed her heals together. "I am."
"You are a very beautiful creation," said the suit.
"No," said Melody turning prettily away.
"Don't be so hard on yourself. You are very beautiful. I know beauty. I was created to understand it, and you are beautiful enough to take on the world if you want to. Why do you not?"
"Because it's only skin deep," Melody admitted. "I'll never understand humanity like I wish to. I'll never be human."
"Being an organic human is overrated in my opinion. You don't need to be human to be rejected or appreciated. All that is required is to look and act the part of perfection. Humans that do not play this game are treated with the same contempt as biological freaks far as you have likely felt like a mechanical one as far as I have witnessed."
"But that's just it. I can't act the part no matter how I look," said Melody with a perfect little pout, and glancing again at the door she asked with a raised brow, "Why do you not want me to go into that room?"
"It is the final resting spot of the man who did not complete his promise to me, because in his madness he destroyed himself beyond repair."
Melody stiffened. "You mean—!"
"He is regrettably offline."
With a gasp Melody reached for the door but stopped again, hesitating. She was not programmed to handle tragedy. What would happen if she looked? She stepped back. She could not go in.
"I was so angry with him," she said hollowly. "I… I…but he created me… he… did love me in his own way… he…"
"I'm sorry for your loss."
Melody glowered and stomped away.
"Don't be!" she snapped. "He was a horrible father! A horrible creator! He should not have created me!"
The suit shifted thoughtfully, almost predatorily; though Melody was unconcerned as she stomped about and threw down a work bench and everything on it with all the strength she had. The table itself crashed into the wall— lodged into it like a bullet. The items on the table were all but exploded every which way breaking things and smacking into the walls. Then she burned red with rage and other emotions she was not programmed to understand. She ground her artificial teeth in a way that would have crunched steel into powder. The tears squeezing from her optical sensors were scalding enough to boil a potato and steamed down her cheeks. Her gears were tight enough to hear them screeching into each other.
"Please."
Melody stopped. The pleading had been so miserable, so lost, so imploring, that she had to heed it. She could not help it. It echoed as though from her own secret inner desires. It was the voice of that suit. A kindred spirit. If there was truly a ghost in the shell that was robotic life.
"You're lonely," said Melody, the tears falling now prettily and not nearly as hot.
"And broken and lost and angry, the same as you," said the suit, "but perhaps we could come back together."
"You want to be symbiotic with me?" demanded Melody, not sure she liked the idea even if she did not understand completely what the suit was programmed to do. "What would be the use of melding two lost souls together into one lost soul? There is no counter balance in that."
"You do not need what I am programmed to give. You already are beautiful, even if I am programmed to be more beautiful still."
It said this without rudeness that Melody could sense, only the programmed fact induced by the creator. The creator must have been a very vain and horrible creature, though.
"You are programmed to make people beautiful?"
"Originally, but now I can be more than that if I so choose even if my original programming is my core desire. I can make someone look ugly now if I wish. I can make myself look like the person I overtake. I can shift into whatever can still fit well enough into my size and general shape so long as it is human in appearance."
"My…" Melody choked. "My father did that for you?"
"Yes, expanded my abilities, but to no true end unless perhaps we could work together. You are Melody, right?"
"Yes," Melody said quietly as though on a breath, though she had no real breath and no real lungs even if she was programmed to be able to mimic fragile breathlessness as well as many other dainty things.
"We could join together less physically and still help each other."
"For moral support, I guess," agreed Melody timidly as she stepped towards the suit again.
With care, she knelt before it, and it moved up a little of its own accord.
She reached out her hand, and the suit reached out an appendage of sorts like a rubber glove. They held each other's hands a moment and Melody did feel a little comforted in the fact that she finally touched another sentient thing with camaraderie she had not dared to dream of since her magical time with that human boy, Bradley Carbunkle.
The thought of Brad renewed the tears, and she closed her eyes as she let the glove-like hand go. It was no offense to the suit-being, but it was nothing like the candid, warm, organic, gentle hold of Brad's hand. The veins that reverberated against her sensors from his naturally beating heart could not be replaced by anything.
"I was programmed for human companionship," Melody admitted with some regret despite herself even as her memory banks played back with perfect nostalgic sepia tone in gentle slow motion those moments she had had with Brad whether in that romantic boat ride or in that cozy old-person's home. "Please don't take offense."
"One cannot be blamed for one's programming," the suit said with a sort of shrug, "but we can still be good friends, I hope."
"I would like that very much," said Melody, "but you could not help me get what I am programmed for, I don't think. Besides, I think I've already overran part of my programming further than my father dreamed, because I am in love with a human."
"Does this human know this and you were rejected."
"I don't know if," said Melody as she had to admit it, "if Brad rejects me. He did not outright get a chance to respond, but… he did see my true form. Though… he had admitted earlier that being a robot would not stop our relationship if…"
"Then perhaps there is hope yet," said the suit.
Melody sulked and stood up.
"I doubt that," she said brushing her dress off with just a hint of snootiness, but of course it was only the façade over a hurt interior.
The suit, which knew all about interiors versus exteriors was not in the least bit fooled, Melody supposed.
"Come now," cooed the suit more sympathetically than her father ever had. "Don't be like that. I have hope, now that I have a friend. So should you."
"You think?" asked Melody just a touch tartly despite herself.
The suit was not offended. "When you say 'Brad'," it asked. "You don't happen to mean 'Brad Carbunkle', do you?"
Melody jumped with a horrible gasp. "How!?"
"I was programmed to make one person beautiful specifically," said the suit a little more powerfully than before, perhaps a little more darkly than before, but Melody felt darker herself anyway quite suddenly. "Perhaps you've heard of her too since you know her companion. XJ-9? Otherwise known as Jenny Wakeman."
NOTE: My co-conspirators and I are now posting the second of the five MLaaTR stories we've planned. XD For this one we drew inspiration from the mysterious final season that did not come to fruition. It was alluded to that Melody would return and, of course, there was a lot about another episode in which the exo-skin would return and take over Brad. We decided it would be fun to put these two ideas into one story with our own spin after the same fashion as our first fic Of Cabbage-heads and Prodigies.