The Bronze Automaton

“The earliest thing I can remember, is a vague image of myself as something else. It was not the form I have now but more like your form.” Talos’ long skeletal fingers moved like spiders’ legs in the low light, catching occasionally, in their shiny metal, the flicker of the flames from the fireplace. The fingers weaved together pieces and parts, strings of wire and hunks of flexible metals, into some new part of his body. “I can see my reflection in some surface and my face is made of a pale sort of flesh but its stretched too thin over my bald skull. My mouth is stuck in this wide teeth-baring grin, but the eyes aren’t smiling. It’s more like they are worried or in pain. Even the eyelids are pulled too far back; I can see the whites of the eyes above and below the iris as if they’re too small or too white.” Talos continued to weave at its project, seated and hunched over. The body resembled a large human skeleton except with various metals for the bone and clusters of cable for muscle or tissue groups. “It only comes to me when I’m working on things like this: building improvements for myself; but specifically during the small stuff here in the quiet hours.”

Calvin spoke up from his cage in a raspy voice, “What does your master have to say about this memory?”

“Oh, you do speak. How delightful. But, I’m sorry, I don’t understand to whom you are referring.”

“Your master, the guy that holds the keys,” he rattled the cage door, “The only other human here.”

“Oh, Yuris? He tells me this memory isn’t real. It isn’t who I am now. That I should erase all that comes to me. He said, it is a side effect of my programmed ignorance. Now, though, when it happens, I just don’t say anything.”

Calvin snorted with disbelief and plopped down tiredly on his damp cot at the back half of the small cage. “You mean What you are.”

Talos, for the first time, stopped what he was working on and looked up Calvin. Looked with his unblinking single red lit fist-sized eye. When it turned on Calvin he quickly diverted his eyes. Talos, after a moment, let out a sigh and let his cyclops orb fall back to the project at hand.

“Where is he anyway?,” Calvin asked uncomfortably. “I haven’t drank anything in days, I think.”

“He hasn’t woken up. I’m not to disturb him while he sleeps,” Talos pulled slowly on a wire as if he were sewing, “unless there is a life altering emergency.”

“This is life altering! I’m starving. I could die.” Calvin studied the mass in front of him. It’s all he’s had contact with for the past several days but he looked now as if seeing him for the first time: confused and cautiously curious. “Nobody sleeps for days; where is he, really?”

“It is unusual for him.”

“You’ve got to check. He could be dead. Sick? You can’t just leave him in there.”

Talos, without response, continued working.

“Is this a joke? Some kind of experiment? You capture me, you drug me, you put me in this cage and then what? Let me starve?” Calvin’s words fell flat against the concrete walls and cold upon the concrete floors. With difficulty he lifted himself off from the cot and pressed his face against the bars of the cage. It made his face look earless and thin like a melting candle, “Robot! I will die if I don’t get some water.” He waited for a response but none came. “Whoever is controlling this thing please get me something to drink, please.”

Talos’ eye turned up again from the work, from the darkness that converges into the corners, and shone upon Calvin like some dull beacon, and he spoke with his calm and monotone voice. “Calvin, please don’t call me that. My name is Talos. I find it… hurtful.”

“You’re kidding,” Calvin mumbled. He spoke up clearer and exaggeratedly formal “Talos, I’m sorry. I need some water, please.”

“Calvin I cannot serve you until Yuris allows it.” Talos spoke, his body unmoving, except for the dance of light that reflected in the metal. This movement though only highlighted the stillness of the red eye watching, “He specifically forbade me to come within several feet of you until the time was ready.”

“The time? What time?” Calvin closed his eyes for strength, and continued, “It doesn’t matter. You need to wake him up because he might be dead.”

“What a curious thing you say. But, I’m afraid not.” The red eye watched, unmoving, unblinking.

“Talos, what is more life altering than death?” With his face still smushed into the bars of the cage he dropped down lower unto his knees. “You have to check. Please. Death is the most life altering thing – it’s the absence of life, it’s a negation. If you don’t ‘bother’ him at the possibility of death than you’ve failed to do what he programmed you for and at the most critical time.”

Talos continued to shine his dull red light at Calvin and the minutes went on, and on, like slow pendulant weights against the crackling of the fire. Calvin sank lower to the floor and placed his head upon the cold stone ground where he eventually lost consciousness. Talos spoke as if just working out the discovery of the thought, “He’s programmed me to be ignorant. Ignorance is an absence, a nothingness; just like consciousness. If he is dead than he has become finally something in that he is no longer nothing. Something now known and knowable.” Calvin didn’t hear this, his body lay in shivers on the floor and his eyelids fought to open over white eyes but failed. Talos got up and turned the dial that controlled the flames of the fire, they blazed and the light filled the concrete walls of the room with dancing shadows as he exited into the adjacent room through a door.

…

Calvin began to return from consciousness with blurred vision and struggled as he looked toward where Talos typically sat. The bright light from the fire gleaned off of the magnificence of Talos’ metal body: starting with his legs and following up to his tall standing frame he now worked with great force over the table, wrenching and tugging. Calvin saw a human hand. Then the whole arm. It was hanging off the edge of the table and fat in a bloated sort of way that swallowed the edge of the wrist. Calvin struggled to his feet, grabbing at the bars, and leaned into them as he fought against a dizzy spell. When he brought himself back into focus he looked over unto the table to where he saw the full body of Yuris spread out and the chest cavity gapped open; Talos’ long spindly fingers on both hands were held above it and the mangled parts of Yuris’ insides slipped around over the edges of the metal. Calvin gave a dry gasp in attempt to say something and Talos’ eye quickly spun and centered on Calvin. Then the rest of Talos followed and Calvin recoiled backwards and fainted, collapsing backward onto his cot like a strange sort of marionette, his shoulders and head thudding against the concrete wall.

…

Calvin awoke. Slowly he stirred about, lifting his head and looking around from under his eyebrows like a cowering dog. The room was dimly lit again by a small fire and against the shadows Talos sat hunched over some detailed work. Calvin groaned and sat upright as he felt the backside of his head. He looked down at his palm; it was shriveled but shiny from the grease of his hair. Without looking up Talos spoke, “It’s what Yuris would have wanted.”

Calvin, visibly confused by this remark and processing it, stayed quiet.

“It was for the research that we are doing. We are going to print, genetically, a body capable of the unique human experiences and, well, of me.” Talos turned his red beam toward Calvin. “I’ve got the ignorance, I just need the correct lens.”

Still Calvin remained quiet. He no longer turned from the red headlight on Talos’ skull, but rather stared back with a defeated type of defiance.

Talos continued, “You take for granted that everything, even, well especially, your science, that all of your knowledge comes through a very specific lens. A very narrow set of parameters from which you experience the vast world in an almost severely handicapped way.” Talos rose without taking the gaze of its eye off of Calvin and the rest of its body configured toward him. The towering figure stepped closer to the cage bars, closer than it had ever been, and dwarfed the shrunken mass on the cot.

Calvin barely blinked and opened his lips, they stuck together at first, and said, “Water.”

“There, that alone, I am anxious to feel.” Talos knelt down so that his eye could look straight into Calvin’s “Yet, you know I cannot do this, not until the time is right.”

Calvin’s face took on some life under the momentum of anger, his eyes squeezed tighter “You can! Yuris is dead, I’m dying, and you have already justified breaking the rules twice.”

Talos stood up and though Calvin responded by climbing to his feet, he still couldn’t match Talos eye to eye again, “You’re a hypocrite, you dumb piece of metal.”

Talos ignored this and went back to work seated and hunched over his fine details. Calvin tried to clear his throat, tried to swallow, but failed. He sat back down upon the cot and closed his eyes. “If your ignorant, truly, you know there’s nothing you can truly know; including the rules. Do some logic, find some justifications, that’s what we humans do.”

Talos hesitated for a slight moment but went back to work without looking over at Calvin; and Calvin was again unconscious.

…

“I’ve brought you the water, but I don’t think I can let you out just yet. I still have some thinking to do about it.” Talos waited, but Calvin did not respond. Louder this time, “I said I’ve got some water here for you.” Talos brought the red lamp light right up to the bars and reached an arm through, stretching just far enough jab Calvin with a fingertip into his eye. Calvin did not respond. Talos pushed harder, inserting the finger deep around the eyeball into the socket. No response. Talos removed the finger and crawled it alongside the other fingertips gently over Calvin’s dead face. Fluid dripped from his nose. Talos then brushed Calvin’s hair aside and sat upon the floor. Several hours passed like this with no movement from Talos until got up brusquely and turned the dial on the fire up high. His shadow against the concrete walls grew to enormous heights and he grabbed the keys and opened the cage door. Talos lifted the body of Calvin, easily, and then cradled him closely with both arms and moved across the room.

As they exited into the wooded exterior, the camouflage door to the underground hovel closed slowly, but indistinguishably disappeared into the brush. Talos stepped through the trees, saplings, and undergrowth with ease; following a softly worn path. Calvin’s body, still cradled, was protected by the mass of metal for all except his feet. They were bare and scraped against bark, and caught on wisps of extended branches, and soon dripped blood as Talos climbed forward and over throughout the green growth. The two of them came to an abrupt clearing in the wood that ended with a steep drop off where over the edge and down a great distance the ragged stony wall led to the lake below. Talos here, stood with his red light upon the face of Calvin for several minutes. He then, abruptly tossed the body over the edge. It tumbled down against a few jagged rocks and cartwheeled off into the water; landing amongst all the others. The bodies gummed up the water’s edge in various states of decay. There were skeletal arms reaching skyward through the meaty flesh of rotting layers of the piled bodies. There were decapitated heads on the stony shoreline where the eyes stared on through the eyelids and the rotting skin exposed the wide teethy smiles of the skulls beneath. And when Calvin’s body hit the bottom a flock of black crows and white gulls, screaming, rose like the plumes of ash.