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CC: Chapter 64
🕑 Added 2024-05-31 14:30:06 +0000 UTCHis first few days in Hensha were surprisingly…familiar.
Not that he’d ever seen any of the ashen-faced members of the wasteland before, but when he looked into their despairing eyes he felt a certain sense of empathy that he knew couldn’t have been born from his own experience.
The town was a ramshackle affair – the wooden beams of each shop-front and residential hovel creaked against the burning winds of the Taila Badlands that blew in the North. On the broken streets that had once been cobblestone, the villagers milled about their daily business – farmers harvested grain from their meagre fields, cattle-drivers from neighboring settlements drove their charges through the streets towards barren pastures, and merchants plied their wares on every street corner – hawking pottery, wicker baskets, or rice-wine and other less savory materials.
XJ-V looked at all these strange sights, with Dr Janus in tow, and committed them to his memory banks. This was different from the images he had blink-clicked into his metal brain down in the Doctor’s bunker. Here, what he saw was real. What he was seeing was life – living in the only way it could against the searing heat of the wasteland.
The people stared back at him with little fanfare, despite the fact many of them had never seen a Cog since the time of Qing’s dynasty. Some spat at his feet as he passed – a gesture that he considered strange considering the general lack of moisture in their environment.
“Pay it no mind,” Janus murmured to him as they made their way through the streets. “Once they see what you can do, they’ll be bowing at your feet.”
The Dao moved forward of its own accord, and the mind of XJ-V existing in the present-day jaunted forward to the village elder’s home, where Dr Janus was showing him off to the leader of Hensha.
“He requires a human-subject interface,” the Dr was saying. “In essence, experience of humanity.”
The Elder, a man who, despite his station, couldn’t have been more than thirty five, sat back and rubbed his temples.
“Janus,” he said. “We’ve been through this before.”
“This one is different, Manus,” the Doctor replied with haste. “XJ-V is a complete model with a built-in Empathy matrix. Not only is he capable of performing feats that can help this village, but he is also able to understand the pain of your people and act on it.”
The Elder scoffed. “That’s all well and good, but if I give sanction for another one of your devilish machines to run amok in my village, I could have an open rebellion on my hands!”
The two guards at the door carried stun-batons at their hips, XJ-V noticed. He also noticed that their fingers had been twitching towards the handle of their primitive weapons since first he entered the room with his creator.
“Dr Janus,” the Cog said. “The guards of Elder Manus seem to believe I am a threat to the village. Perhaps it would be best to leave and alleviate the villager’s stress levels.”
Janus practically ignored XJ-V’s suggestion, leaning forward and spreading his palms on the dusty desk the Elder sat behind.
XJ-V saw the young man shrink before the stare of the Doctor. It seemed to him that age and experience was starting to do the heavy-lifting in this conversation.
“Do you remember the oath you gave to Qing?” Janus said, his tone instantly changed to one of almost regal authority. “Have you forgotten the promise you made to the true Master of Mankind?”
Manus stiffened. “O-of course I haven’t. I just –“
“Then tell this servant of humanity what needs doing,” Janus interrupted massively. “And he’ll get it done.”
The Elder gulped, sizing up both his interlopers before rubbing his temples again and ordering his guards to stand down.
“Janus,” he said. “I hope you know what you’re doing, this time…”
…
[Anima Cores: 151]
Rank 5…the next level.
He should stop.
He needed to stop.
And yet even though he heard every gear and clank groan within him, he couldn’t tear himself away from the visions of the past. There was something within them that was the key to the future. He knew it. He knew it in the way he knew that the Dao would not allow him to perceive such visions without knowing that they were of import to those who walked within its domain. Mah-Jung was wrong. They were wrong – the Dao was a gateway. It was a gateway to perpetual knowledge. He needed that knowledge. He needed it now more than ever.
He needed it so that everyone he knew and cared for weren’t committed to the flames of war again.
So while his body churned in its repair protocol, struggling to keep up with the power of the spiritual realm that could easily crush it, and his fingers gripped the stonework of his bed, he delved deeper. He delved further.
It was the only way he could win against what was coming for them all.
…
A blur of activity spread itself before his eyes. Him, looking at crates and hoes and cattle and shopfronts, while his hands worked tirelessly for weeks on end. As he did so, he noted how the faces of the villagers began to take on a different look – for every favor he did, he at least received less spittle from the people. For every cattle herd he drove and farm he tilled to increase the crop-yield of the people, he received more and more approving grunts and nods until, finally, an elder farmer actually told him ‘Thank you’.
He had turned to the man as though slapped, but quickly remembered himself and bowed to him in the style of the Eternal Dragon his Creator had instilled in him. He resisted the urge at the very core of his being – the desire to ask why the old man felt the need to thank him – a machine – for providing a service.
Such thoughts began to dominate his mind on his new visits to the surface – many without the stewardship of Doctor Janus. His commitment and strength were unmatched. His knowledge of the wider world beyond Hensha helped him communicate the benefits of crop rotation and how the people could create proper arable farmland for their beasts of burden. He liaised with the Elder after completion of every task, who begrudgingly had begun to refer to the Cog by name.
On some days, Doctor Janus would accompany him for the purspoes of observation. XJ-V understood that his exertions were a kind of test – a routine examination of his interactions with humankind and his ability to understand their needs. On many days he visited certain villagers personally to ask them what they required of him – even if it was a small deed that seemed inconsequential. Those villagers he chose were dependent on his own observations of them toiling under the sun. His analytical mind saw so clearly those people who suffered on a daily basis and could detect even the most miniscule changes in their manners that indicated they could use his assistance. He could detect their pain, and they came to appreciate his noticing.
Humans seemed to enjoy such a trivial notion as that – as someone simply noticing when they were struggling. He found it odd that their peers were not able to notice what seemed painfully obvious to the machine-man.
But on the days when he helped with the feeding of a newborn baby, and looked at how the faces of mothers changed from fear, to general anxiety and then, finally, to acceptance and appreciation of the Cog’s aid, he understood that perhaps there was a simple explanation for such ignorance: human beings noticed suffering. But some chose to do nothing about it.
That was a thought process he could not wrap his head around. One night, he made an enquiry of Janus regarding this strange phenomena when they had returned to the lab.
“You know something?” the Doctor had replied. “You just keep surprising me. Perhaps its that little Empathy-Matrix in your brain. Perhaps it’s…something else. But I doubt that. I doubt that a lot. He didn’t really care about us once. He wouldn’t care about us now…”
XJ-V faced his Creator with a puzzled look.
“Ignore me,” the Doctor said as he called the elevator to take them down into the bowels of his lair, where the jovial barks and lapping silicon tongue of XJ-I awaited them.
“I will answer your question,” the Doctor said. “With a question of my own. If two men live in a world without food, and one man suddenly discovers a fresh apple growing from a once barren tree, what will be the likely outcome?”
XJ-V thought about this for some time, mulling the question over as XJ-V licked his face without a single drop of spittle.
“This unit finds itself at a loss,” he said. “I know what answer you expect from me, Doctor. But it is not the answer I wish to give.”
The Doctor took a seat abruptly and, to XJ-V’s surprise, he put his notepad away and simply leaned forward, listening to his creation.
“Take me out of the equation,” he said. “I want the answer to be yours.”
The Cog set down his canine brother, facing his creator on his knees as he gave an answer the Doctor would never have expected:
“If this unit were the man who found the apple,” he began. “This unit would share the food with another. But this unit do not know how the food would taste. This unit do not know what it means to have sustenance. Thus, it would seem only natural that this unit should relinquish the apple to the other man. This unit believes the answer you expect is that the two humans might fight over the food until one dies. This unit understands that this is how you view humankind, Doctor. But I can not see them this way. I can not imagine that every human, given the chance, would choose murder over the love of their fellow being. I can not understand why I think this, Doctor. Perhaps you know.”
The Doctor stared at him for quite a long time, eyes barely blinking as he considered such an answer that came from something he had made. And, though XJ-V couldn’t have known it at the time, that sense of fear he felt before was starting now to become replaced by something else.
“No, XJ-V,” he said. “I don’t understand why you have given me this answer. Furthermore, I don’t understand why, towards the end of your analysis, you began to refer to yourself as ‘I’.”
The Cog reeled, immediately beginning to apologize for its brashness.
But Janus, in the face of such prostration, simply shook his old, withered locks.
“No,” he said again. “I don’t understand you at all, it seems.”
A thin smile began to play across the old man’s lips, and even with the Cog’s advanced facial recognition techniques, it could not interpret what that smile truly signified.
“That means more than you might think,” he finally said with a little shrug. “It means you’re ready.”
