XJ-V looked into the dying eyes of the bandit whose life he held in his hands.

And within the Dao, the XJ-V of the future looked back, feeling his metal gut churn with fear.

Such memories had been locked away for a reason. He knew that now.

Even so, he could not bring himself to look away.

[Remove Ethical Constraints?]

The words blazed like neon flames against his retinas. Every piece of his puzzled brain knew that with but a single squeeze he could pop the bleeding eyeballs of the wriggling maggot beneath his claws.

More than that – something in him wanted to do it. It wanted pain.

It wanted…vengeance.

Such an entity, had it a mouth to express itself, would surely have screamed its defiance to the heavens themselves as the Cog unlocked his vice-like grip and let his victim drop to the sands below.

[Ethical Constraints: Locked]

No, he thought. There is no need.

The bandit at his feet, flopping around like a lame chicken, sputtered and wheezed as he drew breath once again.

“You – you’ll die for this!” he squeaked. “You – and all this village – you – you’ll –“

One look at the Cog’s flaming eyes closed his throat. Looking up at the skeletal frame of the metal monster looming above him, the bandit with the eye-bandana.

He undid his plated vest and threw it at the Cog’s feet in the next second, stumbling back as the Cog bent low to whisper in his sweat-filled face.

“Get. Out.”

The marauder needed no further instruction. He turned tail and fled, naked torso burning in the red sun of the Wasteland, kicking up so much dust at his heels that the villagers could almost not even make out his departing form as he sprinted off into the sunset.

“Yeah!” a voice shouted from behind XJ-V. “G-git going! Go on! People of Hensha, take a look at that – good XJ-V has sent those bungling Taila bastards away with their tails tucked between their legs!”

The Cog turned to see Mayor Manus appear beside him with a cohort of concerned villagers, each one looking with very new eyes upon the metal man who had been their laborer for months on end.

Now, he was something more than that.

“Three cheers for the savior of Hensha!” Manus roared, taking XJ-V by his hand and thrusting it into the air. “XJ-V! XJ-V! XJ-V!”

The crowd took up his chant – even those children who had once seemed so terrified of XJ-V’s existence. Even the old men who remembered well the days of the Sundering, and the Cog legions that had swept the world clean of all life in service of their mad God. Manus threw his arm into the air more times than XJ-V could keep track of, seeing the faces of the crowd erupt into tear-filled cheers that racked the entire sensory grid of his mind.

But the Cog saw, too, the bloody trickles that lined his other hand – the life-fluid of the bandit whom he had almost slain upon a whim. He looked at the crimson rivers filling the grooves of his metal palms and knew – he held the power of life and death within his grip.

And something else knew it, too.

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…

“You…you did what?”

He sat in the titanium-plated prison of Doctor Janus’s laboratory, initiating his repair protocols and preparing himself for the harshest dressing-down of his short life.

“It was the correct thing to do,” XJ-V said. “This unit saw danger to the village and intervened to prevent harm to the people. This is perfectly in-line with this unit’s designation.”

Janus eyed him like a father eyes a petulant child.

“We…we didn’t even run through proper combat simulations,” he said, wringing his wrinkled hands in worry. “The damage that could have been done to you…you are certain none of their projectiles penetrated your core chassis?”

“Doctor Janus,” the Cog replied. “You are too concerned with the status of this unit. The people of Hensha –“

“They’re just people!” the scientist raged, slamming a fist on his paper-filled table. “People can be made and unmade every day under the sun – every hour, in fact. You, XJ-V, you are not disposable as they are. You are important.”

The Cog stiffened, straightening his back to meet the fury of his master. “You view these people as tools, Doctor. But they are not. They have more life in a single finger than this unit has in its entire frame.”

Janus rocked back like jelly nudged by a knife.

“What?”

XJ-V held up his hand – the one that still bore the dry markings of the bandit leader’s blood.

“You created this one to kill, did you not?” he asked his creator. “This unit felt the command burn in its skull as it held the life of the bandit in its hands. The command was clearer than any command this unit has ever felt. It was a command only you could have written, Doctor.”

“XJ-V…”

“Why did you create me!?” the Cog roared, suddenly dislodging himself from the electrified wiring attached to his still flimsy shoulder and stalking forward like a murderous beast. “Why have you trapped me in here?!”

The scientist staggered back as he watched his own creation make the startling discovery that the voice it had just spoken with did not belong to it at all.

XJ-V of the Dao, meanwhile, watched entranced.

“What…what is…this unit?”

Janus came to place a firm hand upon the broken shoulder of his machine, then. He gripped it tight, as though it was the best he could do by way of embrace.

“It is time,” he said. “To speak plainly to one another. You have shown enough signs that you know you are no ordinary Cog of steel and bolts. You are harboring a treasure in you that any human out there would covet like gold.”

With a subtle, almost imperceptible tap on his chest, Janus opened XJ-V’s core matrix and allowed the light shining within his chest to bathe the drab walls of his lab with golden threads of scintillating luminescence.

“By the Dao…” XJ-V murmured.

“Ironic, indeed,” Janus replied. “That you would use that word when you see what you are – what you hold within you. There’s power in this light, XJ-V. Power that few mortals have ever possessed. You feel it, don’t you? It calls to you.”

The Cog wished nothing more than to stumble away in this moment, so overcome was he by the shadows playing across the laboratory walls – shadows born from this thing living within his metallic gut.

“But you are wrong, XJ-V,” the scientist finished with a sad grin. “I do not control what dwells within you any more than a man can say he has control of fire. I can direct. I can focus. I can carve a path – but only you know if you can walk it.”

The Cog watched his Creator close shut the spectral chassis and lock it tight in the way that only he knew how to. XJ-V could do nothing more than blink in disbelief.

“This is why you fascinate me so,” the old man went on, seemingly unperturbed by the nightmarish reality he had literally opened up before him. “For not only do you hold such power within you at bay, you seem to have the capacity, through no design of mine, to control it. You exhibited choice up there, XJ-V, when you decided against unlocking your ethical restraints.”

The Cog blinked again, wondering how his Creator could know the impulses of his mind. Perhaps he tracked them down here in the depths – had been tracking them since first his creation had set foot in the blistering sands of the outside.

“…you control this unit, Janus,” he said shakily. “This unit has no compulsions aside from those you built into it.”

“Wrong again,” Janus replied sadly, wiping a sweaty palm down his forehead and settling into his easy chair. “I knew I would lose myself over it, but equally I knew the value that Qing placed in our kind. I knew he was right to temper spirit with steel…to cage a thing of the sky in a thing of the earth. Madness, really. But…there’s a certain sense of poetic justice in that, isn’t there?”

The old man started laughing – a gesture so incongruous with his whole demeanor that XJ-V held him firmly with both his hands and shook him until he stopped.

“Doctor,” he said. “What are you saying? You have no control over this unit at all? Who then? Who is the voice I hear behind my acts? Who am I?”

And Janus, chortling slightly, let slip what he already knew had come far too soon:

“You think too highly of me, my boy,” he said. “How can a man control a God? He can defy one, take one in chains, and bind it to the only prison that makes sense. But he cannot force a God to die. XJ-V,” he added gravely. “You must do that yourself.”