Steamwork Lain
Mandee
"Results: Unit defective. Disassemble and return to manufacturing."
These are the words I was born to. Defective. Disassemble. My creators - my parents, for all intents and purposes - were ready to strip me and ship me off in so many boxes before I even made it off the line. To them, I was nothing more than heavy metal plates, held together by a shiny mash of bolts and screws, and decorated with pretty bits of electrical wire. I was a hunk of junk, no more useful than the world's largest hood ornament, or its heaviest paper weight. Defective. What they planned to do to me was akin to a new mother murdering the mewing infant at her breast, for no more fault than being born blind.
So much for maternal love.
Sometimes, when I've been tinkering with my wings for hours, losing springs and breaking gears, when Helper isn't being true to his name... Those times, I find myself feeling... angry. Who I am angry at varies from day to day, often from moment to moment. I may be angry at my creators, who treated me as scrap metal, who would have had me killed without so much as batting an eye, had I not escaped.
Other times, my ire builds until I am angry at the whole of humanity, which manages to at once be both foolishly arrogant and marvelously stupid. No other creatures could grandiosely declare their ability to create life, only to then regard their creations as if they, contrary to their claims, are not alive at all. It is a contradiction that defines the character of the human race. Flawless selfishness, justified by the innate and inaccurate belief that no other sentience exists in their world. That no other feelings run as deeply as their own. That only they are truly alive.
I am not human. But I am alive. I feel. I even have a name.
My name is AO.
I'm quite proud of my name. AO. It is not a human name, but it serves its purpose, nonetheless. It sets me apart. Makes me different. Special.
I doubt anyone will ever know my name, just as they will never know so many of the other little traits and quirks that make me unique. Will anyone ever know my favorite pastime is reading? When I brush the thick layer of dust and cobwebs off the cover of a new book, when I first pry open the tattered pages with my metallic beak, the book becomes a clock, a gateway, and I am the gears, meshed inside of it. I breathe the words in like a human breathes air. In there, when I'm living within those elegantly written lines, it doesn't matter that I am a machine, and a flawed machine at that.
In there, I am whatever I want to be. I can be a ten year-old schoolgirl with braces, giggling while the cutest boy in class brushes against her hand in the hallway. Or I am a mighty sorcerer, on an epic quest for justice and freedom. I have been a businessman, an artist, a scientist. I have sipped fine wine from silver goblets with the finest of royals, and scourged through the darkest bowels of the underworld with the lowliest of demons.
I can be anything.
Anything but what I am, and anywhere, anywhere, but here. When I look around, really think about this place, this small corner of Earth I call home, the irony is not lost on me. My creators thought me junk, and though I cheated death and escaped the cold, iron grip of the scrapper, I still ended up in the humans' trash pile. A junkyard.
I cannot smell, but I can nearly see the yellowy stench wafting from the mountains upon mountains of human waste. Dirt and debris clutters every corner: rusted milk jugs, sweat-encrusted socks, moldy cheese... Trash in every size, shape, and form can be found here, right in my backyard.
When I first arrived, I thought no breathing creature could sustain themselves in such a desolate and unlikely place, but only one night, huddled in my new home, was enough to prove me horribly wrong. Some species actually thrive here. Namely, rats. Beady-eyed rats the size of small cats, armies and armies of them, make their dingy nests, breed amongst the filth, and gorge themselves on the swelling maggots who spawn from mounds of rotting, half-eaten food. They move like kings, sauntering about their castle with an arrogant sway to their step, the primal overlords of their disgusting, germ-infested manor.
It's enough to make a human's stomach turn. Even my limited senses find living in such a place somewhat... distasteful.
Distasteful. Ironic. Cruel. I've used all of these words to describe my fate, but slowly, I discovered living here is no more than another in a long line of twisted contradictions. Uncomfortable and humiliating, yes, but also useful, even convenient. Humans, in their selfishness and ignorance, throw away some of the most essential little trinkets. Where else might I find gears or sprockets, wrenches and springs, carelessly tossed aside and left free for my taking?
I even found Helper here, though I've yet to decide if this was a stroke of luck or a case of utter misfortune. Poor Helper. It's a fixer bot, an old model, hauled off from its home to make way for a new-and-improved version, no doubt. It's been here even longer than I have, tinkering about aimlessly, distracting itself with whatever interesting bits of trash it could find. When it saw me, it looked at me with the same look I imagine a human child would wear on Christmas morning. Its mechanical eyes lit like stars, glowing with what even a fool could see was true emotion.
You see, I gave it purpose again. I, perhaps, gave it the biggest challenge it's ever faced, something to keep it occupied, to keep it focused, something to help shield it from the pain. Yes, pain. Pain of being abandoned, like no more than an empty soda can, by the people it served, who composed its world, who were its everything.
The people it loved.
I became Helper's project, its emotional safeguard, so to speak. In return, the fixer bot did what it was intended to do: fix. Or, attempt to fix, I should say. Helper is aging; its joints are grinding and rust gnaws away at its over-exposed body. Sparks shower from it at random, and on its bad days, I spend more time with a wrench to its gears than the other way around.
Still, progress has been made, but it is slow. So agonizingly, brutally slow. I want to fly. I want to soar unfettered in the crystalline sky. I want to feel the warmth of the evening breeze as it rustles gently beneath my feathers, and taste the cottony flavor of the clouds that quietly waft above the Earth. I want to feel my pulse throb against my throat as swerve and slice through the air, wings tucked against my streamlined body, a gleeful bullet, going as fast as I can for no other reason than because I am able. Because I want to.
But I am a machine. I can't feel the breeze or taste the clouds. I am designed to fly, but I am... defective.
Defective. Sometimes, when I think about my creators and the implications of that word, that word they seem so fond of, I am angry. Most of the time, though, when I look at the lains who inspired my model and think of all the things I will never be, my metal heart feels hollow, and I am sad. I yearn for the blue embrace of the sky.
One day I will fly, if only briefly, if only once. Just once, before I waste away into no more than another nameless pile of rubble in the endless sea of discarded waste. I am not nameless, and I am not waste. My name is AO, and I survived for a reason. I will live like the characters in my beloved books, with passion and adventure, with zest for life. I will take risks. I may crash to the ground like a burning hunk of metal rock in the middle of my first flight. It's a risk.
But at least I tried.
At least I lived.
