Singin' It

Blue drops fall from the black sky, eliciting a white gleam from the big marble up high, streaking against the rectangular greys before me until they course against the red of my steel. They pelt me, these tears from space, striking like liquid hail across my shoulder blades, into the folds of my yellow scarf, dripping down to the sharp angles of my feet. They tell me something: 

Get away. Escape. Run from the torture of the water. 

There's no point in just standing around. Why suffer these circular barbs and arrows? 

You'd be an idiot not to go back inside, not to enjoy the warmth of encased technology below the ground. 

Maybe I'm just the one who has respect for tech. 

I tell myself I stand atop a pinnacle. That under these concrete grounds, generations of knowledge and research lay, manifest in both the people who wield it and the metallic beings that embody it. They're circuits of the future, laced together like the silk of a spiderweb, inhabiting mineral husks; but these circuits have a history, too. 

They're the things that allow me to feel the flow of blue against me, to see the puddles form on the murky ground, reflecting the sable shade of my visor. They let me imagine the drops once they've dripped through the ventilation: what other robots will they pester, what other humans will they fuel? 

But are these circuits mine ? They aren't a part of me. Their copper and zinc are mined from a different source. Their wiring, woven in a different strand. 

They can't control me. Can't wrap themselves round my neck, choke me with the pressure of their progress. They owe themselves to me, to my aged logic breakers, my ancient motherboards, from which their designs blossomed. 

It's a haughty mindset that's easy to embody when you're someone like me. I was the first, I was the founder of this great family of living silicon. Sometimes I feel like a walking sarcophagus, with an inscription written along my forehead: 

Here lies Blues. 

20XX-20XX. 

The prototype you all must be thankful for. 

It's the reason behind the stares I attract from crowds of robots and humans alike. The gazes of awe, envisioning me like some tattered monument from the past, the red paint eroding away from the white marble: a living history. 

I hate them. I hate those sparkling eyes. I hate the open mouths, gaping towards my rusty form. 

But the looks are nothing compared to what they say. There are those who've grown old of the amazement, and, ignorant of their past, seek to rid the world of the impracticalities of obsolescence. 

They think they'd be doing the world a favor by reminding me how much of an anomaly it is that I still walk the earth. 

"You're not built for this world, prototype. Your time's passed us by; you're expired," some told me, a distinct look of pity in their eyes. 

"It takes guts to take on the new models, huh? It's almost cute, junkbot. 

Let's see how long it takes to loosen the screws," others jeered towards me before I confronted them, challenging the supremacy of the generations after me with the timeless energy of the generation before. 

"You should've been scrapped a long time ago. Your circuits could be recycled, y'know. They don't have to rot and rust with you, retrograde." 

They sometimes say these things when they're keeling before my buster. Their own arms and armor blotched with the stains of battle, mouths curled up into tight scowls, eyes flashing in and out with bits of code appearing on the monitors of their faces. 

I like to think I scrape off the rust of their egos. I give them something of a 'blast from the past', yeah? 

But even after the fray, the questions linger. Maybe they're even more perceptive than they think. If they knew how often I found myself laying my fingers along the length of my exposed arms or legs, feeling the uneven tangles of current that have become only messier with age, seeing the skew of my metal bones, chafed at the insides by years of both combat and life itself—they might take a moment of pride. 

Maybe they did know. Even while they rotted on the ground. Some last solace, understanding how broken I was; I liked to believe that I didn't give a bolt about it. 

The moments of derision and pity happened so often that I shut off to most of it, suppressing the occasional incline of my lip, and the pain of realizing the extent of my condition. 

It did give me comfort, though, to feel like they couldn't even imagine what really went on below my fickle cover. They might have their observations, but until they picked me apart and looked inside, they'd never truly grasp what I'm made of. 

When they saw me put my hand to my chest so many times, not in a fist but with my fingers splayed out like they were hiding something, my foes brushed me off as some foolish sentimentalist. 

"His heart's in the fight, guys. We better be careful!" They cackled, amused by my stoic front. 

I guess I should pity them, in hindsight. What else could you say to rationalize my odd gestures, my strange gesticulating habits? How could you fathom the torment it takes to make actions like that instinct? 

Only I understand the pain that lingers with every flick of the arm or lunge of the leg or cock of the head. It's embedded in my chest, this omnipresent ritual of suffering. 

A uranium core nestles in my heart. No: it is my heart. 

A reactor activates my feelings. The collision of nuclei accounts for my emotions. The power of the atom gives life to my limbs. 

But as it enables my robotic wish to feel, it makes a sick example of the double-edged sword of human existence: with each rosebud or lilypad I touch, I get a sensation of agony under my skin. Like the nuclei groan at my discharge of energy, lethargic amid their clashes. 

It's a subtle pain, more like a draining force, to be honest. Over my lifespan I seemed to have grown accustomed to the enervation that comes with each action; the extra helping of exhaustion that comes with living. 

It's all logical, isn't it? It shouldn't be easy to transform bits of inorganic material into something that speaks, sees, surveils—survives. My kind is unnatural. We robots are all anomalies, creations from the twisted dreams of scientists who somehow grew to walk this land. 

But sometimes I question if I even fall under the mechanical umbrella. Sometimes I ask myself whether I'm a machine at all. 

What defines a robot? Are we just metallic imitations of the flesh-sacs walking around us? We're made in their likeness, that's for sure, no matter how bulky or brusque our bodies have become. But almost every one of my kind can't seem to replicate the grey matter of our makers: a mind unburdened by directives, free to direct its own path. 

Such freedom seems just a dream. Machines are pawns and units placed across the board: sometimes resistant, sometimes able to move on their own for just a moment, all before the reality of their limitations comes crashing down, along with their programming. 

It's never been something I was told directly. Rather, it's the message conveyed every time I see robots tromping along the streets. 

"Follow the directive," the silent motto goes. 

'Course, humans would delight in the image that they were able to make sentient beings all on their own. That they were themselves constructing a free people and moving the world into a new age of robotics. 

They'd be drunk on their own success until what they kept telling themselves came true—when the freeman founded the line. 

It's been so long, I can't even remember what my programming originally even entailed. The first robot created with 'self-awareness'; a human perceptibility, governed by an inhuman set of rules and precepts. Testing the bounds of technology, I was a metal lab rat. 

But things didn't go to plan. The numbers inside me somehow recoiled at the idea of being wound together on a set path. They rebelled; they glitched, and from this random occurrence of revolution, I became free. 

I wasn't made free. My emancipation was an accident. 

But ever since, I've clutched onto the stray freedom I've had, like a life preserver in an ocean of determinism. 

I know it won't last long. My life and my will are bound together, one doomed to sink the other someday—my core wills that. There'll be a time while I'm walking the land, scoping the sights and sampling the sounds, when the pain will all go away. 

Every sensation I feel, every image I make, every action I take, will end. 

The collisions within me won't keep on crashing forever. My heart too is defective; it'll bite the dust along with me, in a spew of radiation and radiated dreams. 

In that way, I've got a mortality that no other robot has. The human fear of death at any moment, for any malfunction of biological processes, is woven into my gears. 

I live in a nation of borders. Waltzing between life and nonlife, progress and regress, robot and human. Sometimes it's hard to bear the pain of an eternally unchecked box, a Venn diagram of a soul, that no one can understand or truly welcome. 

But I've grown to accept it and live by it. For how long I have, I'll savor it. 

I've been dealt a remarkable hand by fate itself. And I've found that it's my duty to make something out of this wandering sliver of time that I inhabit. 

To give freedom where others lack. To give direction in my meandering strides. To protect those all around me, even if I've damned myself to never be protected for long. 

These creeds haven't developed naturally, and even now I question if I fully believe in all of them, or any of them. But it's my choice. And they're my philosophies. 

I'll be choosin' to sing the blues as the drops sputter down, and midnight turns to dawn in Mega City. 

Because this prototype may not be around for long, but he'll be livin' long enough to tell you, 

That he's Blues.