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i.
It’s not long before Clear has realized he has made a mistake.
In confinement, Aoba’s skin has become like paper. It’s white as milk, fragile as porcelain, and thin as the edge of the blade Clear used to remove his lover’s eyes. Clear can see Aoba’s blue veins flowing under his skin. Aoba looks like their beautiful planet Earth, his ribs jutting out like a mountain range, his veins like tributaries of the deep blue sea covered in fog.
Clear tries to take good care of Aoba, but as of late he’s developed a nasty habit of refusing to eat. His muscles tense and twitch from crown to jaw, and he won’t open his mouth when Clear offers him food. So Clear has to help him, gripping with his strong false fingers around Aoba’s milky throat and forcing him to swallow. As a result Aoba’s developed a collar of bruises around his neck. At first Clear thought they looked like flowers in bloom, but they soon grew discolored and spilled spoilt, crusty pus on his master’s lovely skin.
It’s almost as sad as the other new truth in their lives: Aoba wears a blindfold. It’s because of me, Clear thinks, and he can’t stop a small twinge in his stomach, unrobotic as it is. I did this. I made him this way.
Where Aoba’s eyes used to be there are ugly, scarred sockets, but Clear can still see Aoba’s eyes in his mind’s eye: a deep, translucent amber. Aoba’s eyes are the same color as the fur of a bee or the sweet honey it produces. Aoba’s eyes are the same color as a river of melted gold. Aoba’s eyes are the same color as the golden flowers kids in the schoolyard decry as weeds, yet pin their hopes on when they die.
And even more important than that: they are real eyes, real human eyes, realer than Clear could ever hope to have.
Clear’s eyes are functional. Aoba told him that they were beautiful, back then. But they are not real. They are synthetic. They are a robot’s eyes, made by a man… They are merely one more mark of a counterfeit human.
Real eyes…
Aoba can never hope to have real eyes again.
ii.
God, but he’s sick as a dog, isn’t he? Aoba retches but there’s nothing in his stomach, so he’s left gasping on the floor. His breath comes in pants, and saliva drips down from the corner to his lips. He doesn’t try to wipe it away. It glistens there—rather beautifully, Clear has to admit—as Aoba’s bare chest heaves and his bones click as he tries to stabilize himself.
The sound startles something inside of Clear and he breaks his gaze with a start. He leans down to Aoba and gently wipes his chin. “Master…Aoba-san…please eat, you need to be strong…”
Even without effort or the will to live something deep inside of Aoba has given his body the tenacity to make it through each day. But he’s hardly human, for all it means in the mental sense of the word…
Aoba is in limbo: he’s slowly stripped of his humanity, but not yet crossed the line.
To stop halfway is terribly cruel. To take his eyes and his voice but to leave him some strange shred of humanity would be like leaving a ghost to wander the earth. Who knows if he could ever find peace in this life Clear has built for him…
“Please eat…Master…please…”
Clear feels sorry for what he’s done, but he realizes that Aoba cannot return to being human.
“Since you can’t be a human any longer, and I can’t become one for you, I’ve decided to make you like me,” Clear says. “Isn’t that convenient, Master?”
Aoba shivers.
“I’ll give you new eyes, Aoba-san. So you don’t have to worry.”
iii.
Clear labors long and hard over the wiring.
It’s not like it’s a problem for him, staying up nights. Although he studied the circadian rhythms of human beings, he was not programmed with them himself. He doesn’t get tired, so he can just remain awake, watching Aoba all the time.
After all, he loves Aoba, and it’s not like he has anything better to do than spend his time by his side. Of course it’s so! Aoba is his Master, and what lowly servant could leave his Master in a time of need? Aoba deserves the best. Not that Clear could give him that—but he would work as hard as he can to make Aoba a new pair of eyes.
But he is concerned over Aoba.
“This is the first time I’ve done this, Aoba-san.”
Aoba says nothing. The only movement is the almost imperceptible rise and fall of his chest as he breathes in and out. How such shallow breaths of air can sustain him, Clear can’t imagine.
It’s not like Clear was expecting a response, so he goes on anyway. “So it’s very difficult for me.”
He pokes the wire through the holes he’s made in his lover’s back, threads it though and pulls it tight, shimmery silver against Aoba’s white skin. Again and again he does this. Aoba bleeds a little, but he does not bother to wince.
“You know, I used to think it was bad to be a robot,” Clear says. “Grandfather told me to hide my face, and I was afraid to show it to other people. But it’s not all bad, being this way.”
Then, Aoba dips his head. It’s the faintest of bows, but Clear is overjoyed. He would hug Aoba, but by this point he’s so fragile, so emaciated that Clear is scared he would crush Aoba into a pile of dust.
“Robots don’t have this problem,” says Clear. “If you’re an android, you don’t have to feel pain.”
iv.
He’s collected the supplies for weeks, tungsten and steel and bakelite and glass. It’s not been easy trying to find materials that will get along with one another.
He blew the glass of the bulbs himself into two marvelous little bubbles, scarcely larger than an inch. They’re not perfectly spherical, his synthetic eyes can detect within moments of creating them. But they’re close enough, and so thin and clear and shining…
But now, the preparations are finally finished.
The operation is a delicate thing, and goes as well as could be expected; despite Clear’s relative lack of experience, Aoba is quite the obedient patient. He looks so small, bound by thick dark straps to the stainless steel operating table, and so sickly under the fluorescent lights. Clear feels a small wave of pity rise in his chest, but it’s not real the way Aoba is. It’s not pain that’s tugging at his heartstrings, no...it’s programming, it’s all programming…
Clear puts his hands on Aoba’s tiny shoulders and swivels him around to face the mirror.
He takes off Aoba’s blindfold, gentle as a doe.
“Aren’t you beautiful now,” Clear says to Aoba, his voice like velvet. “Of course, you always were.”
Aoba still can’t see, and he shakes his head with the slightest of motions.
“Oh!” Clear says, understanding flaring and dimming in his eyes. “Don’t worry, I’ll show you. You’ll be able to see. This part is mainly for aesthetic purposes. I just need to connect the circuit.”
Even if he can’t have real eyes, a symbol is better than nothing, right? Now he has two small lightbulbs plugged into those scarred sockets, screwed in like a doll’s. Clear flicks the switch and connects the circuit.
And now Aoba is glowing yellow, lit up from the inside. How brightly the two bulbs shine, even brighter than real eyes! And how beautiful!
A cheery smile splits Clear’s face in two. “See,” he says happily. “It’s just like it used to be!”
Of course it doesn’t look quite the same, but Clear thinks it looks friendly, albeit different. But the point it’s to look human, the point is to become a robot, so it’s quite all right, isn’t it—
Clear’s train of thought is cut short when he hears a noise, tiny and soft but unmistakably Aoba.
He can’t tell if Aoba is trying to speak at first. He’s just making this empty hissing sound, this soft hhhhhuh hhhhhuh at the back of his throat.
Can he hear Aoba, or is it just something he’d say if he could speak?
Clear doesn’t know why, but he hears this and is frightened:
“You did…” Aoba’s voice is almost a whisper, his chin bent to his chest. “You did this to me…”
“But Master!” Clear reacts instantly. “I was trying to help you, you needed eyes and…”
It’s only a moment before Aoba begins to convulse violently.
The electricity spasms through his bones, wrack his body from his narrow toes to the tips of his hair. He falls, releasing this ragged airless choking rasp that could have come from the long-dead lungs of a ghost.
Clear runs through the medical dictionary programmed in his brain. Even though it takes just a few milliseconds (he always was much slower than the alphas, that they never let him forget) it feels like too long. Any amount of time is too long to spare when his Master’s life is on the line, his Aoba, his…
Oh! he thinks, as Aoba jerks to a still on the operating room floor.
Clear falls to his knees, and it’s in that moment that he knows he’s made one mistake too many.