Author’s Note:  This flash fiction story was written based on a prompt provided by tyrooneus_wigglebottomus during a livestream.  I hereby transfer all story rights to them, with the caveat that it remain posted on this blog.  If you would like your own story, stop by twitch.tv/blainearcade during one of my streams and I’ll write it for you live!

Prompt: An old robot created by a mad scientist becomes sentient.

What a day it was for the drifting remains of the Epsilon Hyena Station, the name of which was long faded, or scratched off, across the entirety of its hide, deep tissues, and super-titanium bones. As the paint flaked the name changed in equal measure, though it slowed as the intelligences took off, rocket by rocket, to less cloyingly green pastures.

First shortened to Hyena Station, the name then became the The Lost Dot, then the Garbage Dot, then a bar code in systems now foreign, and now, if it was referenced at all, perhaps as just a glitch in a digital map, it was called the Sundered Green. Called that by the first intelligence to arrive in over three hundred years, the first to see that the crops that used to feed its billion residents at its height had reached a new height of their own, becoming a diverse jungle across the entirety of the artificial moon.

She had two names herself, and played two roles, set two traps, and both were about to spring as the pair of rockets arrived on opposite sides, to the coordinates she’d given, the bulk of the station shielding them from each other’s sensors. Best to settle in now, and she chose a knothole in what was not a true tree, though it had taken a similar form in these recent decades, its ancestral squash going rounded and ridged, now hanging as fruit with dark green and orange rinds.

Her body was of the sort, in both configurations, that could sit perfectly still, long enough for the stubborn plants of this void-drifting sphere to grow over entirely. Perfect silence to match. Her creation, assembled at the height of her madness, an embarrassing eon that was, likely no longer bore ears sensitive enough to hear a slight breath, but her former lover did. He didn’t have blueprints, or he did, and they belonged to a god much older than herself.

He was first to arrive under a mostly simulated, but still energy-pressurized, sky, a beautiful innocent blue, yet in place of water vapor clouds the distant plasma-fire of engine-wake nebulae could be seen. Like a noble elf from an ancient paper tale, he dropped into the meadow-jungle of a long melted down reactor core on the tips of his toes, quiet as a katydid.

On his back was slung a sword, naught but silver on the exterior, but replete with sandwiched layers of quantum computing boards within. She knew that blade, had forged and programmed it for him. It would’ve warmed her heart to know he still kept it sharp, but that organ was stored in a lockbox two dimensions below their current one.

Was it still his best friend, she wondered. His isolation was back, otherwise he wouldn’t have answered the summons, but had it been continuous? Did he still feel that no mortal could understand his ages of struggle, his sense that time was passing faster and faster?

Yes, she guessed, hoped, as it was written all over his face, drawing his cheeks, emptying his electric gray eyes, whispered unending on the blue lips of an enchanted cryogenic sleeper. She’d only ever known this man, made immortal and elven by her meddling alone, as Lenns. The last time she’d said it she was pretending at death, motivating him to surge forward in battle, to test that very immortality.

There was no time to dwell on it; Lenns had barely sat down, conjured his sorrows for stewing, before the other arrived: a refuse reflection in a junkyard mirror. The same being, but in the opposite shell.

This one had never known silence, as its pneumatic legs, even when assembly line fresh, pumped and moaned with every step. Now that was exacerbated by rust every ion as super as the titanium at the core of Sundered Green.

Also like the station, its name had degenerated, in the mouths and banks of others, and in its own mind too. Robot-information integration unit-Prometheus class-variant G5-model #1777174. Robot-information integration unit. Robot. Rob.

Her eyes sharpened, the most any part of her would move before the inevitable clash. Rob’s ultraglass skullcap was still clean and transparent, the only maintenance it had attended to. She saw it was still hollow. No flame. No Prometheus in its class after all. All Rob knew how to do, even now, was obey. And it had the same summons as Lenns.

“What have you done with her, foul metallic?” the elven spacefarer demanded after shooting to tiptoe and drawing his simulator blade. The projector in its hilt activated on cue of his anger, sparkled blue.

“Who is ‘her’?” the metallic queried, voice degraded from its initially perfect imitations now that it hadn’t had the sounding board of other organics since before its last power-down, which was the death of three pulsars ago. It had no anger to match the man; that was the whole problem.

“She called me here,” Lenns said, voice a bitter acrid flame. “After all this time, she had survived, and I almost had her back in my arms, but now she isn’t here…” He leveled the tip of his weapon at Rob. “…and you are.”

“This unit was summoned by its designer,” Rob informed, but that only enraged Lenns further. He knew how to get answers out of metallic remains, the point of his sword could extract them. There was no reason to let it shamble on, screeching so rusty, in mimicry of his eternal life force.

She watched as he charged. Rob was still, but for its ill-maintained trembling. That was the program. Don’t strike back until necessary. Minimize violence, learn the most, gain the flame of identity from the spillover of a burdened and melting quantum processor. Perhaps now. It was the last chance, if Lenns was to be spared.

Just as the sword was magnetically pulled toward its targeted zone, flakes of rust exploded off Rob’s top left arm. A simple pole unfurled, blocked, but not so simple inside, same as Lenns. Some of her design principles never changed, whether the format was organic or metallic. The pole’s interior absorbed the shock, learned a thousand things about him from one blow, and then redirected the kinetic energy to a vibrating chassis, shaking off all the rust in a deathly shower that forced the elven immortal to shield his eyes.

Parts eaten through, the Prometheus class was still functional enough for battle. Energy that might try to dissuade Lenns with words, often the most efficient means of moving forward across the living cosmos, had to be rerouted into blocking, blocking, blocking. She swallowed her fears, misgivings. Eventually the program would decide striking back was the only avenue that remained.

Lenns reeled. A galaxy away, the last blow struck against him. How had this obsolete creaking dummy landed a hit? He could dodge the wind, dodge stellar radiation even. No one built a body faster than his own, and he had trained it further. Unless… No. Better to keep fighting than even consider.

The battle raged, each missed strike cutting the tall grass as if by razor. They became two lawnmowers charging at each other. Squash rained from trees, stems snapped by nothing more than the energy crackling in the air. What seemed to be an even match was undercut more than the grass by the seeping fact that Lenns couldn’t land a hit on anything but the rod.

His energy was drained, swing by swing, the metallic unaffected by his sword’s hologram projection of the machine’s predicted location one second in the future. It was all trivial, until the perfect opportunity was targeted, right on the sweat of Lenns’s heart. A single jab brought the nearly fey creature to his knees, bruising heart muscle through bone and flesh alike.

Still, no plasma ignited in the machine’s head. She had to intervene, to at least explain. Out she jumped, before the metallic could deal the killing blow, drifting between on the magenta rings of reduced gravity that had served as her shoes longer than she’d known either of them.

“My love,” Lenns managed to say, his last words, but he could still comprehend.

“Hold that thought,” she said, eyes growing brighter, hands coming closer to his spreading weeping bruise. It was not meant or interpreted dismissively. He should hold it, should pass in the warmth of affection. “I did this for us all, I’m sorry.” She saw the question in his eyes when it couldn’t form in his mouth.

Rob was passive. It would never touch its creator. Her touch was only upgrade, her intent only invention. That was the doctrine of its code.

“I created you both,” she explained, earnest tears flowing. “You with love and alteration,” her eyes were on Lenns, “and this lifeless machine with raw engineering. Both times the goal was an imperishable soul, one that could last in this fading galaxy. You did well Lenns, you can’t perceive it yet, but even in an immortal modified body, your spirit wears thin.

I kept hoping this machine would generate its own spirit through experience, but it must be transferred, and only yours is compatible with my code. Let me have it now. You have kept it well, but it is ultimately my design.”

He couldn’t stop her if he wanted to. The last thing felt was her touch, and he could have passed in admiration, in peace, if he so chose at that catalyst. Either way, the only hands that could, modified by every school of science, the left only changed by the right, and the right only changed by the left, took from him the blaze of sentience, and placed it in the skullcap Rob opened.

“So that is it,” the metallic said once properly integrated. “That is what makes me.”

“Yes,” she answered. Rob looked at the slumped creature that had made it this far.

“I love you,” he told them both.

THE END