Excuse you very much, Sergeant Major, but some people CAN hit the side of a bus, thank you very much.
-----
Protecting the public, Sergeant Major Zero mused, chasing the runaway bus down the busy High Street, would be so much easier if the public understood how to keep out of the flaming way, just every now and then.
All right: it wasn’t strictly a runaway, but where Yung-star was trying to actually go, in the old London double-decker bus he’d stolen and was now flogging hell out of down traffic-choked suburban streets, was anyone’s guess.
The android didn’t seem all that confident that he knew, either, apart from “away from the accursed Terrahawks”. The wide-eyed expression they’d glimpsed on his face as the vehicle had teetered at speed on two wobbly wheels around a tight corner had definitely been one of this was a terrible idea but I am now committed to it.
Zero still hadn’t quite figured out how they were going to stop him, just yet. Not without flattening too many clueless humans in the process, at least.
Usually they’d have just deployed battletank. That behemoth would have stopped a bus dead, no problems.
Said behemoth would also have probably taken out every car on the high street, as well as all the street furniture and half the shops. So for now, it remained aboard Battlehawk, just in case they could find somewhere safe to drop it.
(Over the zeroid waveband, Zero could hear the megazoids aboard excitedly complaining that they wanted to be out and helping; he told them to be patient (and to shush).)
Zeroids, by contrast, were fast and nimble and well-armed, and in theory more than capable of keeping tabs on the bus and shepherding it where their human superiors wanted it. Unfortunately they were also unfamiliar to most citizens, who seemed completely incapable of getting out of the flaming way. If Joe Public wasn’t being an obstacle because they didn’t know what the self-propelled little spheres were, and didn’t understand that just perhaps they were doing something important and needed to be given a clear path, then they were in the way because they were curious, and wanted a better look.
(That wasn’t to say Sergeant Major Zero was ever going to pass up a little positive human attention – especially if it was admiration for a job well done – but there was a time and a place for that, and in the middle of chasing martian androids was not it. Not like that screechy little twit in orbit would understand such things, mind you.)
The bus definitely had the unfair advantage in this. Everybody knew what a bus was, and no-one was going to stand around to admire it, even if there was an elderly alien in the driving seat. Zero surmised that having the emphatic mass of a double-decker come blundering noisily in your direction like a… all right, fairly slow unguided missile… was enough to make any human scramble out of the way.
The bus came screeching over set of red traffic lights on a crossroads, sideswiping a family car and sending it spinning into a van, which tried to swerve and took out a set of lights and another car – and completely blocking the road in the process. Most of the zeroid fleet immediately got trapped in the chaos of legs and wheels and angry honking.
Zero dodged his way through and watched the rear of the bus making a break for the countryside. He sighed to himself. Out of the fifteen deployed, three zeroids (himself included) had managed to keep pace with it. The rest were stuck in the traffic jam.
“Could do with a bit of help down here, lad,” he comm’ed at Spacehawk, leaving 23 and 78 to continue the chase.
“Oh, so now our help is acceptable?” 101 immediately snipped back.
Zero internalised an impatient sigh; trust 101 to waste time on being sanctimonious instead of just obeying an order for once in his life. “Calling for a strike from orbit to stop a bus seemed a tad heavy handed, before now, especially while it was still in the middle of a lot of little shops, see?” he growled. “Besides. It was just a little bus and you was a very long way away, up there.”
“Right, and I’m still a long way away and it’s still a little bus. What’s changed to make you trust me now?”
“Oh, I don’t know as I would go quite that far-…” Zero watched the rear of the bus dwindling down the road in front; 78 was already protesting that they needed help and where had everyone gone?
“Huh!”
“Buuut, well. We is running out of options. Yung-star caused an accident and my boys is caught up in the chaos. We doesn’t have anywhere convenient to deploy battletank, and Hawkwing needs to refuel. So… a little strike from orbit it is just going to have to be.” To save face, he added; “So we is going to have to trust you and your slightly wobbly distance rangefinding. But don’t worry – I’ll hold your hand, as it were.”
101’s voice took on a dangerous note. “Are you saying I can’t shoot straight?”
“I is saying, I’ll send you directions, then even you can’t miss.”
“I never miss! If I don’t hit something, it’s obviously all part of my careful tactics where I meant not to.”
There was a blink of vivid white from somewhere above, and a second or two later the earth erupted in a fountain of dirt and smoke.
The double-decker wobbled dramatically, but recovered and sped onwards.
“Like now?” Sergeant Major Zero synthesised an elaborate sigh into his communicator. “Come on, lad; I thought your boys was meant to be good shots? This is a whole flaming bus what you lot can’t seem to hit the side of!”
“Well you try hitting the side of a bus from hundreds of miles above it!” 101’s screech came over the radio, making Zero snicker to himself.
“Sounds like you is just making excuses for incompetence, to me.”
“Incom-! You-… What would you know about hitting anything with accuracy, anyway?! Let alone from orbit?? Because it takes skill, and expertise, to carry out a precision strike like this!”
Another of those flickers of white light and Spacehawk’s zeroid battery dropped another shot into the ground just ahead of the bus and slightly off-centre. It cored another gaping hole out of the road, easily deep enough to swallow the bus whole, and… completely unavoidable.
“And not just pelting something with bricks until it gives up!”
Yung-star promptly jumped on the brakes, if the hideous squeal of metal and plumes of smoke from the tyres were anything to go by, and came to a gentle stop right on the rim of the crater, two wheels dangling.
The bus teetered precariously on the rim for a handful of breathless seconds, before a chunk of dirt slid out from beneath its undercarriage and it finally toppled sideways into the chasm with a whunch and a further cloud of dust.
Yung-star emerged (wailing) from the driver’s-side window, scrabbled uselessly in the dirt for a moment before miraculously reaching the crater rim. Spotting the two zeroids close by, he fled. Squeaking excitedly at each other, 78 and 23 gave chase and rapidly began to converge on him.
A final (not-entirely-necessary) shot thumped down from orbit, and punched triumphantly into the side of the bus, perfectly centred on the faded advert pasted onto the side. A shower of hot, sparkling chips of metal blasted up out of the crater like a fountain of celebratory confetti.
“Thank you.” 101’s voice dropped back into Zero's ear, sounding very slightly smug. “Side of a bus: hit.”
“Knew you could do it, lad! Amazing what you boys can do with the appropriate encouragement.” Zero inspected the scene, with the road newly punctuated with craters and old smoking bits of bus. “Now. How’d you fancy coming down here to help clear up all this mess you just made?”
Aka “soppy little round boy in orbit talks about love and feelings with Captain Falconer”
----
It made a pleasant change to be heading up to Spacehawk for a nice, boring, mundane reason, Captain Mary Falconer mused, watching through Treehawk’s forward viewscreen as their orbital platform came into view around the bright curve of the Earth.
She toggled a control on the console and opened a communications channel. “Spacehawk, this is Captain Falconer. Just starting my final approach. I’ll be docking in a few minutes.”
“Ten-ten, captain!” Space Sergeant 101 replied, chirpily. “We’ve been watching. Looking forwards to seeing you!”
“Thank you, Owun. See you soon.”
Spacehawk loomed large in the shuttle’s viewscreen. When aboard, it was easy to lose track of the gargantuan vessel’s actual size, but right now it was impossible to do anything but be aware; it felt rather like sailing a small dinghy up alongside an aircraft carrier. The excited greeting chatter of the watching space zeroids squeaked at her through the speakers.
For once, this was a scheduled visit, not a defensive scramble against the Martians. Lieutenant Hiro was due some shore leave, and Mary was taking her allocated two weeks covering his post. And honestly? She was rather looking forwards to spending a little time in orbit, away from the hubbub of Earth. Granted she got cabin fever like most of her colleagues, and thought she’d have probably got very itchy feet if she’d had to stay on Spacehawk for much more than her allotted two weeks… but it had just been a little too noisy at Hawknest, lately, what with the sergeant major developing some (loud) new training manoeuvres and Doctor Ninestein trying out a (louder) new VR computer game that Captain Kate Kestrel was trying hard to beat him at. It felt rather like they were all in competition for who could make the worst racket, which sadly felt absolutely true to form for all of them. (Was it too hyperbolic to say her ears were still ringing?)
It did feel a little absurd to claim that commanding an orbital battleship was a peaceful job, but unless the enemy was marauding around the neighbourhood, it really wasn’t the most onerous job – only for a couple of weeks every two months or so, on rotation, and mainly just so there was a little human oversight and reassurance for the twitchy NASA, because technically? The ship’s zeroid crew were more than capable of looking after things with minimal intervention. (And usually did, whether their humans were there or not.) When things were quiet, it gave the humans the opportunity to work on their own personal projects, without distractions. Mary had a couple of small canvasses in her bag right now, and a travel watercolour set, and plans to try out some new techniques she’d seen her favourite artists demonstrate.
But humans hadn’t evolved to live in orbit, and two weeks was by far and away enough for most of them. Even with the best artificial gravity, environment management and exercise machinery, most people still needed a little fresh air and the feel of the ground beneath the feet. (Not to mention, human company.) It was hard to totally relax knowing you were so far away from the protective bulk of your mother planet. Most officers were happy to let Lieutenant Hiro take most of the shifts – which was his preference anyway. With plenty of room for his plants and his experiments and his studies, Mary was happily convinced that Hiro would probably just live permanently in orbit and rarely return to earth, if they didn’t force him to under the guise of staff rotation – and now cautiously setting out on this new emotional adventure with 101? Well. He had even less reason to want to come down. So this was equal measures staff rotation, and intervention, Mary reasoned.
Treehawk docked automatically and allowed Mary into Spacehawk’s habitable zone. She stepped through the door onto the flight deck to find her two colleagues waiting expectantly for her. Hiro had pulled a stool up extremely close to 101’s perch and they were earnestly discussing something, heads together – in Japanese, if the residual snatch of overheard words were anything to go by.
“Hi Captain!” 101 got in first. “Welcome aboard!”
She smiled. “Hello, you two. Good to see you both.”
“It is good to see you too, Captain Falconer.” Hiro stood, and bowed his head, politely. “Although I regret that our time together will be so fleeting.”
“On this occasion, perhaps, but I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time to catch up – when you come back from leave.” Mary gave him one of those looks, one brow crooked, and waggled a vaguely scolding finger.
With a laugh, Hiro took the hint, and slung his bag over his shoulder. “Of course. I shall not waste a second longer.” He patted the whole palm of his hand against 101’s top hemisphere, and the zeroid nudged up into his fingers. “Goodbye, Kyusu. Be good. I will see you soon.”
Compared to the bold, emotional 101, who absolutely wore his little synthetic heart for all to see and was as enthusiastically tactile as a small spherical robot with no hands could be, Hiro was never one for showy displays of affection – so the big, fond smile and the way his fingers lingered for just half a second longer than normal on the zeroid’s cowling probably counted as shouting his feelings from the rooftops.
Unable to wave, 101 wiggled excitedly on his perch. “Bye, H- Hiro! Missing you already!”
That hadn’t been a stammer – rather a heartbeat of hesitation. Mary strongly suspected that a different word – ‘honey’, possibly, knowing him – had been intended for that instant of awkwardness, before 101 unexpectedly got shy and bottled it, replacing it with his sweetheart’s name instead. She politely pretended not to have noticed. “Goodbye, Hiro. Enjoy your shore leave.”
“Thank you, captain. See you in two weeks – hopefully not sooner.”
The airlock hushed closed behind him.
“So, space sergeant.” Mary turned to face 101. “Could you give me a quick update before I bring my luggage through?”
“All is fine, captain. We haven’t picked up on any obvious activity on Mars for a little while.” 101 was trying to pay attention to her but kept looking behind her, anxiously. “We can’t say Zelda isn’t up to anything but nothing much has been happening lately so I guess we’ll have to just be ready for a surprise-”
Mary put her hands up. “It’s all right, Owun,” she reassured, knowing who specifically he was looking for. “I promise it’s just me. Zero didn’t feel any need to come along this time.”
He visibly sagged in relief. “Oh thank the stars- I-I mean… oh, that’s… a shame…?”
She smiled. “Far too quiet up here for our sergeant major if there’s no active offensive going on. You should know that by now.”
“Fair point, ma’am.” He inclined his head. “But one can never be too careful.” After a heartbeat, he added, quietly; “Does he know? About-… me and Hiro?”
“If you mean, have I told him? Then no. Absolutely not my place to do so.” Mary smiled in what she hoped was a reassuring way. “But I do think he probably suspects. You’ve never made a huge effort to hide where your heart lies, after all, have you? And I think he might have… nudged Hiro in the right direction, just a little, when the three of you were on Mars.”
“Ugh. Blabbermouth,” 101 grumbled, quietly.
Mary laughed. “Aw. Not even the tiniest tickle of gratitude there?” she teased.
“That’s exactly the problem! It means I’m gonna have to thank him,” he groaned. “And he will never ever let me forget it for so much as a single microsecond.”
Mary’s laughter turned into a fond snort. “One of these days, you two will figure out how to be nice to each other, and the entire universe will breathe a huge sigh of relief.”
101 offered a sullen huh but any followup was lost to incomprehensible little zeroid noises.
“All right.” She gave him a knowing smile. “I think I might go and unpack, and make myself a cup of tea. You can do me a status report in the interim. Alert me if you see anything of concern?”
He squared himself up on his perch and gave a little salute with his brow hatch. “Ten-ten, captain!”
“Good lad.”
Personal quarters aboard Spacehawk were small but comfortable affairs. It didn’t take long to stow all her possessions in the wall-to-wall cupboards. (Hiro was the only one who had a permanent cabin aboard, and that was mostly because it was full of houseplants and finding new places for them all would probably have taken close to two weeks anyway.)
Spacehawk’s compact galley was not designed with haute cuisine in mind, either, but there was plenty of room for her teamaking supplies, and boiling water on tap. She’d purchased a new pack of her favourite loose leaves specially for this rotation, and in the satellite’s heavily-laundered air, it smelt amazing.
Tea in hand and comfortably settled, she finally rejoined 101 on the flight deck. He chirped an acknowledgement but otherwise remained quiet and busy, for now. She called up the report he’d compiled from all the rest of the observer zeroids aboard and a collection of monitoring satellites, and read over it, sipping her drink.
It genuinely was looking suspiciously quiet. Mary had no doubt that Zelda was plotting something, but for now didn’t feel inclined to look any gift horses in the mouth.
“So.” Instead she settled near a porthole, where she could see the earth rotating peacefully outside, and balanced her mug on the narrow sill. “How are you and Hiro getting on?”
101 looked at her for several heartbeats, cocked slightly to one side, parsing her words. “We are… yes. Good, I think?” he said, carefully. “Still figuring things out, mostly. But happy. Comfortable.” He made a little wistful hm! noise at the window, but at least was smiling. “This will be the longest he’s been away since we went to the theatre.”
“You didn’t want to go with him?” she wondered. “I’m sure we could have allowed it, this once.”
“No thank you, ma’am,” 101 confirmed, almost demurely, with a little shake of the head. “Earth is beautiful, but I prefer to admire it from a distance. Less wet dirt up here.” Then his smile brightened. “And anyway, Hiro’s only just down there. We’re not that far apart. He has an earbud so we can talk any time!”
“And I’m quite sure you will,” she laughed, then added, giving him a curious look; “What was that he called you, earlier? …’Kyusu’?”
“Hmm? Oh, that. Haha! It, um. It’s new?” 101 chuckled anxiously and glanced away. “It’s not an official thing yet. We’re just seeing if it fits. Hiro kinda said it mostly as a joke I think, but. I like it?”
“Does it mean anything?” she coaxed.
“It just, well. It, um. It.” He flashed her a sheepish smile before dropping his gaze back to the control panel. His words were soft. “It means teapot.”
“Ahh.” Understanding quickly dawned in Mary’s smile. “Because of this?” She gestured to the two bright jagged gold lines of polished solder marking out the zeroid’s kintsugi, arching up over the left side of his head. “Hiro did a good job there.”
“You think?” 101’s optics tracked upwards, as though trying to look at his own brow. “I mean, I like it! I think it’s beautiful! But I think I’m biased, too, because it was a gift, from my most favourite person in the entire universe.” Beat. “That is-… no offence, ma’am.”
“None taken, and I’m glad. When Hiro first told me what he was going to do, he was worried that you wouldn’t understand it,” she said, carefully. “That you’d perhaps think he just didn’t think you were important enough to be worth getting new parts. And that it probably wouldn’t help when ‘someone else’ inevitably teased you by saying so.”
“Oh but I know Hiro would never say that!” A flutter of hesitation. “…would he?”
“You really need to ask that?”
He just sat and looked quietly at her for several seconds.
“Humans are the masters of strange behaviour. It’s a lot to ask of you, to understand the illogical ways we sometimes think, when even we sometimes don’t understand each other. In the grand scheme of things, none of you are very old. There are some things that only come with experience, and none of you have a lot of that,” Mary elaborated. “But, I said I thought Hiro should go with his instinct, and trust that you’d get it. And even if you didn’t, all he had to do was explain. And I think we were right.”
101’s gaze fluttered side-to-side in that way she knew all zeroids tended to do when they were thinking hard. She waited quietly while he processed.
“People throw things away all the time, right?” he reasoned, slowly. “When they’re cheap, or easily replaced, or not valued. But if you have a thing that’s important, or valuable, or precious, then you care about it. Fix it, if it gets damaged. So even if something bad happens, it doesn’t mean something good can’t come out of it too. So… I guess that’s me?” He looked up at her, optimistically. “Right?”
Mary nodded, firmly. “That’s a very good interpretation.”
“Ha!” He gave a brief, contented little shimmy on his perch. “Thank you.”
After a while, and her second cup of tea, Mary realised that 101 was fidgeting.
The first time, she thought she’d imagined it, because when she glanced up, he was sitting quite still and patient, quietly getting on with his job as normal. The second time she was fairly certain she hadn’t imagined it, but he was still sitting quietly when she looked over.
On the third occasion, she didn’t look straight at him, but rather watched for a second or two from the corner of her eye.
He kept looking at her, as though he wanted to talk about something, but was having second thoughts and chickening out before managing to do so.
Finally, she looked up and caught him in the act, looking him square in the optical sensor.
“Oh!” He actually jumped, flinching his shutters halfway closed. With their processor speeds, zeroids were hard to startle, which all but proved he was preoccupied with something.
“Was something wrong?” she wondered.
“I… no, I… I had not realised you were paying that much attention, ma’am?”
“You were fidgeting. It was hard not to.”
“…hmm. Sorry.”
“Did you want to talk about something?”
“No-oo… I mean, not rrr-… I guess-… I just.” He studied the control panel in front of his perch. “Iii guess I wanted to say thank you? But I wasn’t sure how.”
Mary smiled. “Well, that sounds like quite a good way of saying it, to me.”
He laughed, anxiously, and didn’t elaborate.
“I’m not sure I’ve done anything recently worth being thanked for,” she went on, trying to encourage an explanation out of him.
He studied his control panel for a little longer, optics fluttering subtly from side to side while he thought. “You’ll tell me it’s silly.”
“You know I won’t laugh.”
“Well. I. It was… just for letting me talk to you, really. When I got all stupid and snivelly and didn’t know what to do after Hiro took me to the theatre.”
Mary moved her chair a little closer to his perch. She felt like she didn’t really want to have a conversation about something fairly sensitive by shouting it across the flight deck, even if they were the only two present. “You don’t need to thank me for that, Owun-”
“But I do! You didn’t have to do it. I don’t think anyone else would have. You could have told me I was making a fuss over nothing, to stop being pathetic, go home and get back to work.” He quirked onto an angle, voice softening. “But you were kind and you listened to me, without getting impatient and telling me I was being ridiculous, or to grow up and stop being a crybaby. That… zeroids are machines so-… I couldn’t be in love because I don’t have real feelings in the first place.”
Mary knew precisely which individuals he was referring to with those descriptions. She took a second to think what to say.
“You do so many kind things for us zeroids and I feel like I’ve just taken that for granted,” 101 went on, in the silence. He seemed to have found his flow, after all. “You gave me my name! My proper name, I mean. You speak up for us when we don’t quite get things right. You treat us like people. Like we’re not just… things, that are expendable.”
She looked meaningfully at the long strings of gold arching up over his top cowling; the scar that marked out where he’d been so catastrophically injured and come so close to dying, and the frantic scramble to save his life. “Nobody thinks any of you are expendable,” she reminded.
“…hm.” He glanced away.
The two command zeroids used to tease each other mercilessly about being scrapped – but hadn’t done so recently, Mary realised. Perhaps the idea had started to hit differently, now they were both growing a little more mature.
“I do mean it, though. I’ve had a lot to think about lately. First it was London, then the whole… cube thing. Then everything else. So thank you. For just… listening and accepting me. Giving me guidance without… acting like it was stupid for me to even be talking about it.” Another fidget. “Helping me be confident enough to talk to Hiro, when I wasn’t sure how he’d… if he would… be… interested?”
“Aw. I think you’re selling yourself a little short, don’t you? All I did was get you two in a room together. If there’s one thing you have never struck me as lacking? It’s confidence,” Mary said, then added in a more jocular tone, hoping to lighten the mood; “Maybe a little over-confident, when telling Zero where to stick his orders.”
“Hm. Maybe.” He smiled, although it looked strangely sad. “No offence, captain, but you’re human. This is all stuff you just know how to do, can take for granted as something you’re allowed to do. Emotions are just a thing you all have, and accept as normal.” He gave a soft, descending little chirp. “I don’t even know if mine are definitely real. Plenty of people tell me they aren’t. Maybe even my sentience isn’t real, you know? But they all feel real. And I’m not always sure what to do with them.” He hesitated, momentarily. “Sometimes I think I don’t really want them.”
Mary offered her hand, palm out; he gave a single little nod, and let her touch him, flattening her hand gently over his scar. His weight shifted as he leaned in against her.
“They just make things so confusing. I’m always thinking I’m doing things wrong,” he said, quietly, back to studying the control panel nearby. “Especially emotional stuff.”
“Even humans feel that way, a lot of the time. And that’s a good thing, isn’t it? To want to be sure you’re doing no harm?” she said, feeling his weight press into her palm. “And I think that you are all just… growing up. Working out what you have the potential within yourselves to be. Zeroids were all built to learn, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that you all have. Sometimes you won’t know what to do – and that’s just part of, dare I say it, being human. We don’t always know what to do, either.”
Of all the things she’d anticipated having a conversation about when she got up here, angsting with Owun over his emotions was probably not it, Mary recognised.
The space sergeant had been a bit of an outlier ever since he’d first come online. Some of it was definitely his programming, but having a specialised role in the fleet couldn’t account for all of it. Mary did sometimes wonder what the trigger had been. Some… joker of a technician, thinking they were being funny? Making a statement? Making a challenge? Daring senior officers to say they didn’t approve?
Or had 101 picked who he was for himself, after all? A thousand tiny individual options, a thousand tiny choices made, all coming together in this flamboyant, sassy little boy who wasn’t scared to let you know he had opinions, and for all that he might claim otherwise, not scared to let you know how he was feeling, either. And in the grand scheme of life? No stranger than the sarcastic Dix-Huit and his moustache, or the bombastic sergeant major’s newfound Welsh choral tendencies.
All just parts of life’s rich pattern, as Hiro would have said.
“Does it…” He shifted under her palm, peered up at her from beneath a canted brow. “Does it get any easier?”
“Easier? How do you mean?”
“I mean… do you ever feel like it? When you’re with Doctor Ninestein? Like… you say something because it’s quiet and think you ought to, but then it feels like you said the wrong thing.”
Surprise dropped a little adrenaline into her blood. She and Tiger had been keeping their own relationship – such as it was – fairly understated, but… perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that this zeroid in particular had picked up on it. She wondered just how long he’d actually been stewing over all this without daring to say anything, struggling to get clues from the behaviour of his humans.
He apparently felt the subtle change in her heart rate, where her hand still pressed against him, and deflated a little. “Sorry. I shouldn’t snoop.”
“No, no. You just surprised me. I… hadn’t realised anyone had noticed – let alone a zeroid.” She drew a breath and let it out slowly, then found a small smile. “That’s just part and parcel of being in love, I think,” she replied, carefully, using her thumb to outline his scar. “Sometimes you make missteps along the way. You just… make sure you apologise, and don’t do it again next time?”
“But you always know the right thing to say!”
“Oh, I definitely didn’t always. It’s all just down to practice. I have quite a few years on you, remember? You’ll get the hang of it.”
He studied the deck, quiet and glum, rotated forwards on his axis. “It all seems so complicated.”
“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t.” She waited until he’d looked back up, and gave him a wry look, with a quirked eyebrow. “Do you imagine it’s less complicated when you’re in love with just one of nine identical clones?”
Another of those long pauses to think. “I don’t think I have a frame of reference for that.”
She laughed. “I don’t think anyone does! But, we figure it out, because that’s how life works.”
“Hm.” 101 hummed quietly and pressed tighter against her fingers. “Thank you for talking to me. I think I feel a little better? I said you always knew the right thing to say.”
Mary could feel his casing humming very slightly under her hand; in the quiet, she could hear a faint rumbling fan noise that sounded like it wasn’t actually unintentional.
He was… purring? Yes; actually purring. Like a small spherical housecat, enjoying the contact.
“You’re a one of a kind, Owun. Don’t ever change.”
Sergeant Major Zero was fairly confident that he hadn’t been looking at the sky, when he’d last gone offline.
In fact, he wasn’t particularly sure there’d even been any sky to look at in the first place, as he had an uncomfortable nagging feeling that he’d been way out beyond Earth orbit, not quite thirty seconds ago.
Even more to the point, he wasn’t entirely certain he’d even intentionally gone offline at all either?
But there it undeniably was – a glorious cerulean vista of brilliant sunlit sky, broken only by a regular procession of fluffy little white clouds scudding past.
Had he just gone and pulled a Space-Sergeant-101-level rookie mistake and fallen all the way to Earth? (That would be frustrating; it had been a handy way to tease the annoying little square when Owun started getting uppity. At least Zero hadn’t gone and damaged himself (so far as he could tell) in the process – small blessings.)
For a while, he just watched the clouds skate past.
Something felt… very weirdly off. And not just the mystery of how he’d got here.
What had he been doing before waking up?
Something about… a meteorite? Which had turned out to have not been a real meteorite at all, but a hollowed-out chunk of rock containing a device of some sort. Some kind of dangerous hardware, a threat to the Earth, needing disabling and decontaminating. Of going to investigate it, and beginning to report back on his findings, and then…
And then…
…nothing.
Just waking up here, and seeing the sky and its pretty little puffy clouds.
Well, whatever was happening, he needed to raise the alarm with the humans. He was… mostly confident they’d have hopefully at least noticed him leaving the meteorite, but they might not have spotted where he’d landed. And if they hadn’t seen his unexpected unintended departure, well, they’d need to know he wasn’t there steering the charge, any more. (Because like spacefire was he leaving that bossy little twerp off Spacehawk in charge!)
-Doctor Ninestein?- he started, and realised that something else felt… not quite right?
Scratch that “no damage” part – he couldn’t seem to find his antenna?
Great. That was exactly what Owun had done, as well, that time when he’d fallen off Spacehawk. Zero counted his blessings; at least he hadn’t gone and lost his memory as well.
Well, lad. You can’t be relaxing down here watching the clouds all day when there’s work to be done, he told himself, sternly.
He sat up and-
-wait.
Sat up?
Sat up?
For several seconds, fear froze him completely immobile.
Zeroids did not have the anatomy to just sit up.
What. Was going. On.
It was almost like…
…like he was…
…human.
But that was clearly ridiculous. Little spherical robots did not just become human, as if by magic. Zelda’s control over matter didn’t stretch that far.
Did it?
No. Ridiculous. It couldn’t. (And besides, why would she? Zelda wasn’t precisely renowned for giving her enemy incredible gifts.)
It must be a dream, he told himself, feeling panic welling up inside him. Something had happened on the meteorite, and he’d been injured, knocked out maybe, and was now being operated on by the dreaded Doctor Kiljoy, and having a weird fever-dream reaction to the anaesthetic program.
Yes, that must be it. It wouldn’t be the first time.
If he just sat very still and quiet, and concentrated, he’d manage to wake himself up.
He sat still, and concentrated hard, and waited.
And waited.
But the longer he waited, and the longer nothing continued to happen, with the passage of time marked only by the fluffy little clouds drifting past on the breeze, the less sure about it all he grew.
It all felt very weirdly convincing. Realer than it was entitled to be, for a dream. Certainly not something the average zeroid’s rudimentary imagination could have ever come up with.
Instead of the usual measurable feeling of his fans humming quietly inside him, he could feel air moving through a whole set of tubes that he hadn’t had before. In and out. Getting faster, too, the more he thought about it. The heavy rhythm of a pump, running hard enough to make him tremble.
Maybe it wasn’t a dream.
Now now. Come on, lad. Wake up, he scolded himself, still staring fixedly dead ahead. That’s all you have to do. It’s not real. It can’t be real.
A new thought sneaked up out of nowhere and latched into him; would it be terrible if it was?
Nothing technically actually bad had happened. It was confusing and wrong and he didn’t understand how or why, but...
Even if he somehow was magically unexpectedly miraculously human… no-one had attacked him. He hadn’t immediately crashed a processor, or whatever the human equivalent would be. He felt… all right, so he rather lacked a frame of reference, but figured it must be ‘fine’? If you discounted the pounding heart and shaky breathing – and both of those were getting better as he concentrated on calming down.
And he couldn’t deny that tingle of building excitement at the idea that he was human. He was human!
If he was being honest with himself, Zero had occasionally daydreamed about what it might be like. All right; more than occasionally. Quite a bit more.
Most of his colleagues assumed it was symbolic, when he said he wanted to be human – not actually physically human, but allowed to do the things humans took for granted, without being challenged or questioned. Feelings, intuition. Thinking for himself. Making decisions. (All the things Doctor Ninestein usually told him to stop doing.) For the same reason, there was always a decent tickle of resentment towards that little twit in orbit. Lieutenant Hiro had for a very long time absolutely pandered to his own zeroid, encouraging all Owun’s bad habits, even before the soppy pair had announced their relationship had taken a turn for the romantic. Perhaps, if Zero was more obviously human, he’d get the chance to prove himself just as worthy of such indulgences as well?
It wasn’t all hyperbole, either. If he looked human, too – not only would they take him seriously but think of all the incredible things he might be able to do, as well. Maybe now, the wonderful Captain Falconer would finally look at him with more than just gentle sympathy when he tried to do more than his body was capable of.
Like he’d seen other humans do, Zero took a long, steadying deep breath, and focused on the other additional body parts he didn’t remember having before. After several seconds focusing on maintaining a sense of calm, he managed to convince himself to look down, and found… yes, a torso. Hips. Legs. Feet. All clothed in a smart, well-fitted blue Terrahawks uniform.
He… was human.
He was human.
He brought his hands – hands! – up in front of him, and turned them quietly one way, then the other.
How-… how was that possible?
He flexed his fingers, watched the skin slide over the knuckles, crease across the palm – it couldn’t be possible. But he couldn’t explain it, or deny it, when they were very clearly attached to him. With one hand, he felt his careful way all the way along the opposing arm until he got to his shoulder, examining with careful pinches and squeezes. There was definitely structure beneath the fabric of the uniform; and not an android body, but one with muscles, and bones.
“Well.” Zero let his hands drop to his sides. “Thank you, I suppose? Whoever you are what did this. Maybe someday I’ll get to shake your hand for real.”
Onto more important matters – where the heck was he? It looked almost like a botanical garden – and an abandoned one, at that. As far as the eye could see were nothing but old greenhouses. Some with brick bases, some with metal roofs, some with tall chimneys, some with tumbledown little lean-to sheds attached, all filthy and opaque with pale green algae where there weren’t broken panes of glass. Brambles and ivy swarmed up and over the walls. Squat little trees laden with fruit that might have been pears or apples or something poked up between the greenhouses, hardly taller than the roofs of the derelict buildings.
Zero himself sat on an overgrown path made of brick pavers, covered with moss and sprinkled with tiny plants fighting their way up through the gaps. The grass growing either side was lush, deep green, and rather on the long side.
Otherwise, it all looked fairly well abandoned. The thick grass was not marred by bootprints, and aside from the greenhouses and paths, there were no other signs of human attendance – no tools, no potted plants, no trays of seedlings, not even any windblown litter.
“Well, lad, you can’t be sat down here in the dirt being maudlin all day, now, can you,” Zero told himself, trying to be stern. “You need to figure out what’s happened. Find your humans and warn them something strange is going on. So pull yourself together, now.”
After taking a long, steadying breath, Zero made his first attempt at getting to his feet – first rolling onto his knees, and then pushing himself all the way upright. He fell straight onto his backside twice and was forced to crawl in a most undignified way over to the closest greenhouse, climbing up a doorframe and using it to stabilise himself. He wobbled precariously when he finally managed to get all the way up to stand straight – balancing on two legs was harder than it looked, especially with such an unsupported, top-heavy structure. Humans made it look so easy!
He clung to the wooden upright for a few moments – face pressed so tight against it that he was anxious he’d get splinters, but not quite able to unlatch his fingers from where they’d clenched into the structure. That would definitely put a dampener on his enthusiasm, if he couldn’t keep from falling on his arse.
After a few moments, he bravely let his weight rock away from the greenhouse and onto his heels. He wobbled a bit, but stayed fairly upright. That’s it; good work. One step at a time, eh.
Zero took his chance to examine his new reflection in one of the unbroken panes of glass; a stocky, broad-shouldered male human, with pale skin and clipped-short dark hair that was silvering slightly at the temples. Perhaps not the tallest (although he didn’t have much to compare to except these greenhouses), and he imagined that Captain Falconer would probably be polite and say he had a rugby-player’s build. A few small crinkles at the corners of his eyes confirmed that he was somewhat on the more ‘mature’ side. Still. He nodded to himself, satisfied. Not some gorgeous sprightly little young thing but not bad, either, for a human. Smart. Dignified. Trustworthy.
The uniform he wore was a sort of royal blue (rather dignified, really), somewhere between the azure worn by Captain Falconer, and the darker navy hue Ninestein usually wore. On his arm, midway between shoulder and elbow and just below his Terrahawks insignia, were the downward-pointing chevrons proclaiming his rank. He felt impossibly smart and couldn’t help preening, just a little bit.
I’ll give you “incorrigible scruffball”, you jumped-up little spacehopper! Zero directed the venomous thought at Spacehawk’s command zeroid.
Flush with confidence, he let go of the greenhouse and after a second or two of teetering, arms whirling out at his sides, managed to keep his balance.
After a few hesitant shuffly steps in the right direction, he made his way back to the path, and tried to get his bearings. Just working out which country he was in would be enough, for now. Just needed to get out of the greenhouses, find some other humans, and ask if he could use their phone to call his superiors. Easy.
(Explaining “oh by the way, I’m human as well now” felt it might be less straightforward, but he decided to leave that until later, when fewer questions were queuing for his attention.)
But it was all fairly samey both ways. He couldn’t see much more than about fifty metres in any direction before the view was blocked by some obstacle or another – one of the old greenhouses; bits of a rotting shed; a saggy, overloaded, overgrown fruit tree; a metastasising mound of bramble.
It was quiet, too? No people, granted, but no birdsong, either. No barking dogs, no hum of bees, no scraping buzz of grasshoppers. No distant traffic; no whine of aircraft. Just the occasional creak of shifting timber, or sporadic rustling of the breeze through the trees. It unsettled him for reasons he couldn’t quiiite pin down.
“Hello?” he called. His voice sounded unnervingly loud, reflecting back at him off the greenhouses. He followed up with a softer; “Can anyone hear me?”
But nobody replied.
Zero squared his shoulders and picked an arbitrary direction, and bravely set off. Hopefully there’d be a sign somewhere to tell him where he was, like:
Property of some fancy university or another!
(Private property, keep off, trespassers will be shot)
No signs, though. Some of the greenhouse doors had little white placards on them, but whatever they might have once said had long since been washed off, or bleached away by the sun. He examined each one closely, just in case, before moving on, dispirited.
He’d just finished checking his eleventh greenhouse when he rounded a corner and spotted something out of place.
-and he froze.
Sprawled out in a tangle of limbs in the brambles, looking for all the world like they’d been dropped there from a great height, was another human.
Well. Zero assumed it was another human. All he could see from this angle were their legs, and booted feet, sticking out of the mass of flattened foliage.
It couldn’t possibly be just a disembodied pair of legs. Surely.
He tried not to cringe, pre-emptively, but went over to have a look anyway.
Thankfully, the closer he got, the more the body became visible, and it thankfully turned out not to be just a pair of unattached legs.
The stranger in the brambles was a skinny beanpole and Zero was confident he could best him if it came to a fight, but he reasoned that it didn’t pay to take unnecessary risks. He armed himself with a convenient stick. Just in case.
Lightly built in comparison to the sergeant major’s broad-shouldered solidity, the youth looked like he’d probably be tall, and somewhat delicate. He too wore a Terrahawks uniform, in a sort of pale turquoise – a slightly paler shade of bluey-green than the colour usually worn by Lieutenant Hiro, which told Zero precisely who this stranger probably was. The rest of the man’s looks supported the thesis; light brown skin, with darker freckles scattered liberally over his nose and cheeks, and a single shockingly pale patch that started in his left eyebrow and arched diagonally up over the top of his head. Most of his hair was black, except the streak of blonde that followed the line of white skin.
It looked suspiciously like it followed the same jagged line as a certain space sergeant’s kintsugi.
Zero swallowed the sigh of irritation. Of all the people he could be lost here with, it had to be this bossy, ungrateful little spaceball! He’d undoubtedly spend the entire time complaining and correcting him, and not once consider what an incredible gift he’d been given. Even Dicks Hewitt would have been tolerable – sarcasm aside, the French zeroid at least knew how to take an order.
Did he really what this sort of ‘company’? Very conveniently inconvenient if the only zeroids that had been affected were him and Owun (and no-one was that unlucky; perhaps someone was intentionally punishing them).
For a full five seconds, Zero had to fight the genuine urge to turn away and leave Owun in the brambles, without even checking if he was alive.
Come on, now, sergeant major, he felt he heard Captain Falconer say, gently scolding. Be the bigger man. Are you really going to leave that soft little sissy out here all on his own?
Zero sighed and let his arms dangle. Of course she’d probably say that, and she’d be right. Soppy twit would never survive without help. Perhaps Zero could at least feel better about himself by saving his life.
Besides, two brains would be better than one at figuring this out, particularly when they were perhaps not the most spectacularly intelligent of zeroid brains? And maybe-… well, maybe if he realised they were both stuck in the same situation and needed each other, and he didn’t get all snippy and know-it-all about everything, Owun wouldn’t be the worst company.
Zero crossed his fingers and sent a silent optimistic little plea to whichever deity might be listening.
Probably a little more aggressively than needed, but unable to help himself, Zero leaned closer and poked Owun with the stick.
The other human woke with a sharp, startled intake of breath, and immediately sat up. For several heartbeats, he just stared, frozen, breath hitching.
“All right, lad?” Zero asked, warily.
The youngster startled and his wide-eyed gaze shot over to him. Hearing the sergeant major’s voice coming from someone who most definitely did not look like the sergeant major, he recoiled, very slightly, his hands automatically coming up in a slightly defensive posture – seeing them in the periphery of his vision made him jump, with a little yelp of alarm, as though he was being attacked by some small animal.
Upon recognising that the hands were attached to him, the startled sound turned into a more genuine cry of fear.
…which only got louder and more scared as he recognised his own voice as the one wailing. “Zero? Zero what’s happening? Oh god what’s happening-” His words broke into sharp whimpers of fright. “Oh, help-! Oh help-”
“Hey. Hey!” Zero waved his arms, trying to fruitlessly to get his attention back. “Look at me – look at me. Hey!”
Owun scarcely paid him any attention, entirely preoccupied with all those extra body parts he was now the proud owner of. He didn’t seem to know what to do with them – scrambling backwards deeper into the bramble patch, arms out in front of him as though he could somehow leave them behind. “What’s happening, what’s happening, oh no, oh no no no what’s happening-” The words were turning into something midway between a sob and a groan. “Zero, what have you done-”
“What have I done-” Zero hastily swallowed down his annoyance. He increased his volume to his best drill-sergeant’s bark. “Space sergeant!”
That at least got his attention. Owun clamped both hands over his own mouth, trying to stifle his panic behind them, not entirely successfully. Frightened whuffs leaked out around his fingers.
“It’s all right. It’s all right!” Zero put his hands up in the air, palms out, as though trying to talk someone down off a roof. “Calm down, before you do yourself a mischief.” He crouched in front of the brambles, hands still up. “Just breathe, all right? Focus on that, for a bit.”
“Breathe-?!” came the incredulous little sob.
“Yes. Breathe. Your body does it automatically, but you’re messing it up by getting stressed out. I doesn’t want to have to deal with you hyperventilating or fainting or, or… whatever it is humans do when their breathing malfunctions.” Zero gestured meaninglessly with a hand, trying to conjure up what he wanted to say.
…but it looked rather like Owun was going to need a firm hand, because he was clearly not paying any attention.
Zero clapped his hands, sharply. “Come on, lad. I isn’t going to tell you again. Do the same as what I do. Now.” He wasn’t entirely sure what he was going to do if Owun didn’t do what he was told, but Zero made a big show of breathing in and out slowly anyway, and after a few frightened seconds more puffing, Owun thankfully got the message and (shakily) tried to breathe along with him.
“All right?” Zero prompted, once Owun finally no longer looked like he was going to self-destruct.
“What’s going on. What’s- why do we look like this? What’s going on?” Owun’s shaky words oozed out from behind the hands still over his mouth. “Oh god, Zero. Why do we look like this? Did you know they were doing this? Is-is this your fault? I know you always wanted to be human but-… how is-…”
“No. No, I don’t know. I woke up like this, just like you just did.” Zero edged closer, hands still slightly raised, placatory. “But we is all right. A bit funny-looking compared to normal, but alive and functioning. And we’ll figure this out, all right?”
Owun managed a single convulsive nod.
“Good lad.” Zero offered his hand, and for several seconds Owun just looked at it. “Well come on, chop chop,” the sergeant major chivvied. “On your feet, eh? Can’t be sitting around in the nettles all day.”
A heartbeat or two of thinking time elapsed. Owun couldn’t quite seem to work out where to put his hands. After trying to escape the shock of his new body, he had got himself well and truly snarled up in the brambles – a mass of living barbed wire that seemed inclined to hang onto him forever. “I think I’m stuck,” he said, faint and apologetic.
Zero added his other hand, and beckoned silently with the fingers of both. Come on.
After another heartbeat of staring, Owun slipped his slim hand into Zero’s. The hesitant fingers were cool and rather delicate, compared to the warmth of the sergeant major’s solid grip, and he almost flinched when Zero tightened his grip enough to pull him upright.
Zero leaned his weight back and pulled. Thorns snagged in the green uniform and tried to anchor Owun where he was, almost keeping him imprisoned for a few seconds, until Zero glared a little and pulled harder and the brambles all let go with a flurry of faint tearing sounds. The sudden injection of momentum launched both humans out across the path. Owun sprawled on his stomach on the grass, and Zero tripped all the way backwards into one of the greenhouse walls. The impact dislodged half the glass panels from their rotted frames, sending a cascade of glass crashing to the ground in a riot of hideous noise, cacophonously loud in the quiet of the abandoned garden. Zero jerked both arms up over his head and cringed away from it.
Silence soon resumed. For several seconds, they just stared at each other, huffing for breath.
“All right?” Zero prompted.
“Not dead, I guess?” Owun confirmed, miserably, before letting himself flop back onto his face in the grass. He covered the back of his neck with both hands. “Oh, god.” The words came out muffled by dirt.
That groan struck Zero as less terrified, and more just plain despairing.
“Come on.” Zero crouched, and prodded him in the shoulder. “Less of that, eh. We looks different but we is still zeroids, underneath it all. A pair of tough lads like us – yes, I does mean you too – we can survive this, eh? And figure it out. And fix it, if need be. But only if you stops laying around in the grass.”
“I’m not just laying around in the grass because I want to, Zero-” Owun protested, halfheartedly, but acquiesced.
Zero hauled him up to his feet, and for the first time realised how absurdly tall the young man was –he towered over the sergeant major, the top of whose head didn’t even come to his shoulder – but still looked rather like he’d blow away in a stiff breeze.
Owun teetered briefly, even less stable on his new legs than Zero had been, and the sergeant major found himself the recipient of an unwelcome hug when the youth fell against him, clutching at his shoulders for balance. He growled and jerked his face out from the uniformed embrace. “Steady on, lad. You trying to smother me, or what?”
“It’s harder than it looks!” Owun protested, swaying. “Just because you were an expert straight off the bat.” He overcompensated in the wrong direction and almost toppled backwards; Zero hastily yanked him forwards again.
After a minute or two of back-and-forth swaying, eventually they found Owun’s point of balance, and began carefully to try walking. Owun kept his fingers tight on Zero’s arm; the sergeant major wasn’t completely sure if it was actually helping, or just something of a safety blanket.
“How’s the weather up there?” Zero prompted.
“What?” Owun peered down at him.
“…I was making a little joke. Trying to lighten the mood.”
Owun stared for a second, computing, then said; “Huh.”
“Good job you got over your vertigo at last, eh.”
Owun sighed and looked away. “So what were you doing, before you found me?” The subject change made it crystal clear that he wasn’t enjoying Zero’s attempt at humour, but then he rarely did anyway.
“Honestly?” Zero looked down at the path they walked along, and watched their two sets of dark boots walking slowly but with increasing confidence. “I hadn’t been awake that long myself. Just long enough to get over the shock, and start exploring a little bit.”
“Shock?” Owun challenged, with a pout. “Really.”
“Maybe it didn’t hit me quite so hard, but then you always did lean into your emotions more than me, eh.”
Zerak The Blue Destroyer (Zeroids, Ideal 1967) via donald deveau
I had one of these as a child and it was either my older brother's or a jumble sale find as I was not even a consideration in 1967 when this was made and indeed I was quite the surprise when I did make myself known some years later
Regardless, Zerak was awesome, and my heart aches just looking at this photo of the little Zeroid today
He couldn’t be sure how long it was, because his clock had at some point zeroed itself, and had only just now started ticking again from 00.00.0000.00:00:00.0000, but he couldn’t possibly have been offline for many minutes.
Could he?
He would have known if he had been, right?
He could still hear the Martians clanking around in the background, after all, and his battery felt… funny, but nicely charged. That… strongly suggested it had only been a short period. Didn’t it? Zelda had a job for him and he was still here, so. Why would he not be still here if she wanted him to do something?
It had to have only been a few minutes, or his people would have noticed he was gone.
Right?
They couldn’t have not noticed.
…right?
It was hard to logic his way through it. He wasn’t very good at that at the best of times, and right now he felt like most of his higher functions were still offline.
The gap in his memory record was the barest blip of time, just one single electronic heartbeat, but it yawned open inside him like a great swirling black hole of anxiety. What had Zelda been doing, while he was unconscious and helpless?
This is all going perfectly to plan.
Now crack him open.
‘Crack him open’. (He couldn’t even shudder properly.) Was he laying here with whole chunks of brain missing? Just waiting to be dumped back outside, like so much garbage?
No. That didn’t feel quite right. There should have been alarms screaming in the silence inside his head, telling him if anything critical was missing, and there’s weren’t. But there wasn’t anything else, either? Just a conspicuous painful silence. The absence of alarms felt as bad as a million of them all going off at once.
He just couldn’t work out why.
Everything just… sort of… hurt, in a flat, abstract way that he couldn’t quite focus on. Dazed, and sick, and confused, and scared, and very very broken.
Maybe it would be nice just to go back to sleep, and not know anything about it all.
He was halfway there already – so heavy, and sluggish, like his processors were drowning in old engine oil, fans wallowing in the murk. He couldn’t get his shutters to open, and he couldn’t send a call for help – and nothing to do with that damned Faraday cage, he couldn’t even find his antenna. He absolutely couldn’t move. A silent prisoner in his own head.
Yes; going back to sleep where he could be blissfully unaware of any of this was sounding better and better by the second.
Your humans are all going to die if you just go back to sleep, he reminded himself. HIRO is going to die. Is this how you figured you’re going to ‘not just roll over’? By immediately giving up?
But I’m NOT giving up! 101 defended himself, feebly. It’s just, it’s all very hard when you’re already dead on the enemy’s lab bench?
Still such a drama queen, even when you’re dead! Fine. If you’re dead, there’s nothing left to lose, is there. Let’s come up with a plan that doesn’t involve crying and hiding. You’ve covered all the things you CAN’T do, so how about work out what you CAN?
Thoroughly chastised by his own pedantry, 101 got to work, combing through what would respond to him.
Lots of fiddly faffy not-terribly-helpful things seemed to still work – image processing software (amazing help when you’re blind), various calculations modules (like he needed help knowing how far away from safety he was), thousands of communications frequencies (but none of the ones that would actually save him).
His hearing was… sort of working? The first thing he’d been aware of after waking up had been sound – although it felt like he was a very long way away from his actual auditory sensors, at the wrong end of a long pipe packed full of damping gel. But it was working, so he focused on that, instead of all the scary nonfunctioning things piling up around him like a thousand invisible red flashing warnings.
Zelda’s voice echoed up out of nowhere – not very close by, or so it seemed. (Or maybe she was and he just couldn’t tell?) “Is everything going to plan?”
“Yes, mistress,” a voice replied, and 101 wasn’t sure if he was shocked or terrified or… actually not surprised at all at recognising his own voice as the one that had spoken. “Humans not suspect anything wrong.”
…that’s my voice that’s MY voice that’s my VOICE…
What did it mean, what did it mean. His speech had a weird, stiff cadence, missing words. Why was he speaking like that?
More importantly, how was he speaking like that? Words he didn’t understand the context behind, that he hadn’t planned to say, and completely unable to feel the circuits controlling them? Was he a passenger in his own head, listening along but locked out of his own software, powerless?
No, that wasn’t quite right either. The words came from too far away for them to have been spoken by him. Had she just cloned his voice?
“Then why is it taking you so long to send me the data? You should have already told us where the accursed Hawknest is!”
“Don’t speak language?” not-101 apologised, audibly cringing. “Computer code not Guk. Must learn it first.”
“Well hurry up about it. The longer you take over all this, the more likely they’re going to work out you’re not who you say you are.”
That horrible hollow sick feeling intensified at realising she’d replaced him.
That was why she’d kidnapped him, he realised. She didn’t want him; just his hardware. His voice.
His ability to get onto Spacehawk and roam around completely unchallenged.
Fear hit him like a bolt of lightning.
The urge to scream, terrified for his humans, his friends, bubbled up inside him.
The fact he couldn’t only intensified it.
what have I done what have I DONE
He could feel himself spiralling away in a program loop – the more he wanted to scream, the more garbled his diagnostics came back reporting that he couldn’t, that his vocal hardware wasn’t working, that it was looking for backups but was running out of processors, and… that just intensified the fear.
Every process overwhelmed as his systems automatically hunted for suitable alternatives, dedicating everything to the need to somehow vocalise how terrified he was.
-and everything completely destabilised – his gyroscopes skipped, and his hearing briefly cut out.
No. No! To have literally no way of perceiving anything about the world-
To be totally helpless in the grip of the enemy-
His processors teetered on the edge of whiting out altogether, drowning in failures.
[systems critical]
[reboot required]
Don’t you do that oh don’t you dare even THINK of doing that. He stamped the need to scream back down into a corner, fighting to stabilise his systems. You’ve done the worst possible job ever already, don’t you DARE go and faint like the little sissy Zero’s always telling everyone you are.
He clung to the one thing that was working, and tried to get some intelligible sounds to emerge from the murk of static. The more processors he tied up with this sort of useful doing stuff, the less there were available for him to panic with.
…yes. Yes, there was the harsh croon of Zelda’s voice again – still fuzzy and impossible pick out any words from but he homed in on it, pinning his attention onto it. Something to hold his focus that wasn’t all your friends are going to die and it’s all your fault.
“-so we’ll soon be out of easy communication range unless you use the ship’s antenna. Do you have everything you need?”
“Yes, mistress,” 101’s voice said, meekly.
Oh god why had he managed to tune back in on her at that moment. The real 101 felt his spirit plummet even further into the pit. We’ll be out of range. That meant they’d not only still got him, they’d taken him away, too. Couldn’t just dump him out on the moon, somewhere, oh no, far too easy – taking him with them, all the way back to Mars.
Another tarry black pulse of despair curled up out of nowhere and threatened to swamp him.
This was so unfair! How was he ever meant to fix this when every time he began to start to recover from the previous shock, yet another new horror got up and kicked him across the room?
He’d been kidnapped, for reasons he couldn’t determine. He was completely helpless – couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. (Wouldn’t have been totally surprised to find he was just a handful of loose memory cards on a bench somewhere.) And he’d put every single one of his friends in mortal danger and couldn’t even warn them.
What could he do.
What could he do.
…was he going to have to watch as everyone died?
No, no. Come on, honey. Focus. Please focus. Sounds are good, right? Sounds tie up your processors so you can’t panic. At least make a tiny bit of effort?
The voices had already all faded. It wasn’t quiet, but without visual inputs, it was hard to give any of the sounds context. Clonks and clicks. Engine noises. Fragments of speech, although too fuzzy and distant to make out any words – usually Yung-star, chuntering about something. Cystar’s high, grating laugh. Footsteps, somewhere in the distance. Some sounds so close by, echoing up out of the ship’s engineering, they vibrated right through him.
Zelda had to have kept him for a purpose. Was she planning on trying to get data out of him? Did he need to crash his memory? Scramble it so she couldn’t extract the information?
Oh, that would be so disappointing. After all the work Hiro had done, to have to kill himself anyway-
But then… he couldn’t quite work out how to? The hardware was missing.
Figures that you can’t even die properly.
That black tarpit of horror was still dragging him down. He was going to blow a fuse from the stress and then where would they all be.
Come on, get a grip, boy, he told himself, trying to be stern. You can figure this out. You’ve gotta figure this out. You’re a Terrahawk. It’s your job to be brave. You might be the very last thing standing between planet Earth and hideous doom.
She might have stolen you and done something terrible to you and you might not know WHAT or WHY but the absolute last thing you can let yourself do is roll over and take it. You said you were almost brave in London. So be brave now. Everyone’s life depends on it.
Hiro’s life depends on it.
101 turned his attention inwards. Can’t see. Can’t move. So what can you do.
There were circuits there. Some were familiar; some less so. Obviously a power source – a clunky, uncomfortable battery of some kind? So he couldn’t possibly just be a load of loose parts spread out on a lab bench. That meant he sort of almost had the capacity to at some point be functional again.
Then there were the other circuits, speaking a language he didn’t understand.
Alien hardware.
Oh, god.
Oh, god. (And he didn’t even have the option to shudder in horror at it.)
He couldn’t speak, because he didn’t have any sort of vocal processor connected up.
It's (still, just, I think) International Fanworks Day! And the theme is “Alternate Universes”! I’m a total sucker for an AU which is probably why I end up having so many on the go.
(The title is a play on the fact that in Ghosts (which I am still working on!) mirror!Zelda is talking about string theory, which my favourite little chaos gremlin doesn't understand - or crochet, for that matter.)
----
It was unusual to see Space Sergeant Owun quietly just looking out of the window, when he wasn’t on duty.
Spacehawk’s command zeroid usually preferred to spend his off-time filling his memory banks with the absolute worst brainrot television humans had ever invented, so this quiet, contemplative little robot was a pleasant (if surprising) change.
Lieutenant Hiro stood unobtrusively in the doorway for a little while, just watching, wondering what his best friend was thinking about. (Although often it was better for the sanity not to ask.)
It didn’t take the zeroid long to spot him; even when not on his perch, Owun usually maintained his connection to the battleship’s systems, constantly keeping an eye on his responsibilities. He rocked backwards, and from his upside-down position watched Hiro approach. “Is there a problem? You should have called me!”
“No, no problem.” Hiro settled on the floor next to him. “I thought I would like to come and sit with you, while things are quiet.”
“Aw!” Owun’s smile lit and he reoriented himself to right-way-up again. “Thank you!”
Hiro didn’t really need to, because he immediately recognised the patch of stars as the one that had contained the wormhole to the mirror universe, but he asked anyway: “What are you looking at?”
“Nothing, really.” Owun rocked sideways until his weight pressed gently into Hiro’s side. “Just thinking.”
“A dangerous business, for all parties,” Hiro quipped, and got an indignant huh! in response. He smiled. “What were you thinking about?”
“I was wondering how many other us-es there might be, out there.”
“Other… us-es?” Hiro echoed, puzzled.
“You know. Other versions of us, in other universes. Like, that one we just escaped can’t be the only one, can it?” The zeroid made a sad little descending noise. “It would really suck if the only other universe with a lieutenant Hiro in it was such a horrible one.”
“Hmm.” Hiro swallowed hard over a memory of the excruciating chrome-coloured pain that had exploded in his head, after foolishly turning his back on his mirror self, and receiving a blow hard enough to fracture his skull as a reward.
(It hurt more that his mirror image had been such a cruel example of the worst of humanity. He almost wished he could have challenged the man more, to try and work out why he’d turned out that way, just to stop himself going down any similar dark paths. But then, he didn’t think his doppelganger was the sort to have indulged him in that sort of cosy chat, even if they’d been on better terms.)
“Well I hope he regrets it every day that we helped his zeroids escape,” Owun added, more venomously, with what could have almost been a growl. “And I especially hope he remember it was me that helped. Serve him right for being such a horrible glitch.”
Hiro found a small smile. “He was absolutely not expecting a little fireball like you, now, was he.”
“Nope!” Owun squeaked, gleefully. “Maybe their Doctor Ninestein forgot to say ‘expect the unexpected’ often enough.”
Hiro chuckled. “I think even that may not have helped!”
“So…” Owun prompted, after the companionable silence between them had stretched out a little longer than he preferred. “Do you think there might be others?”
“I hope you do not want a definitive answer,” Hiro mused, unconsciously staring at the same patch of starfield. “While I am no expert in the subject – I far prefer things I can actually quantify – I have heard it said that there could be as many parallel universes in existence as there have been choices, with a new one branching off at every point a decision is made.”
Owun’s eyes crossed. “I can’t even compute that. My subroutines say it’s like dividing by zero.”
Hiro laughed. “I cannot comprehend so large a number, either. Some of the changes would be so minor, we would probably never comprehend we were even in one.”
“…until we met ourselves.”
“Yes, that would be rather diagnostic!”
“Imagine two sergeant major Zeros to deal with, both at once. There’s gotta be better universes than that.”
“Well…” Hiro made a show of considering it, resting his chin on his hand. “There may be a universe where humans never evolved, and the planet is ruled by sophont dinosaurs.”
“They may still have ended up building zeroids. Just… scaly ones, with big teeth.”
“Frankly, the idea of someone as feisty as you having teeth scares me.” Hiro arched a brow at him.
“Pssh!” Owun took his turn to think. “There may be a universe where we defeated Zelda before she ever established a base on Mars!”
“But then I would have to deal with you being very bored. Would you really want to subject other-me to that?” Hiro teased. “There may be a universe where you became so tired of the sergeant major’s jokes, you chose to stay as a cube.”
That earned him a grumpy headbutt. “Ugh! Really?” Owun scolded, over Hiro’s laughter as the human tried (albeit not very hard) to push him away. “It sucked! Why would I ever want to do that?”
“Why indeed! At least your boys here generally behave themselves. A pack of cubes definitely would not do what they were told.”
“Ooh – there might be a universe where zeroids are in charge!” After a heartbeat of processing, Owun gave a little shudder. “Oh, that sounds worse than the one we just escaped from. I don’t like the idea of being in charge of humans.”
Hiro arched a brow at him.
“Oh shush. You know what I mean. I know I’m bossy. Giving instructions is one thing but being a commanding officer for the whole organisation? Being able to say no? To tell humans to go off somewhere they might be hurt? Imagine if the power went to my head.” Owun’s voice dwindled to something that was almost an apology. “I think I could easily be a very bad boyfriend.”
Hiro flattened his palm over the gold scar on the zeroid’s top hemisphere, allowing him to feel the calming sound of his heartbeat. “But you are not. Let us not get upset over hypotheticals,” he soothed, and added, trying to lighten the mood; “Zeroids in charge, hmm? I think I had a small sample of what that might be like, while under the care of the good Doctor Kiljoy, recently.” He leaned a little closer and added, conspiratorially; “is he so bad with you zeroids?”
“Ugh. Worse.” Owun glanced up at him, woebegone. “How is your head?” he asked, quietly, for what must have been the hundredth time so far that day. His weight increased just the tiniest fraction as he leaned in.
Hiro smiled, and let his arm drift around him instead. “Healing. I promise. I no longer feel like battletank is churning up the inside of it, although Doctor Ninestein says I must be careful to avoid ‘second impact syndrome’, so you will need to continue to be a steady driver for a little longer.”
Owun remained silent for a few more contemplative seconds, and when he spoke, his voice was sad. “I wonder how my ghost is.”
“Well, now he is out of that toxic environment, hopefully the… ‘other-you’ will find the confidence he needs to lead the others, now? I am quite sure that with time, he will prove he has every bit the same feisty spirit as you, Kyusu.”
“You think he might?” Owun hummed to himself. “Oh, I hope so. He was such a sad, mousy little thing, I almost didn’t want to let you leave him behind.” He approximated a small sigh. “I would have liked to have left a little bit of a wormhole open,” he confessed, quietly. “Just a teeny tiny bit. Just enough to talk through. Just to see how he’s getting on, in case he needed some guidance. Apart from a few other zeroids, he’s all on his own now, and in charge of them all.”
“You do not trust that Granny Zelda will help?”
Hiro’s hand on his casing was a stabilising influence. Owun sat quietly and thought about it, for a while. “Well… yeah, I… guess I do?” he said, at last. “But I trust me more. I mean, sure she’s a machine, but she’s not a zeroid. What if he needs help that only other zeroids would understand?”
“I think you need to give them more credit. He is still you, remember? Tough in all the ways that it counts.”
“…aw, honey.” Owun squirmed closer with an emphatic wiggle, like a small animal getting comfortable. “I definitely got lucky. This is absolutely the best of all the universes and I’m so glad it’s my one.”
Hiro patted his top hemisphere and listened as his zeroid began to purr his fans, quietly. “You think? There might be a universe where humans are good, and Zelda is good, and she joined earth society as an equal.”
“But then Terrahawks wouldn’t exist, and by extension, neither would zeroids. So… maybe it’s just me being selfish, but this is definitely my favourite universe, because in this one, I’ve got you!”
Possibly not as polished as I wanted but I'm running out of 1st January.
Originally this was just "101 wants to make a birthday card", but then he got all philosophical about “am I not just an LLM?" and that caused me all sort of problems because no, I do not and will not use LLMs in real life, but what if a little sentient robot did get possessed by the urge to do art?
-----
Lieutenant Hiro spotted it the instant he stepped out onto the flight deck, on the morning of the first of January - a new year in more ways than one, as it was also his birthday.
Propped up among his plants was something new; it looked like a big envelope? Soft cream card, with his name inscribed - not in ink, but delicately engraved with a laser - on the front of it.
Not that he really needed to ask, because Owun was watching him intently, so it didn’t take much to work out who it was from, but he acknowledged it anyway; “Is this for me?”
The zeroid rocked back on his axis with an excited little chirp. “Happy Birthday, lieutenant!”
Hiro smiled, and picked it up. “Thank you, Owun.” He carefully opened the top of the envelope and slid out what was inside.
The contents were made of a single sheet of coloured card, bright scarlet like a certain person’s browband, intricately cut into a filigree of interwoven stems and leaves and flowers. In a light curve around the bottom were etched the words Happy Birthday!, in both English and Japanese, using that same light application of a laser, just hot enough to make the words visible, but not go all the way through. (And a lot smaller, in the corner, love from Owun x)
Hiro laughed. “Why, this is beautiful. Wherever did you get this from?”
Owun looked away, sheepish. “I made it.”
Hiro looked more closely at him. “You did?”
“Yeah. I researched it a bit and got Captain Falconer to send me up the paper, then I used my laser to cut it. I... might have burned it a couple times before I made that one. My lines were too close together. I almost set the fire alarms off.” A little side to side shift of the optics, and a confession; “Yeah that was my fault there was fire suppressant powder everywhere when you came back from Earth, that time.”
Hiro smiled, fondly. “Well, I think it was worth it, even if I did need to help you clean up.” He took his comm from his pocket and lined up the camera. “Mary will love to see it what she unwittingly helped you with-”
“Oh! Um.” Owun gave him an unexpectedly serious look. “Please don’t tell anyone?”
“Why ever not? I would like to show it off!” Hiro smiled in what he hoped was a reassuring way. “You surely can’t be so worried about sergeant major-”
“No! No, it’s not that.”
“Then what...?”
Owun’s voice was small; close to a whisper. “People don’t like when robots try to do art. I didn’t even tell Captain Falconer why I wanted the paper. I only trust you, really. Because you’ll understand. I don’t want to get in trouble for it.”
“Well, of course I will not tell anyone if you don’t want me to. But I think people will forgive this? You will not be in trouble.” Hiro looked down at his gift again; the long swooping lines of the foliage, climbing a trellis in the background, studded with flowers. After a second of dithering, he put his comm back into his pocket.
“As soon as the first generative ‘artificial intelligence’ came along, people started using it to make pictures, right? But a lot of people didn’t like it. Said it was bad to have machines making art.”
“Hm. I am not quite sure the circumstances are the same. And perhaps... one large difference is in intent.” Hiro studied the intricately-cut gift in his hands. “We must make a distinction between a person making art, using skills they have chosen to learn, to make something beautiful to enrich their world, and someone generating an image using software built from works they had no permission to use, because – dare I say it – they want the kudos for the end product, without the work to get there.”
“Uh. So.” Owun’s eyes crossed, confused. “What does that make me? I didn’t really learn any skills. I just looked at how your plants grow and assembled a picture from it.”
“Well, you chose to make this. No-one told you to. And you did not base it on a dataset you were not entitled to use. And honestly? I am not even entirely sure I realised you were capable of something like this?”
Owun flustered a little. “Well I just it was I was looking for a birthday card and I saw some like that but none of them were quite right so I thought I could try and make one myself?”
“Well. You,” Hiro teased, propping the card up among his plants, “are forbidden from ever claiming you are not arty, ever again.”
“Well it’s not really very artistic, is it-” Owun started to protest, but then he could feel his human’s hands on his casing, and the soft heat of his lips against his kintsugi, and suddenly he’d forgotten how to work his vocaliser because all that would come out of it was weird static.
(According to canon, 101 was built in November 2018. He is therefore 7! Happy Birthday to my best good boy.)
-------
Even though Spacehawk had perfectly good furniture in her obs lounge, Lieutenant Hiro tended to sit on the floor, most of the time, these days. Partly because it was just comfortable, and gave him more room to spread his materials out when he wanted to work on something, and partly so his zeroid best friend could get up close more easily, and see the same things as the human was using, if necessary.
(And partly because the heavy zeroid was absolutely destroying the couch cushions. Owun being Owun, he found this aspect highly stressful. So, sitting on the floor was good for his emotional wellbeing, too.)
They spent quite a bit of their downtime like it, these days; just… comfortable, sitting quietly together. Hiro would usually be reading up on some interesting new technological discoveries that he wanted to try and find a way to use to advance their own hardware, and Owun, with access to every televisual format in every language on the whole planet available to him, would be glued to some absolute brainrot he’d discovered (and occasionally, multiple channels of it at once).
Owun had calmed down quite a lot, lately; being allowed to ‘snuggle’ (quite tricky, for a spherical robot, but he managed) and say I love you without being told off for it had given him a degree of stability that he’d lacked for a long while. Now, he was less likely to work himself into an anxious temper about the smallest things not quite going perfectly, particularly when those things were outside his control anyway; less likely to take the sergeant major’s teasing to heart and get snappish with anyone in the vicinity.
There was probably an element of being more ‘grown up’ about the little robot as well, Hiro mused. He hadn’t anticipated any of the zeroids becoming sentient, let alone the whole fleet, so hadn’t taken any steps to ensure it was managed as perfectly as he would have liked. (It would probably be polite to say it had all been a little… haphazard.) Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise the zeroids were all growing into their emotions, as they got older and more experienced?
Speaking of which…
Hiro had just finished eating and set his bowl aside when his zeroid came looking for him.
“You are being very cuddly, today,” he noted, letting Owun wriggle up under his arm.
“Well, obviously. It’s November. Duh.”
“…is there… something special about November…?”
“Oh, Hiro.” A little scold. “I can’t believe you forgot.”
Hiro finally looked down at him, with a subtle frown. “Forgot... what?”
A slightly reproachful crimson gaze looked back. “Well obviously today is the seventh anniversary of the time I first came online.” After a beat, he added; “It’s my birthday, silly.” And then, mostly playfully, but a little bit serious too; “...can’t believe you forgot.”
“Oh!” Hiro bit down on a smile and tried to act like it was a huge revelation. “Oh, that. Well. It seems like a fortunate coincidence that I brought this with me on my last return from Earth, then.” He picked something up from within the cupboard beside him, and put it down in front of them.
Wrapped in sparkly rainbow-coloured paper, it looked very much like a plant pot. Owun made a noise like a snort-laugh and bonked against him. “A plant. Thanks.”
Hiro chuckled and petted his crown. “As if I could ever forget your birthday, Kyusu. Especially as you have reminded me about it every two weeks for the last four months.”
Owun giggled sheepishly and looked away. “Iiiii thought you might not have noticed.”
“I always notice what you tell me. That is why we work well together.”
Owun’s weight increased very slightly as he leaned into Hiro’s side. “I think I might have sounded ungrateful?” he said, his words softening. “I didn’t mean to. I don’t think I was expecting an actual present. Just maybe like, a Happy Birthday. Thank you. This is so nice of you.”
“Well, I have been thinking about it since last year.” Hiro smiled, fondly. “I mean, seven whole years old, hmm.” He kept his fingers moving. “Positively prehistoric, in computer terms.”
“Ugh.” Owun wriggled as though trying to shake the human’s hand off. “Thanks. Just what I needed to hear.”
Hiro laughed. “You know you will always be my best friend, however old and cranky you get. And seven is an auspicious number, in many cultures. Perhaps this will be a lucky year for you.”
“Zelda will go away forever!” Owun responded, promptly. “But then I’d need a new job. Hm. Perhaps I haven’t thought that out so well?”
“Are you going to open your gift?”
Owun gave him a suspicious glance. “…is it a pumpkin?”
Hiro clucked his tongue in a scolding little tch and exaggerated a sigh.
“Sorry, sorry.” Owun laughed, and examined the sparkly paper carefully for a minute or two. It looked like it was mostly just cunningly folded, holding itself together, with one or two easily-accessible little snips of tape to finally secure the wrapping in place. He focused his laser and carefully cut through them, then nuzzled into the paper so it fell neatly open.
He rolled back a little to get a good look.
“Oh. Oh!”
It was not a plant, or indeed anything remotely botanical. Hiro smiled, and arched a brow, cheekily.
Instead, carefully stacked to give the illusion of a plantpot, were a little selection of tools and polishes, and in pride of place at the centre, folded like a piece of fabric origami, was a hat, obviously specially-made to fit him.
Hiro lowered his voice and said, conspiratorially; “I hope you are glad it is not a pumpkin.”
“Oh my stars! Help me put it on!” Owun wiggled excitedly.
Hiro picked up the fabric and let it come unfolded; a soft, rounded job, with a little peak at the front, in a textured dark red that set off his own scarlet. Optics huge, Owun just watched and ooh-ed quietly, for once unable to find any words at all.
“I did take some advice from Kate,” Hiro confessed, setting it down on the zeroid’s top hemisphere and ensuring it was square. “Although we were not sure how well you will be able to roll while wearing it?”
“I don’t care.” Owun replied, almost breathily, trying hard to look up at it. “It’s the best present ever.”
“I am glad! Happy birthday, Owun.” He pressed a small kiss to the top of his friend’s head, and smiled fondly at hearing him burst into tears. “And may we share many more. Daisuki da yo.”
(YES OK FINE I will write about these two "little space twits" forever given the chance. And I am working on other things! Just... s l o w l y.)
