I was shaken, to say the least. I’d barely managed to bring Brand back to life. Had I used one or two more spells, I wouldn’t have had enough slots left to convert into healing magic to bring Brand back from the brink. I spent twenty minutes cleaning off the char marks and chemical stains on his back. The metal plate that covered Brand’s reactor lay crumpled on the ground several feet away, and I had to hammer it back into shape before I could stick it back on Brand’s back where it belonged.
I ached all over by the time we were finished. I’d barely sat down before passing out from the exhaustion.
When push comes to shove, it turns out those goblin totems were pretty comfortable to lean against, all things considered.
I woke up several hours later to find that Brand had set up camp in the goblins’ settlement. The stone stank of rotten meat and goblin musk. I skittered away in shock at the sight of the goblins’ totems, whose gruesome details I only just noticed.
The things were misbegotten and macabre, made from bones, stone, sinew, and the exoskeletons of giant arthropods. Their sinister shadows danced by the light of our campfire, which Brand had appropriated while I’d slept.
Yes, the goblins were cretins and degenerates, but they sure knew how to prepare a hearth. They’d stuck sharpened bones into the flames, on which they’d speared the meat, to be roasted for dinner. One of the spits had a goblin head on it, charred to a crisp.
“Look who’s up,” Brand said.
I dusted myself off, removing bits of crumbled insect wings that had gotten snagged on my scales.
“Wh-What happened?” I asked.
“You slept a little, then I slept a little, too,” Brand replied. “We’ve restored our lower-level spells and some HP. Currently, I’m at two-thirds of my maximum HP.” The rippling circles crossed his face—the sign that he was scanning. “You’re at three-quarters max health.”
“Should we rest some more?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t risk it,” Brand said, shaking his head. “We lucked out this time. We’d probably get attacked if we tried again. Fortunately,” he added, “I’ve got my
Walking up to the campfire, I sat down cross-legged with my tail curled around me. Brand joined me, his hydraulic joints softly hissing as he sat down at my right.
“Are you hungry?” Brand asked.
I shook my head. “No, not yet. You?” I asked.
Though, as a robot, Brand didn’t eat food, he did need to consume charge every now and then, be it electrical or arcane.
“Nope,” he replied, with an LED grin. “It’s one of the perks of being mechanical: healing takes care of my energy needs.”
“I wish you’d told me what you were going to do,” I said. “The self-detonation, I mean. I…” I tucked my legs against my chest. “You really scared me back there,” I said. “I was worried you weren’t going to make it.”
Brand tilted his head. “I would have told you if I’d thought of it earlier,” he said, “but it was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
Lowering my head, I sighed.
“I don’t know whether or not dying in here will kill us in real life, and I don’t want to find out. We have to be more careful. I…” I swept my tail to the side, scratching my scales along the rock. “I don’t think I’d be able to forgive myself if dragging you in here caused me to lose you forever.”
“Excuse me?” he said. “I’m the one who pulled you into this. If there’s any blame to shoulder, it’s mine, not yours. Besides, if you want to pull out, we can always use my
I flicked my tail from side to side, trying to fill the silence. But the silence ran its hands over me and tugged at my neck. Emotions I’d been suppressing for the past few days bubbled to the surface.
Having my friend tell me it wasn’t my fault only made me that much more certain it would be my fault; depression can do that to a guy.
I shook my head. “You don’t get it, Brand,” I said, my voice breaking. “You… you don’t.”
“Alright, that does it,” Brand said, crossing his arms in frustration. “For a while now, I’ve had a feeling that something’s been off with you. So, spill it. What’s going on?”
I told him about Yuta, about the fungus devouring the stars, about Andalon’s anger with me, and the time rifts, and Suisei’s secrets.
I told him about Mr. Himichi’s death.
And then…
I took an especially deep breath. “Brand… Mistelann Skorbinka is dead.”
The robot’s LED face froze, then twitched. “What?”
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I looked him in the eyes. “He loved you, you know. He wanted me to tell you that.” Trembling, I glanced downward. “He asked me to, with his dying breath. He wanted to kiss you, Brand. He wanted you to have all of his kisses.”
Brand’s green LED eyes dropped.
“Fuck.”
There was a long quiet.
“Is that all?” Brand asked.
“I wish.” I said.
“You wanna talk about it?” he asked.
That opened the floodgates. “I’m scared, Brand,” I said, with a shudder. “I’m… petrified. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I thought I could predict it, but I can’t… and that terrifies me.” I shook my head. “I have this sinking feeling that something awful is about to happen, and the fact that I don’t know what it is makes it almost unbearable.”
“Something more awful than the fungal apocalypse?” Brand asked.
“Yes!” I groaned, staring him in the face.
“Genneth…” he sighed. “We have plenty of time. Time doesn’t flow in here at the same speed as it does out in the Thick World.”
“That would be more helpful if we weren’t up against an evil that attacks across time,” I said. “The rift I saw in Yuta’s memories matched the knights’ descriptions of the rift that brought them forward into our era. I think the fungus created the rift time, maybe even with the intention of bringing the knights to our time period. It probably brought Verune to the future, too. How can we fight something like that?” I asked. “What’s the point of making plans against an enemy that can strike us from the past?”
“Ignorance won’t get us anywhere,” Brand replied.
“Ignorance isn’t the same thing as the inability to know,” I said. “You can’t understand what can’t be understood.” I sighed. “Part of the reason I’ve been to keep hold of my sanity is because of my hope that, eventually, the mysteries will unravel and all of this will finally make sense. But what if it never does? What if we can’t ever understand it? How can reason be my guide if it doesn’t give me all the answers?”
“What do you mean?” Brand asked.
“Well… for instance, how do I know that the crud Mordwell Verune spewed from the Melted Church’s balcony isn’t the Angel’s honest truth?”
Brand stared at me for a silent moment. His green LED lips had shrunk down to a little blot on his face-screen.
“Why do there have to be answers?” he said, quietly.
I stammered. “W-What?”
“Categories are a convenience, not an absolute.”
I stared at him.
Again, Brand sighed. He waved his hand at me dismissively. “Alright, alright, how about this: how do we know when someone has died?” he asked. “I’m not talkin’ about definitions for legal or medical purposes. I’m talkin’ about the end-all, be-all, this is the fundamental meaning of what death is definition.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked, spreading my arms.
“Everything,” Brand replied.
“Well…” I bit my lip. “You’re dead when… you’re dead,” I said.
“Really?” Brand said, his LED eyebrows flattening at me. “Mr. Neurotheology has nothing to say about the ultimate nature of death? I can’t believe it.”
I lowered my gaze. “I don’t like thinking about death, Brand,” I said. “You should know that. Heck, I’ve been spending the better part of a decade writing a clarinet sonata just to avoid having to talk about the deaths of my loved ones.”
Brand nodded. “Well, speaking as a pathologist, death is a beasteaten mess. Some say you die when your pulse stops. Others say you die when consciousness ends, but that’s not much better. How can we say we know when and where consciousness ends when we still don’t yet know what consciousness truly is yet. Is it when brain signals stop, and if so, what counts as stopped? Where’s the cut-off? Is it when there’s a certain amount of hypoxia or hypoglycemia? Is it when the brain’s frontal cortex is no longer producing detectable levels of electrical activity?”
“I think that’s… reasonable enough,” I said.
Brand shook his head. “Not a chance. What if the brain’s higher functions are still in working order and the body is perfectly fine? Is that death? And what if you train a computer to perfectly simulate someone’s consciousness?” He pointed his finger at his head, as if to volunteer himself. “Has the person come back to life, or are they still dead?”
“What’s your point?” I asked.
“The more we learn about death, the more we appreciate just how much we still don’t understand. That’s true for most things, not just death. Yet most of us go about our lives without ever thinking about that. At the risk of sounding like you,” he added, “it’s a matter of hubris. You take it for granted that there should be categories, classifications, and answers, and that we should be able to figure them out. But you know what? The truth is, it’s a miracle that we know anything at all, and another miracle that what we know turns out to be usefully applicable. Compared to the people that came before us, we probably seem like gods. We can cure disease. We can control the weather. We can fly. Yet, in the grand scheme of things, we’re still ants.”
I frowned. “I don’t like being an ant,” I said.
“Well, I do,” Brand said. “At least most of the time.” He tamped his staff onto the ground. “Knowing the way people get, I’d be worried if we really were the big fish in the pond. It’s good that there are still mysteries: I wouldn’t want to live in a world where there were no mysteries left to unravel.”
“But you just said it was hubris to believe that the mysteries even had answers.”
“Yes,” Brand said. “It’s hubris to expect it. So… don’t.” He shrugged happily. “Don’t expect to find answers, but never stop looking for them. Stop beating yourself up for what you don’t know or can’t do, and focus on what you can do, one step at a time. And if you’re lucky, you’ll discover that you were wrong.”
“Lucky?” I said, gawking at him. “How can you say that? At this point, I’m the last person I’d trust.” I briefly closed my eyes. “I’d been meaning to tell you about Mistelann’s death all this time, but I couldn’t work up the courage to do it because I saw you were happy, and I didn’t want to take that from you.” I started to rant, slowly at first, then faster and louder, though I never rose to a yell.
I was spiraling.
“Just like I couldn’t work up the courage to come clean about my transformation until it was too late, just like I couldn’t tell the truth to my family until it was too late, just like I couldn’t save Nina until it was too late, just like I scared away Andalon again, just like I couldn’t work up the courage to listen to my son tell me everything was fine and instead insisted he get the surgery, only to die on the operating table, just—”
—Brand leaned over and kissed me, digital lips puckering on his LED screen-face. This wasn’t like the previous kiss. This was slow. Deliberate.
He pulled away reluctantly.
“I’ve always loved you, Genneth,” he said, softly.
Pixelated tears trickled down his screen.
“Brand…?”
He stared at me aslant.
“Thank you for telling me about Mistelann,” he whispered. A tear twinkled in his eye. “It mustn’t have been easy to carry that burden.”
“I… I don’t deserve—”
“—Stop saying that!” Brand rebutted. “Of course you deserve my thanks. And not just for that.” His LED face smiled. “Thank you for being who you are, Genneth Howle.” Sniffles rasped from his speakers. “Don’t ever change. But if you must… then make sure you change for the better.”
The silence returned, but, like our bodies, it too had been transfigured. I might still have felt broken, but… at least I wasn’t alone.