The Robot that Loved

I once knew a kid. She taught me about the human life. She had the knowledge of a 1000-year-old elephant. At least, that’s what she said, I don’t know what an elephant is. She showed me how our world crumbled in the hands of the Higher Beings. How humanity smashed into fragments like a vulnerable mirror. She helped me out of my distorted views. She told me she wasn’t scared of me. She didn’t mind my weaponed body, built for the kill. My only wish was to keep her safe. I did. From everyone but myself.

Now looking back, I can see that she was scared. She had lost everything. Her home, her family, and she was about to lose herself to the cruelty of this world. Her face drained of colour, looked up from her parent’s limp shoulder and locked her eyes on mine. She was a fighter. She knew that she was going to die, but she didn’t want me to see her weakness. Her face transformed into a blank canvas staring back at me. But it was her dark, bottomless eyes that gave it away. The deeper I looked the more they told the story of a little girl who just wanted her home. She just wanted to be loved.

So, when the apple rolled past the fresh red puddles and greeted my feet; I picked it up. I went over to her trembling body and held out my hand with the rosy apple perched on top. She was scared, but I didn’t understand. Maybe it was the destruction of her home. Maybe it was her parent’s corpses that lay beside her. Or maybe it was me. She didn’t go for the apple, or the half-collapsed door frame that I blocked. Instead, she sought me, weaving her arms undermine, until they wrapped around the interlocking metal of my body. She held onto me. I had seen this happen before. When a female wrapped herself around a little boy. I had thought she was trying to protect him, but it was useless because they died so easily.

Suddenly, her blank canvas burst into colour. Every sob added more hues of grey and blue. Then I broke my first rule. The rule the Higher Beings had made, ‘do not keep the rejected beings from harm’. I promised to protect her.

I found a hiding place for us beneath the rubble of shattered buildings. It was the safest place I could find. No windows, no gas and a doorway that had been blocked with brick and debris. Her cheeks were dry, but her nose rumbled as she breathed. She told me her name, Mia. She told me about her parents, how they would go for walks in the afternoon and her mother would sing the same lullaby she always did. She then lowered her voice to a soft hum and spoke of the Higher Beings. She spoke of the constant running from them, the constant agitation. They wanted her dead along with everyone else like her, the Unfavoured Beings.

In trade for my protection, she interrupted the program that created a fog to cloud my every thought and action. The inability to question any instruction the Higher Beings made, no matter how gruesome or inhumane. I would lose a memory of what I had done once the fog wafted in and took over my mind. Ever since I found her and we took refuge in each other, it had become easier to shut out the instructions. But every so often it creeps in again, suffocating the saneness inside me. She called it an Episode.

Every night she begged to go out with me to scavenge for food. I was about to reply with my usual response of no, when it dawned on me, she hadn’t been outside since I found her. I felt a new emotion she had taught me. Sympathy. So, I let her come with me. Everything was going fine until we headed up the hill. She started complaining about how ‘it smelled so putrid it was going to make her blind’. I thought she was overreacting, but the colour evanesced from her face. She said, ‘it smelled like 100 rotting bodies that had been left in the sun.’ She was wrong. It wasn’t 100 rotting bodies. It was thousands piled on top of thousands, mangled and drenched in blood. I noted an emotion I was experiencing for the first time-sadness. The eerie silence echoed over the unburied graveyard. I felt her fingers slip into mine. They were ice cold and shaking. We ran as fast as we could to escape the rising repulsion.

I knew I couldn’t protect her anymore. She wanted to fight. To destroy the Higher Being’s district. She was angry, a girl trying to piece the broken shards of her life. I wrapped my arms around her to hold them together. Like clockwork, the tears rolled down her face. I think deep down she knew she couldn’t do anything. I recognized the emotion I was feeling was love. I then understood the depths of what she was feeling. Having the thing you love most slip through your hands like water in a desert. That’s when it happened. The fog seeped in. They told me to kill.

I now remember how the piles of people came to be. I remember how Mia’s parents perished quickly in my hands. I remember how Mia’s motionless body came to lay in a pool of red. Maybe she should have feared me. Maybe I knew I would eventually revert to my original design one day. Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Or maybe I just wanted to be loved.