Work Text:
Interphase
“Working late again?”
The Great Being tightened his grip at the sudden noise and the tiny brain-crystal exploded in his forceps. He sighed and turned around, pain pounding behind his eyes from peering too long into the microglass.
Angonce leaned against the doorframe, a knowing look in his eyes.
“I lost track of time.”
Angonce looked the mess of armor and twisted wires on the exam table up and down.
“A drone? By hand? It’s thanks to you we have fabricators for those now.”
“Just making sure I don’t lose my touch.”
Angonce stepped closer and lowered his voice.
“At least work on something useful. Our timeline for the Prototype isn’t getting any longer.” Angonce said. “... That is, if you’re going to insist on avoiding Garan…”
The Great Being rubbed his dry eyes.
“It’s better for us both when I’m not around… No chance I say something stupid.”
Angonce’s eyes flashed with concern.
“Go home. Get some rest. He misses you. Not that I’m getting involved.”
“You talked to him?”
“Not that I’m getting involved,” Angonce called over his shoulder as he vanished down the hall.
The Great Being sighed in relief as quiet filled the lab again. The lab was his only sanctum these days, his deliverance from the constant noise. Household chores he hadn’t done, relatives they hadn’t visited in ages, books Garan had recommended months ago that he still hadn’t read…
It was enough to drive anyone mad. It hurt to think of things so small, to make his brain move that slowly, like a Thornatus engine stuck in low gear but roaring and shuddering as it struggled to make the jump to the next one.
He selected another brain-crystal from the drying rack and set it below the glass. Then, he carefully positioned the barrel of his command probe up against the crystal. He tapped a few commands on the input screen, and sat back to watch the electricity etch channels through the crystal, the neural pathways that would define the drone’s existence.
It was the standard programming for a tunneler. Hoist load. Dig through earth. Deposit load. Nothing fancy.
Once it was done, he cradled the crystal in his hands, and crossed over to the bench where the components of his drone were sitting. He had the trunk and head connected and mostly wired properly. He’d do the limbs later. If his work on the crystal hadn’t taken, then there would be no point in doing those anyway.
He pushed the drone’s head forward to expose the brainstalk, and his fingers searched for the seam.
“What if we named you Garan?” he joked. He spoke to his creations sometimes, while he worked on them. It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean they were alive. He spoke to his less anthropomorphic inventions just the same.
“You’d never scream at me for something irrelevant, would you?” he continued, as he found the seam and popped the brainstalk open. “Never give me grief for something I did decades ago. Never expect me to know what you’re feeling without telling me… Scratch that, you just wouldn’t bother with feelings in the first place, would you?”
He reached within the brainstalk, and felt for the gap in the stack. When his fingers found it, he slipped the delicate crystal inside until it clicked, completing the circuit.
The drone immediately powered up, its maskless head snapping to attention.
“Greetings, Great Being,” it said with the soulless, programmed cheer of something that had no idea whether it was issuing curses or benedictions. “How may I be of–”
He dislodged the brainstalk just enough to break the connection, and the unit powered down, its head lolling suddenly to one side.
“The unit functions within established parameters,” he noted to himself.
He packed up his case, and headed to the door. There was nothing more to do here tonight. Wiring the limbs would take more fine motor control than he was capable of right now in his exhausted state.
Soon, he would be back home.
With Garan.
Well, Angonce had mentioned the new Prototype. Perhaps he could stop by the worksite for just long enough to ensure the Av-drones weren’t making a mess of things. They should be working on the cervical support struts now, if estimates of their capacity were accurate.
It would be unfortunate if some emergency were to happen there that would require him to stay until dawn, at which point he would have to go straight back to the office.
Truly unfortunate.
Prophase
“Unit, stand up.”
It did as it was told.
“Unit, sit down.”
It did that just as eagerly.
“Stand up.”
Compliance.
“Sit down.”
Compliance.
Tedium.
He slumped down in his chair and stretched his little muscles. He yawned, a habit carried over from his old body of flesh. He knew better than anyone that the exhaustion-oxygenation reflex had not been programmed into the drones.
“Unit, walk to the balcony and stand on the railing,” he said, his voice cold and dead.
The tunneler proudly walked the length of the facility, stepped out onto the veranda and hopped up on the railing. Beyond was an endless, roiling sea. This islet was perfect for when he grew tired of naturalistic observation and wanted to pull a subject aside for more focused experimentation without the possibility of being disturbed.
He’d learned frustratingly little from it all.
It had seemed like such a good idea at the time, to abandon his old life, to live in the robot among creatures who would never stand up to him, never cast him aside, never irrationally blame him for things that were not his fault. Simple creatures. Yeses and nos, the world working in complete harmony towards one goal, as it should have been back home.
As with most things, the truth hadn't quite lived up to the vision.
He’d have reversed course, if he could have. He never did that. But he’d have gone to the others with his tail tucked between his legs and admitted he was wrong, grievously wrong when he had left.
But that door was no longer available to him. The hatches were sealed. The robot was in flight. That could mean only one thing.
There was no home to return to.
“Unit, throw yourself from the…”
He shut his mouth and groaned in frustration. The momentary pleasure of watching it tumble through the air and break itself on the rocks beside its hundreds of predecessors wasn’t worth the time and effort he’d have to invest in identifying a new test subject.
Unfair. Even the basest of pleasures had been taken away from him.
“Unit, come here.”
It clambered down from the balcony and padded over to him with measured steps, showing no hint of relief at its reprieve from termination.
“Unit, who is the wisest of all Great Beings?”
“You are, Great Being,” its dull voice droned.
“Unit, who is the best builder among the Great Beings?”
“You are, Great Being.”
“And Unit, who is the most handsome Great Being?”
“You–”
“– are, Great Being,” he finished in mocking chorus. He’d heard every empty praise more times than he could count.
“I am with you when you take your first step, and again when you take your last,” he said. “All will know me for a time, but I can never be shared. What am I?”
The unit looked up at the ceiling, and he could practically hear the relays clicking in its head as it tried to interpret the words. What’s next, smoke wafting from its eyeholes? Tiresome.
“Query unclear, Great Being,” it said. “May you please rephrase?”
His head drooped, his eyes fluttered closed as loss gnawed at him. Garan had been the one to tell him that riddle. They’d gone back and forth like that for hours, in the old days. Before everything had gone wrong. It was better than flirting. It was flirting.
He shuddered, looking away from the cold, unyielding gaze of the unit before him. They’d driven each other up the wall in the end, he and Garan had.
What he wouldn’t give to feel that way again. He would cut off his own leg to be as angry at something again as Garan had always made him. He would kill to cry again, the pathetic, desperate way that Garan had made him cry.
It had been millennia since he felt like someone had reached inside him and torn all of his guts out. There was nothing in this tidy toybox he’d imprisoned himself in worth feeling that way about.
What an imbecile he had been to run away from that feeling. A scared, clueless imbecile.
“Unit, remove your Kanohi,” the words came tumbling out of his mouth before he realized he had spoken. It complied immediately, of course, revealing a slate-grey face and dead eyes.
“Turn around,” he continued, his mouth dry, the world spinning around him.
The unit turned, exposing its pulsing golden brainstalk. He reached out with a trembling hand and caressed the glowing crystal.
He thought of Garan’s laugh, the way he would unconsciously reach out and touch his leg to emphasize a point, the way he sprinted outside barefoot whenever it rained to feel the drops on his face…
Some things couldn’t be imitated, he was certain. But he had to try.
With a soft click the brainstalk popped loose and fell into his hands. The unit’s head dropped, chin against its neck. He carried the brainstalk over to his laboratory and attached it to his command probe.
He knew exactly what to do. A few quick jolts in the right places. He’d just have to get the pathways started. The unit’s adaptive learning programming would do the rest. Over years, centuries, perhaps, but the gaps would fill in.
He dialed his microglass in closer to inspect the delicate little capillaries he had made in the crystal. Satisfied, he grabbed the brainstalk and returned to the unit.
He snapped it back into place in the drone’s head, and waited with bated breath for the startup sequence to finish.
One final touch. He remembered what had made him alive, truly alive for the first time, after years of going through the motions, query and response, input and output, task and completion.
He removed his own Kanohi and pressed a kiss to the lips of the new being he had made.
The Matoran’s eyes flickered on and he lifted his head again. He swiveled his neck slowly to look around the room, the awe of a newborn child in his expression, jaw hanging open.
“Who… Are you?” asked the new creature, its voice uncertain, unpracticed in its new, less structured cadence.
He laughed a long, wounded laugh, tears prickling at the corner of his eyes.
“Me? I… I made you.”
“And who am… I?” The Matoran smiled in delight at something so simple as a pronoun. “I… I, I, I!”
He took the jet black Kanohi from the Matoran’s hands and stared into its empty eyes. It dawned on him then. He remembered this unit.
He placed the mask back on the Matoran’s face, but left a hand on it, caressing every last curve and ridge that he had hammered out with painstaking care.
He had styled this Kanohi after Garan’s face. That pattern of spots on his forehead, the shape of his eyes, the kind, round mouth…
Ru Ru. Guide through the darkness.
“Garan,” he told the Matoran. “You are Garan.”
“Garan,” Garan said.
Of course, years down the line, his choice would have consequences he could never have foreseen. The imitative and adaptive ability he had programmed into the Matoran would cause all who beheld Garan to begin to copy him — and begin to make those same pathways in their minds even without his direct interference! The change he had made would spread across the population like a disease, leaving him baffled and unsure.
But for now, he sobbed, clinging to Garan as tightly as he could.
“Yes… You’re Garan. You’re mine… You’re Garan.”
Metaphase
The boat was full of pitiful things. They sat curled up on the benches, moaning and rocking in place, or lay sprawled out in the aisles. Misery and desperation hung heavy in the air of the passenger hold.
Broken tools, in need of repair, so they wouldn’t slow down the work. That had been the idea, hadn’t it? When he had built their soon-to-be captor?
The being that some called the Matoran Velika wove between them, trying to walk hunched over in imitation of their agonized postures. Karzahni would not care that he was undamaged, but it would do him no favors to make the Matoran suspicious. He still struggled to get the mannerisms, the microexpressions of a biomechanical body all right.
He found an empty seat beside a porthole and claimed it. He stared out through the fog at the island that he had called home for thousands of years.
A horn sounded, and the boat lurched beneath them and was on its way. A distressed clamor rose up from the Matoran. It was sinking in now, that there would be no reprieve at the last moment. This was the point when many would jump overboard and try to swim back to shore, despite their damaged states. The ones who weren’t pulled back up would be the lucky ones.
He leaned up against the filthy wall and tried to rest his eyes. Moments later, there was an obnoxious prodding at his elbow.
His eyes flicked open and he beheld his neighbor, a big dumb grin frozen on her face by terror. One of the Vo, the power-couriers. Heremus’ work, mostly, though they’d all contributed to each design.
This one’s right side had mostly been stripped of its armor, and her right eye was missing too.
“We just pushed off,” she said.
Truly, Heremus had blessed this one with an extra measure of intelligence.
“Great Spirit, it’s actually happening,” she whimpered, her hands trembling. “Do you think there’s really no sun there? Tibi said she heard there’s no sun… And statues that scream. Oh… Mata Nui, preserve us.”
She grabbed his hand, and he stiffened at the sudden contact. He didn’t jerk his hand loose, though he could have, considering how weak her damaged limb was. He didn’t squeeze back either, letting his hand hang in her grasp like a dead fish.
“We’ve got to stick together, you and me,” she said. “The sane ones.”
She silently mouthed the word “sane,” as if any of the others were in a state to take offense.
“I don’t trust these others,” she said, her lone eye scanning the boat. “Oh, sorry. My name’s Nerra. I’m from the Valley.”
Nerra formed her other hand into a fist and extended it towards him. He stared blankly at it until he remembered the significance of the gesture. Hesitantly, he touched his fist to hers.
“Turaga Halpa sent me,” she said. “Who sent you?”
“No one,” he said. “I chose to come.”
Nerra laughed, slapping her skeletal knee.
“Good one! No, seriously, you look like you’re in decent shape. What’s wrong with you?”
It was his turn to laugh, a dry, mirthless sound.
“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
Nerra watched him with her one-eyed gaze for a few moments before realizing he would say no more. Asymmetry. Disgusting.
“Me, I got caught in a kane-ra stampede,” Nerra began to chatter with no provocation. “I told Aoula, ‘double check the latch.’ ‘The latch on that gate sticks sometimes,’ I said. See, when it sticks like that, all it takes is one charge from a kane-ra to knock it loose and the gate swings wide open. But she didn’t listen. There’s just no helping som–”
“Hard reset, all systems.”
The unit that had once called itself Nerra instantly straightened in its seat, its body rigid as a statue, its lone eye unblinking.
“Hard reset complete. This unit awaits your command, Great Being,” it said in a soft monotone.
Then, it was silent. He leaned back against the wall and shut his eyes. It was better for them both this way. Nerra would feel no fear or pain in the new, awful home she was bound for. And he could get some rest without the incessant blabbering.
He didn’t exactly regret what he had done to these beings. Though he found he appreciated Nerra’s company much more now that his “improvements” had been removed.
As the boat sped towards Karzahni, his mind drifted back towards more unpleasant territory. He clenched his jaw as the same refrain that had driven him this far down his unthinkable path echoed in his ears.
How dare they take him away from me?
There had been a fire, apparently, while he was communing with his agents on Bara Magna. Garan had run back into the hut to save one of his brothers, because that was Garan.
A few little burns on his arm and head? Preposterous. He’d been working just as fast as before. It would have been much easier if Garan had died. Extricating a Matoran from the satellite would have been a simple task for him. But no, instead, he was headed for a world of hurt. Of his own volition, of course.
Anything for my Garan. Mine. I didn’t build you with my own hands to lose you now.
He would find Garan on Karzahni and get him out of that wretched place, no matter the cost to this strange little body of his. And one day, he would make Karzahni pay for daring to touch what belonged to him.
A great builder could make great tools, but not other great builders. It was a lesson he had learned the hard way.
He would teach Karzahni the distinction between a builder and a great builder. He would demonstrate at length what a great builder could do to the mad ruler’s body.
But, that would come later.
I’ll be with you soon, Garan.
Anaphase
The unit he had encountered on the boat – he had already forgotten its name – had been right. There was no sun in Karzahni. There were statues that screamed.
There were all manner of other unpleasant things too. Things he tried not to let linger in his mind as he made his way across the barren island.
Suffice it to say that he would have given Karzahni less leeway in how to repair the drones if he had known it would be done to him one day. Garan – the first Garan – would have called it irony.
He called it damned bothersome.
His legs were shorter and far less efficient, slowing the progress of his long march across the island. There was an insufferable clicking sensation when he turned his head about thirty degrees to the right. He could feel a few seals in his torso that weren’t watertight. It seemed that even his optical sensors were less sensitive. Hues looked less vibrant than before, but he'd have to test in a more colorful environment than Karzahni.
What a shoddy job his creation had done in re-creating him. There was much he could improve on, but he had far more important things to do now, even if his shrunken chest made it hard to draw in enough breath to keep pushing his body.
He'd had to get used to a new body before. He'd get used to this one too.
He shoved his way past shambling, forlorn Matoran, looking each one over as he passed to make sure it wasn’t Garan.
With each unfamiliar Kanohi he saw, his hopes dimmed a little more. If Karzahni had already sent Garan away, he could be in any one of the domes. He would never find him.
He clenched his jaw hard to divert from that line of thinking. No hypotheticals. You are a scientist. Think rationally.
Then he spotted a black shape toiling beside a sweltering forge, and all logic was thrown to the wind. He sprinted to his side, forgetting pain, forgetting caution, forgetting everything but the need to know now. He touched the Matoran on his shoulder, and he turned.
Garan. It was him, unmistakably. Though, he had been repaired. He had been–
It stole the breath from his lungs. He had known rationally, of course, that the next time he saw Garan he would be changed. It was quite another thing to see, with his own eyes, Garan’s hunched back, his shorter, mismatched limbs, his…
He had to look away before the fury swallowed him whole. One lifetime of torment wouldn’t be enough to pay Karzahni back for this. A billion billion lifetimes still wouldn’t be enough suffering. He didn’t think he was capable of devising an appropriate enough punishment on his own. He’d have to convince some ancient horror beyond his perception of time to claim Karzahni, to torment him for infinite simultaneous eternities.
He took deep breaths, forced himself to let it go. Garan was changed, but that didn’t matter. He was here! He was touching Garan’s shoulder again, and it felt as solid as ever.
He stood there fumbling for words, so Garan took that burden from him.
“Vel… Vel, is that you? What in Kar– What in here are you doing here?”
Garan’s eyes moved down his body, taking in the extent of his alterations, and his face fell.
“Ohh, I see… He got you too, huh? How did you get hurt? You fell off the ladder, didn’t you? I told you never to step on that ladder again, that thing is a death trap.”
“The Tarakava thrashes and roars in the shallow waters as if wounded. When the scavengers come to feast on weakened prey, it strikes like lightning.”
It sometimes took him a moment to parse them, but Garan always understood his riddles. Always. He had examined Garan’s code a thousand times, but could find no explanation for it.
This time, with understanding came shaking hands and a burning rage.
“You… You mean,” Garan stammered. “You were fine? You faked it so Turaga would send you here... To me?”
He nodded once. Garan doubled over like he’d been punched.
He took a step forward and stretched out a hand to lay it on Garan’s twisted spine, but Garan pressed his hands to his chest and shoved him backwards.
“Idiot,” Garan snapped. “You great big idiot. Why would you ever do something so stupid? You had your whole life ahead of you, now you’re… Now you’re a wreck like me. Why? Why am I worth that? Huh? Why would you do that for me?”
He met Garan’s eyes.
“I am with you when you take your first step,” he whispered, fighting hard to keep the quaver out of his voice. “And again when you take your last. All will know me for a time, but I can never be shared. What am I?”
He heard Garan’s breath hitch. The rage in his expression melted away in an instant.
“Oh, Vel…”
Garan lunged forward and wrapped his stubby, warped arms around him. Their chests touched, and he felt the warmth of Garan’s heartlight, bathed himself in it. He reached out and held tight to what was his in the darkness.
They stayed like that for a long time, until the chaos, the horror of Karzahni started to fade. But, it could not last forever, and Garan was the first to withdraw.
“I suppose I should show you around,” Garan said. “But stay close. This place is insane, Vel.”
He spotted a dock over Garan’s left shoulder, where a little rowboat was moored. The only guards were two fellow “repaired” ones. He’d need only four words. One line of code.
“The Niazesk lingers not in the Fikou’s hunting grounds,” he said. “Not even to chart its course.”
Garan followed his gaze to the boat and grinned.
“If by that, you mean ‘let’s haul ass and decide where we’re going later,’ I'm on board.”
Telophase
The few weeks he had spent fine-tuning the Matoran vocoders had been some of the most engaging of the entire project.
So many fascinating engineering problems to solve. What frequency should they communicate in? He’d considered infrasound so they could talk to each other without subjecting him and his ilk to unnecessary noise, but hadn’t been able to make audio receptors sensitive enough to pick the frequency up.
He regretted that failure for the first time as he endured a tirade from Garan, who seemed intent on pushing the hard limits of his vocoder’s volume capacity.
“— no more time for your constant tinkering, Velika,” Garan was shouting, pounding his fist on the table. “It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be a scientific marvel, it just needs to pump water through the filters! Balta can draw up the schematics, but his hands just aren’t good enough to fix it. We need you. While you run test after test, we’re down to drops of clean water! We could have riots on our hands soon, Vel!”
He sank deeper in his seat, eyes roaming all over the room, everywhere except Garan’s mask, contorted by desperation. It was easier when he didn’t have to look at their little electrochemically induced displays, so similar to real emotions that sometimes they almost fooled him into believing they could actually feel. Almost stirred something in his gut.
It had been easier before, he finally decided, when they hadn’t come to him with their little chittering noises and their petty problems, forcing him to take sides in their toy struggles. They’d been predictable, once. Input and output. Query and response. Task and completion. They’d done what he said. None of this emotional garbage to gum up the works, give him erratic output after erratic output. That was for people, not things.
Looking back, he had no idea why he’d ever tampered with that. Sentiment. Some passing fancy. Perhaps it was his curse to poke at everything he’d made until it fell apart.
He could set it all right, of course. All it would take was four little words.
“Once there was a hammer,” he began when Garan paused to breathe. “That screamed in pain every time the builder swung it to drive a nai—”
“No,” Garan cut him off. “No! This isn’t one of your riddles, Vel. Focus! Get your head out of the clouds. If you don’t fix this, we’re all going to die. Don’t you understand that? Doesn’t your life mean anything to you? Your friends’ lives? Mine…?”
That was it. Before his little windup toy could further impugn its creator’s morality, he sprang to his feet, orange eyes blazing with indignation.
“Hard—”
He cut off the command with a sharp intake of breath, eyes locked on Garan’s mask. Those little bumps on the brow of Garan’s Kanohi, he’d put them there. Teased them out of the molten metal one by one.
With three more words, he could wipe away everything Garan had ever been and seen. And if he decided he was wrong again, he could reverse course with a few quick jolts.
But even that Garan would never be his Garan. The one he had held on Karzahni, the one who had looked up at him with trusting eyes and said his own name.
He did not speak.
A dull, vacant look passed over Garan’s face, but vanished after a moment like it had never been there in the first place. Garan shook his head to clear it.
“What just…” Garan murmured.
The Great Being huffed and sat back down at his workbench, staring at the pieces of the disassembled pump spread out before him.
“Hard,” he repeated.
Garan stepped behind him, resting both hands on his shoulders. He leaned his head back until it touched Garan’s chest.
“I know, Vel,” Garan said. “I know it is. You didn’t ask for this. None of us did. Look, I wish I could live in the world you live in, where it’s all a game and there are no consequences to anything. Sounds a lot easier. Maybe none of this matters one bit to you, but it matters to me, and it matters, period.”
Garan slid one hand down his arm and gave his hand a squeeze.
Velika squeezed back.
“Lean on me when it’s hard. Let me lean on you.”
Garan looked down at the pump and cocked his head to the side.
“Hmm…” he said. “I know… Doesn’t this piece go… Here?”
Garan cinched a flange so tight that it would never take in enough air to spin up the impeller. Velika successfully suppressed a growl, but couldn’t keep his eyes from rolling. He knew Garan was getting it wrong on purpose to coax him back into the project, but it wasn’t going to work.
Velika watched him make three more wrong moves, including one that could have snapped the rotor assembly, before he seized the whole mess away from him, his deft hands immediately flying to correct every error.
“Hey, easy, easy,” Garan laughed. He leaned in close, an affectionate glow in his eyes. “Just tell me what to do… Ok?”
Velika could have finished it in minutes on his own. With Garan, it took the whole night.
Somehow, that wasn’t infuriating.