1. Rain Drops
The first time Ben met Levi was almost like a waking dream.
That night, Ben wished that was all it was: a surreal unreality.
It was pouring, drenching the entire city of Tamerlain with a torrential storm that flooded the streets. It was day three of an endless-seeming fall downpour. By now, the gutters were choked with debris, boasting so much backlog in the infrastructure underfoot that there was nowhere else for the dredge to go but up.
Around him, the only things on the road were a handful of cars racing by, the occasional scurrying pedestrian, and dozens of bots trying to keep ahead of their impossible task of road management. They were square units, not humanoid, equipped with basic AI coding; just enough to allow them a logical course of action on how best to maintain the streets, remove trash, and avoid collisions with one another, cars, and street traffic.
However, they were all fogged in his periphery, barely notations, while he forged his way home in the onslaught. Only the broken sidewalk ahead was clear, a path that always took him right past Smith’s Bakery, and the alley that cut between it and a row of apartments.
It was miserable, the rain like white static with its ceaseless drowning effect. He could hear the pound of his heart, feel the water soaking his hair before sliding between his shoulder blades in a constant stream.
Then, the lamps on the sidewalk flickered on, pulled his eyes up, and for whatever reason, he glanced down the alley in passing.
What he didn’t expect was the abrupt sight of curved fingers barely illuminated in the streetlight.
Pale, human, and beyond that, the shape of a body obscured by shadows.
His stomach dropped with a sudden jolt of horror. Hurriedly, Ben turned, pulling his phone with a surge of panic, terrified he was about to discover a murdered or injured mugging victim stashed in the darkness.
Ben’s finger was on the emergency services button when he pounded over, but as he got closer, an equally grim visage revealed itself.
Not a man; a machine.
He was on his back, more likely than not a Decommission waiting for trash day. Maybe one that someone had discarded from the back of a truck on the drive past. His blond hair was drenched, clinging to a face that had once been perfectly constructed. Strong in feature, utterly human, but from the neck down, it was pretty obvious the droid had been parted.
Ben hesitated a few feet away while he took in the sad sight.
His skin had been stripped from just under the jaw, leaving raw parts exposed to the elements: hip hydraulics, the titanium rib casing harboring his compact fusion reactor; raw tendon cables, polymer fiber conduits through the neck and myomer bundles…it was an atrocity.
Ben tapped his thigh, glancing from the singularly intact hand to the untouched face, as if whoever had parted him hadn’t had the heart to take away his identity in full.
Ben would never know why his face was untouched.
Probably not altruism, but perhaps time? Could be a stolen unit hastily stripped of its most easily accessible parts.
He exhaled, turned to leave the sad heap behind, but paused when he heard the softest click of whirling mechanics.
It froze him, and when he glanced back, his heart panged when he saw its eyes had parted, one wider than the other. Beautiful, hyper-realistic blue eyes staring back at him with something indecipherable. Maybe awareness? Maybe it was cognitive?
Ben was almost sickened to think that this being had been tossed without being fully decommed.
He turned, eyes wide when the Synth’s fingers twitched. Otherwise, it was immobile beyond twinges of basic motor relays firing off.
“Well—fuck.” Ben squatted down next to it, flexing a smile when he saw the pupils shift to follow his motion before he touched his throat. “Can you speak?”
Silence was the answer. Not even a glitch in an attempt to open the jaw.
Fuck.
Everything in him wanted to go.
It was late. He had just gotten back from a day spent hunched over tiny parts and power distribution relays. At this point, he had been on his feet for twelve hours, and the burn of exhaustion was slowly killing him.
Ben put his face back in the rain, eyes shut, while gathering himself for the odyssey it would be to simply walk away. This wasn’t his problem, damn it. People parted Androids out every single day and left them in the trash.
As soon as he thought it, another soft sound opened his weary gaze. He glanced down at the body and found one leg had shifted up to bend at the knee, then, just as swiftly, deflated with a grind of tungsten support struts and actuators.
At a glance, Ben could tell this was an old model MX-09. War machine, as was evidenced by the ceramic plating and soldering paths in the visible frame, probably repurposed later after some grievous injury. That was usually how it went.
Ben’s bet was a Companion, thus the humanoid skin and modified appearance, as well as the telltale, aftermarket supports around its hips and groin. It all suggested he had been graced with another set of equipment to sate the lonely housewife, and wasn’t that uncommon an occurrence for damaged droids nowadays.
“Alright, let’s see what we can see,” Ben murmured, pushed up, and made his walk around, bent low over the unit like a scavenger. The damage was worse on the right-hand side. He could see the droid’s skull had been cracked, but admittedly, the malfunction could have been from rain infiltrating the matrix, missing parts, or really anything at all. It would be impossible to really tell without a diagnostic scan, something he kept at home for all kinds of late-night take-home projects.
Ben almost laughed at his abrupt feeling of altruism.
Was he really thinking about taking this fucking thing home?
He was easily looking at months of repair here. The MX-09 was at least two models behind industry-standard, which would mean scavenging parts, buying equipment he didn’t want to buy, and leaving his job to then immediately go home to do more work.
Not to mention, how the hell was he planning on taking this unit home?
What? Would he fly the thing six blocks on the currents of whimsy and fortune?
Ben wiped water out of his face before bracing on a knee, glancing around the alley with a swift scan as if someone was watching him debate his course of action from the shadows.
He blew out a breath, reached out and touched the droid’s thick blond hair, and found the wet tendrils soft, human, and lush. Its fingers spasmed at the contact, and again, it was as if it were trying to communicate somehow, or at least move.
If it was fully aware in there, its systems were probably in full-blown self-preservation mode. It would want to get sheltered, at the very least, strive to keep the water from infiltrating critical exposed systems…
Damn it. Ben knew that this thing would be lying out here indefinitely, panic mode activated, and yet wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing to help itself.
That was a little too much pain and suffering even for a being that a lot of people assumed was disposable. Too much for him to just leave as-is and walk away from.
Of course, he could always contemplate the alternative.
Ben could reach into that skull and yank critical components. Shut it down fully and let the trash guys do their jobs.
Suddenly, though, Ben couldn’t unsee that blue-eyed stare shining back at him upon discovery. This wasn’t the behaviour of something glitching out, or simply having a residual ghost in the machine lingering before frying out from being waterlogged. If that was the case, he’d expect to see a constant malfunction, twitching every few seconds while the interior electric sizzled out.
No, the responses were reactive if discombobulated, which was a hell of a lot different.
As if this droid was reading his mind, a sudden jerk of its leg scared the holy God right out of him.
Ben almost fell on his ass and gripped his heart with a shouted, “Fuck me, man!”
Again, that deflation of limb.
Ben couldn’t do it.
He recovered, ran shaky hands over his face, laughed in disbelief over his own inclinations, but still asked softly, “If you can hear me or understand me, move that finger.”
Ben held his breath, watching the droid’s hand, then winced when the MX twitched again.
His stomach sank. All over again, for the thousandth time in his life, Ben felt that sense of lament strike him. Not for this Synth, but on his own kind’s behalf. It was a twist of the knife to the gut to contemplate how far they had all fallen down the ladder of moral superiority or even basic decency.
Worse, it always made him reflect on his own job, his own hand in their construction and advancement. Advancements that would inevitably become outdated, and then end up in the fucking garbage, exactly like this MX unit.
He straightened to his feet, glanced around, relieved when he spotted a large trash bag before upending the contents to join the rest of the garbage in the alley.
It took a lot of effort, grunting and sliding the heavy Synth onto the plastic sheet, but Ben did it, cursing his own empathy the whole time. He finally got a good grip on the wet plastic corners, then began to drag the Droid out of the darkness and onto the sidewalk, praying that the bag held the whole way back to his apartment.
It was the night that Ben’s entire life changed.
The night he met the MX-09, Levi, and the night that would become the memory that haunted his actions for years ahead.
It was the night Ben looked at something thrown to the wayside—something labeled as trash and realized he couldn’t handle what it represented anymore.
Decay of a human society where it felt like there was no humanity left to spare. That truth reflected at him from the machine’s sky-colored eyes that night, watching him the entire six-block journey back to his complex.
It was the last night Ben could look the other way.
