Work Text:
Dumb robot.
Brian’s hands were steady as he removed each wire, allowing the awful blankness that came with each disconnect to consume him. The cavity in his chest felt the same — hollow and empty, with or without the wires — but his heart ached anew. He wasn’t sure anyone quite understood this feeling. He could take out the wires, tear apart his plating, grind the gears to a halt, and still his chest would scream with pain. Technically, it was the only pain he could feel.
Dumb robot.
He was used to feeling like this. Used to feeling like an oddity, a party trick, a clever contraption devised for amusement. He didn’t even mind feeling like this. He thought, perhaps, that he deserved it. He deserved to be treated like a hunk of metal with a fancy voice box, just a piece of machinery hooked up to a switch to make him seem human. What was it, after all, that made a human? It certainly wasn’t a heart; Jonny was proof enough of that. Jonny didn’t need a heart to be human. And Brian had a heart, and still he was stiff and robotic and programmed, with a little switch on the back in case the operator didn’t like the setting.
Dumb robot.
If he was smart, he would have gotten out while he could. But it wasn’t easy, not with Jonny. It wasn’t easy not to fall for those eyes (as much as a piece of artificial life could fall in love). Brian knew he didn’t deserve the gaze Jonny gave him. Jonny treated him like a human, a real human person who breathed and laughed and thought rather than imitated and pretended and processed. Brian wished he could give Jonny his heart; Brian’s heart was real and flesh and it beat in a way his body didn’t understand but perhaps Jonny’s would.
Drum robot.
Brian’s heartbeat was regular enough, he supposed, but unlike what his crew believed, it was not perfect nor as even. His heart beat and it was human, it pulsed and pounded and sped up and slowed down and it did all of the things human hearts do. But those little signals, those uncontrollable pulses, well… they did not make a human. They made a robot with a human heartbeat. They made computing units work and fans whirr and circuitry warm but they did not make a person think or exhale or feel, they merely made a sad play at it. Those little fluttering beats were what he fought against with each tap of the sticks on the drums. Those irregular patterns that translated badly to sharp and even lines of text were what he strove to beat out of him, tap after tap after tap after tap after tap after tap. He did not deserve the delight of a heartbeat — a robot could not feel the joy of the organ pumping adrenaline through veins nor rejuvenating blood with oxygen — because he was not human enough for it.
Drumbot.
He liked the drums, because people never had to ask if he was a robot or not. They assumed he was. They assumed drums were easy and robotic and regular, and not that every beat was a precise and deliberate choice by the DrumBot to stay within the lines, stay within the rhythm, stay consistent with the code and the chorus. He had been a showpiece plenty of times before. He had been an Oracle, gifted with prophecy, but even as supposedly humble truth-seekers came to ask their fortunes they looked at him and wondered who crafted him. He had been a Hanged Man, offering warnings to those who passed, but as they chose whether to listen they thought about rust and metal limbs and not about a man.
Dumb robot. Drum robot. Drumbot.
Brian removed another wire and found with a combination of relief and consternation that his speech abilities were greatly impeded by the action. Good. Robots didn’t speak out of turn. Robots needed switches to tell them how to think and what to believe. Robots were what Brian was, and Brian was not a human. Perhaps once, he had deserved that rank of personhood, but now he was merely a thing with the name and face and pretense of a man. So why did Jonny treat him like he was… human? Why did Jonny still, after everything, treat him like he mattered? Why did he matter?
Drum. Dumb. Drum. Drum. Dumb. Numb. Tongue.
He wanted to speak, to make a sound to remind himself where and how and who he was, but there were missing pieces of his body. Wires, yes. It seemed his cognition was hindered as well. He was just a tongue-numb dumb-drum bot, a dumb-numb drum-tongue person who was not a person. His processors fizzled a little in protest at the rather forceful removal of another wire. He was already glitching, what was one more?
Dumb.
Drum.
Numb.
Tongue.
Sun.
Some.
Sum?
What made a human? A human? Not a heart, hearts were human but not human, living but not alive. Hearts were dumb, numb drums. Hearts cooked in suns and numbed tongues and were dumb. No, it was not the heart that made the human. Brian thought he might tell Jonny that sometime. It was the sum, the sum of the whole, the heart wasn’t part of the equation. Humans were sums of the dumb and the tongue and the numb and the drum and the sun and some other things and Brian was just a Bot.
Jonny was human. He was not always smart and sometimes very chatty and often hollow and always pumping blood with a regularity Brian envied and occasionally basked in the light of a star and was everything else that made him Jonny and it was all human.
Brian was a drum— a numb— a tongue— a dumb—
dumb—
dumb—
—bot.
.
.
.
> Power Off. Connect Source To Restart. _