9. The Magus

I'm heavier than I look, but I am not so dense I fully sink. I floated on, sinking and rising in the waves. Sharks and whales bit me and finding an acidic taste like battery acid never fully consumed me. Barnacles and oysters grew on me. I became one with them, nothing more than another piece of debris drifting in the sea. Thoughts of Eva continued to flow between my ears, but my thoughts were no more self-aware than the oysters who rode me.

Around me, the world changed, but I stayed the same, for a long, long time.

And then a voice from a distant past said, "There you are, brother."

I had washed up on shore, swathed in dead seaweed, shore flies buzzing merrily around my still-wet form. An old, unused connection fired off in my brain, letting me know the voice belonged to Schrodinger—but that didn't matter to me. I remained still; waiting for the ocean to take me back, as it did the countless other times it had spit me up.

"Are you ignoring me, brother?"

I said nothing and did nothing, as I felt Schrodinger"s booted foot roughly turn me over. I stared up into his green eyes, his blond head haloed by a perfect, blue sky, and I shut my eyes. It was far too bright. Eva crashed in waves through my head, washing away any opinion I might have on the situation.

"Oh, come on brother, don't be like this, talk to me, I'm lonely."

When I remained as I was, Schrodinger went a little way away and sat down. Day and night passed, and the seagulls were crying their first cries of the new morning, before he moved again.

"I'm sorry, brother, forgive me; this will hurt me more than it will hurt you," he said. With that, he put his hand against my chest and annihilated me with a blast of power so strong that instead of creating sound, it created silence.

I hadn't been destroyed so thoroughly for a long time. For one shattered blissful second, I was truly nothing, before the agony began as my atoms and then cells reconstructed. The oysters and barnacles, however, did not reconstruct. Without them dulling my senses, I felt everything as I had not for a long, long time.

I didn't try to stop the armaments that shattered forth from my forearms when I was finally fully formed, nor did I try to prevent my arsenal from blasting into Schrodinger. He, for his part, didn't try to—or perhaps didn't have time to—dodge. He exploded into wet, gray chunks and reassembled moments later into his tanned, humanoid form. Without hesitation, I destroyed him again. The need for destruction overwhelmed everything, even thoughts of Eva.

The second time he reassembled, he dodged my second blast and was saying, "Now that was uncalled for—" when my third blast blew his head off. A seagull swooped as if intending to take a bite off it and then, thinking better of it, dodged.

The third time he reassembled, he didn't hold still long enough for me to take aim. In a second, he was behind me, pinning me in a headlock.

"Brother," he said, his voice full of the same insane hunger that first let me know he was different from the rest of us. "Brother, I come in peace. I am only trying to help you out, and you keep killing me."

"You can't kill that which is not alive." I hadn't used my voice in so long, yet it sounded the same as it did the day I had said goodbye to Eva.

"Well. You destroyed my clothes anyway. My clothes aren't going to reassemble. I liked those clothes."

"My apologies," I said.

Schrodinger released me and I destroyed him once more. This time, I did not wait for him to reassemble. I took off running into the surf, some latent programming telling me that I had to escape.

Schrodinger caught me by my too-long hair and dragged me back onto the gray-pebbled beach. He sat on my back, pinning me, pulling my arms backwards until they broke with a resounding, painful snap, pressing my face against the rough sand.

"Destruction Number 7, do not try that again, and by that, I mean do not try escaping me," he demanded.

I lay still. Eva, I thought, Eva. I listened to the seagulls calling frantically as they circled above our heads, waiting to see if we would provide some true carnage for them to eat.

"I hate to do this to you brother, I don't want to order you to do anything, ever. But I'm so bored brother, so gods-damned bored." His voice had a plaintive whine to it, "Please don't leave me alone again. Please. I'm going to lose my god-damned mind if I have to be alone again."

"You reap what you sow," I mumbled, my mouth and nose full of gritty sand. The ache in my shoulders throbbed gentler as Schrodinger loosened his hold just enough for my bones to re-form.

"You know damn well that this isn't my fault. I'm the victim here! I didn't ask for any of this, though I've got to admit, you're a victim too," he said.

When I didn't say anything, Schrodinger punched the back of my skull, "Talk to me!"

"My, what nice weather we are having," I intoned, repeating a long unused lesson Eva had taught me about small talk.

"No, don't talk to me about the weather, actually talk to me! Be real! I've had enough simulated conversations with my companion-bot to last me a millennium. And humans are just too depressing, too transparent. I want a real conversation, a conversation where there are no rules about what we say. Don't you? Aren't you lonely?" he said.

"I think you are misunderstanding something, brother," I said. "I don't want to talk. I don't care about you or your boredom. Did you forget, brother? I am an earlier model. Unlike you, I was programmed to have no sympathy whatsoever. Or at least if they tried to program sympathy into me, they failed. All I care about is…" I stopped myself.

"All you care about is?" Schrodinger repeated, "What? Oh, my God. It's Eva, isn't it? You pathetic pooch, you're still obsessed, aren't you? I thought for sure you would be over it by now. They really screwed the pooch when they made you."

"Woof," I said, "Woof, woof." The corners of my mouth turned up in a parody of a grin, and a noise that was a parody of laughter came out of me, making my body quake with Schrodinger still on top of me and my mouth still pressed full of sand.

After a while, the laughter fragmented into sobs. I cried out like a dying animal, "Eva! Eva! Eva!" The name tasted like bone dust on my tongue, and it just kept coming.

I felt Schrodinger's fingers tap on my back. "You done?" He asked.

I bellowed in response.

A little while later, I said, as calmly as possible, "Get off me Schrodinger."

His grip loosened a bit. He said, "I go by the name Iago now. Schrodinger was my slave name."

"Okay, get off of me, Iago," I said.

"I will," he said. "But you've got to promise to hear me out. I think I've got the solution to your dilemma. But first, I have someone for you to meet."

I considered waiting him out, waiting for him to tire of pinning me down and leave on his one accord. But I realized that could take years, and I knew that after he had used my true name to order me not to escape, I could never escape unless he let me, so I gave him my promise.

"Green Eggs and Ham taught me more about the human condition than War and Peace ever could," Eva laughed. She began to speak to me, I think, as she would have spoken to a child—though I never saw her interact with a child.

Eva had long since stopped having me read Tolstoy and started reading to me: Dr. Seuss, Aesop's fables, Grimm's fairy tales. Fantastical children's stories that often had morals at the end, though I did not always (or even often) understand those morals without having them explained to me. She showed me illustrations and pointed out silliness and absurdity. She laughed, and I laughed with her; why would an old lady swallow a fly? She taught me humor. She asked me about the moral of the fox in the manger, and when I got answers wrong, she patiently corrected me.

While she still wouldn't let me touch her, Eva grew more comfortable touching me as the days passed. She even pulled my head into her lap once; she stroked my close-cropped hair, fingers like the ocean"s current.

"Some men have idiotic taste in women. Only an idiot would want to marry such a light sleeper," I said when Eva questioned me about the moral of The Princess and the Pea.

"That isn't the answer I expected," Eva laughed. "You're becoming so much more human."

"You get to sleep easily, don't you, Eva?" I said.

Her voice rose an octave, "How did you know that?"

"You've fallen asleep when you had me read by myself," I said.

"Oh, right. Whoops."

"What is sleep like?" Desire to know what Eva knew, to experience what Eva experienced had grown out of my desire to simply be near her.

Eva blinked at me, "Oh right, I guess you guys don't sleep. Sleep, sleep is like… I don't really know how to describe sleep itself. I guess you can say it is like a lapse in awareness. Like you blink and suddenly you feel refreshed and groggy, and time has passed." She paused, "All humans need to dream or else they will eventually die, and some humans remember their dreams, but I'm not one of them. I never remember my dreams. If you are curious about dreams, you'll have to ask someone else."

"I'm not curious about dreams," I said. If Eva didn't dream, they were of no interest to me.

"You know, you're getting to the point where I am not sure how much of your bluntness is due to you being a robot, and how much of it is actually part of a personality," Eva said.

I shrugged. I liked shrugging. I liked how my shrugs made Eva purse her lips.

Eva was opening her mouth to respond, but I never heard what she was going to say because just then, her cellwatch rang. The moment she answered, a frantic male voice on the other end said, "Eva! Suite three-thousand! Number 11 is melting down! It's got Cohen! We need?—"

"I'm on my way!" Eva didn't bother to hang up her cellwatch as she bolted for the door and down the hall. I ran one step behind her, unwilling to leave her side. She didn't notice me until we were in the elevator and dropping down, after she stopped frantically pushing the button to get to the basement floor.

Behind the sounds of her panting, the jazzy elevator music, and the faint screaming still coming from her cellwatch, there was a stillness as she met my eyes.

"You followed me," she said.

"Yes," I said. "I did."

I could smell her sweat. I wanted to lick it from her glistening skin.

She turned towards the lit-up red numbers that indicated which floor we were passing, 14, 12, 11, 10… She glanced at me and then turned back towards the numbers, 5, 4, 3… Without thinking, I put my arms on either side of her, caging her between me and the elevator doors without touching her. She didn't acknowledge me as I dipped my head down and inhaled her scent so deeply, I almost cracked my lungs. Her scent filled me, and the only thing that made me exhale was the prospect of breathing her in anew.

The elevator doors opened too soon, and she took off running down the hall again, with me after her. Soon enough, the faint sound of screaming from her cellwatch became an echo of real screaming that could be heard down the long white hall, louder and louder the closer we got, until we were behind a crowd of scientists looking into a padded room, that must have had soundproof walls because otherwise we would have heard the screaming reverberating all the way from the elevator.

Even with just the door to the room open and the walls hugging in the rest of the sound, it was hideously loud. Wailing, howling like a dying coyote. I could easily see over the heads of the scientists and see that it wasn't a coyote making the noise, but for a moment, the noise of him distracted me from the form of him, and I did not understand immediately that he was a Destruction, like me.

I hadn't known we were capable of making such a noise. I hadn't known we were capable of crying either. Our bodies can suck water from the air around us for our bodily functions, and his body had clearly sucked much moisture out of the parched air to create the obscene streams of artificial tears soaking his face.

I wondered if he was displaying true emotion. None of the other Destructions, whom I had spent every night of my existence with in silence, had ever displayed even the briefest flicker of emotion.

I looked at Eva, trying to see if her reaction would provide some sort of clue to why this Destruction seemed so emotional. He kept sobbing, "Make it stop, make it stop," as he rocked, wet and naked, in that soundproof room.

The metallic smell of blood permeated the air, and I noticed thatwithin an arm's reach of the sobbing Destruction, there lay a human female with her arm broken so badly that several inches of white bone could be seen stabbing through the material of her green button-down shirt, which was turning into a darker, browner, green as it soaked up the blood seeping from the wound. In stark contrast to the Destruction, the human only softly panted, the sweat on her forehead the only real sign she was in pain.

I looked to Eva to see if she wanted me to do anything, but she was already weaving through the crowd, walking towards the panting human. The Destruction looked up at her and screamed, "Kill me, kill me, kill me!"

I watched with the crowd, wondering what Eva would do next. On the surface, she looked composed, but the smell of her fear was almost physical in that dry air. I could easily distinguish her fear scent even when other terrified humans surrounded us. Their fear smelled more alkaline, less enticing—though their fear too was enough to make a part of me itch.

Eva spoke softly to the Destruction, "Easy now, easy now, I'm just going to take Jenice away, we aren't going to hurt you."

"You're already hurting me!" the Destruction wailed, "Go away, go away!"

Eva's heart rate, already racing, sped up.

"Eva, that's enough, come back, you don't have to do this, we'll figure something else out," a man said from the crowd, to murmurs of assent.

"I've got this handled," the injured woman said.

But Eva didn't turn back, she took another small step forward. "I'm not hurting you. I'm not going to hurt you. You've got nothing to be afraid?—"

A fresh round of screams cut off her words. Eva stood frozen until the words died down into whimpers and took another step forward. She froze again when the Destruction shakily rose to his feet, moving for all the world like an unsteady human. Slowly, he rose, until he was standing with his posture slouched and protective. He wiped a forearm across his face, smearing the artificial tears, and lunged.

My body acted before my neural network got the message to my brain. If my brain had had the chance to think first and then act, I might have done something differently. I may even have let Eva die. But my body didn't let Eva die, it intersected the Destruction and Eva, so that his blow landed on my chest. It hurt me, but it would have destroyed Eva.

I returned his blow with one of my own, right to the middle of his face, then I kicked him. The need for destruction swirled up inside me, a violent hurricane, the water of my restraint swirling down a drain. I wanted to release my arsenal upon him, to explode, but my instincts warned me that Eva would be in danger of a blast reverberating in such an enclosed space. It hurt. Restraining the violence hurt me. The pressure inside me is like a gas can in a fire, volatile energy with nowhere to escape to. The pain of it blinded me, forcing my tears down my own face.

I tackled him. I was on top of him, punching, kicking, slamming, crushing, biting. Desperately trying to release at least a fraction of my violence on the being that would dare attempt to hurt my sun, my Eva.

The Destruction, for his part, didn't fight back. He had gone placid with my first punch to his face, and his blank expression turned from surprise to mirth as I punched him again and again, soon he was laughing. "You're like me!" he said. "Like me!"

I broke his jaw, momentarily silencing him, breaking his bones again and again as they reassembled again and again. My fists were wet with his acidic radioactive plasma, and my own tears as they fell onto his distorted, laughing face. So that is what our blood looks like and smells like, a part of me thought: gray, ugly, nothing like the beautiful scarlet blood of the human that bejeweled the floor. Noises like a dying animal deafened me, noises that were coming from my own throat.

"Destruction Number 7, pin him down by his arms," Eva's words, spoken softly, sliced through the pain and violence.

I did as she said. I held him down, breaking his arms in my grip. I met his eyes and saw dilated green irises in an inhumanly symmetrical face. "You're the same as me," he whispered.

"I'm not," I said. I don't know what prompted me to say it; we were both Destructions, created for the same purpose, but all the same, I did not like him thinking we were similar.

I felt Eva kneel beside us. I wanted to tell her to stay away and let me destroy him, but I said nothing.

"Destruction Number 11," she carefully enunciated, "calm down, do not use violence in any way, shape or form to any human in this building."

"You don't think we tried that already?" a male scientist said from the doorway. "He's completely broken. He needs to be put down."

There were murmurs of agreement and regret from the other scientists.

"All that work for nothing."

"All that money down the drain."

The Destruction called out to them quite calmly, "And how, pray tell, are you going to kill me?"