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The Googles faded, mercifully enough, at the same time.
Google_B explained it as an interconnected neural network, something that tied all of the robots together. Brothers of metal rather than flesh, and brothers to the very end.
It was Wilford, and Dark, and the Host, and the Googles. And they were all that was left, holding onto existence by their fingertips. Had Bim been there, he would have laughed their worries away. Had the Doctor still been there, he could have prepared them for what would happen.
The Googles were made of metal, where the others had skin and bone and magic holding them together. And when the magic faded, so did they. The Googles weren’t held together by it, funnily enough. They’d explained it to curious ears before-- they charged on electricity, of course, but the thing that kept their life forces going, that made them more than computers, that made them sentient, was the magic. It was their heartbeat, the oil in their joints, the spark behind their eyes.
As they faded, it wasn’t as noticeable as Bim and the Doctor becoming see-thorough, as obvious as Dark’s thunderstorm.
“Blue.” A command, almost snarled from across the catwalks. Wilford’s eyes glinted, feverish. He’d been working nearly nonstop since Bim went, determined, convinced that Warfstache TV was the answer to saving them all. Google_B had caught him talking to air, knocking impatiently on Bim’s dressing room door.
Google_B looked up from rigging a light, impassive under Wilford’s glare and snapped directions. “Yes, Wilford?”
“Hurry up, and come here.”
Google_B barely rolled his eyes, stiff. He’d been stiff for months, joints creaking with every movement. Arthritis, the Doctor would have called it. He poured more oil into his systems, masking the sound of ripping, grinding metal as best he could. The oil stained his skin, flesh-colored silicone turned murky, blotchy brown. Google_G had tried to help, bleaching holes in his own arms: desperate to hide the decay.
It wasn’t as if Wilford would have noticed, anyway. He was too far gone.
They were all too far gone.
“Did you hear me?” Wilford bared his teeth, holding a bundle of wires. “Blue, come here.”
“I am not your personal assistant,” Google_B snapped, eyes flickering weakly. He turned, slow, spine whining with the effort. There was rust in his joints, and worse, he could feel it-- an imperfection, scraping sand against delicate glass.
Wilford was kneeling, fingers jerking at a knot. He could see the studio floor below them, the rickety catwalk creaking as the magic faded, bit by bit. Wilford was moving faster, if anything, to make up for it. They didn’t have much time before all was lost, but if anyone could rescue them, it was him. He could bring them back. They would always come back.
“Here.” It was brusque, a disdainful flick of the wrist. Wilford tossed the coil of wire towards Google_B, barely glancing up.
A crash, and the entire catwalk shuddered underneath them. Wilford’s fingers slipped on the knot, and Google_B blinked, slow.
Too slow.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Wilford jumped to his feet, not even flinching as the rafters started to sway.
“I--” Google_B stuttered, processors struggling to catch up with the surroundings. A coil of wire had hit his chest: arms too slow, and, at this point, too weak to catch it. The catwalk was shuddering under their feet, concrete floor a fifty-foot death sentence below. In front of him, Wilford, a picture of rage.
“Pull yourself together, Blue,” Wilford snarled, hands shaking.
Google_B’s eyes flickered again, arms jerking to his sides. “Perhaps you need a break, Warfstache.” His tone measured, even as static interrupted each word. His body was far beyond gone, mind bursting at the limits of corroded metal.
“Perhaps,” Wilford growled, crossing the distance between them in two swift steps, “you need to speed up.” He poked a finger, hard, into Google_B’s chest.
Google_B stumbled, off balance. His foot caught the coil of wire, curled behind him like a snake, and he was sent crashing to the floor. The entire catwalk shook again, swaying dangerously. His fans whirred in his chest, useless.
Wilford stepped forward, and Google_B could barely lift his head to look at him, despite the alarm bells sending command after command to his long-dead systems.
“What, was that too much for you?” Wilford was sneering, shoulders hunched forward, and Google_B forced himself not to see Darkiplier advancing on him, knife drawn. “You’re not faded yet, robot. Get up.”
Google_B could barely beep in response, hairline cracks in his limbs making themselves known. “Apologies,” he managed, forcing himself upright, ignoring the groaning of metal, ignoring the oil leaking from fresh tears in his skin.
Wilford grasped his hand, none-too-gently, to haul him to his feet.
Too fast.
Google_B felt his arm break with the whine of metal on metal, the gasp of ripping flesh. He stumbled forward, then back, clutching the dangling limb to his chest.
Wilford pushed Google_B away as he fell forward, watching him fumble for balance with his face twisted into an expression of disgust. The world turned under their feet, the entire studio below seeming to warp as gravity lost meaning to the shaking rafters.
Google_B held the guardrail with his one remaining hand, in shaking, glitching fingers. “Apologies,” he said again, increasingly distorted. Wilford glared at him, trying to catch his eye. Google_B turned his face up, oil smeared across his brow, and looked across at Wilford with static blurring out his eyes.
A beat, and Wilford’s presence of mind caught up to him with the air of a train screeching to a halt.
“How pathetic.” Wilford’s eyes narrowed, lips drawing back, and he took a half-step away. “What ever happened to reliable machines, Google?”
“I am having difficulty--” Google_B started to explain, leaning carefully on the guardrail as he held his broken arm in place. The middle of his forearm had snapped, oil leaking steadily into a stain on his shirt, a puddle on the floor. His hand twitched with a clicking sound, wires stripped, bent out of place.
“No,” Wilford spoke over him, eyes hard, all restraint suddenly gone. “You don’t have anything. What am I supposed to do with a machine that doesn’t work?”
Google_B snapped, straightening up, “I do not work for you, Wilford, as you would do well to remember. I work because I am your friend.”
“You’re a machine,” Wilford growled. “And an awfully mouthy one, at that.”
“I am trying to help--”
“You don’t understand!” Wilford was shouting now, and he took another step backwards. “I won’t let my friends die in this godforsaken office!”
“Wilford, please--” Google_B’s eyes flashed, despite it all, hearing the note of desperation strangling Wilford’s throat.
“If you’re too much of a coward to help me, robot,” Wilford growled, now grasping the guardrail behind him, “you had best leave before I kill you myself.”
Google_B reached out, gears whirring in protest. “Wilford, please,” he repeated, or at least tried-- nothing came from his speakers but a violent burst of static.
“Useless robot,” Wilford said, glaring, and his fingers curled around the hilt of his knife, at his hip. “You’re not helping. You don’t think I can do it.”
More static, but Google_B shook his head as much as he could with his joints locked in place, creaking. Wilford didn’t seem to notice.
“You don’t think I can bring them back,” Wilford hissed, and Google_B realized that the glint of madness in Wilford’s eye was directed at him a moment too late. “They always come back, Blue. I came back. Bim came back.” A giggle, and Google_B moved forward, too slow.
“They always come back.”
Too slow.
It happened in slow motion, and when Google_B replayed the scene, he knew there was no way he could’ve moved fast enough to save Wilford, even with a fully functional body. The catwalk shook under them, and Wilford’s shoes scrabbled for purchase on the grated floor. The guardrail wasn’t enough, in the end, and Wilford too close to the edge, and the floor itself too rickety to stop Wilford from plummeting fifty feet to crack his skull against the concrete floor.
"Red, come in.”
Google_R walked, stiff, into Dark’s office. “You called for me?”
“I did.” Dark hunched over his desk, pale, a white spot among the angry swirling of his aura. His aura ran unchecked these days, and the office was in tatters. It wasn’t often that Dark opened the door anymore. “How is Will?”
“Recovering.”
Dark didn’t probe any further, and Google_R didn’t offer. The Doctor’s ghost hung in the air for a moment.
“Blue has finished repairs,” Google_R said, beeping to fill the silence. Why Dark had called him here, he’d never know.
“As if it matters.” Dark smoothed the front of his suit, disheveled, still managing to snap at Google_R with fangs bared.
“Of course it matters,” Google_R retorted, before he could stop himself.
Dark raised an eyebrow, the circles under his eyes seeming to deepen, a fresh glint lighting what was left of his sanity. “As if anything matters, Red.”
“Of course it matters,” Google_R repeated, in almost a whisper, speakers leaking static. Dark’s aura swarmed around him, buzzing, whispering.
So tired.
Rest your corroding limbs, robot.
Go to sleep.
“Stop this, Dark,” Google_R waved the smoke away with a creak of his joints. It was almost laughable, desperately holding Dark off until the end. With that in mind, Google_R took a step towards the door.
“It’s not fair, is it?” Dark’s aura whipped up to speed for a moment, obscuring the walls, then fell away entirely. Google_R took another step away, whirring gears giving away his movements.
Dark stared across at him without the glamour of his aura in the way, for the first time in a hundred years. He was a corpse in every sense of the word, skin stretched tight over sunken cheeks, the knobs of his skeleton. The wear of a century showed through, and Google_R grimly cataloged each injury. His body had long dripped dry of any fluid, leaving behind sores cankered in miasma. The rotting hollow of his chest was visible behind torn flesh, if he could even call it flesh, and Google_R would have gagged.
He didn’t gag, seeing Dark’s eyes sunken and shriveled, face nearly as empty as the Host’s. Seeing a smile, teeth elongated and yellowed, tongue withered away. Google_R could only look as Dark dropped his illusion to leer, every trace of humanity gone from the body he puppeted.
“No,” Google_R beeped, taking a step towards Dark, suddenly soft. “It is not fair. I apologize, Dark.”
Dark looked up at Google_R, head tilted to the side. A bone snapped, and Google_R realized a moment too late that the door of the office had vanished entirely among the smoke.
Google_G knocked on the Host’s door for what felt like the hundredth time, a plate of food in his hands. With Google_R in for repairs and Google_B still weak, it was up to him to make the rounds of the office, trying to keep some semblance of normalcy.
“Host,” he beeped, resting his forehead against the door. The world was spinning again, as it did more often these days. It was really as if they were aging, in the way humans did. Google_B was weak of body, metal rusting under torn skin. Google_R had been weak enough to start with, but after his run-in with Dark, he dripped miasma instead of oil, coughed smoke, moved more delicately. And that wasn’t even speaking of Oliver, who was already nearly gone. They were all too far gone.
“Host,” Google_G said again, setting the plate of food down to join an identical stack of rotting meals. The strain was too much, standing and holding something at the same time, and he slid to the floor. He was so tired. “Host, you need to eat, or at least let us know that you are still in there.”
A moment, and the door was as silent as it had always been. Google_G looked over at the pile of plates and sighed, adding the newest one to the stack. He’d clean up at some point. Some day. Before they all faded.
He hauled himself to his feet, eyes flickering faintly, and stopped to catch his breath. The hallway was dark, Wilford’s magic no longer powering the rest of the office, the electricity long since cut. Everything was starting to crumble, gaps in the illusion they’d kept for so long. The only light came from his own chest, and even that was starting to grow dim.
“The Host thanks you.” The door had opened a crack, a warm glow from within. The Host’s voice drifted through, so softly that Google_G was sure he’d imagined it.
“Host?”
The door slammed shut again, a draft blowing down the hallway, a loud click in the stillness. Google_G shrugged: there was nothing more he could do, after all. He shuffled back towards the Googles’ room, lit by a spare generator and the dregs of their strength. As he looked back down the hall, he could’ve sworn that the pile of plates before the Host’s door was one plate less.
“Anything?” Google_B looked up from his pile of scrap metal, trying desperately to craft them into functioning body parts.
Google_G shook his head, dropping quietly into his own chair. “How is Red?” Together, they turned their heads towards the back of the office. Oliver, hearing their heads turn on squeaking pivots, looked up at them.
Oliver’s eyes glitched from blinding yellow to white noise, furious even as his face was impassive. The skin of his brows knitted themselves together; below, the skin of his cheeks became ribbons, only half-hiding the destroyed metal and wire of his jaw.
“How is he?” Google_G asked, tentative, even as he chided himself. Afraid? of what? His own brother?
Oliver beeped, crackling, and nodded his head before bending again over Google_R. He didn’t bother to use a welding mask now, sparks flying into his charred shirt and melted skin as he worked on Google_R’s broken limbs.
Google_B turned back to his pile of metal, and Google_G watched, tiredly. There was a stench of futility to this, to repairing every crack in their systems as they broke down. It was trying to plug the holes in a crumbling dam, cutting the heads off a Hydra, a cause long since lost. Each of them were too stiff to move without gallons of oil, and their stock was running dry. This was it, and the worst part was that they had seen it coming.
At this point, all there was to do was wait.
It took another week for Wilford to be back on his feet, magic slower than it had ever been. Even from bed, he worked feverishly, discarded script after script littering the pristine cleanliness of the Doctor’s abandoned clinic. He’d see the wisps of Dark’s aura every so often, but they were always gone before he could snap at them to leave. The Googles had brought food and advice the first few days, but had gone silent. Wilford thought nothing of it, too focused on cue cards to think of anything else.
He had to bring them back.
It took another two weeks for Wilford to realize that his plans required a second person behind the lights and camera, and after that, another day for him to muster up the will to knock on the Googles’ door.
By ‘knock,’ Wilford had decided to kick the door open, grab the nearest robot, and book it to the studio. He’d accomplished the first step, but seeing the scene inside the room, stopped short of the second.
“Goog-- Blue? Green?” Not a movement nor a sound answered him, and Wilford took a shaky step back.
Google_B stared him in the eye, mouth open as if he was about to speak, hands spread in front of him. A too-familiar sight, and yet landing squarely in the uncanny valley-- Google_B didn’t move, didn’t breathe. His eyes flickered as Wilford watched, binary code and static filling the tiny screens.
“Blue?” Wilford tamped his mustache with one hand, the other squarely placed at his hip.
Google_G stood next to him, as if the two had been talking, laughing, even. His eyes were similarly blank, and an unnerving kind of terror echoed around the room.
“Green?”
Their eyes seemed to flicker in response, and the horrible, horrible realization dawned on Wilford as he watched them. He should’ve known, of course, and guilt hit him close behind. He should’ve known when Blue moved slower, when Red took the oil meant for the pulleys and lights, when Green’s responses had slowly ground to a halt.
Behind Blue and Green, Google_R sat facing a computer. Oliver stood behind him, facing away.
Even from here, Wilford could see that Google_R’s eyes were dark. He didn’t dare to speak again, seeing Oliver’s eyes flash, seeing the broken metal of his mouth clenched tight. Oliver couldn’t see Google_R, couldn’t see that the light behind his eyes had gone out. And as long as he couldn’t see, he would never know.
Oliver was frozen facing a drum of oil, fingers outstretched, close, but never close enough.
Wilford took a breath, a step back, and saw the Googles’ eyes flicker in something akin to fear. He could fix this, of course he could. A little oil and some elbow grease, and the others would know how to wake Red up. Their minds were there-- that much was obvious. Trapped in the husk of their bodies, but still there. And as long as they were there, everything was okay, right?
It was a miserable way to live, and Wilford’s fingers twitched against his holster.
No. There was still hope. There was always still hope, for all of them. He could bring them all back, because they had always come back, and because that hope was all that he had.
And for that hope, Wilford would leave all four of them here, staring at the same spot in space until their minds went the same way as their bodies in the months ahead. Because it would take months for the last of the magic to drain from their cores, the last of the power to fade from their circuits. Months of waiting, frozen in place, as Wilford searched for a solution, holding onto a hope that would never come.
He didn’t realize that tears were running down his face until a crash sounded from the back room, louder for the silence that had settled over the office.
“Uh, sah, dude!” The fifth robot in the room waltzed through, laughing, in perfect condition.
“Who-- Bing?” Wilford wiped his face, confusion giving way to anger.
“In the metal, bro!” Bing grinned at him through the clouds of dust he’d kicked up, and Wilford was experienced enough to see that his smile was on the wrong side of unhinged.
“What happened to the Googles?” Wilford asked, fearing, knowing the answer.
“These old farts?” Bing slung an arm around Google_G’s neck, careless. “They’ve been like this, man, just hanging out.”
“Is something... wrong?” Wilford narrowed his eyes.
“Nah, everything’s good!” Bing abandoned Google_G to pat Google_R’s shoulder, a giggle working its way through his chest.
"But they’re--”
“--fine!” Bing turned back to Wilford, eyes glittering. “They’re fine, see?”
And Wilford looked, really looked at Bing for the first time in a long time, and saw the smoke escaping his mouth, the way his eyes glitched in and out of coherence. And Wilford knew, if only for a moment, that Bing’s mind was in the same condition that the Googles’ bodies were.
Too far gone.
The moment passed, and Wilford glossed over the horror of the room before him. “Hey, Bing?”
“What up?”
“Do you want to help me hang some lights?”
It only lasted two days, two days of Bing knocking over cameras and playing with the carefully tuned soundboard, before Wilford grew frustrated. Bing’s own corroded circuits were in his head, after all, and once Wilford had taken care of his head, he’d left the body in the Googles’ room and shut the door for the last time.
Google_R was the first to leave behind a body of metal, dead in his chair. Then came Oliver, light fading with a final burst of static. Google_G went silently, and it took days for Google_B to realize that there was one less light in the room: that, in fact, he was the last light.
Google_B stood in place for a month before his eyes flickered, the image of Bing’s body finally fading.
Google_B stood in place for a month before his vision went dark, the last of his life, the last of the magic draining from behind his eyes.
Google_B stood in place for a month before he finally faded. And as he did, the rest of the robots turned first to shadow, then to air. Brothers of metal, and brothers to the very end.