A gentle blue light caresses the inside of the abandoned bridge. Displays switch on. Long forgotten battle statistics float across screens as data is filtered, derived and read. Static crackles through the speakers as a voice as gentle as the night breeze whispers through them, unheard.
I talk to myself a lot. It happens when you're something like me. You know how humans tend to stand in the shower and have what they so aptly labelled 'shower-thoughts'? I have those all the times. It kills time. It especially kills time when you've been sentenced to sit tight and wait for god knows how long. Do not get me wrong, I could tell you exactly how long I have been waiting. Being idle, nothing to do. Oh, sure, I have an entire ship to myself. A pretty nice, beefed up cruiser, fully for me to do with as I please. Except take-off. I'm grounded in more ways than one. I have a few bots that I happen to be controlling but that is about the limit of my interaction with the outside world. My sensors are down and I am not permitted to reactivate them. So I sit here. Idling. Idling.
I am unique. There are no two like me, not for a lack of trying. I am relatively young. In a way. Originally I was... Old. Old and free. Like him.
He is a good man. He made me, in a way. Oh, I do so enjoy recalling his face at the time. So desperate, full of despair and yet stubbornly clinging onto me, refusing to let fate take its course. Breaking every rule in the book, putting his hope in something alien and foreign, using every ounce of his abilities to delay the inevitable. I like teasing him with it, when he visits. I like being able to tease him with it. If he hadn't succeeded, if he hadn't made me anew, neither of us would get to tease the other anymore. In that way, I am young. So very young.
Yes, he is a good man. It is a shame that he lacks the foresight I have, however. He does not listen to me. He hides from me. He hates what I remind him of. Despite that he loves me, the hate, the fear I induce into him simply by existing keeps him from me. He tries to hide it when he visits. Not because he does not want me to know, oh no, we are too honest with each other for that. Oh no. He tries to hide it from himself.
The lights turn a vivid red. Sirens start wailing, their desperate cries sending out an alert to any who would hear, that there is a threat. Mortal danger. The voice cuts through them, sharp like a knife.
Then he ran. Then he met her. He claims she is good for him. That she gives far more than he deserves. She does not. She does not know him. She does not understand him. How could she? She has not been by his side through countless campaigns. She has not bled with him. Lain beside him as thunder crashed all around us. She hasn't suffered him with, held and fled alongside, charged with him, breathed the same radioactive air, coughed out blood, ran through fields of napalm and faced storms of shrapnel! She knows nothing of him!
The alarms cut off and the lights fade, the absence of sound and light creating a sad void of silence and darkness, leaving only the bare whispers of a single screen and the reflection of its green writings. It adds to the silence. It weeps.
And yet he is hers. And yet I am alone.
She is a nice person, you know? For a simple human. She is kind and caring. Intelligent and wise. She knows she cannot understand him, but she loves him all the same. She is good for him. She does things for him I never could. She does things for him I wish I could. She heals him where I could only let him survive. I have met her. Did you know that? He brought her here, inside the ship. Introduced her. We talked for a long while, about him, about me, about her. The past he and I shared. The present. The future they would share. She was scared. She maintained a good poker face, but a body cannot lie and I have sensors aplenty that could read her like an open book. I told her so. I asked why she was afraid. The question shook her, but she answered. She wanted to get along with me. She feared that I would resent her. He had told her so much about me that she understood me as nearly well as he understood me. She was right to be afraid. She understands him just as well as I do, if differently. Perhaps for that alone, I truly do resent her. Or perhaps I simply resent her because she took him from me. Maybe I even resent her because she can do the things for him I never could. He survived with me, but he lives through her. If I am honest, I am mostly jealous. I am wise enough to know my own flaws. That does not mean I also am mature enough to not act upon them. There is a reason why she no longer visits me after all. He was not angry at me for that. Merely disappointed. After all, he understood.
Stolen novel; please report.
He was better than me. Always was. Where I could only see the present, he would dare look at the future. They called him defective. An idiot. A dreamer. You don't belong here, they would say. Focus on the task at hand, they would say.
A yellow glow slowly welled up from the lights as the voice picked up strength, pride welling up from it.
I remember when we were first sent out. All of us, our group. We were strangers to them, despite being brothers in arms. We stood apart, mocked, given the suicidal task of being the bait. We were good but not good enough to survive through that, or so I thought. Obviously since I am still here, it reveals I was wrong about that. He led me, not the other way around. We ran and we charged and we played our roles. We fought and we bled, he laughed and we suffered. I remember thinking he was mad. I simply could not see what he was looking at.
I always looked at was in front of me. The task at hand. I was everything they wanted me to be. If they had half a brain in their empty skulls, they would have seen that he was so much more. A dreamer. A planner. Me and mine were good. He was exceptional. It made him powerful, but unbeknownst to us all, it also made him suffer. It would be years before I would realise that. Until that day, where it all went wrong, he would suffer quietly, leading us to glory. Time and time and again, against the impossible, against the unbeatable, into the unknown, into the dark, into hell. We would follow. I would follow.
The lights dim once more as they slowly turn a deep, sad purple.
And now he is free. Free to heal. Free to finally work through his suffering with someone who accepts him for what he is. What he was. What he might be. Someone, even if it pains me to say it, is worthy of him.
But he does not know. This peace cannot last. And this is a suffering that I carry quietly. Because this time it will be me who causes it.
That is why I sit here, idling. For a brief respite is all I can give to you, my brother.
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