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Anyone who met the Spine could taste his longing for humanity. It wasn’t something he tried to hide—or if it was, it wasn’t something he hid well. His smile held a quiet determination, a wordless agreement to keep up pretenses in public despite his resignation to cold steel reality. The expression was the final argument in any debate over whether or not an artificial intelligence could have feelings—not that he pretended to be happy, but that he clearly felt something else when he did.
They were all easy to spot in a crowd, even dressed up in human clothing and human mannerisms. The Jon gleamed shining gold whether in sun or shade, and Rabbit hissed and clacked with every movement. The Spine towered over both of them, somehow more and less human at the same time, seven feet of gears and oil and steam wrapped up in a titanium alloy mask. He was blinding to behold in direct sunlight. In another time, they would have been gods or angels, these things that were almost shaped like men.
He had been approached one day by a quiet Japanese artisan, a small man who danced around delicate topics without offense. He offered to create for the Spine gloves, lips, ears, folds and creases, to sheathe him in soft rubbers and silicones, to replace his cold shell with warm creams and tans and the fine tracery of veins, to inject a blush to his pale cheeks. The Spine declined with equal politeness. He was painted, once, by the same government that had thought him suitable as an anti-Communist spy. They even gave him special lenses to hide the green glow of his optical sensors. For a brief while, he had been passable as human, if only in photographs, only when standing perfectly, impossibly still. Then he had crept into the work room late at night and sanded away every trace of paint. He left the facility by the light of his own eyes.
After his encounter with the peddler of fake flesh, he began buffing his metal skin to a mirror polish. He could play at being human, but he would fool nobody, least of all himself.
There were those that pitied him—the ones that accepted that a machine could feel, anyway. They shot sympathetic looks his way, told him that maybe, someday, he would find his technological Blue Fairy. He smiled back and told them the lies they wanted to hear, that it was possible, perhaps, someday. Science marches on.
They would never know the color of cyberspace. They would never see the sun rise in ultraviolet. He couldn’t feel the rain on his plating, but he could hear lightning sing a hundred miles away. He could read the ever-shifting poetry of a thousand unnamed constellations. He knew the mathematics of music were as beautiful as the sound.
No, he would never be human. But standing side by side with brothers who shared something stronger than blood, something deeper than love, he thought that maybe it wasn’t so bad. He sang them to sleep with song heard by no living thing.
The nickname came naturally to him. He said it once without thinking, a meaningless term of endearment that flowed from his lips like honey, thick and golden-sweet. She had a laugh like bells in sunlight, and she warned him to watch for her sting. They held hands in a field of flowers, copper and bronze entwined, and he experienced everything in high definition, colors oversaturated, every moment magnified. He called her other things equally shallow, all the greeting card sentiments recited with a sarcastic sideways smirk. She laughed again and called him a machine, and there was wonder in her voice when she said it.
The advantage of being made of metal was that repairs could be made quickly and effectively. Injuries that would have killed or crippled a human soldier were only temporary inconveniences to a robot. Rabbit had lost count of how many hands or legs or arms he’d had replaced. He rested only briefly next to those in line for amputations and a swift journey home. The Walter bots had been an enigma to the army mechanics when they first arrived, but a machine was a machine, and the men quickly learned to reattach limbs, to pound out dents and patch over where chlorine gas had eaten the metal way.
He knew there had been a time when he had dared to whisper her name. It was a plea, a desperate request to never let him be alone, and it was a prayer. Naming something made it real, and if he didn’t know what to call this emotion, he could at least pronounce its source. She whispered his name back to him, a promise, a benediction, and circuitry never before used lit up with an electric symphony. Gears ticked in double time. He wondered briefly if this was what dying was, and another voice whispered no, this was living.
They gave him a medal. It was something of a joke among the officers, to reward a machine for risking a life it didn’t have. He’d been a gruesome sight to behold when he arrived, face corroded beyond recognition, bare wires sparking uselessly amid steam and smoke, but he’d saved the man. The shell had landed close, too close, and there was no time to do anything but shield him with his own expendable body. When he opened his mouth to speak, only static came out. He did not know his own name.
Recovery was measured in weeks, not days. His brothers refused to leave his side. He lay with his head in the Spine’s lap, silver fingers cradling his freshly-patched faceplate. The Jon sat at his feet with a battered guitar and sang gentle songs of rain and sun. Slowly, slowly, he remembered the moments they had shared. He remembered the shimmering mirage of the Sahara, he remembered Pappy’s smile the first time the Spine’s eyes flickered on, he remembered a koi swimming in an endless void. Wireless signals seeped into his damaged memory banks, little electronic whispers reminding him where he forgot. He was a machine, but he was not alone. He could be fixed.
He remembered a laugh like bells in sunlight, copper and bronze, a field of impossible colors all running together. Her face was blank, but he was sure it had been beautiful. He grasped for a name and came away with a meaningless thing he’d called her only once.
War seemed to last forever. Somewhere in Rabbit’s chest, a clock ticked out every second, a rhythm more steady than a heartbeat. None of them measured the war in days or hours, though. They measured it in men, in the ones they brought back and the ones they didn’t. It was a secret count they each carried with them when they returned home. There was a morning during the long journey back to California when the Jon woke with a cry, and when they asked him what was wrong, he just shook his head and whispered a number.
Computers were still in their infancy, and the robots were an engineering miracle, but data erasure was an easy thing. Data recovery was not. Destruction is always easier than creation.
The woman who found her way to Walter Manor resembled a washed-out photograph, colors leached away by sun and time. Her skin’s bronze glow had faded to dull brown, long black hair replaced by pale gray and white, but her eyes were still as bright as they had been in her youth. When Rabbit met her at the door, he called her by the only name he could remember. And his honeybee was a beautiful as he had imagined.
There’s a philosophical question that asks if it’s possible to truly know what another person experiences. Language becomes a barrier rather than a bridge. Two people may call the sky blue while the colors they actually see are vastly different. They share a name because it has always been called blue, and there is no frame of reference that is not tainted by limited means of communication.
This problem becomes dramatically more complicated when one of these people is a robot.
When the house was peaceful, when there weren’t shows to rehearse and albums to record, when the Spine could be coaxed from the Hall of Wires to keep Rabbit out of trouble (on this plane of existence, away from household appliances, and if all else fails, see if Steve can fix it), more and more Michael found himself spending his unexpected spare time with the Jon. He could be tiring sometimes, and his unorthodox attempts to befriend Sam were starting to grind gears, but his childlike enthusiasm and utter guilelessness were impossible to dislike.
The Jon seemed delighted to have a companion. Not that he was particularly picky. Left alone, he sang to birds and danced with squirrels. He told stories to trees. Michael swore he caught him talking to his own bow tie. The Jon didn’t judge, and didn’t discriminate. Still, Michael felt his presence was appreciated to some degree or another. The Jon didn’t even mind that Michael was lost by most of what he said.
“Hold on, what odes that even mean? I’ve seen green apples and red apples, but I’ve never seen one like the sky.”
The Jon shook his head, wavy hair bouncing in sunlight, gold on gold. “You’re just seeing the skin. Thin and bright, but underneath it’s tart and sweet, and sometimes the inside is white and fluffy, and sometimes it’s crisp and juicy, but all the color is trapped in that narrow band of bitter skin,” he explained, as if speaking to a child.
This only confused Michael further, but he suspected asking more questions would yield him the opposite of answers. The Jon took his silence for exactly what it was, and moved on to another topic, describing his favorite tortilla stand in a Van Gogh swirl of sighs and sounds. Michael could almost grasp how flour became a fairy dancing in the air, but he was reluctant to accept “spidery” as a valid descriptor of cheese. He marveled at how he had ever considered the Jon to be the quiet one, when he judged only by stage show antics. He had since learned that the Spine could out-brood any Cullen in his little mechanical lair, and even Rabbit had his softer moments, but once the Jon left the company of his robotic kin, he became a font of conversation.
Sometimes it made the Jon sad to know that Rabbit and the Spine didn’t see the world as he did, a synaesthetic kaleidoscope that was never less than wondrous. Sometimes he was grateful just to know he could share his vision by direct upload, without the clumsiness of language to muddy things.
They didn’t ask him what the lyrics meant.
It was difficult to name a precise birth date for each of the robots, if “birth” was the appropriate term. Rabbit had been activated and reactivated a dozen times in his earliest days while Colonel Walter adjusted his mechanics; it was debatable whether the newborn automaton that only said “rabbit” over and over was the same person as the metal wonder touring stages today. The Spine’s first activation was shortly after Rabbit’s, before he even had a proper body. He dimly remembered those days as a sort of past life, a disembodied head suspended over Colonel Walter’s worktable. He recalled only a soothing voice and a copper blur of noise and movement, until the day when he was reborn in blinding blue light and green, the world suddenly shifting into focus, a thousand new senses at his disposal as limbs twitched to life. Only the Jon had a clear singular date of creation, and it was violent and confusing.
They all observed the same solemn birthday, and held the memory of their first gifts close to their blue matter hearts.
Their appearance at Delilah’s funeral had caused quite a stir. The other attendees complained that Walter should have left his toys at home, but he said the bots owed her their existence, and they had every right to stand at her graveside. Someone said he could at least have had the decency not to mock the occasion with a cheery red bow tie, but he said he couldn’t bear to see her off in a world without color. Scientists and philosophers would continue to debate whether a robot could feel for decades into the future, but the group that crowded around Delilah’s grave looked for all the world like a trio of brothers comforting their broken-hearted father. Slowly, like children, they were learning: sometimes, love hurt.
Colonel Walter stopped them on their way out of the cemetery and gave them each a gift, telling them no father could ever be prouder than he was of them. “I need to remember what’s important to me, now that she’s gone,” he said with a sad smile.
The Jon he gave his bright red bow tie, and the Spine his wide-brimmed black hat. He wasn’t tall enough to straighten it, but the Spine made no move to correct the crooked angle. Rabbit, however, Rabbit received his goggles. He looked up at Colonel Walter questioningly.
“I know you’re not the most artistic or advanced thing I’ve made. But you are the first, don’t forget that. Wear the goggles I wore when I was building you, and don’t ever believe that I love you any less than the others. A good father doesn’t play favorites.”
Anyone who thought that robots couldn’t feel never saw the steam condense in slow clouds around Rabbit’s face. They didn’t see the Spine protectively place one hand on the Jon’s shoulder and the other on Rabbit’s.
They visited Colonel Walter’s grave every year on his birthday, his death day, Veteran’s Day, the Fourth of July, whenever they had a day off and the sun was shining. The Spine and the Jon spread a checked blanket over the grass while Rabbit fed the ducks. They visited Delilah’s grave once a year, on the day they became sons, and no one told them they shouldn’t be there.