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“Robo, look! It’s you!”
Marle’s face was pressed up against the window as they swooped low over the southern continent. Beeping curiously, he leaned in next to her. “So it is,” he said. The speck was hard to make out, but it couldn’t be anything else, all alone in the fields like that.
“You’re so cute!” cried Marle. “Are you being a scarecrow?”
“Yes.” A little subroutine he thought of as his smile played through him. “That was before the birds grew accustomed to me. Eventually I had to use laser lights to chase them off.”
Lucca was looking down too, now. She steered into a gentle loop, silently considering the spectacle below while Marle waved her arms frantically against the glass. “Can you see us? Hiiiii!”
Robo whirred. “Yes, I remember watching Epoch go by. It was... pleasant. I speculated you might be thinking of me, too.”
“Must have been weird,” said Marle, turning in her seat to watch the little metallic worker vanish behind them. “Seeing us up here all the time on crazy adventures.”
“Not all the time,” said Lucca quietly. “Only the first few days.”
“Oh.” Marle considered this. “I guess that’s true.” Her big eyes turned toward Robo with what he read as a sort of pitying admiration. “Wow. You really had to believe in that forest. And us.”
He beeped shyly at her, but his attention was largely focused on Lucca. She was staring ahead now, hands clenching on the controls.
They flew on in silence.
* * *
Many generations later -- earlier, from his own reference point -- Robo strode through his young forest alone. Sunshine streamed through the canopy, feathering the underbrush and his own body-plating with light. Every diagnostic, every analysis he carried out was returning optimal data. Satisfaction was the word.
He’d managed to facilitate a complete restoration of the blighted soil, solved complex puzzles of chemistry and irrigation, reprogrammed the earth so that its climatic input resulted in lush, green output. He took a moment to stop and flex his shade-dappled plates, full of pride. In only 24.3 percent of the time allotted to him, the slender trees were thriving. How much more splendid would they be by the time his friends returned for him?
A squirrel chattered overhead, jovial counterpoint to the ambient song of birds and insects. Robo had passed from the western sector to the northwest one, and here, too, all was well. Perfect rows of trees stretched out around him, and all about them lay the balancing sprawl of undergrowth. He paused to trim an errant shoot and took note of the time. Continuing in this orderly, clockwise fashion, he should be able to finish pacing out the northern sector and be back by sundown.
But now that he considered it, wasn’t the light level changing a bit early? He peered up into the leaves, but could make out little except for a general darkening of the sky. Strange. He considered his other senses, running quietly in the background to make way for that surge of emotion, and here found the answer. Barometric data showed the air pressure plummeting rapidly.
Indecisive, he looked around once more. The dappled patterns on the ground were beginning to waver already, swaying and becoming indistinct. The birdsong was changing, too. It seemed the rest of his survey would have to wait.
By the time he reached Fiona’s homestead, it was scarcely lighter outside the shelter of the trees than under them. Gone was the blue sky he had seen this morning, now shrouded in black clouds and driving rain. The human laborers were scrambling to get their animals inside, tying down shutters, staking down canvas over the gardens. Anxiety began to buzz within him as he watched them, helpless. He always hated this part, even when they had more time for it. They always had more time, he was sure.
“Robo’s back!” someone shouted. Young Rowena smiled at him, hurrying past with a sheep in her arms. “Ever see it come on this fast, Robo?”
He didn’t answer.
The wind whipped Rowena’s cloak straight over her head. Behind them, thunder seemed almost to grind up out of the trees. He’d best get inside as fast as possible. There was no Crono here to protect him from a lightning strike, no Lucca to repair melted circuits.
He was sitting inside, far from any windows, when a CRACK-BOOM! shook the walls and rattled the very bolts in his head. Dazed, he waited for his hearing to recalibrate, and when it did, perceived a rising murmur of confusion, then shock, then dismay. He peeked around a corner into the great hall. Between the people clustered at the windows, he could see flickers of red light.
His forest.
The roar of horror that threatened to flood Robo’s senses was heard by him alone. Outwardly, all his powers were turned toward barreling out the front door with a speed and ferocity he’d nearly forgotten in his long century of peace. Workers dodged aside, crying out for him to stop. He was halfway to the edge of the woods and already bathed in apocalyptic orange light.
La Vos, came Ayla’s voice in his memory. He shut it out.
It had been a warm winter, a dry spring. The leaves had been bravely green, all his readings acceptable. But tonight, one heaven-struck tree had exploded like a grenade, hurling fiery shrapnel into decades of accumulated kindling. There were small fires everywhere. He stomped out the one nearest to him, but a bush beside it was already going up, hissing and sizzling in the rain. In desperation, he hurled a beam of healing light at the bush, but the flames only seemed to eat more hungrily.
CRACK-BOOM fell again, nearly knocking him on his back. He was surrounded by other workers now, pulling on his arms. “Robo, come back inside,” they pleaded. “You'll be struck.”
He almost wanted to be struck. He could see it now, his friends arriving to find the land as dead as it ever had been. It was cursed after all. The humans would leave, seeing that it was hopeless, seeing that they had better ways to spend their short lives. And here he would wait until they came back -- Frog, who could've stopped it all with one tremendous wave of magic. Crono, who could have diverted the lightning in the first place. Lucca, who had power over flame itself.
Beeping softly as the calculations played out, Robo allowed himself to be led back inside. He was, after all, a thing to be led. A useless construct. A relic from the end of the world.
The storm moved on. The forest burned for three days.
Inside, the others grieved. Rowena tried to keep their spirits up -- maybe it would be good to clear the ground cover, she said. Maybe the trees won’t burn entirely. Maybe the animals will escape. Robo didn’t want his spirit up, such as it was. He toggled off his subjective processors and silently helped with chores.
At last, the rains came again, gentler and more lasting this time. The sun rose like someone had forgotten to tell it what happened. A gentle drizzle lay over the smoldering world, obscuring sky and ground alike in dull, hazy blue. Slender tree trunks stood about uncertainly, blackened and denuded, the spaces between them filled with ash. Not one living creature lent its voice to greet the day.
Robo walked his forest alone, slowly, bearing witness.
The same rote path he had followed before led him back to the northwest sector. Here, he had first noticed the storm approaching, and here a quick succession of pattern-recognition alerts compelled him to finally turn his full processing power back on. The sudden flood of emotional data sent him to his knees.
It took several minutes to clear the backlog. When he could see again, his memory banks had produced an image for him. Crono, after a battle, bleeding copiously from what looked like a devastating leg wound.
“Mr. Crono!” Robo had cried in alarm. “Allow me to assist you!”
His friend had looked down at his own leg as if surprised. Sheathing his sword, he allowed Robo to deploy a beam of healing energy.
“Mr. Crono,” Robo had asked as he worked, “why are you smiling?”
Frog, cleaning his sword nearby, gave a croaky laugh. “‘Tis but a scratch,” he said. “Sometimes they're funny that way. I'd wager the lad barely felt it."
Here and now, Robo’s eyes rested on a singed tree trunk, cracked open, with a viscous runnel of pale green fluid dribbling from inside. It glittered in the damp sunlight as he reached out a hand to touch it.
"I don't understand," he murmured, as he had then. How could so much spilling make a warrior happy?
"Canst not bleed if thou'rt dead," Frog had said.
And Crono grinned.