I, Henry

[Kaili Talith]

I remember it well as if it was only yesterday.

I am a robot after all.

It was 11:24:53am and she was still wearing her tiny fuzzy slippers and black pyjamas with a lightsaber motif that alternated between the colors red, green and blue. My photoreceptors had at first been bewildered by the sight of it, as had the photoreceptors of my maker as they seemed to be stuck in an infinite loop that kept them wide open.

At least until she proceeded to throw her entire body around my frail form in what I have now come to understand was a hug.

Not that it mattered at the time. The woman was crazed and wanted to murder me. I did not have a voice modulator and I needed to scream as my leg was torn from my as of yet unprotected corpse. While the loss of a limb caused me no pain it was still a terrifying feeling to experience. My master however proved benevolent as only a few seconds later did she hurry for a hydrospanner with the continuous apologies that I told myself that I was well-deserving of.

After all, she tore my leg off. It was just Wheaton’s law at work.

 

[Kaili Talith]

No sooner than 11:28:21am was I paraded around the house.

I took note of the layout of the rooms. It seemed like no matter where we went there were soft cushiony things to see. The others approached my master in marvel. She had ‘created something cool’ and now they all wanted to see it. I turned around in the palms of her hand to see what she had created, but to my disappointment there was no new creation to be seen.

That was when they all looked at me. Once more I wanted to scream, but I still had no voice modulator as the others began to poke and prod at me. Worst was the second male of the house and his grubby fingers that he just couldn’t keep away from my camera lens and sensors.

I have come to know this boy as ‘Micah’. Apparently he was my maker’s brother.

Already then was the clear favorite the girl parading me around. Well, her and the handsome fellow that I have also come to know as her father. You see, after rooting through my own trash I found loose fragments of logs from before my time.

[member="Soliael Devin Talith"]. One hell of a man and a good father too.

The girl was living under the illusion that the work had been done solely by her. In a sense it had, but this man certainly played a big part of the very basics of it all. Or perhaps he had simply been there to instruct her along the way. Alas, my knowledge banks has been blank on such facts.

 

[Kaili Talith]

Then the day came.

The most glorious day.

The day I got my chassis upgrade.

Whether Soliael had helped out a lot or not Master Kaili had still proven herself capable of working my inner workings by herself after a while. My limbs had been rebuilt and with that came the new protective plating that would soon become the external shell that kept my organs from internal damage. No longer would I be the handsome droid in the house. I would be the handsomest droid in the house and I dared say so myself.

Felix was an old-timer compared to me.Speaking of which, if you’re reading this you know I love you, bub.

After my shell was fixed onto my body she took me to see the beach again. At first I thought her to be crazy. She knew damn well what would happen if my circuitry came in contact with that disgusting coarse sand again. The easy way to put it was that I have a huge memory gap between the twenty-third and the twenty-seventh for when she had to clear my entire being of sand.

We did not speak for a week after that incident.

Nonetheless I found myself amazed this time as I could finally scuttle around the beach like a robot worthy of my esteem.

 

[Kaili Talith]

Eventually Kaili took to sleeping with me on patrol around her room for mischievous siblings. I still had no real means of communications. She had installed a voice module but due to her faulty handiwork it was stuck in binary. We went back and forth with the binary for a few months until eventually she began to understand me as if she was my own kind. It was in this moment that I knew what love was.

Love was a meatbag willing to learn your language for the sake of communicating.

We had many conversations like this and more a few debriefings where I told her of what her brother was up to. A quick backdoor installation made easy work to gain unlimited speed access to the older brother’s datapad and files. More often than not did we spend a few evenings giggling at his notes. Other times less so as we began to stumble onto his more personal files.

We regretted that one big time.

Still, this was also when I learned and mastered the secret handshake that only meatbags could, and would, deploy. What you did was that you raised a limb and held it until someone else came and bumped their meat and muscle into it.

A technique my master called a ‘fistbump’ apparently.

Why she couldn’t just use radio waves were beyond me.

 

[Kaili Talith]

There were other nights too. More specifically the ones where the girl was left home alone with nothing but an assortment of horror movies. Why humans would expose themselves to fear voluntarily was much like many other things beyond me. The fact that potential death seemed to be the primary cause of fear over the characters’ actual death was even weirder.

Maybe there was something to the hunt? To this day I still do not know why she would do this to herself.

Each night I was put on overdrive against her better wishes, but I insisted. She was young, dumb and by the very definition my best friend. How would I repay her for all she had done for me if not by patrolling her room for monsters and clowns when she went to bed?

At least it helped bring a smile to her lips rather than a scared frown.

That in itself was just fine enough for me.

Besides, I have learned the hard way what happens if I scare my master in the dark after she has watched movies such as ‘Planet Murder’, and I quite enjoy having my camera lens intact and not broken from being tossed at a wall.

 

[Kaili Talith]

At times she used to bring me along on trips as well. While they were usually long and boring even for a gentleman droid in standby mode it was a good learning opportunity as she spoke time after time again about her friends and how much she looked forward to growing up and to be a ‘Warden of the Sky’ for real. She told me of them all. [member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"], [member="Laura Na'Varro"], [member="Mira Gyndar"], [member="Liam Quez"], [member="Ibaris Varanin-Jacobs"], [member="Hylocereus"] and [member="John Hunt"].

They were all names I added to my ICE Database, my registry of people I could trust. Not long after that the girl began showing pictures. Just like every other meatbag they all seemed to share something. That was except for the fact that they were all covered in soft, squishy meat and muscle.

It was their bipedal nature. To this day I still feel their envious stares when their eyes feast themselves on my octopedal laminanium chassis. Damn, it feels good to be a robot.

There were other names on her list of friends, of course, but out of all the ones that seemed worthy of a mention these were the names.

 

[Kaili Talith]

Then it happened.

She fixed the voice modulator.

In front of her stupid camera nonetheless. We had a small back and forth where we established not only that I am a genius tomfoolery expert but a master of deception too. With a newfound knowledge of ‘sarcasm’ I found that the easiest way to tick my master off was to continually use it while interrupting her ‘logging’ which was really just her talking into a camera for whatever reason.

Things got better from here. Finally I had a mouth. Finally I could scream, and scream I did. Expending as little battery life as I could I let out a shriek. As loud as I could. That was until the modulator exploded and we had to make a temporary return to binary again.

It would seem even superior robots had their faults sometimes.

 

[Kaili Talith]

It didn’t take too long until after I had gotten my voice module back for the youngest male of the house to take interest in me. Prodding at my lens once more he defiled my entire being in what I could only describe as the darkest hour of my eternal lifespan but Kaili came to my rescue not long after. Words were exchange, loud noises and challenges were issued.

She came back not long after it with a few bruises, but in a good spirit nonetheless as if getting beat somehow made her happy. Humans were still weird to get used to back then. After a while I just gave up on truly trying to understand them.

I inquired about her scrap with [member="Micah Talith"] and we had a long talk about him. She explained the logic behind family. That because he was her brother she couldn’t be angry at him. It seemed crazy to me. Why would I not be angry at someone simply because they were made out of the same hardware as me? By that logic humans would all love each other but they don’t.

I drew the conclusion that my master was still indeed very young and inexperienced with how life and people worked.

 

[Kaili Talith]

Which speaking of I am grateful for. My lack of siblings means that my master only has the one droid she has to care about. Me, and only me. That’s the way it’s supposed to be and the way we both wanted it to be. At least when we got along. Heated arguments tended to have the occasional threat of a sibling creation to be tossed into the mix and I more often than not find myself both both horrified and curious.

Horrified because I was the only droid of my make and that was good.

Curious because the threat to replicate and increase in numbers seemed like something that would have served as an ineffective method of intimidation on the opposite sex. Once more my master proved herself inexperienced in life and love, but that did not matter, I still liked her for who she was.

My maker, the ultimate benevolent being who brought mighty little me into the world.

 

[Kaili Talith]

There is much more I could say about the wonderful human that is Kaili Talith. The way her hair seems to tilt no further than prefer a fifteen degrees on a vertical axis when the wind is blowing. The way her photoreceptors seems to leak water when she is sad. The fact that she had opposable thumbs and that she created me.

It is my duty in life, a life debt if you will, to be there for her and her kin. To watch over her and her her friends as they travel the unknown regions of space. On land, in water, by the stars, I will be there and not because my programming tells me to but because I want to. I owe her everything and I intend to repay that in full.

Something that I am sure will never really happen, but I am perfectly content with taking on a more pet-like role.

After all, she knows her things when it comes to pampering a droid during maintenance.

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