"Don't Cry." I don't manage to say the words, as the anti tank round tore its way through my body. The thought has no time to travel to my voice box as I fall backward, the remains of my body crashing into the snow. Wires spark, and hydraulic fluids leak as I understand intuitively that my power core has been broken. I'm Barely lucid as my thoughts slow to a crawl, the hard drives and substrates holding my mind too badly broken to function properly.
Despite that I understand that I'm dieing. I picked a fight against a ten ton mech suit, it was the most obvious possible outcome. Still I just wish she wouldn't be so sad. Who exactly shouldn't be sad escaped me for a brief moment, until the thought clicked. Rain, my daughter...well not biologically obviously, I wasn't human though technically she wasn't either, not really. They called them freaks.
She rushed to my side as I fell, her cold blooded body shivering in the snow as she knelt over me, calling out my name. "Don't cry."
I yearned to say it, ached to get the words out, wanted to say it and so much more. Warn her, tell her to run, to get away from this war and this planet. Had I ever let her know how much she meant to me? How much I loved her? My sweet child? My curious adventurer who poked her head into everything wether it it was a hornets nest or a treasure chest. She wasn going to have to be so strong now, her and Emry both. Two adults, who fate, circumstance and a glitch in my programing had lead me to adopt.
Emry was safe at least, he was always the more cautious of the two of them, the responsible child. So ambitious, building an army, fighting a war rebelling against tyranny...Emry was so brave and I loved him so much. I hope he knew I loved him, how much he meant to me, even if i had to rescue his sister more often than not.
Ah...I'm running out of power now...and I don't think there's going to be enough to recover to every reboot my sorry silver ass. Heh, I died to a teenage girl in a mech suit with daddy issues. Hehehehe, I wish they knew...how familiar this all is.
"Don't cry." Despite it all, someone designed my body with tear ducts...and I couldn't bring myself to stop the tears. I don't want to die, I don't want to let them go. I'm so selfish. I hope they get to their own happily ever afters. No matter who they have to kill to get to there.
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And with that final and oddly violent thought, Lake Pond died. A robot, over three hundred years old, Birthed in an era where Synthetic life was in its infancy, she took the role of nanny, tutor, nursemaid and friend for the first 80 years of her life. But eventually, the child she raised, took care of, worked for, and eventually tended to passed away, quietly of old age of all things.
Nothing can quite break a person like knowing they can replace their parts, and you, their loved ones can never replace yours. For two hundred and twenty years, lake went to work in a society that never truly saw synths as people avoiding emotional connection in an attempt to save money, keep her body working and save the planet.
She eventually got a job as a ship pilot, delivering cargo to and from the colony stations around the planet. Living a comfortable routine that would eventually get her to her goals, her life was interrupted when Emry and Rain seemingly fell from the stars and into her lap.
Instead of turning her back on them in their respective moments of need, Lake helped them, pulling Emry out of the wreckage of a ship, and Rain out of a cargo container, she got them shelter, and food. At which point she had planned to walk away, but something happened.
Maybe it was a glitch, something that turned on her old nanny programming and forced her to look upon these two full grown adults and see them as her children. The truth was a lot scary to lake, so of course she never addressed it.
She cared about them, enough to see through that first act of kindness to the next, and it just kept going. She couldn't explain it, she told people who asked that they were her children according to her programing, but the truth was they weren't. Lake could have gotten up and walked away at any time, when things became complicated, when the government came down on them, when one sketchy job led to the next, or when they joined the rebellion Lake could have just walked away.
She never did.
In her final moments Lake hoped beyond hope they'd figure it out, just how much she loved them. How so very much she wanted them to succeed.
Lake would never know, and in that the cold void of unconsciousness was welcoming, for at least in death she wouldn't need to concern herself with such thoughts.
You might imagine how annoyed she was when the embrace of death faded and she found her eyes opening and refocusing on an entirely new world, utterly unlike her own.
"God, fucking dammit."