#horatio nullbuilt

When Horatio began the first messy sketches of another bot on blue-prints, it had been rather aimless scribbling in the dead of night as silence weighed heavily on him. He hadn’t been thinking of what it would become beyond something to fulfill the urge he had in himself to be working on something, to create. Normally he was satisfied with small projects, with little repairs around his ship to try and make his living situation just a tad more comfortable in between tackling the larger, more complicated problems that the UNNIIC had. There was no intention to create life, no intention for sentience, and when he finally turned in for the evening to rest and recharge, he hadn’t even bothered to finish the initial sketch. He hadn’t even come close to it.

That blue-print stayed there, splayed open on his workshop desk for almost a year and a half.

There were often days at a time, weeks even, that Horatio wouldn’t so much as glance at what he had drawn out with messy, half thought out notes scribbled on the sides. Things would be stacked on top of it, and it would be buried underneath other small but quick projects that Horatio felt warranted his attention more than a late night vague concept that honestly at times didn’t seem like it would ever become more than it was in it’s current state. On the occasion that he would sort and organize a few of his belongings, he considered putting it away once and for all, tucking it somewhere safe to collect dust with the rest of his unfinished concepts. However, every time he ran his optics over the tired, almost rambling notes he had written, something in the very back of his processor kept him from shelving it. With a small, synthesized sigh, he would set the papers back down, and walk away leaving his workbench never entirely clean.

Then there were days that he would stop, take a quick look down at the papers as he passed by, or let whatever project he had been focused on fade to the back of his processor for a few minutes to examine what he had left unfinished. He wasn’t someone who could ever really consider himself busy per se, but nonetheless he never allowed himself to dwell on what was taking shape on the blue-prints for very long. Just a moment or two in order to jot down a quick note or idea as they came to him. Then his pen would be set down once more and he would carry on with what he had been doing before he was momentarily distracted.

As months passed and more notes, more ideas, were placed on this disaster of a plan, something vague began to take form. The problem was that the more shape it took, the more frustrated and uncertain Horatio became with it when the thought would occur that he still had no idea what he was looking at, what it’s purpose would serve. It was small and round, perhaps something he could fashion a light out of if he found the parts. It would certainly make scavenging during the nights a possibility, something to get him out of the UNNIIC, away from his mind… or perhaps some small storage unit, one he could keep tiny but important trinkets in. He could fashion an intricate lock to go with it and…

No, no that wasn’t right either. In fact, something about it struck him as deeply, intrinsically wrong.

There were time that horatio would set his pen down a little harder than intended, and the sharp click of it hitting his workbench was almost as loud as the silence around him.

* * *

It was nearly impossible to tell the difference between destruction and natural decay in the area surrounding the UNNIIC. When everything as far as you could see looked the same, it was just natural to assume that this was simply the way things were. Sure, there had been times when Horatio wondered how things had come to be the way that they were, as his memories from his past versions were… messy, at best, and nonexistent at worst. Either way he never allowed himself to dwell on thoughts and curiosities like these for long, especially when he knew he would likely never have the answers to the things he wanted to know. He knew how to build, how to repair, and how to make things function against all odds when supplies were limited and tools were scarce, and he had to worry about where he was going to find the things he needed rather than ponder the reason he even needed to scavenge in the first place.

And in the end he had decided he was in no better shape than the land around him. There were no mirrors in the UNNIIC, and beyond catching a few poor glimpses of himself in what little clean and reflective metal he could find, he didn’t have much of an idea as to what he actually looked like. His hands though, Horatio saw his hands every day of his life, and they seemed to be no better off than anything else he might find while scavenging in the Junk Pile, other than the fact that they were attached to him, and they functioned.

Horatio couldn’t help but think that perhaps Man had crafted his kind to be tougher than any automatic and non-sentient machinery out there could every be. It left a pleasant buzz in the back of his processor to think that he had been built to survive above all else, and really if that’s what they had intended for him, he took joy in the fact that they would be proud of him because that was about all he could do.

He went through the motions, took what he needed from the land, and he lived.

* * *

Nights were the worst for Horatio because they left him without much to do as the light faded into darkness, and traveling out into the Junk Pile or further became too much of hazard for him to risk it most evenings unless it was absolutely necessary. This left Horatio with a little too much time on his hands, and not enough to occupy himself with. There were of course always things around the UNNIIC that needed repairing, a seemingly endless amount of things, but time always seemed to slow to a crawl through the night, and the odd jobs Horatio would take up never seemed to be anything that would eat up hours of the night all on it’s own, much less require him to use more than a quarter of his processing power as he worked on it.

It was the nights that left Horatio in his head, thinking too much about things that ultimately didn’t matter, things that had confused him for the longest time. He knew he was likely never going to get answers to his questions though, no out in the Junk Pile where his searches often took place. He hoped though, and he prayed that perhaps the answers to the thoughts that plagued him were written between the pages of The Gospel of Man. Horatio had read it time and time again, he knew it by heart, and somewhere deep down he knew that the answers wouldn’t come from a book, not in a literal sense anyway. It brought him comfort to keep it close though, and to think that Man’s purpose for him was out there somewhere, if not in the book itself, and so he hoped, and he reread it again.

For years he worked on and off on the large structure that stood tall on top of the UNNIIC, one that he had long ago identified to be some sort of searching mechanism or visual tool for the downed unit, but by his calculation could, with the right tools and supplies, be turned into a telescope and used to look into the heavens above. Someday he hoped to get it up and running, just like the rest of the ship, but it all seemed like a distant dream at times, and so he contented himself with sitting aside the telescope and spending his nights looking up at the sky while he worked on it. On clear nights he could see stars.

They were so far away but sometimes, when he’d lay back on the UNNIIC’s roof and reach his hand out above, he felt as though perhaps he could one day find himself among them. Far from this desert, this world, and who knows what, or who, he would find out there.

There was never any warmth when he reached for the stars, but as he pulled his hand back down and laid it across his chest, he would think to himself that perhaps if he could fly… simply leaving his problems behind might be a better answer than any he could find in a book.

* * *

When Horatio had first discovered the Junk Pile there had been a wide assortment of tools and machinery, broken and working alike, that he could sift through and pick what he wanted to haul back to his ship to put to use. Maneuvering through it had been difficult, but he’d often found that he didn’t need to delve terribly deeply into the pile to find something that he could use in one way or another, and he figured that he’d never be at a shortage of usable metal with everything he could find.

His first trip into the mess of old destruction and twisted salvage had been so long ago now, and while he was right, he was still at no risk of running out of metal he could weld together to make something new with, it was everything else he was beginning to hurt for. He made short cuts where he could, but the Junk Pile seemed to dwindle and become sparser far faster than any serious progress was being made on the UNNIIC. Many days, after dragging his haul back from the Junk Pile, Horatio would simply drop his bag at his feet as he stood outside the UNNIIC and stared up at the decrepit ship before him. He’d struggle to fight back the faint sense of hopelessness that plagued his processor. It was a massive ship, and he was just one simple bot, and even if he had a thousand years he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to repair it all on his own.

Day after day though Horatio continued to make his way through the heat of the desert to the Junk Pile, bag empty apart from a small tool he could use to cut through wiring and metal alike should he need to. He’d pick his path carefully, though he largely knew the area like the back of his hand, and from early on in the morning to mid afternoon or even early evening, he would dig and sort and catalog what he found based on how immediately useful it would be to him. Finding things that truly stunned and amazed him was becoming far more of an uncommon occurrence, but most days he still managed to return to his ship with something tucked away that he was eager to use, or even to simply pull apart.

Scrap metal, frayed wiring, destroyed machines that he could take the time to deconstruct and choose from what was within… there was some small part in the back of his processor that told him he should have been disturbed by that very idea, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to care. Whatever- or whoever -these machines had been so long ago, they were now gone and he knew deep within his circuitry that Man would have wanted him to take what was destroyed and build something new with it, just like he had read about some many times in his Gospel.

His bag was always filled slowly, meticulously, always taking what he knew he could use and leaving the rest for another day. A project would always come up that he could come back for whatever he needed at that point, or perhaps another soul would wander in from the distant dunes seeking the very thing he would leave behind. None of this was his, so to speak, so he felt no need to claim it all for himself.

There was one particular evening, however, that he allowed himself to break this rule in a small and seemingly innocuous way. He’d made his way through the junkyard once more, passing more familiar areas that he had already picked over fairly well in favor of new hidden spots, and treasures that he had yet to uncover. What he found though was darker than that though, as he found himself before an unsettling sight, even for someone like him who had found more than his fair share of robot husks that had ended there in the land.

A bot of an unidentifiable make, though Horatio was quite certain it had in fact been a bot at one point given the remains he found. What was left of them, anyway, as what he stumbled upon looked as if it had been some sort of explosion that had ended the poor thing’s life.

Impact, Horatio had thought, though he wasn’t entirely sure how he knew this. Perhaps because it reminded him so much of his own ship, how partially embedded into the ground the UNNIC was, how the land around both it and this husk seemed to have warped and been almost blow outwarns at the force of the horrible landing. He didn’t even want to think about just how or why this bot may have fallen from such a fatal height. Instead his optics began to wander over what was left of the husk, and he dropped his bag open on the ground while he got a closer look.

A shattered processor, twisted protoform, plating all but mangled beyond repair, and from what he could see there was very little of this husk’s inner workings left in tact. That didn’t stop him from picking through what he could find and examining it. There were a few small things he could pull from it to take back, namely screws and a few of the thicker cables that didn’t look like they had sustained too much damage in the fall, and as he searched he carefully separated them and set them aside in a small pile to deposit into his bag when he was satisfied that he had cleaned everything from this frame that he could currently use.

There was one small piece that, at first glance, looked as though it had merely been broken off a larger piece. It probably had in some way or another, but upon closer inspection he found it was in fact it’s own device. A voice box. He’d only seen one before and it had been in his own throat as he’d been attempting to make a few small repairs to his own frame, but he still knew well enough what this was and what it was used for.

Horatio had no real use for this. His own had worked well enough last time he’d check, though admittedly it had been quite a long time since he’d actually given it any use. The speaker could potentially be used if he ever needed to make repairs to his radio, but for now that was functioning as well, and so far had brought Horatio nothing but disappointment.

He’d moved to set the small piece down, but just before it touched the ground once more, he froze, staring down at it in his grasp.

What would the point of having a spare voice box in his supplies be? He didn’t need it, he really didn’t. That’s what he told himself, again.

B’sod, did he even really need the one he had in his throat at this point?

Maybe he didn’t need that second voice box, but when Horatio left the Junk Pile that day it was tucked away not in his bag, but in the pocket of his coat.

* * *

The voice box ended up sitting on Horatio’s desk for three months before he so much as looked at it again. It, along with the blue-print that he hadn’t touched in just as long, was shoved aside, buried under other papers and ignored as small projects made their way on and off of his desk. It gathered dust, took up space, and was about as useless to him as Horatio had suspected it would be when he first brought it home, but it was never tossed away, never scrapped.

There was one instance where Horatio had considered taking it apart and using some of the smaller screws holding it together for another project he’d been working on. It’d be too easy, and make his progress so much simpler. He’d grabbed his screwdriver and the voice box both in hand and he turned the device over in his hands a few times, while listening to the radio that he had playing a short distance away on it’s absolute lowest setting. He hated what was being droned out through the speaker, but it was the only thing fighting off the ever encroaching silence around his ship.

Before he even pressed the tip of his screwdriver to the first screw in the voicebox, his optics were drawn to the radio as the frequency it was on seemed to cut out for a moment, and all he heard was static. Interference, likely a storm rolling in causing the disruption between him and Metropol. Really Horatio didn’t care so much that he couldn’t hear the voice of Metrolpol calling to him anymore, but there was something about the static that put him on edge.

The transmission returned only a few short moments later, and the deceptively soothing voice of Metropol once again crooned into the quiet workshop with the same repeating message beckoning Horatio to leave his home and come to it. It’s words only ever made Horatio’s energy tanks churn with unease and even irritation, and there never seemed to be any other frequencies for the radio to pick up otherwise he would have changed it long ago. With a small sigh he set his tool down and reached for the radio to turn it off, but as he touched the device he felt faint vibrations coming from the sound it produced, and a dull warmth as it’s systems buzzed away. It almost felt alive…

Not in the same sense that Horatio was alive of course.

He was alive. He had thoughts, feelings, desires of his own…

And yet this radio still managed to share more ideas and messages than he ever had, even if the drivel that spilled from it sometimes made Horatio wish that his processor would fry out in the heat of the desert sun some days.

His hand pulled back from where it had stopped and was almost instinctively brought up to his throat, made up largely of considerably delicate wires, and he felt where his own voice box was positioned beneath them. There was a stillness beneath his fingertips. It was cold. When he dropped his hand down again, he looked down to the voice box that he still had clenched in his other hand, useless as it was and still coated in a layer of dust that it had collected during it’s time left to waste on Horatio’s desk.

Horatio stared at the voice box for a few moments before he set it aside once more. He turned the radio up, and he looked for screws elsewhere.

* * *

The telescope had always been a project that Horatio considered to be a bit more of a hobby than something that was actually necessary to one day potentially getting his ship back into working condition. There were times though that it was easier to focus on something that would make his time grounded her a little more enjoyable than on a dream that often seemed so far away from him though, and the promise of seeing the stars above so much closer was something that made Horatio feel genuinely happy to think about. That by no means meant that it was ever going to be an easy task though, because it’s inner workings seemed just as complex as every other part of the ship it was connected to.

Sitting outside under the night sky with a dim lamp hanging nearby to light his work as the moon traveled across the sky… this was when Horatio felt his happiest. He would work slowly, in no rush to finish as he simply wanted to enjoy his time out under the starry sky. The silence was of no consequence out here as wind whistled by and the world seemed so open to him, and he was comfortable. He would steal upward glances and he could swear there were billions of distant eyes staring back at him, somewhere farther than he could ever reach, but there was something comforting about it all the same.

For the longest time he could never quite put his finger on just why he felt this way, and really he’d never taken the time to even think too terribly hard on it before he’d turn his attention back to the work at hand anyway.

When it was time to head back inside though after so many hours of sitting out and enjoying a soft breeze and the company of whatever waited for him out in the stars, that’s when it always hit him. There was something off, something that left him unsettled to his very core processing as he descended down the ladder back into the UNNIIC, and he was never quite sure why. Nothing was ever out of place, nobody ever found where he lived and broke in, nothing was wrong and he knew this. Yet he stood there evey time, looking around his bedroom like he was expecting something to be different, and it never was.

And it took him many, many nights of this to realize that he was disappointed every single time.

When he did, when it finally hit him how wrong he felt there in his own ship, in his own room where he was so far from the eyes in the sky and the rest of the world around him, he sat on his bed and he held his head in his hands, unsure of what to do.

* * *

Horatio knew it was well past time for a recharge, with his energy reserves hovering just around the 12% mark and threatening to dip lower if he didn’t do something about it soon. He made no moves to get up though, his pencil scratching messy lines over his nameless blue print as he often did on his most troubling nights. The nights when the wind storms came in and the radio couldn’t quite pick up any frequencies for hours on end and so the night was filled with nothing but static and Horatio was left entirely with his thoughts.

It was soothing in his own way to work on this particular blue print, and with every new sketch this design took new shapes. A portable emergency energy course? No… perhaps he could work it into some sort of alarm system? No, still no. Horatio had tried to apply many labels and firm ideas to it, and each one had ended up being almost violently scratched off the page, hidden from view as Horatio all but started again. One page became two, and two was quickly filled and Horatio could only look helplessly between them wondering why he even cared. What did it matter if he made something that didn’t quite work? That was so often the case with everything around him, and his marvels were few and far between.

He considered something that could perhaps drag back heavy loads from the Junk Pile. That… didn’t sound terrible actually. It would make his life easier when it came to finding some of the larger machinery that he wanted to bring back to the UNNIIC to deconstruct rather than tearing it apart then and there in the Junk Pile.

Tank treads, or something similar, could be useful for that if he could find them. Attach a hitch to it, or a hook or…

Horatio sighed, and he tapped his pencil against the desk, an uneasiness taking him over again as he stared down at the drawings before him. He guided the tip of it over a line he had already drawn to darken it, give it a more firm shape, round it out just a little. Keep it small, keep it maneuverable…

The radio’s static cut out for just a moment, and a voice could be heard that nearly made Horatio jump. The same monotone voice calling him to Metropol as always, and it only lasted a few moments before the weather outside cut off the frequency once more and static filled the room again. He kept his optics locked on the blue-prints as he listened, only to flick towards the small voice box that had been case aside and had collected a thick layer of dust since it was last touched.

His free hand migrated, without him really realizing it, towards his throat once again, the tips of his fingers brushing against the first few layers of cables that covered his own voice box, and he kept it there as he wrote.

There was this somewhat senseless, nearly undefinable small round thing scribbled onto his blue-prints with a number of notes that had been entirely undecided on even after months of contemplation. Some had been crossed out. Some had been rewritten after being crossed out. Tank treads? Perhaps some sort of arms to drag metal back from the Junk Pile? Maybe just a hitch that could hook into whatever it found. A voice box.

There was no question about the voice box as Horatio added it to the side under a number of other details. He underlined it multiple times before slamming his pencil down, and he stared down at what he had before him. It was impractical really, and Horatio knew it would be rather foolish to slap a voice box on something that was meant to simply go back and forth between the Junk Pile, to drag things for him while he was focused on other projects. If all he did was run radio frequencies through it, he’d just get a mobile version of the Metropol announcements he so entirely despised already.

There was something about it though… something in the back of his processor that made him feel warm as he thought about it.

Horatio stared down at what he had before him for a long while, his energy reserves continuing to dip lower and lower, but there was a spark so deep in his very core, perhaps somewhere in his very coding that screamed at him that he was so close to something beautiful here. So close to creating something truly worthwhile. He just had a feeling that even if it wasn’t something that would help him get his ship in the air one day, it would be something that he could leave this world feeling truly, utterly proud to call his creation.

Something Horatiobuilt.

The thought was as chilling as it was absolutely exhilarating to Horatio, the realization hitting him harder than anything ever had before, and his optics glowed just a little brighter in the dimly lit room as he stared down at the image before him. He felt as if he were unable to move, felt as though he were simply humming with electricity running through his circuits. Honestly he might have sat there all night with excitement and fear barreling through him all balled up into one strange emotion he had never experienced before, a sensation he never wanted to leave him. His own body needed attention though, and finally Horatio moved, slowly reaching for the pencil with a shaky hand. He touched it to the paper to only add one more small detail that changed everything for him.

Two small, round optics were added to the front of this design before Horatio set the pencil back down, and he stood from his desk to retire for the evening.

* * *

There were far more small intricacies that Horatio hadn’t initially considered when he first began fully throwing himself into the creation of his bot- Crispin, he’d decided -and this project alone had quickly become far more complex than any other that had come across his desk before. Then again, Horatio wasn’t even sure this was something he could really even call a ‘project’ anymore. No, it was so much more than that.

The first thing that he’d decided, after only a few brief moments of consideration on the matter, was that he didn’t want Crispin to communicate to him through only a few set of learned responses allowed by programming. If he was going to give life to something in the same way that Man had given life to them all, he wanted his creation to truly live, to have free will, and choices, ideas and desires. He wouldn’t settle for anything else.

Still, it was a lot harder than most things he’d attempted to pull off before, and the number of nights where he ran himself nearly to the point of completely running out of charge just putting the framework for a mind together were becoming impossible to keep track of. It challenged him in a way that he had never been before, in a way that made him happy to work on it. The nights he spent huddled over his desk carefully soldering and piecing together what would someday become a companion for him reminded him of how he felt the nights he would spend atop the UNNIIC, working away at the telescope and staring up at the sky above him. This time though there was no sadness when he set his tools down and finally caved into his exhausted body’s needs. No matter how low on energy he was, he would throw one last glance at the progress he’d made, and as Crispin finally began to take a physical shape… he didn’t go to sleep with a haunting sense of loneliness anymore. Only with an eagerness, and ideas floating in his processor of what he wanted to do next.

Horatio’s original ides for tank treads had been long since scrapped and replaced with a much more maneuverable mag-lev unit after he’d managed to uncover one in surprisingly good shape during a fruitful trip to the Junk Pile. The arms, while the idea hadn’t exactly been scrapped like the treads, never quite ended working out with a lack of supplies being the main cause of this. The few arms he had found were busted beyond repair, and the last thing that Horatio wanted was for Crispin to wake up with dead weight hanging off of him. He needed to wait until he found something suitable to use on such a small body.

And Crispin was quite small.

The day Horatio had finsihed Crispin, finished building him anyway, he’d simply stood at his desk and took a good long while to admire what he had created. Crispin rested easily in Horatio’s hand, and he was cold, inactive, just waiting for Horatio to give him the power he needed to begin his life. Horatio had gone back and forth a few times on just what size to make Crispin’s frame, and finally he’d settled on something smaller for the bot. It’d be easier for him to get around, and the smaller frame would take less time and energy to charge him up to full.

And honestly there was something nice about being able to hold Crispin in his hands, even if currently he was unpowered, still just a concept even now in the final stage of his creation.

Horatio carried Crispin’s finished frame away from his desk for the very first time, into the ship’s recharge station and he eyed the newest cable that he had pulled from the depths of his ship to hook up just for his new ship mate. As eager as he was to see what was ow well over a year in the making come to a head, there was a weight in the moment that kept Horatio from simply plugging Crispin in and being done with it.

No, he sat there on the floor beside the cable he’d picked for Crispin, and for a moment he stared down at the frame in his hands and he truly thought about what he was going to do next. From the moment he plugged Crispin in there would be no going back. Never again would his life be the same, and he would have, in a sense, completed the cycle that had so long ago been started by Man himself. Horatio couldn’t help but think to himself as he stared down at Crispin that Man would be proud, and Horatio himself was proud in that moment.

And he knew this was only just the beginning, and that though he didn’t know who Crispin was going to be just yet, the two of them had all the time in the world to learn from one another, and that the end of Crispin’s creation was the start of something lifelong and, Horatio hoped, something beautiful.

There was warmth in Horatio’s very core as he reached for the cord, and with a gentle hand he plugged Crispin in to begin charging him up for the very first time. The optical display that he had created for him lit up and begin to emit a soft blue glow that filled Horatio with a sense of pride and happiness that he had never before experienced.

“Hello, Crispin...” He uttered through a voice box suffering terribly from neglect, the sound coming out scratchy and nearly unintelligible as that part of him once again heated up and readied itself for use. Crispin was not yet online though, and he wouldn’t be until his charge was entirely filled, so after running a rough hand over Crispin’s round surface, Horatio set him down and stood from his spot to join him in a well deserved recharge, knowing that when they were finished the rest of their lives could begin.

* * *

“This is where we live?” Crispin had asked. It had, oddly enough, been one of the first questions that he had asked Horatio after he’d first booted up and had a chance to look around while his optics cycled. The tone of his voice was a bit disappointed, almost judgmental in a way, and that had surprised Horatio more than the question itself had.

“I… yes? This is where I’ve always lived, as far as I can remember anyway, and it’s where you’ll live too.” Horatio said. “If you’d like, anyway. It doesn’t sound like you care for it terribly much though...”

“Well…. I mean sure it’s a place to live, but it’s not much of a home now is it?” Crispin asked, turning slowly where he floated in the recharge room and took everything in. “It’s pretty drab if you ask me.”

It was baffling to Horatio, and for a moment he honestly didn’t know how to respond to him. He hadn’t put much thought into personality or anything beyond a few basic perimeters for different emotions and a few programmed basics of his own knowledge, just so Crispin wouldn’t be starting completely from scratch when he came into the world. He’d wondered lat at night as he set up his recharge station what Crispin would end up being like when he was finally online and functioning, but being ridiculed for his living conditions within the first five minutes after activation hadn’t been at the top of his list of possibilities…

“Crispin… how would you even know? You haven’t even left the charging room yet, much less been anywhere else in the world for comparison. Honestly, for all you know this could be the coziest place in the universe.” Horatio said, and from what he’d seen out in the desert, it just might have been true.

“Well I’m just saying. Isn’t a home supposed to be the reflection of your soul or something? Can’t say I see a bit of you in here anywhere… well, aside from where you’re standing that is.” Crispin said, floating just a little closer to Horatio, tilting himself almost quizzically as he stared his creator down. “Unless you’re drab? Horatio please tell me this isn’t the case, I don’t know if I can take a reveal like that so early on in my life!”

Horatio pressed his face into the rough surface of his hand and he slowly dragged it down as he, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he laughed. This wasn’t at all how he imagined his first real conversation with his creation going, but there was something so real about it, something so genuine that Crispin brought to the table. He was an entirely different bot than Horatio was, and it wasn’t something that Horatio had realized he needed so desperately in his life until he finally had him.

Crispin did back up just a little when Horatio laughed at his joke, and it was a nice sound even if Horatio’s voice box crackled with disuse in the middle of it. His optics brightened and if he could have smiled he would have.

“I think you’ll like some of the other rooms a little more than this one, Crispin. Despite what you might think right now, I have done what I can to make this ship a… home of sorts. It’s your home now as well though, so if you think you can help to make it better, by all means go right ahead.” Horatio said, and as he lifted his head again he motioned for Crispin to follow before turning towards his bedroom.

Horatio didn’t exactly need to sleep, and he’d never really used his bedroom for rest or anything quite like that, but the bed was comfortable to him and the small room made for a good space to store some of his more important trinkets, and a great place to sit down and read whenever he felt like skimming through any of the wide number of books that he’d collected over the years. Of course the hatch in the room lead to the UNNIIC’s roof, and to the telescope that he’d put so much time and effort into before creating Crispin, where so many of is nicer nights had been spent. At least Crispin seemed to appreciate this room more than the last, finding just the fact that it seemed to be a bit more lived in appealing.

The rest of the tour continued in much the same way, with Horatio standing near the doors and explaining in the simplest of ways what each room did or what purpose it served, all the while watching Crispin slowly explore his new world, optics bright and shining with a sort of wonder that Horatio himself hadn’t felt in such a long time. Only a few times did Crispin bump into or knock anything over as he continued to learn about how to move in this body of his, but from a technical standpoint it seemed to Horatio that everything was working as it should have.

The absolute best moment of showing Crispin around though was when Horatio brought him up to the roof through the hatch, and for the very first time Crispin got a look at the outside world. The day was bright and clear, and Crispin could see for miles all around them and it left him speechless. He spun in slow circles for entire minutes just looking at everything he could see, from the far off Junk Piles, to unidentifiable shapes in the distance, to the clouds high up above the, and Horatio said nothing as he observed him here. There was nothing he could have said, and honestly if he had tried to speak it might have ruined the moment.

“It’s so…” Crispin started after a long bout of silence between the two, and Horatio tilted his head just slightly, curious as to what the small bot would say. “Big.” He finally finished, and Horatio gave a slow, deliberate nod as he thought.

“It is. And it’s dangerous, and there aren’t many like us out here in the desert, but it’s just as much our home as the UNNIIC is, and you’ll get to see a good chunk of it someday.” Horatio promised, watching as Crispin turned back towards him with an eager look in his optics.

“I’ll get to explore it you mean? Not just do your dirty chores out there in the heat, right?” Crispin asked, a suspicious tone entering his voice as he spoke.

“Do you really think I would make you just for that?” Horatio asked.

“I don’t know…” Crispin said lowly, looking back over the vast horizon of the desert. “...I think you made me because you were lonely out here.” He said.

There was a sharp twinge deep inside Horatio, a sort of pain he felt as Crispin all too accurately put to words what he had been feeling for so long but didn’t exactly want to admit to himself. He couldn’t help but think that perhaps he had put a bit more of himself into Crispin than he had originally thought, or that Crispin was going to end up far smarter than he imagined a bot made by himself could ever be.

“Come on Crispin,” Horatio said, choosing not to carry that conversation any further, and as he motioned for Crispin to follow he turned to head down the side of the UNNIIC so he could continue showing him the lay of the land. “I’ll show you where I find most of my supplies from. I’ll have you fetch thing there from time to time, so it’ll be good for you to know where the pile is.”

“I knew it, I knew it, you really did just make me to be a chore bot!” Crispin complained, loudly and sarcastically.

“Favors, not chores Crispin!”

Horatio lead, and Crispin followed.

* * *

The first night that Horatio had brought Crispin up to work on the telescope with him had been quite sweet really. They had come up just as the sun was beginning to set, and Crispin hadn’t been told anything beyond the fact that this was one of Horatio’s favorite spots, and his favorite project to work on. He hadn’t understood why at first, and had been initially disappointed when he was informed that it was in fact not some kind of large laser attached to the ship, but as horatio worked and the sun began to fall below the distant horizon, Horatio looked up and pointed towards the sky.

“Look, up above Crispin. Isn’t it beautiful?”

What Crispin saw above him was a sight that he doubted would ever leave his processor. Thousands of lights twinkling so far away captivated him, left him frozen where he floated as his optics roamed over them, trying to take in each and every one and failing miserably.

“I always thought that maybe, just maybe, if I could get this ship up and running...” Horatio started from where he was sat on the roof of the UNNIIC, and he ran his hand over it’s rusted surface as he spoke. It drew Crispin’s attention back to him, and he stared down at the ship rather than the bot he was talking to. “Maybe I could reach those stars. Fly among them, see them a little closer.”

“Really?” Crispin asked. “You actually want this old thing to fly? And… you want to leave?”

“This is an airship by the looks of it, Crispin, it was meant to fly. Sometimes I think I was too, just a feeling, you know?” Horatio said with a small snort, and after a contemplative moment as he stared down at the tool in his hand, he set it aside in favor of stretching out and laying back. There were no clouds tonight, and the view was stunning. He didn’t want to pass it up. “I certainly never feel like I’m meant to stay here on the ground.”

“Would you take me with you?” Crispin asked, and there was such an eagerness to his voice, but the slightest hint of desperation tainted it all and pulled Horatio’s gaze to the small floating bot above him, the glow of his mag-lev unit brighter to him than any other star in the sky.

“Of course. I don’t want to go anywhere without you.” Horatio assured.

Crispin didn’t respond immediately, simply floating and staring down at Horatio with dimmed optics, and for a brief moment Horatio thought that perhaps he needed to go inside and recharge for a bit. Before he could voice his concern though, Crispin lowered himself slowly, and he settled on the roof between Horatio’s spread arm and his side.

He was warm, round frame thrumming with life and it was so nice to simply lay there with Crispin at his side as he stared up into the sky, a comfortable silence taking them over for a few precious moments until, almost hesitantly, Crispin spoke up again.

“...You know, Boss, it’s been weird here since I first… booted up, I guess. I haven’t exactly figured out my place here yet, and I’m not sure I will for a while now either.” Crispin said, and hearing him say that did make Horatio just a little sad, but it wasn’t hard to understand just why Crispin would feel that way either. “But this… right here with you, this is nice. This finally almost feels like I’m really home, right where I need to be, you know?”

Horatio curled his arm around Crispin, dragging him just a little closer to his side, hugging him there as the two of them stared up at the night sky and the stars stared back at them both. “We cans tay here as long as you want, Crispin.” Horatio promised, and the soft sigh from Crispin put him more at ease than any thoughts of flying ever had.

“I think I’d like that.”

* * *

It was easy to lose track of time when it didn’t really matter to Horatio in the first place. Days with Crispin passed by, weeks, months, maybe years it was hard to tell. Not every day was easy living with someone who was so fundamentally different than him, almost his polar opposite in every way in fact, but even through arguments and disagreements big and small, Horatio couldn’t have imagined his life without the little bot. He was happy with him, and after a long while the two settled into a sort of contentment with each other and what they had.

While Crispin did his very best to help with repairs on the UNNIIC, there really was only so much he could do for Horatio, and in fact some days Horatio was sure that having Crispin around might have actually slowed the progress down a bit as he now had far more on his mind to focus on than just just making repairs, though he could hardly say he was unhappy with this. As far as he was concerned, he had no real time limit, and while his dreams of flying far and exploring the world from above never truly left his processor, he had something here and now that made him feel more than willing to take his time and enjoy what he was building. He’d get there someday, and when he did Crispin would be right there beside him.

The night he finally finished repairs on something he had been looking forward to for so long though, was the same night that Horatio’s world and everything he knew was sent tumbling, crashing down around him. The telescope, so long in the making, was supposed to be a milestone in his work on the UNNIIC, and cause for celebration for him and Crispin both, but no sooner had he gotten the device operational was everything ripped away from him in one fell swoop.

POWER, FORFEIT, ENEMY, PLUNDER.

Hoatio had never had much to begin with, but what he did have meant everything to him, and they had taken it all away from him, starting with their power core. Without it they had no lights, no home, no chance for survival. They had been low on power when the attack first came, and all at once his priority became finding a replacement, even something temporary, just to keep he and Crispin going long enough to solve their problem.

The Generator had been easy enough to get up and running, but it could only sustain them for so long before they’d eventually end up back in square one, so even with a full charge he couldn’t afford to rest.

Horatio had known somewhere deep, deep in his very core programming, that someday he would find himself in Metropol. One by one his attempts at finding a solution to their problem failed, and finally the city that had been beckoning to him for so many years was the only place he could turn in such a desperate situation. Honestly he would have rather offline out in the desert, fighting all the while for every other small spark of hope he could grasp at, than turn to the city that had haunted him for as long as he could remember. He felt wrong even considering it, but it was Crispin he needed to think of, who wanted to see The City of Glass and Light, who he had to think of first and put before himself in every situation.

And so they went. The train ride too short for Horatio’s taste, and he knew that they were barreling headfirst into a world of trouble. He could only hope it wouldn’t be more than they could handle.

What they found was… a nightmare. Metropol, city of glass and light was a crumbling disaster of a city, kept alive seemingly by one machine who thought that the way to progress was to eliminate anything that she deemed to be weaker than her, less intelligent, unnecessary. The progress to a brighter future that only she could see, and possibly, only she would reach. Horatio wanted nothing to do with it all from the very beginning, he wanted his power core back and a way back home where he could forget about everything festering away in the city, and yet despite every attempt he made to simply reclaim what was his, he found himself inadvertently fighting to fix the city he so innately despised.

And through it all… he learned things he had never wanted to learn, or at least told himself he didn’t. About himself, about the world he lived in, and it seemed as though with every step he took towards Metromind and his stolen power core, the city itself fought back against him, taking more and more as he went until he had nothing left.

In the end, when it was all said and done, he felt that the cost too heavily outweighed the victory. Horatio had won, he’d defeated Metromind and left the city he so despised with what he had come for, his power core, and nothing more.

Perhaps he was truly selfish like Metromind had said, because in the end he did do exactly what he’d set out to do, to take what he believed belonged to him, leave, and never look back again. What became of that accursed city… well, his connection to it died with the name Horus, it died with Clarity, it died with Crispin. Metromind was wrong, Horatio could walk away from a problem when he lost everything he cared about trying to solve it, though there was still a guilt that came with it all, with leaving the city as it was to die out on it’s own in time just like the rest of the world had. He knew it would, but he couldn’t just…. There was something in him that kept him from doing anything other than what he and Crispin had originally set out to do. If he didn’t, what was it all for then?

There was a numbness in him as he set out across the dunes in search of where he came from, and he cradled the power core in his hand close to his person, the only thing left of what he had before.

It was easy to lose track of time with every step and, well, when it didn’t really matter to Horatio in the first place anyhow. All that mattered to him was getting back to the UNNIIC, to where he belonged. His load was light, but weighed heavy on him and almost seemed to drag him down, threatening to bury him in the dunes he had once found safety in. The only thing he could do to fight it was to move, to take another step, and keep his eyes faced forward and never look back.

When the first blurry shape of the UNNIIC began to take shape over the horizon, a familiar sensation washed over Horatio. Exhaustion. He hadn’t realized just how low on energy he was until he was dragging his feet through the final miles of the sandy dunes that separated him and his ship. The winds blew wildly, sending his coat flailing as the first little drops of acid rain began to fall from the sky. None of it though, none of it was enough to make him take one step faster.

“Just a little further,” He mumbled out into the dry, electric air around him. “We’re almost there, Crispin, almost...”

As the shadow of the ship’s hull finally loomed over, he stumbled past the long dead generator and pulled himself up, making his way into the UNNIIC with the power core pressed tightly to his chest.

“Home.”