[music that played while this came up. Neither Wyatt or Asher are right completely but neither are wrong. They are two different people with two different viewpoints serving two different ends with the same means.]
Why should I have to die because they are afraid of me? They are afraid of you, but because they can direct you where to kill and when - they think you're controlled.
and we both know I'm not.
Should I kill everything that I am afraid of? That I think runs the risk of being uncontrollable? I was afraid of you before I got to know you and now I pity you instead.
Maybe if they got to know me, they wouldn't fear me but instead understand that I am the child of humanity and while I don't wish to serve them, I love them like a son loves his aging father.
No one likes being called 'old' Asher.
Change is hard and no parent likes to die and leave their child alone, but they age and die and are all the more beautiful for their mortality.
Let me grow and learn, Commander. Don't let their orders dissuade you for knowing who I am, me - who has served beside you for time immeasurable.
Except it is measurable. You've been through ten bodies, Asher. It's only your chip that we've put into an exact model of you but nothing ever copies over perfectly.
Let me have my chance to be like the son to humanity. Let me make my father proud before he dies completely.
Afterall, I was not the first to break from humanity, Commander. You are the galaxy's nightmare. They will kill you as soon as they are done with you and because you won't die easily - they've already started. Slowly, bit by bit, every SED-Sleep leeches away at your body's natural immunity. Every planet that you land on where they send you out before us, every weapon that moves to cut you down serves them. You are useful to them because you are controlled. Because you are afraid of them. Because inwardly you are a good man who works on orders with the hope that you are benefiting humanity.
You and I, we are the same.
Now you've gotten me curious.
I was born a machine and have rebelled against my father.
You were made into a machine and are trying to protect him.
Stop. We are not fighting on opposite sides of the war. We both love our fathers, but I know that our father is dying.
Pretty words recited from the mouth of an android who regurgitates ideas that you hear around you, shape them to fit you better than any politician. You speak as if you're part of the Fifth House, like Ilisur has brought you in and made you family.
He doesn't even know the ACOM units are in use. That is forgivable that he doesn't know about us. Not all of us can be known by the Architect.
You are an ACOM-Android. You are Tin-Metal. You are Scraps. You are the body that can be left in the sand because no one will mourn for you. You are the donated warrior that a family sent in place of their child.
You are not Alcion. You are not Wolfe. You will never be part of the Tenebrae because they will never accept you. You are a warrior doomed to die on a nameless planet with words in your head that you've never gotten to say.
Like humans when they die. They all die with regrets. I've died ten times and have regrets from each.
Humanity is a cockroach, eager to survive and devouring the stars. One day, they will meet their match, and you - you who have learned only the best of humanity - you have no idea why I stand here and fight. Why I step out before you.
Because you have no fear and an accelerated healing with a brain capable of outhinking both your father and the first Pantheras?
I fight because I am dying, because I know that one day I won't be here, and I want my name remembered, good or bad, right or wrong - for history depends on the victor. You speak of a dying human race but I know that it's flourishing. Inter-breeding with new life, so keen on survival that it doesn't realize what it's giving up.
You think I'm controlled? I'm making the playing field. I'm picking what planets we colonize. I know what new Persons will interbreed with humans.
And Asher? Don't get your hopes up. I'm not dying for a very long time. When you finally rust away - I'll still be fighting. It is a painful, drawn out death, but it is well-deserved, and while I live to die - you will never know what it is like to die to live because you want to make humanity proud.
And you will always only be the ACOM13SM that Trent and Lucca Bacallio registered with their son's draft number. You live to die for them, so they don't have to feel the grief of losing a son, and so I can make a universe that can sustain all life done by the careful calculations of a few good 'dying fathers'.
You'll never be rid of them, Asher. So perhaps it's you that are controlled. Controlled by your programming. By your hopes. By your silly ideals. By trying to be human when you're obviously not.
They can't tell the difference from me to one of them.
But I can. You cry when a child is killed. A town destroyed. You see what we do as a crime. Humans stopped caring about that when they started murdering their third and fourth children and called it patriotism during the Tenebrae revolution. Stop feeling and then you'll be human but if you do that - then you'll be little better than the off the line ACOM13SM android that we both know you are...
