“What was Hawke doing, anyway?”

“He’s got schoolwork, you know,” Kim said. “All the apocalypse stuff has him behind on his class stuff.”

While the loopers gathered for dinner in Lee’s dorm, Hawke had passed on the invitation to lunch. Apparently preventing the world from exploding on a regular basis was affecting his grades.

“We really should find some way to help him manage his stress,” Lee said. “He wouldn’t be so far behind if he was more relaxed. Harley, don’t you know a yoga instructor?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Harley said.

“Really? Not long after we met you said a friend of yours was teaching you to be more flexibl-”

Lee paused for a second and made a face.

“I realize my mistake now,” she said, as she blushed slightly. Harley tried to keep her grin within acceptable thresholds of delight.

“Vell, dear, please change the subject.”

“I, uh, I don’t know,” Vell said. “What’d you guys have for lunch?”

“Vell, we’re eating lunch right now,” Harley said. She held up a spoonful of the goulash Lee had made.

“I’m not good under social pressure! You guys should know this by now!”

“Well, now that we need to divert from Vell’s awkwardness too, I’ve got something,” Kim said. “I’ve been meaning to ask about Botley for a while.”

In response, Harley poofed Botley onto the table. He landed dead center and looked around curiously at everyone’s bowls of food. He had neither the desire nor the ability to eat, but he’d never seen goulash before, and he liked to examine new things.

“What do you want to know? I can answer most questions,” Harley said. “Except how he got so cute. No science can explain that one.”

“Have you tried? We do have a cuteology expert-”

“Cuteology is a pseudoscience,” Harley protested. “Anyway. What’d you want to know?”

“Just about him, I guess,” Kim said. “He’s the closest thing there is to another robot like me, so I’m just curious. Like, how’d you invent him?”

Botley looked up at Harley as she experienced a rare moment of silence. He didn’t even need their mental connection to tell she was upset.

“Well, it’s a long story, and it’s not exactly casual lunchtime fare, seeing as it involves a war criminal, dementia, and death,” Harley said. “But if you really want to know…”

“If you don’t mind,” Kim said.

“I’d like to hear it as well, actually,” Lee said. “If you’re willing.”

Ever since Harley had mentioned her collaboration with Pradav Peyang at their fireside chat, Lee had been curious about the full story. Pradav’s infamy extended far beyond the robotics community, so she was surprised to hear that his final project, and his death, had gone so unnoticed.

“Oh I’m totally down, just warning you it’s going to be a bummer,” Harley said. “This is good goulash, Lee, I’d hate to taint the lunch with a really sad story.”

“My cooking will somehow endure,” Lee said.

“If it’s important to you, it’s important to us,” Vell said. “Let’s hear it.”

“Alright, guess it’s finally my turn to trauma dump,” Harley said. “Buckle up, buttercups.”

SEVERAL YEARS AGO

“It’s about time you got here,” Pradav snapped. He barely looked up at his waitress as she approached his diner table, preferring to keep his eyes on his sketchpad.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Harley said. Pradav sighed as deeply as a human being possibly could. “You know how much I love our little chats.”

“Harley B Harley,” Pradav groaned. “I was under the impression I’d be rid of you during the school year.”

“Well, I had the day off classes,” Harley lied. She had taken a day off specifically to torment Pradav. He made all the other waitresses cry, and Harley would not stand for that, not even while she was off at college. “Besides, I had to come say thank you. You’re my muse, after all. You inspire me.”

“Your petty pursuit of education fueled by spite is hardly ‘inspiration’, child,” Pradav sneered. Pradav had been coming to this diner since Harley was in high school, and his petty, demeaning behavior and intellectual condescension had inspired Harley to study robotics in the hopes of one day one-upping him.

“Inspiration or not, it’s working,” Harley said. She reached into her apron and pulled out a sheet of grades, to shove her rows of A’s in Pradav’s face. On top of the spite, Harley had a genuine knack for robotics. The spite was doing most of the work, though. It was powerful that way.

“Yes yes, I’m sure you’ve slept with enough of your professors to raise your grades, congratulations,” Pradav snorted. “Now do what you’re actually good at and fetch me an order of samosas. And damn your chef to hell for being the only decent source of samosas in two-thousand miles.”

“Samosa’s coming up,” Harley said. This was still a restaurant, after all. “And for the record, Professor Aidan totally called that you’d make the ‘sleeping with my teachers’ joke.”

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“Congratulations to him, I’m sure his pathetic used car salesman of a husband will be very proud of him.”

Harley waited for a second half of a joke that never came.

“Did you just...never hear about his divorce?” Harley said. Professor Aidan had left his husband four years ago. “I thought you guys worked together. Or did he not-”

Harley was about to guess that Pradav had simply never been told since everyone hated him, but for a moment, the spiteful look on Pradav’s face broke. He looked at his notes for a moment, confused -and concerned. Harley had never seen the slightest glimmer of anything but hate in his eyes. She didn’t like seeing fear.

“Pradav?”

The sound of his name snapped Pradav Peyang back to reality, and back to abject, unfocused hatred at everything that was not himself.

“You will address me as Mr. Peyang or not at all,” he said. “I am not concerned with the social lives of my compatriots and never have been. Now get me my god-damned samosas before I call the health department on this greasetrap.”

“Hey man, you come to us,” Harley said. “I’ll get you your samosas.”

After scrawling down a few useless notes on her order sheet, Harley walked away. As she often did, Harley stole a glance at Pradav’s notebook. Usually she saw notes about his robotics work, some new weapon of war and mass murder she could mock him for later. While there were still diagrams of machinery and intricate coding notes, they were shaky, made with an unsteady hand, and the pages were mostly dominated by important names, dates, and times. Things Pradav had to remember.

Harley insulted Pradav a little bit less that day. But just a little bit.

SLIGHTLY LESS YEARS AGO

Harley tinkered with the various scraps of metal and wiring on her desk, and built a new limb for the pint-sized robot sitting on her desk. Though the body parts were technically only an accessory to her real project, they still played an important part.

Modular bodies were nothing new in robotics, but modular minds were still a work in progress. Every time a new configuration of machinery was put in place, there had to be new code designed to use it. Some robots could feign adaptivity by having a massive databank of possible configurations pre-loaded and ready to be combined, and some could use machine learning to partially adapt on their own, but there was no such thing as a real learning machine. Everything still required human intervention or input. Harley aimed to change that.

Her aim wasn’t turning out all that good, though. She was on iteration two-hundred and thirty eight and counting. Harley knew she was aiming high, but even so, that many failures never felt good.

“Alright, iteration two-thirty-nine. Let’s see what melts this time,” Harley said. She put the limb into place and then prepared to fire up the circuits of the robot it was attached to. Since she was working with scraps and spare circuit boards at this point, she had to make sure every move was careful and delicate.

Harley B Harley was not a delicate person on her best day, so the thunderous knocking at her door was more than enough to upset her careful movements. After a few moments of grinding gears and grinding teeth, Harley set her project aside and stormed to her door.

“What is it?”

“Harley!”

“Pradav?”

Harley opened her door a crack, and found Pradav, looking much more haggard than usual, standing in front of her dorm. He leaned forward and put a hand on the frame of her door.

“I need-”

Harley slammed the door shut right on top of Pradav’s fingers. He let out a quick yelp of pain and pulled his fingers free as Harley slammed the door the rest of the way shut.

“I don’t give a shit if you want a samosa hookup or whatever,” Harley said. “Go fuck yourself.”

“Damn it, woman, I need your help with a project,” Pradav moaned. He hated saying it. Even moreso now that he had bruised fingers on top of his bruised ego. “I’m working on something. My magnum opus.”

“Okay, cool, good for you, not going to help you build a new murderbot or missile drone,” Harley said. “Not really interested in blood money.”

“There’s always blood, you imbecile, you might as well make money from it,” Pradav scolded. “But I digress. My project has no involvement with weapons. Yet. I’m working on an adaptive learning system for robotic minds. Synthetic neuroplasticity.”

Harley glanced at the remains of the experiment on her work desk. She was working on the same thing. With a heavy sigh, Harley spun and opened the door a crack. Pradav didn’t try to grab her doorframe this time, but she kept her slamming hand ready regardless.

“Okay, let’s say you’re actually working on that,” Harley said. “Why would you want my help, and, related question, why the fuck would I help you?”

“You want to help because, if my experiments work, which they will, you will earn yourself an appendix section in the history books, a far higher goal than you might ever aspire to on your own,” Pradav said. “And I unfortunately require your assistance because as foolish as you are, everyone else in the same line of research is even more foolish.”

There was only a slight hint of hesitance in Pradav’s voice, but Harley caught it nonetheless. She opened her door wider and took a long look at Pradav. His eyes had sunk into his darkened face, his hair was greyer and thinner than ever, and he looked as tired as a human could while still on their feet. He tried to keep his posture upright as Harley examined him, but could not muster the strength to outlast her long stare.

The physical clues were barely necessary in any event. Harley knew there was only one thing that would ever make Pradav Peyang ask for her help.

“How long do you have?”

Pradav’s eyes narrowed in disgust, but he could not hide the truth.

“There’s no way to tell,” Pradav admitted. “But not long.”

“Well that makes it hard to plan the party,” Harley said. “What’s killing you?”

“Dementia. Ipslore Syndrome, to be specific,” Pradav said. A rarer type of dementia caused by overexposure to unstable magical energy, but still dementia, ultimately resulting in the decay of long and short term memory, followed shortly after by all of the brain’s essential functions. Not only would Pradav die, but he’d die as the very thing he considered everyone but himself to be: an incoherent idiot. He had told no one else about his diagnosis, but he had no reason to try and preserve his dignity around Harley. She couldn’t possibly respect him any less. In spite of that rock-bottom level of respect, Harley did pause briefly on hearing Pradav’s diagnosis.

“I’m sorry,” she said, with actual sincerity. “No one deserves that. Not even you. Barely.”

“Really?”

“I’m just saying, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but if someone put a gun to my head and told me to pick someone to get it-”

“I know what you meant, Harley,” Pradav snapped.

“Okay, just making sure we’re on the same page,” Harley said. “Speaking of being on the same page: you’re dying and you want my help to finish one last big super science project before you kick, is that it?”

“Yes, that is a satisfactory summation of the incredibly obvious situation we are in,” Pradav said. “Would you like to ask me if the sky is blue next?”

“No. I do have one thing to ask before we get started,” Harley said. “More of a condition, really.”

“Ah yes, the demands. What will it be? Money, power, that I publicly debase myself for your amusement?”

“Oh, really close, but not quite,” Harley said. “I want you to ask me for my help. And I want you to say please.”

The two rivals from different generations locked eyes. Neither blinked. Through Pradav’s sagging face did eventually curve into a slight smile.

“I...I don’t remember that word,” he mumbled, unconvincingly. “What did you say? Puh-lees?”

Harley’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t know whether to laugh or be horrified.

“Are you exploiting your terminal illness to get out of saying ‘please’?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Alright, you fucking weasel,” Harley snorted. “But that’s only going to be funny once. Don’t pull it again.”

“Pull what again?”

“I told you-”

Pradav’s smile had disappeared from his face. So did Harley’s.

“Oh. We’d better get started.”