Genesis

The bar was a dusty old shit-hole in a place nobody ever wanted to be. A tangerine light slanting through musty wooden windows played over the millions of particles which filled the room. Otis regarded them and their meaningless play, reminded of words once spoken to him by a woman now dead for millennia. She’d been an artist. All she saw was light and color and it had always been enough for her. Otis no longer had a heart but the traditional feeling of pain could still be felt there. But her lesson remained after all this time. There is beauty everywhere if you take the time to see it. He’d tried. Good goddamn had he tried.

But time is a tricky thing. The last of his ice had melted. The whiskey was warm, its touch electric and disgusting. The oily glass was difficult to hold with his carbon fiber fingertips. They were suited more for holding the grips of high caliber weapons. The liquid poured over his synthetic tongue. The liquids were carried through a series of filters which broke down the molecules into component parts which were carried away by repurposed viruses from valves along the segmented silicone tube. The molecules were stored for later use. The remaining water was cycled into his coolant fluids.

The locals had grown accustomed to this 6 foot tall monster who had come to live among them. They knew that he offered them some kind of security in a most insecure world, but his habits proved quite vexing to their limited, single life spanned minds. For all they knew he was only machine, and he could barely argue the opposite against them. They didn’t know why this machine drank or sat silently among them in their one refuge. He didn’t know either. Truth be told, nobody knew anything about why they were either here now, or still here, on this miserable and long forgotten planet called Earth.

Most couldn’t afford to leave. Their ancestors had been left here by the space farers some 8,500 years ago and since had toiled on a bare planet, reaping a bitter harvest of 2,000 years of plunder, when humans were the most awful species that had ever existed. Others, like Otis, couldn’t afford to leave for much different reasons. Otis and a few others in this very bar had fled a military industrial complex which simply didn’t allow flight. Warriors were born and bred for that purpose. They were never to come in contact with the decent folk of the stars. Theirs was a purpose so terrible it could destroy the entire narrative that modern society had built itself upon. So those that left were doing so at the very real threat of extermination by exterminators who had been genetically bred to excel at their task. They were often hideously scarred by implants of all sorts. Most had lost some if not all of their limbs. In a time when only the brain really mattered soldiers had a much, much longer life expectancy. All were completely without the ability to socialize on normal worlds. Realm worlds. They came out here to the origin star to die alone and the military usually afforded them that right. For 3000 years humans had expanded so far from Earth that it had become an irrelevant myth that nobody really cared much to hear. This made it the perfect place to get lost.

Few had the unique ability to see it as Otis did. With memories of the days before the space farers left. For Otis the ghosts were laid bare in his perfect, digitized memory. The buildings, the cars, the movies, the drugs. The people. The last real people. His brain again synthesized feelings of a heart that was not there as he remembered once again that he was truly the last “real” human. Or at least that is why he had been brought back so long ago now.

Lost in these thoughts Otis had failed to notice the figure approaching from his rear. Sensors were trying to alert him but when he was really remembering something he was mostly gone to the world around him. The hand on his shoulder snapped him right back into this terrible world, with its relentless realism. His head snapped around in an instant, requiring the activation of no less than 60 points of articulation and causing the fans on his exhaust ports to whir with a tiresome whine for but a moment. The reticule in his optical sensors darted about this intruder and listed off key features through a sub-vocalization in his mind. Otis needed no prodding and was pleased to find that his pistol had already lined itself with what passed for eyes on this embarrassment to robot-kind which now stood before him.

The intruder was also a machine, and as far as Otis knew it was all machine. Its whole design had been from a time which never existed which paid homage to the tin can robots of old pulp movies and books. Its torso was a cylinder with archaic dials and various readouts externally wired into one another. Its upper limbs were segmented snakes ending in 4 pointed clamps. His head sported two mismatched circular eyes with a lighted display for a mouth. One bent antennae reached at first towards the sky but then cut once to the robots left and then finally again to its right. This antennae ended in a ball. All of the intruders exterior was rusted. He creaked audibly standing before him now.

“What?” Otis demanded haughtily in a voice that never fully managed to capture his strange soft tenor voice of his human body, pistol leveled at the rightmost eye. Those misshapen patrons who had lived here all their lives had long since fled. The few who had come from the military eyed the escalating situation with cold fixation, probably happy for something to break up this prison sentence.

“English. Roger. I need your help, Otis. You are the only one who will still know my name. I am the ones who broke humans free from the worst power the universe has ever known. I am the one who brought the genetic information for man here to Earth. I seeded this very dirt with you. I built you what your people called Eden yet you forgot it all. You forgot who truly saved you and from whom we had all fled. Your people, humans, they are about to find God, and I assure you they will not survive the encounter. ” The robot had spoken fluently, as if from a human mouth. Otis’ synthetic face expressed the same look he imagined he often saw in others. Doubt that what stood before him was truly human in a machine’s body.

“Yeah well who the fuck is that? None of what you said really jives with my memories.”

“My name is Lucifer, and though I have been much abused by your people’s literary history, I assure you I am the true savior of humanity, and I believe with your help I can still manage to save them, but we have to leave right now”

“This is…” Otis began to balk.

“Right now.” The robot insisted.

“Look I’m a wanted man out there.” Otis hoped that the genuine anxiety he felt about his political situation hadn’t reflected in his eyes. Assuming this robot could read cyborg eyes.

“Yes quite. You are a wanted man here as well. If you think you can take one of the most important projects of modern military science and run with it you’re completely insane. I came here to save you. They’ll be here any minute and we need to go.”

Centuries of hard fought combat had honed Otis’ instincts into his strongest weapon. They plead from within him to take this offer, to run. In fact he suddenly felt the full weight of the peril he was in. What a fool he’d been, truly. To think that he could take the mold for all their killers and just return to Earth with it as if it were his toy that he were huffily taking home. Or course not. They’d put so much into developing him and his peers. The abstract power of his new body made him blind to the reality that he was owned property pure and simple.

Otis looked at this intrusive savior robot and nodded. It’d been agreed. He would accept any help in a situation he had to once again admit he had no real control over.