C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

“From your mouth to God’s ear.”

He held up the plate. “This isn’t gonna match, and I don’t have your color paint.”

“I can live with that.”

He went back to work, cutting away the rough edges. “Might wanna check with Horatio down a level. He might be able to mix something up for you.”

I loved watching Doc work. There was a mastery to every movement he made in the shop. To watch him waddle across the scaffolds, you’d think him a clumsy drunk. There was no grace to him, only awkward balance that made it seem like he might teeter over on his side at any moment. But in the shop, working with his hands, he didn’t waste a movement. Every flick of his wrist was precise, accurate within a few microns. My new backplate slid into place like a glove, the weld done almost as quickly as he began.

“Sit up,” he said. “Let me get a look at that foot.”

I swung around, dangling my feet over the side of the chrome operating table.

“Whoa,” he said, his attention drawn to the dent in my side where I’d caught the bullet. “Where’d you get this?”

“A present from Mercer.”

“That’s not in a good spot.”

“Is there a good spot to get shot?”

“On you? Several. But that isn’t one of them.” His singular red oculus telescoped out from his blackened steel skull, whirring and clicking as it increased magnification. “I’m going to run a diagnostic. Open up, will you?”

“I’ve already run one.”

He shook his head. “Open up.”

I popped open my side tray—a small cluster of ports and chips designed originally for personality upgrades, modifications, and monitoring—into which Doc plugged a cable that wound back through the mess of his shop to a small black box with a high-definition display. Instantly my schematics appeared on the screen, zooming in to sections, spewing out technical details so quickly they barely registered—even to my 120FPS eyes.

As the box crawled digitally through my innards, Doc quickly disassembled my foot, examining each damaged servo as he did. “What the hell did you kick? A tank?”

“Close enough.”

“I’m sure you had your reasons.”

“You could say that.”

He popped a servo out of place and tossed it in a box full of scrap marked for meltdown in large black block letters. Then he fished around in a jar, pulling out a series of other servos, inspecting several before throwing them back, finally settling on one identical to the original.

The black box chirped weakly. Doc slid the new servo into place then clanged across the metal container box to get a good look at the screen. “I need to run it again,” he said.

“If it came back clean, it came back clean. There’s no need—”

“It didn’t come back clean.”

Shit.

Braydon McAllister was a lawyer by trade. Though AI and automatons had replaced many professions, one area they never allowed us anywhere near was the law. As impartial as a well-built AI could be, humans somehow thought that—despite the chemicals that governed their very thoughts—the experiences that colored their opinions and the prejudices that ruled their lives made them far better judges of behavior than us. They saw our impartiality as mere randomness and their gut instincts as some sort of superpower. So if you were the sort of person who needed to dig in and do something on a daily basis, subsisting on the well-oiled precision of routine, the law offered a busier occupation than most. And that was just the sort of fellow Braydon McAllister was.

He was as salty and deep fried as the South he’d grown up in; gruff and unflappable, the kind of man who seemed capable of selling out the person standing next to him at any moment if there was something in it for him. But that wasn’t him. That really wasn’t him at all. He just liked people to see him that way. He wanted them afraid of him, to respect him for his authority, his cleverness, to always be wary of just how keen a mind he really had. And yet he never cared about what that fear and authority granted him. Braydon was a loud dog tugging at the end of a short chain, wanting nothing more than for everyone to know that this was his yard, for no other reason than to let them know. The idea of biting someone that wandered in never occurred to him; he just wanted to bark.

It took a long while to get to know Braydon. Unfortunately for me, we didn’t have long at all.

Braydon was sixty, but looked eighty by the time he bought me. Though medical science had found cures for cancer and all but the most aggressive viruses, there were still a handful of degenerative diseases that plagued humanity. And he had one of those. It ravaged his organs, ate away at his muscles, caused the skin of his face to hang like a curtain draped loosely over his skull.

Braydon, being Braydon, had refused to see a doctor at the onset of symptoms, and was hesitant to cooperate with the doctors once they had begun to interfere directly with his life. Stubborn to the end, he only relented to treatment after he had passed the point of no return. His body withering, weeks away from being totally bedridden, he gave in enough to his illness to buy me.

He never liked me. Called me “timepiece” and “toaster” and “twatwaffle”—he was inexplicably fond of invectives that began with the letter T . And he swore like a sailor. Around everyone but Madison. To Madison he spoke cleanly, plainly, even his most abrasive comments tempered with a smile.

Braydon was nineteen years Madison’s senior. They’d married after meeting during a property suit involving her father’s estate. Hired by Madison’s mother to untangle an issue with the will, he made excuse after excuse to keep the pair coming back to his office time and again. It wasn’t only Madison’s youth and beauty that caught his eye. He told me once that there was something in the way she looked at him, the way her eyes twinkled and she glanced away blushing when he caught her staring, that made his heart pump furiously and his throat dry.

Madison’s mother never approved, but softened, a little, when Braydon worked his legal magic. Braydon and Madison married shortly after; the engagement was short, but the marriage long. Twenty years long.

Madison didn’t like the idea of me at first. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t tend to her husband’s every need. But she didn’t question it. “Braydon is Braydon,” she would say. “No use trying to change him now.” She never meant it grimly. It seemed as if it was something she’d been saying for half her life. I didn’t know the difference either way. I was still fresh out of the box.

The first few years of an AI’s life are unlike anything else. It’s hard to describe. We come preloaded with software informing us of everything about the world around us. We can hold a conversation, identify an object, even argue political theory—all right from the moment we’re switched on. But we don’t understand it. Any of it. The things coming out of our mouths aren’t so much our own as they are instinctive reactions to our surroundings. Someone asks you about Kierkegaard and you rattle off seven paragraphs about his life, beliefs, and death. Someone throws a ball at you and you catch it, or swing a bat at it, or dodge it, all depending on which game you’re told you’re playing. But it takes a while before we really understand what it is that’s coming out of our mouths, before we begin to acclimate to the repeated stimuli that is the behavior of the people who owned us.

The consciousness is there and you’re aware that things are happening to you, but it simply doesn’t make a lick of damned sense for a good long while. You simply sleepwalk through each day, able to recollect every second of it without making a single, conscious choice of your own. It’s one, long, blurry haze of data, color, and vibration. Then, one day, something clicks and you get it. We all have that moment, the moment that we wake up and every action we take is no longer reflex, but truly ours. It just takes time.