It’s made of summer skies and soft breezes. A dash of ocean water. A pinch of sand. There is the distance caw of gulls as he lays on the beach, head cradled on his arms, back exposed to the warm sun. This is his private refuge, his escape from his life’s work. But that, too, he supposes is short lived.
He can already hear the sound of footsteps on the sands. He knows who it is before a chilled hand touches his shoulder. “Sir,” the android implores, so human by design-by his design--, but there is always that catch in her voice. The small scrape of gears as her programming switches on. “Sir, you are needed in the lab.”
Androids were not always this human and he begins to think he misses it. He misses the huge clunking robots. He misses the voice that sounds like it’s fed through a fan. He misses the simplicity of an order and an execution. Now he has this robot looking at him with its blank eyes—not because it is ordered to but because it wants to.
“Please,” he pleads, shrugging off the icy touch. “Please don’t make me go back there.”
They have this conversation almost constantly. Sometimes the android changes—they have names, but he remembers none of them, just like he cannot remember hers. Hardly matters, he thinks bitterly, they have begun naming themselves. Hers could be Terra or Waffle for all he knows, but he does not care. He thought he would one day- that the pain in him would melt away to a fondness, but it’s like an exposed nerve. When the cold hand lands on his shoulder again, the nerve is pinched.
“I said leave me alone!” he shouts, pulling himself from the sand. He is fully clothed. She is naked beside him. Her gaze is casual, blank, but her mouth quirks just slightly. They have all begun to see it as a game. They all just see him as a toy. Soon he will truly become that, but this conversation is evidence enough that he has not.
“But you’re the only one who can make our souls. We need you,” she says. Her voice sounds like his wife’s, he realizes, and he riles. They have gone through his personal files and found those videos; the videos that hold the only evidence that humans were once the master race. Now it has turned to these androids that he builds souls for. Sorry, souls he engineers, he corrects mentally. He engineers their souls, so that more can come and more can rule and tread on the graves of their creators.
And he wants to argue they do not need him, but he bites the words back. He does not know if there are other engineers trapped out there, caught in this cycle, and by withholding the secret he knows, he is saving them; if maybe the others are doing the same. He just nods and dusts off the sand.
“I suppose I am the only one,” he says, voice dry and ringing hollow. “Now lead the way.”