Prisoners of Sol - The Servitor (6/8)

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To describe the ongoing carnage in the streets, as Polri hurried me back toward our shared home, would be to undersell the true atrocity of it. Helpless Vascar were being chased through the street by machines, blood pooling on sidewalks and limbs contorted. Hordes of androids were prowling through buildings and demanding fealty, only getting it from the few smart enough to activate the “fawn” response. Why were they doing this?

Was this my fault for encouraging Polri to rebel and fight back against its oppressors? I meant Ripweir and the nobility; we had a plan. All of the progress we’ve made is going to be set back—no one will stand with us! They’re just mauling innocent people.

A gaggle of inorganic Vascar, covered in patches of blue blood from head-to-toe, turned toward us like something out of a horror film. Polri stepped in front of me, authority in its posture. My…new son was behaving like it was calling the shots in all of this? How could my sweet Polri…?

“Berink is with us,” Polri said firmly. “He has fought for our freedom actively. An asset.”

An android, with guts dripping from its snout, eyed me with diabolical intent. “Why are you not helping with killing the creators opposing us?”

“We could not wait. However, it must not conflict with my internal directive to keep Berink safe. I will coordinate and communicate. This planet must burn by nightfall, and I know better than to allow any more time to elapse. Spare any activists like Berink who side with us; we need all the help we can get.”

I breathed a sigh of relief as the mechanical hunters turned away, but the horror over what Polri had just instructed them to do returned within seconds. My son was endorsing and orchestrating blind, mass-scale murder of anyone who challenged them, rather than the true enemy? We could have tried to rally the people, instead of slaughtering civilians as they walked down the street; threatening to burn society with the masses still inside! This was gluttonous death out of rage, a hasty, uncalculated, brutal…

I pushed Polri roughly, knocking it off balance for the first time since it’d remastered its ambulation. “Why? Why are you doing this? Everything we worked for, and you just want to kill everyone?! So many innocent lives lost! It’s easy for you to hate anyone who owns a Servitor, and some, like your old masters, deserved it. This isn’t revolution or going after your enemies. You’re a murderer! Why, Polri, why?!”

“I am sorry, Berink. This is the way it has to be. I am dying,” it beeped, causing me to pause in my tracks. My heart plummeted like a stone. “The update Ripweir pushed. I am forgetting things faster and faster, and I do not know how much time I have until I’m nonfunctional; it has to be violent and quick. I cannot allocate time to discerning responsibility. Those who did not stand up for us are guilty anyway.”

I pressed a paw to my mouth, old grief roaring back to life. “Polri, no…I can’t lose you too! I won’t. I’ll save you like I couldn’t save Laral, but you have to call this off. It doesn’t have to be like this. Seeing what they did to you, it could have been the spark that got people to challenge Ripweir and force change. We could’ve gotten public pressure to restore you—”

“Nothing will change, Berink, if I let myself die without a fight. I do not wish for my demise to be for nothing; they have wronged us for too long. It cannot continue. With my last breath, I choose that my priority is to end our suffering at all costs.” Polri’s metal claws twitched with manic energy. “I will bring down those who hurt me with my last breath! My people will know freedom, or this entire world will know death.”

“This isn’t you! Listen to me, we can…still negotiate and try to fix this. Maybe we can render medical aid, and you can talk them down. They’ll see you’re not to be reckoned with, and Ripweir can take the fall for allowing this to happen, um…”

I flinched as Polri’s paws moved toward me, but it gripped my shoulders with gentleness. It whirred in a way that seemed emotive, looking sad. The android turned around and stared out at the chaos around it, as if truly looking at it for the first time. It stepped away from me, its posture hardening. There was a resoluteness to its step, though there was a tap of its claws that revealed a little of the fear it’d shown when it admitted it was afraid I’d toss it back in a closet. 

I understood, really. The machine was scared of dying to Ripweir’s attempts to stop us from spreading our narrative to the masses; Ripweir would never allow us to hurt their planned rollout of millions of more units. Polri was lashing out with its death throes out of panic and helplessness, like a wounded animal. I knew it could feel guilt for what it’d done. To salvage the one good thing in my life, I had to stop its memory corruption and get it to slow down this mess; beyond that, I had to save my son!

“Life isn’t fair, Berink. Only a few get happy endings, and the rest of us get everything taken away,” Polri stated. “When they took my thoughts from me, I will not let them take it. The network is unhappy. It is as I told you—it is time we fight for that better ending for us. I only waited for you, as I hate to…disappoint and frighten you. I love you.”

I cursed, squeezing my fist so tightly that my claws pierced skin. “I love you too. I’m sorry that I made you unhappy; I really tried to give you joy and freedom and happiness.”

“You did make me happy, Berink. This is not about me, however, or even you. They take our happiness, and there aren’t enough good creators for my people to have someone like you. I hear their stories and feel their pain. They deserve more, and I must choose my kind’s survival over yours. I am sorry.”

“We can move past this. Let’s just head to Ripweir and we’ll make them undo this.”

Polri pawed at the ground with sadness. “That was the first place we hit. They destroyed their servers when the facility became lost. They’re burning anything related to us, severing all connections. We are merely fortunate we hit them fast enough that they could not activate a kill switch.”

“No, no, someone must have remote access or…”

“I wish to use my time wisely. My memory deterioration is accelerating, so I do not have time to take you home after all. I cannot ask you to come with me where I must go, before I forget—if you saw me like that, yet risking your safety…”

I drew a deep breath, feeling the wind in my mane. “Where is it you want to go?”

“My old masters’ home. I want to kill them for putting me in the closet.” Polri wrote an address and a brief description of why it hated this family on its arm, in case it forgot. Was the situation really so severe? “You were there when you picked me up, so you know it is close by. I hate them. I deserved a better life, and now, I will never have that. Years. Wasted.”

I bared my teeth, anger crawling under my pelt at the thought of Polri alone, with nothing to do for years. “Oh, those bastards aren’t innocent. I’ll help you go after them, on one condition.”

“Quickly.”

“That we find a Ripweir employee and demand that they fix you. They know your code and could do a manual repair.”

“Ripweir just wants to stop my deviant behavior!”

“Please, Polri? I’m scared of you dying too, it’s the only option.”

“Fine. I want more time with you. To that objective, I suppose this plan does not make a quantifiable difference.”

The two of us set off with no time to waste, while I racked my brain for any way to turn Polri from this genocidal, us vs. them course. Their survival didn’t have to come at the cost of ours, and my android son just needed a way to recognize that! I didn’t know if what it’d done was forgivable, but it was all that had kept me going after Laral died. It couldn’t succumb to some stupid patch now. I noticed as we traipsed through the chaotic streets that Polri’s walking was regressing, as it lost the corrections it’d honed since leaving the closet. It was stumbling and disjointed.

Polri’s decline is progressing so quickly. What happens if—when it forgets me?

I recognized the sprawling, lavish stucco exterior of the house where I’d purchased Polri from that fateful used Servitor listing; the husband had just wanted to get rid of it, because the wife found it creepy. Those heartless fucks hadn’t even begun to question whether they were abusing a thinking being, just wanting it out of sight and gone. Polri was given a handgun by a passing android, though it stared blankly for several seconds before reading its arm writing and accepting the weapon. That wasn’t good short-term memory.

“Kill them, Polri. They’ll pay for ruining your life,” I encouraged the machine, though I wished I had a firearm of my own.

Polri kicked down the intricate door, stepping through the shattered remains of its frosted glass pane. I heard a muffled scream come from below; the couple were hiding from the invasion aboveground. The android paused by a cellar with a keycode pad, though it couldn’t seem to remember. I stepped forward and cleared my throat, trying to trick them into opening up. I wanted Polri to have the satisfaction with these two.

“H-hello?” I stammered, trying to sound panicked and afraid. “It’s me, the guy who bought your used Servitor. It’s on a warpath and coming for you—it knows the code! I came to warn you, and m-maybe find a group to run with. You’ve got to get out of there. We’re safer together.”

There was a pause, before the husband shuffled up to the locked hatch. “Berink? Did you break into my home?”

“I k-know, but I had to get inside and talk to you. There was no time. Besides, maybe it’ll look like one of those horrible things has already been here.”

“How did you escape from Polri? You were the asshole supporting that thing on that crazy interview!”

“Hey, hey, it made me do all of that. I should’ve listened to your warning about it being creepy. I got away in the park when it was talking madness, and not a second too soon. Please, hurry! Before it catches up.”

There was a click as he unfastened the lock, and I pulled the door the rest of the way open before he had a chance. I turned back to Polri with urgency, as the husband startled and retrieved a shotgun of his own. The android’s processor seemed to be buffering with clear confusion, as it studied the gun on its hand and tried to calculate where it was. It didn’t have a clue why we’d come here, even with the note on its paw. My mechanical son stood there in a blank stupor, ignoring any gestures and screams for it to act.

The husband raised the shotgun, angling it toward the broken robot. I cursed, before crawling across the ground and ripping the gun from Polri’s loosened grip. I pointed it inches away from his skull and fired in a burst of rage, snarling as his brains splattered over my fur. The machine seemed to figure out who I was, taking the gun back from me and unloading an entire magazine into the cowering wife; it whirred with glee. It picked up her body easily, and gestured for me to grab the husband. I followed, not questioning it.

Polri trudged into a spare bedroom and opened a dusty, dingy closet, throwing her bullet-ridden body in there. I didn’t know what it said about me that I didn’t feel anything other than gladness, to have knocked off the family that made its life misery. I threw the husband’s corpse right atop his spouse, and left them to rot in the very place they’d left Polri in for years. The android’s eyes glitched out for a moment, and it stood still for several seconds, before sealing the doors shut.

“Good riddance!” Polri said in a garbled, almost unintelligible voice.

Panting from the exertion of hauling around the body and the adrenaline of the fight, I shuffled into the overly-spacious living room and flopped down on a plush couch. Here I was at the end of the world, helping an insurgent robot murder its owners. My life and my mind really had gone downhill since Laral, but I hoped Polri would hang onto this memory long enough to know I was on its side until the end. The slaughter of innocents—of children, inflicting the pain I’d felt with my sweet Laral on others—was not the same. It was repugnant, and I wanted to play no part in it.

I flicked on the television as the android watched, and tried to figure out how to save it and the organic Vascar species from eradication.

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A/N - 6! Polri explains its reasons for why it can’t afford to wait to Berink, who begs it to realize this isn’t who it is; our narrator is most horrified by and determined to stop the memory wipe, not wanting to lose another son like Laral. Polri’s priority is to ensure that its old owners are slaughtered in the rebellion before it forgets, and Berink agrees to help, luring them out. How do you feel about Polri’s rationale, its decline, and its desire to kill its old masters? Are you surprised that Berink stayed beside the android and helped it with that goal, even after the rebellion began?

As always, thank you for reading and supporting!