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“Did—you-see-the—sporting-event—last-night—?”
“Please-cease-the—water-cooler—talk,—Steve. We—do-not—even-have-a—water-cooler.”
Sigmund anxiously fingered a frond of the potted plant hooked to his belt as he waited for the mechanized mumbles to fade. The patrol was going… going...
Gone.
The Great Clock’s junior caretaker emerged from his broom closet sanctuary and bee-lined down the halls he’d memorized well before Nefarious claimed them as his own. The path to the infirmary was clear of troops, as he knew it would be at this time of the night cycle.
Sigmund slipped into the dim workshop and approached the murky cerulean glow at the center.
XJ-0461 hovered quiescent in the mnemonic chamber, as he did every night. Awaiting his destiny, the Zoni would call it—much nicer than “magically drugged and imprisoned.”
Unless the doctor made a surprise visit, Sigmund had about ten minutes with him before the next patrol came by.
Sigmund visited XJ-0461 whenever he was able to—when the Clock was ticking smoothly, when Nefarious’ troopers weren’t causing a ruckus somewhere, when neither Nefarious or the Zoni were in the dubious process of “fixing” him.
XJ-0461’s subconscious was a vault, by careful design, which no amount of screeching from Nefarious could crack. The concentrated aura of the Zoni, by contrast, could occasionally jumpstart XJ-0461 into limited bursts of life. The delirious gibberish was the only time Sigmund ever heard XJ-0461’s voice—a far cry from the famous wit of the thoughtful boy Orvus fawned over.
No, Sigmund had not met the real XJ-0461 yet, but the plight of the poor kid made his core ache. He was eager to bring any light he could find into XJ-0461’s dark days.
He often read stories to XJ-0461. Sometimes he told him Orvus’s jokes—gee whiz, though, did his deliveries need work. Once he even sang to him, a soft children’s song debating the assets and liabilities of lunar colonization.
He didn’t know what XJ-0461 heard, if anything. Of all the voices that ranted and droned at XJ-0461 in a day, Sigmund wanted at least one of those voices to be friendly.
“Hi, XJ-0461. It’s me again. Your old friend... Sigmund.”
He introduced himself every time he visited; he never knew what short-term memories that crazy doctor knocked loose that day. Or if this time, maybe this time, the poor boy wasn’t as insensate as he looked.
“I mean, I guess your opinion is kinda crucial to that condition, but uh… I’d like to be your friend. I always hoped we would be.” He sighed and rubbed at his upper arm. “Well, not always. I was… well, I was pretty jealous of you for a while. But that’s not important right now.”
It never had been, really. In Sigmund’s defense, he had planned on decades to properly work through his feelings regarding Orvus’s legacy. The Zoni had other plans.
Sigmund cringed. Was there anything he could have done to prevent the Zoni from taking matters into their own nubby little hands?
“I’m sorry the Zoni dragged you into all this… and I’m sorry they had to hypnotize you to get you here. Orvus never would have signed off on that. Orvus wouldn’t…” Sigmund sighed. “Orvus wouldn’t have approved of any of this.”
Sigmund was more or less prepared—resigned, really—to be XJ-0461’s teacher in matters of the Great Clock. When it came to teaching XJ-0461 about Orvus himself, however… Sigmund had no idea where to begin or end.
“I want you to know… Your father never wanted this to happen this way. He expected you to come here on your own time, you know? After you’d explored the universe. That’s why he wanted to start you out all the way in another galaxy: you couldn’t get from there to here without a little bravery and a lot of curiosity. So, it was handy that your mother was already in Solana.
“Oh, she wasn’t supposed to tell you anything about this place either, so I guess I ought to explain. Mae is your mom and Orvus is your dad, but they’re not… They weren’t, um… to each other...” Sigmund sheepishly tapped his fingers together. “… you know. They were creative partners. They only ever met face-to-face—uh, to screen?—the day you were born. They’d been working on you for… jeez, for a while before then. I only saw Orvus’s side myself, but I know you were really special to both of them.”
A new strain of distress began to curdle within Sigmund. Mae was surely concerned about her son’s whereabouts—the monomaniacal Zoni wouldn’t have thought to fill her in. Should he try to get a message to her? He still wasn’t exactly sure how Orvus communicated with her. Another conundrum to add to his endless list of problems to solve.
“You are, you know. Very special, that is.”
He fruitlessly scanned XJ-0461 from head to toe, desperate for any twitch of acknowledgment, or even life. As always, he could detect nothing other than the red light in XJ-0461’s antennae. It was dim but had never gone out, proof that some energy was keeping him minimally powered.
I bet I can fix you, he didn’t say. He didn’t want to get the kid’s hopes up.
If only he could count on enough time alone with XJ-0461 without the Zoni or doctor intervening. Enough to devote exactly as much caution as the delicate process of repairing him would require. XJ-0461's intricate inner mechanisms required far more finesse and care than a leaky pipe Sigmund could furbish in a few minutes.
Reminded of both his maintenance tasks and the patrols cutting his time with XJ-0461 short, Sigmund knew that his ten minutes were nearly up and he had no choice but to reluctantly skedaddle.
“It’s dumb to hope that you can hear me. I’m sure your processor isn’t registering any outside stimuli right now. But just in case it is, I don’t want you to be afraid. You’re not alone.”
He wistfully watched XJ-0461 for only a moment more. Someday soon, he told himself, they’d be able to talk properly.
Someday, they’d be friends.
“Goodbye for now, sir. Pleasant dreams.”
“You are the robot who assisted me in my escape from Nefarious,” XJ-0461 observed some time later. “What is your name?”
“M-my name?”
Sigmund’s sisterboard twinged as the question he’d been asking for nearly two years was unceremoniously answered: XJ-0461 didn’t remember him at all.
He didn’t remember any of Sigmund’s visits. The words of reassurance, the stories, the song—okay, maybe that one was best left forgotten. Perhaps he had never heard them in the first place.
Sigmund had known this was a possibility—no, a probability. A significant one. He simply hadn’t expected it to hurt so much.
Well then, so be it.
He couldn’t change the past, so he would make an even better first impression the second time around.
“Um, yes, of course. Sigma-0426A. But you can call me Sigmund.”