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“I must say, for a ‘bot, you’ve got a real dainty physique there… No wonder you’re a coward.”
Coward. The word rattled in his metal brain, like nails in a tin can and raucous, digital noise. It certainly wasn’t novel to be at the receiving end of such cynicism, from humans and robots alike. He had endured that rancor since the day he refused conscription for the 39th Central Asian War — unrighteous , he had called it. And yet, as Epsilon continued walking down the dusk of the staircase, under a layer of cold cobble and shattered steel, his eyelids suddenly drooped in a way that mimicked shame, and he sensed a churning in his gut that most people would have described as their stomachs dropping.
“[...] So least you can do is help with this post-war clean-up, right?”
The “clean-up” revealed to be for heaps of the dead at the end of the dusk. Advanced robot models who had been discarded in the damp, cool air of the basement, piled up on the ground like a junkyard, their bodies far past recognition. No longer were they honorable soldiers of war, just scraps to be singed and melted down. Not only was he a coward, Epsilon was often dubbed as far too sensitive for a robot; a paradox indeed paired with the typical doubts in his ability to parent human children; to love, console, and nurture them. He knew now, with the vibration he felt in his alloy bones and the slight quivering of his fingers as he raised his hands, that the former may have been more true than the latter. The order for the fireworks show had already commenced, and there was no possibility of defying his duty now.
The longer the countdown took to tick down to zero, the longer his vision bore into the sight of the limp carcasses of his kind lying beneath his feet, and the ache in his abdomen grew. Even knowing their AIs had been ripped out, like pits spooned out of the flesh of a fruit, leaving their skulls nothing but empty husks, the basement felt crammed — an overload of sorrow pervaded the air. He could not bear to keep his eyes open any longer, could not bear to leave them witnesses to the heat of the blinding, blue flash of light he generated from photon energy, producing sharp prickles across the skin of his face; prickles that could have triggered tears. Could have, because Epsilon did not know how to cry, as much as he had watched his beloved children do the same at the sight of broken dolls or the pain of scraped knees. Epsilon briefly wondered if this was what cowardice truly was — his eyelids fluttered closed, the luciferous bubble stretched kilometers over the expanse of the surrounding city, and the sorrow instantaneously melted and seeped into the ground until it was forgotten.
The safe house he was escorted to was a prison, really. Epsilon despised it. Perched high on a cliff over a foreign ocean, it did not seem to matter how ornate the stone palace was, a mighty frame of high security that had long protected various diplomats over the decades from precarious situations similar to his. It did not seem to matter that the great windows built into the walls and ceilings allowed sunlight to pour in endlessly throughout the day, that clouds rarely ever touched the sky, and thus his sensors were appropriately charged at maximum — he still sat slouched on a bench wrapped around lively palms, drooping as if his entire essence was drained. The close proximity of even the brightest star of the universe would still fail to fill him with a single ounce of energy, because without the children — without his family , Epsilon felt as empty as the metal carcasses he had incinerated long ago.
He missed the children’s laughter, their warm hugs and wide smiles of crooked teeth. He missed seeing the intricate mixture of layered scribbles of crayon on colorful construction paper plastered to the walls of their playroom — and so many were of him, too — vivid blues and yellows. He had a handful in his own office, displayed in picture frames or simply taped to the wall above his desk. Arnold often poked fun at the lack of any other “real art” embellished in his home besides his children's, but Epsilon believed nothing could be acquired from the art market that would be of equal value to their creations. There was nothing of value in the world itself that could be compared to what Epsilon had gained in the last four years.
The plain, bleak walls of the fortress he had been contained in for the sake of his safety utterly depressed him, further fueling his restlessness and agitation. He found himself snapping at Hogan frequently or walking frantically in paces around the vastness of the empty space — he didn’t care about the luxurious pools of water he could dip into or sunbathing beneath the skylights. He sulked like a wilted tulip on that bench, his shoulders drawing further down and inward, the individual strands of his hair draping around his face like a heavy curtain. He wanted the sorrowfulness to melt away. It had not been forgotten.
It pronounced itself when it came to fighting Pluto in the rising brume of a sweeping tornado; that incalculable sorrow. The winds and dust striking his face were like shards of glass, and that pain — Epsilon knew Sahad was still being puppeted by fragile strings, manipulated by a puppeteer bearing even deeper sorrow, and the grief was endless. Epsilon knew the taste of defeat and hopelessness on his tongue even as the battle ceased, even as the clouds cleared for sunshine. The taste was familiar, back to the days of the war he refused to partake in; he knew how useless it was to fight, and he knew whoever controlled Sahad, whoever Bora was, would not stop here. He knew that his abilities as the remaining seventh strongest robot meant nothing in the face of such anguish and hatred — and the cycle would continue to propagate itself even if he tried to light the strings.
Epsilon landed softly in the high grasses, an after-taste of bitterness still in his mouth. He was not a hero, he could not save the Earth, or Sahad for that matter. He was a coward.
But, for now, where blades of green grazed his sides, where the familiar back fields of his home in Hunter Valley greeted him…
“Look, the sun’s come out…”
“Wait… There’s two suns!”
Love prevailed, somewhere on Earth. It cradled him with giggles of relief and mirth, tiny hands grasping at his waist. He could only hope someone would act in his stead to spread something so valuable when he could not.