Chapter Text
K1-B0 was unfamiliar with many emotions. His sterile life with the Professor had secured a life that was nothing but a dull drone. He felt something like a twinge very often, and he was told that this was ‘loneliness’.
Feelings like ‘fear’ and ‘giddy’ and ‘nauseas’ was described to him often, yet always beyond his grasp at every turn. He pestered the Professor for DVDs, Blu-Rays, zip drives of pirated television content, and even mystery VCR tapes from thrift stores.
Movies had helped him understand. They gave him a bedrock to build on and to understand human complexities through the stories they told. Stories couldn’t make him human. He didn’t even want to be human, not really.
The Professor’s lab was a small and unstimulating place with scrubbed linoleum and fluorescents that made his eyes hurt. For years, maybe a decade, it was K1-B0’s entire world.
A single window gave witness to the outside, a courtyard, though K1-B0 did not know the term. All he could see was a fuzzy green carpet two stories down. The movies told him it was grass, a common phenomenon in ‘nature’.
K1-B0 would often stare ‘outside’, especially during the day. He’d watch humans walk below him and follow them with his big, illuminous eyes that showed nothing but stupid curiosity.
“Professor, I want to see that,” he would ask. In his hardware, he had meant it sound like pleading, but his voice modulator was still quite primitive. It came out monotone and harsh instead.
At least once a week, he would ask. Always, the Professor would shake his head and tell him no. He’d gesture to K1-B0’s wiring, a nest of cables that tethered him from the small of his spine to a power adapter the size of a mattress.
“No, you can’t leave. I haven’t figured out how to make it possible,” the Professor would say. K1-B0 was never able to tell if that was genuine or just an excuse. Regardless, it didn’t change the reality. He was chained to this one room, for better or worse.
One morning, well before the Professor’s usual arrival, K1-B0 wandered to the window. He liked the time of day when the sun came up, when the sky turned dusty pink and slowly bled into orange.
Movement caught his eyes. He glanced down, the gears of his eyes whirring. His pupils dilated and his eyes zoomed in on something. It moved on four legs, had an elongated snout and sported two dish-shaped ears that rotated on its head like radio receivers. It had eyes that looked like oil drops. Its feet seemed dipped in resin, not at all like the flabby paws of the ‘dogs’ he was more familiar with.
“That was a deer you saw,” the Professor had told him, smiling. “They don’t often show up on campus. You were lucky to see one.”
K1-B0 did not know what the word ‘campus’ meant. He didn’t care. It was a word he could look up on his own. It didn’t live and breathe and feel like the deer.
“Please, Professor,” K1-B0 pleaded, his own voice static in his transmitters. He nearly stumbled over the cables anchored to his back in grabbing his laptop. It was a ratty Toshiba, and it was how he watched movies.
He held up the laptop to the Professor, his cartoonish eyes meeting those of flesh and fluid. “Please,” he begged again. “I want to see more of it.”
K1-B0 did not understand then. How could he? It was only after combing his memory banks much later on did he see the glint in the Professor’s eyes, an epiphany of opportunity.
“Of course, K1-B0. I have just the thing.”