Broken Heart

They told me he died of a broken heart.

It was something I didn’t understand. Couldn’t understand, actually, according to them. I was a Bot, after all, and Bots didn’t have hearts, so naturally, that was one thing about us that just couldn’t break. A limb, a sensory hub, a logic box, sure. But not a heart. I could look human, they said, and act human and even smell human (though I’ve frequently since wondered what being human could smell like), but I was never going to be human, because I didn’t have a fragile, delicate, apparently deadly-to-break heart.

I supposed, in those early moments after it happened, that that must make me fortunate, at least from the standpoint of self-preservation. I could be repaired. If I had begun to list and sputter and slow down like he had, he would have “cracked me open,” as he always called it, found the malfunction, and fixed it. He was good at that. It was why I was still around after the purge and why I “wasn’t no damn soup ladle.”

I’m still not sure what that means. They all called him colorful, which I eventually learned did not in fact mean he was multicolored but rather that he was unique. He was different, and he stood out, much like me, and we seemed to get along quite well. Even if I had no idea what he was talking about a third of the time. “Just you ‘n me, Clove,” he used to say whenever we were thrown out of another settlement, “buddies through thick and thin.” Thick and thin what, I didn’t ever really know, but it sounded nice. He’d put his hand on top of my head when he said it, and sometimes he’d give my hair a little ruffle, and then we’d set out through the Wastes again toward our next stop.

It was hard on him, so I never said anything, but I liked when we left a place far more than when we arrived. Out in the Wastes, picking our way through the rubble of an abandoned city, I got to see things. My model was never put into service, so I never had a post, let alone a patrol. Our travels together gave me the chance I’d never had to see what the world might have been like so many years ago. It was full of things to discover and places to explore and little objects he called “souvenirs.” I collected those. Sometimes he would just shake his head, ask why I could possibly want to pick them up or what I was going to do with them, but he would usually laugh, too. So I kept collecting them.

That was just one reason I preferred to travel, though. Every time we found a new pocket of life, a new little colony, he would have to bribe them just to let us in. He didn’t say it, but I knew it was because I was with him. Bots were rare, but human memory could be as long as ours when it came to fear. Still, what really made each stop worse than the last was the question he always asked the people there—and the look on his face at the answer they always gave.

Not here, they’d say. Haven’t seen them. Never heard of them. It was never a different answer, but every time he asked the question all the same. And then he’d be quiet, wouldn’t eat for a day or two even when I reminded him to. Sometimes out in the Wastes, we would sit in silence, looking up at the stars on a clear night, but it was different from inside the makeshift settlement walls. I never figured out what he was looking at, but it wasn’t the sky, and I didn’t like it. So I would wait, sitting next to him, until he seemed to be himself again. The survivors had usually gotten tired of having us there about that time anyway, and so we’d leave and return to what it seemed we both preferred.

I noticed, though, that every time we left a place, he started to move a little slower; speak a little softer; look a little...greyer. I asked him about it once, if he was well, and he sighed, long and heavy. “This creaky old steamer ain’t as spry as you, Clover,” he told me. Humans aged, and flesh and bone weakened over time. It was plausible. I had no reason to ask further.

Maybe if I had, our next stop wouldn’t have been our last, and I wouldn’t have been out there now, sifting through caved-in buildings and wandering down a cratered road all by myself.

As I passed faded, sometimes only half-standing signs and storefronts, I scanned the old world names and numbers just like I always had before. When we’d passed into the city limits two days earlier, he had pointed out this street from a distance. Main Street, he’d said. I asked him how he knew, since there was no street sign left, and he told me he knew it from “another life.”

“Humans live only once,” I had replied, puzzled. He simply smiled at me, a strange, wistful smile, and patted my head again.

“...C’mon, Clove. Time this mutt tucked tail and went home.”

My eyes landed on the worn and peeling painting of a four-leaf clover above a shattered display window, and I shuffled to a halt, looking up at it. The name of the shop was long stripped away, but my gaze was fixed on the green-grey painting of what he’d named me for the day we met. Even though the ruined store was small and mostly full of crumbled brick and shattered wood, probably picked clean by looters well before, I couldn’t help but duck through the doorway.

“The best stuff’s what you gotta look hard to find,” he’d said.

The dust inside didn’t bother me, and there was plenty of light to see by. Moving carefully, sliding my feet to keep from stepping on whatever I might find, I investigated this forgotten little shop. There were broken shelves and cases, all empty. It was rarely what I found out in the open that appealed to me, though, and I wasn’t discouraged. An old fountain pen, or a singed magazine cover. He said I had an “eclectic taste,” which seemed to mostly mean I liked things no one else wanted. It was no surprise, then, when a carved wooden box caught my eye, half-buried in a pile of rubble behind the counter, accompanied by a tiny glint of metal.

I skirted the counter and climbed over a shelf that had collapsed, head tilted to one side, until I could crouch by the pile and reach out to work the box free very systematically. The metal I had seen seemed to be some fine, once-silver chain, and when I picked up the box, the chain dropped and took with it a charm it was strung through.

From the little case to the necklace, I passed my curious eye. Finally, setting the one gingerly on the counter behind me to keep it safe, I picked up the other by its chain and inspected it as it twirled and swayed in front of my face, fascinated. All of the jewelry I had seen until then had been on a human body, frequently a dead one, or otherwise in someone’s active possession. This was the first time I had held or even been so close to any I could take. I did look around a little more to be sure, of course, given the state of the structure, but I was alone.

I stood up slowly, twisting the chain this way and that to watch it catch the light. The charm was in what humans called the shape of a heart, but oddly, it was hollow. One side was whole, if tarnished, but then there was a small hinge, and the other side was almost completely gone, just a scrap of metal left that looked like it might have been melted at the edges. And then nestled inside, the strangest thing of all, I thought, a tiny monochromatic photograph of two people whose faces could no longer be made out in any detail.

My first impulse was to turn and hold it up for an explanation—but there would be no answer this time. So instead, I did turn, but just to open the box and settle the necklace inside for safe keeping. It was already a little broken, and the way most people seemed to treasure jewelry, it seemed prudent to protect it. Then, picking up the small case and holding it with both hands, I started to leave the shop with the day’s find. And that was almost it.

I don’t know what made it occur to me, or maybe why it didn’t occur to me before, when I had been looking directly at my newest treasure, but it almost seemed a physical force took hold and rooted me in place mid-step at the threshold. I looked down, reopened the box, and took out the pendant to again hold it up.

“Broken heart,” I said to no one. I was looking at, holding in my hands, a tiny broken heart. The silent weapon that had ended his life was now dangling from my fingers, and all I could do was stare at it, all processes uncharacteristically, and somewhat disconcertingly, stalled. I thought perhaps I had an error, but I could find no corresponding code.

I dropped the box and cupped my palm to lay the charm in it, the photograph facing up, and rubbed my thumb gently over the broken edges. In mounting wonder and dismay, it began to make sense, how this small trinket could cause a man’s demise. It was discomfiting to look at, a piece permanently missing; someone’s memories laid bare, subject to a ruined world’s cold decay.

I had too many thoughts in that moment to really parse through any one, an experience I had never had before and have seldom had since. Several were memories of his face every time his question was answered. Some were memories of his laughter, his voice print. One, the worst one, was of his body the morning I had found him, extinguished by the power of this tiny, dirty, ruined thing.

After several minutes of uncertainty, I closed my fist around the necklace and drew it in close with a sudden, fierce desire to protect it. I did look down at the box again, but it no longer seemed sufficient. Instead, I slipped the chain over my head to nestle the charm securely against my chest, feeling an odd weight when I pressed against it, gripped it through my tunic, colder and heavier than seemed possible.

They were wrong after all, it seemed. I still didn’t completely understand, but I knew, standing there, that I had proved them wrong.

I was a Bot with a broken heart. It was mine to carry, mine to guard, and, for the sake of the man who hadn’t been able to do it himself, mine to see if there was a way to fix.