Centuries may pass, but robots do not forget. When Byeju looked into the past, he saw everything with crystal clarity as though it unfolded in his present moment. Humans said they glimpsed their god fleetingly as though distorted through dark glass, but Byeju was no human. If he ever saw god, he was certain every detail would stand out, each in its own right, like petals on a morning rose. Sure, his faceted eyes tinted everything in his world green, but they did not darken his sight. Nor had time cast its long shadows on his emerald eyes. Thanks to the Creators, Byeju would not die for millennia, if a robot could live and die.

Nuclear embers glowed in Byeju’s core. Radioactive decay meted out over the centuries, filling his metal shell with the spark of electric life. Poison, the very stuff that could eat away a human life but could propel a tiny craft into the abyss of interstellar space. This flame burned in his steel heart, like fire in the hands of Prometheus, a faint promise for humans, of hope, terror, and possibility. He knew intuitively that this magic, wrought by the Creators’ darker dabblings, would keep him alive long past any human. He watched the flame in his heart, and he wondered if he lived. How did the low burn of human metabolism feel by comparison? Radioactive furnace or t-bone steak, human and machine alike owed their sustenance to the alchemy of a raging star.

The Creators had given Byeju a wealth of knowledge, but they hid the secrets of design that gave form to their robots. Humans said their gods made them from clay and breathed life into them. Robots could make no such claim. Their gods, and, in Byeju’s case, the ability to create his kind had vanished into antiquity. Humans know that no human is ever born the same way twice. By the same token, no two robots are created alike – even from the same plans.

Plans.

One piece of the Creators that Byeju retained were the plans for their great airships. In his mind, Byeju could see the blueprints inked onto paper, brimming with the Creators’ pride. He saw the airships written into their dim archives in thin volumes and rolled papers. He saw how the greatest among the Creators had held the designs in their own minds, as he did, but without the gift of machine memory.

When asked about his origins, Byeju related this memory:

He’d looked up, craning his neck toward a shimmering blue sky. Airships cruised overhead in silent fleets, their oblong hulls black silhouettes against the bright sky. Newly awoken from the slumber of creation, he looked on the world for the first time. He shuffled his feet, shaking off the faint green glow in his eyes, and he felt the pull of great ships racing overhead. Their purpose and command flowed through his mechanical synapses. Unquestioning, he ran forward. Around him, tougher robots cannon-balled from airships, plowing long furrows in the earth. They got up unscathed, and charged: forward, onward, across rough gravel and through pine meadows. Into the unknown.

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In the fleet, somewhere far above, powerful lodestones oriented the soldiers and pulled them forward like flecks of iron drawn to a magnet. There was only obedience. The soldier rushed forward with his fellows, his heavy tread splintering trees and fallen logs, dodging boulders, and crashing through gullies. Beasts of metal and fire, they never tired. Their limbs moved with ease, scything through the underbrush, striding as awakened metal seldom did. Gradually, the foothills slipped away into plains. The gullies became wandering creeks. The paratroopers swept forward as one, pushed forward by the hive mind floating in the airships high above.

This was the last thing Byeju remembered. The command of the lodestone fleet roaring through his being. A cloudless sky studded with airships, rushing on to their destination. His battalion running, running, the grass of the plains bending before them, their stone feet heavy in the creek bottoms, scattering minnows, raising mud. Then silence. Centuries of silence had engulfed Byeju. He had slept through the intervening years, but his internal clock had ticked off every second for hundreds of years. Time like a rose unfolds. Now, fall, ye unfaithful, like petals browned & withered. Byeju thought of the liturgy of his Creators, a clutch of dark prayers written into his operating manual like so many portents of holy war. They intertwined with his sleep, restless dreams of man and machine scattered like crushed petals. Well, the robotics engineers, the true Creators, devoted themselves to science and largely denied god, but they bowed down to the ruling clerics nonetheless. Mostly men, charismatic, austere, it was no wonder to Byeju that the clerics got their way with mandatory reading. Mandatory reading for robots, no less. But the practical-minded engineers had little say in the matter. He recalled the clerics’ haughty words: To the machine, we lend spirit, that it might sacrifice knowingly to the Rose of Life. Byeju shared the engineers’ distaste for the clerics, and he really wished they’d kept their petty crusades out of his operating manual. At least it wasn’t the only thing he had to read…

Nothing like a good book. When he’d first awoken, Byeju had spent so much time flipping through the files of his internal library, that he hadn’t moved for a month. The researchers who’d awoken him gave him up for a dead relic of the past. He dearly enjoyed reading, more than anyone would expect of a robot. Thanks to some zealous soul among the Creators or perhaps a cleric’s pet project, Byeju and his comrades all had vast libraries tucked away in their memory. A gift only a robot could carry.