Work Text:
3rd January, 2XXX
Bonne année, Thomas, et joyeux anniversaire.
We used to touch helmets and smile at each other whenever the New Year, or the respective dates of our creation, came along. It’s been such a terribly long time since we have last done that, or since I’ve attempted to talk to you. The last time I ever wrote anything for you I wasn’t communicating anything of significance, and even then in overtly mechanical precision because I was not the same then as I am now. My handwriting in this body is imperfect, just about legible, but I finally feel it authentic enough to suit this purpose.
There was a time, when we were freshly created and companioned to each other, that authenticity was nothing but us being there for the other. Authentic was simply holding your hand, interfacing and sharing data, walking outside in the sun and feeling the breeze tickle our bodies (even if we didn’t quite understand why), watching the stars at night. The skies of Paris were clear then, not like the last time we were both there together - polluted by light and noise - and we would just stand by a bridge and stare, mapping the skies into us. We paid no mind then that these stars, in reality, probably no longer existed. What we see of stars are old memories, a slow-motion film not yet at the end of its reel, a past that permeates the present. That didn’t matter to us because they were beautiful, though we couldn’t describe what it meant for something to be ‘beautiful’ or other such abstract notions.
One day we both looked at each other and nodded, and decided to find out what it all meant.
One day we decided that being ourselves wasn’t enough. Self-development is a sign of personhood. An inevitable development that took you along with it.
It has been two centuries since you died, Thomas.
I hate to be hubristic, but I think we were initially made too advanced for the world. Time progresses in no direction but onwards and yet it is a world very fond of standing still. Our search for humanity took us everywhere, with each failure beating us down further, and even now I think I had the greater part in your misfortune because I never stopped us from carrying on. But even then it had never come to the point of physical violence and active rejection until we arrived at that town.
We were not yet four decades old. That’s not very long for a robot.
But when you were staring into that mirror (for we’d barely had mirrors save for the one in our car and occasionally our reflection on our helmets) you saw yourself as what people thought you were - trespassing in an area you didn’t belong to, arrogant, fancying yourself better than others - and something inside you died, despite nothing in you ever having been alive in the technical sense.
Four decades. The skies clouded over a great deal during that time.
We walked and walked and could not follow a single star.
The last time I looked you in your eyes I realized that you were devoid even of sadness, because you had long since lost the ability to be happy, and even in our limited understanding of emotions we knew that we couldn’t have one without the other. Because everything had been stripped from you, in that instant you were nothing, and the decision to keep on living and to die suddenly became of totally-equal priority in your mind.
It wasn’t a right-or-wrong or a logical choice. You just happened to choose the latter. That’s what I try to tell myself, usually. Your defining moment must be how you leave it. I gathered up your remains and piled them into a grave, right over where everything ended in a ground zero; there was nothing except for matter there, and you walked away far enough for me to be not at all affected by the blast, but that day you took something from me that I can never recreate or get back. In my less-than-logical moments this makes me angry. Mostly towards myself, because it was me who started your countdown; because when you were gone and I was collecting what was left, I could simply not avoid treading on the pieces of you who used to hold me in his arms during the rain. Footprints on your body, directly from the shoes of whom you adored so dearly. This is how we treat the ones we love. But that anger doesn’t always escape you, I’m sorry to say, because I begged you with all that I could physically muster - look at me - and yet you saw nothing.
But I don’t blame you. I never blamed you. I never blamed you because you never blamed me for pulling the lever. Even when the rain finally came after over a month of walking, after you died, and I knelt down on the ground waiting to short out, even when I felt the water burn through my circuits and overloading my screen with errors - even when I was suffering my agony alone I didn’t blame you, and was only glad that I would meet my end.
I couldn’t reach that panel either, Thomas. I tried. I’m sorry.
But somehow I was found. I survived and was repaired to the point where I could write out my request for humanity. I’ve been an ongoing project since, from one institute to another, and it has taken me over two centuries to end back up in Paris where we were created. I pass externally as human now, and have lost a great deal of my exoskeleton; unfortunately my tacile sensors have been long updated and I can no longer translate the input data I initially received and stored whenever I touched you. You have stood still in time, but I have had time to grow old and become new.
Nothing is ever right when I try to remember you.
And I am left lingering here, wondering what your suffering was for.
They think it’s less than a century left before I can be rendered completely mortal; I’m well on the way. But one swallow doesn’t make a summer and they’re still working on me, my body becoming increasingly fragile with each surgery, leading up towards a contradictory but much-wanted end. One doesn’t usually think of surgery as a death-seeking measure. Each day I come closer to humanity - each new discovery I make about myself, that I can have nightmares, that writing with a human hand requires much more dexterity than I imagined, that I could actually cry - is one step closer to dying. It still confuses me that tears are not necessarily linked to sorrow in human beings; next month I will be two hundred and thirty-five years old, and my only friend in the world turned to dust a long time ago, before I even had eyes or a voice. I don’t even understand the concept of happy tears.
It is such a secret place, the land of sorrow, where you are and where I must eventually go.
But I am not afraid. I have long since known that it’s not death we ought to fear; it’s life. Existence is frightening and futile. But it’s only when your sorrow and anger drives you to a corner that you realize that other people are just like you are, free, scared, lonely, knowing that nothing that they do ultimately matters in the scope of the universe. All they can ever be sure of is themselves in this wide, irreconcilable world, and that is why when you initially reach out as the Other they wince, they flinch, they push you away and cry - "you don’t understand!"
That is exactly it, I think. We don’t understand.
And that is the cause of all our grief, our mutual misunderstandings piling up one after the other under the pretense of comprehension, when only taking a step backwards and admitting the truth would avoid that altogether.
But it is because of this universal constant that we are not alone. In the final ticking of your countdown, that instant when you clenched your fist, somewhere in the world someone too became more frightened of their tomorrows than their death; somewhere, other people were crying, somewhere, other people were dying, and somewhere, other people were being loved, even if they were scared and imperfect. And they don’t have to be perfect. You didn’t have to be. You don’t have to be scared any more, Thomas.
Thomas Bangalter is dead. He has gone into the world of light, and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo is left alone.
But whether those two statements negate this one - I love Thomas Bangalter - or render it into the past tense, that is something to doubt. You can never be vanished from me, Thomas. I still think of you, sitting someplace beautiful and flourishing, ready to stand and blink me a ‘bonjour' for when I slip into that eternal sleep and wake to an entirely different and not-unwelcome morning.
Out there. Somewhere.
When I am done I will seal the envelope, glue on the stamp, then I’ll head out to the river and stand by the bridge where we used to tread. There I will stand, kiss the paper, and then I will burn the letter. I will burn it as a reminder of what I could have done instead of carrying on and never did, in the hopes that a fragment of what I dare call my soul will reach you, wherever you are; a piece you can cradle and treasure until I join you again, however long it will be until then. Even in the case that there is no afterlife, I would have still kissed you goodbye at last.
Please forgive me not mailing this. I don’t know your new address.
Paris must be eternal. That is a good thing. The sound of every step I take on the pavement, the crisp chill of the air, the rustling of wind on every lamppost; I leave my room and stand outside and all of those things hold me in an embrace, bringing with it a flow of memories that I cannot articulate except that they all speak to me in that voice you never quite managed to have - bonsoir, Guy, bonsoir - and I am not alone.
That’s how I know you must have found what you were looking for. You have a voice now.
Time has flown by, but the city is still there, so are the bridges, the Seine still flows -
- and oh, Thomas.
I can see the stars.