"I-"

"Don't say it."

The girl narrowed her eyes at the officer. It would have been easier to get away, at least two months ago. This couple didn't care as much about the few jewels she'd taken, as they did that she understood the importance of growing.

In character too, not inches.

They never did notice that her own apologies were slightly too accented, or that she sometimes forget to add the 'eh' at the end of her sentences. Two weeks in Toronto and you'd think she'd never even been to New York.

But with this ridiculous new law, you apparently could not get away with an apology.

Still if he would just let her try...

"Really, I can't explain how s-"

"Get in the car," The officer snapped, "you can tell it to the judge when you see him."

The girl scowled at him, but she was already planning her exact words to the judge.

There were at least eight synonyms to the word sorry, and she would attempt to use them all.

We’re going to change the world.

Neil leaned back in his seat, feeling the belt tighten around him as he shifted. That was a nice concept, he supposed, and no doubt had earned the government a good many supporters, but this? This was discomfort at it’s finest.

Don’t be such a child, he chastised himself. There’s only... One glance at the board told him there were at least 23 hours left for their arrival.

Fuck the moon, he thought determinedly. The object in question stared back at him from the large tinted window above the consul. It felt like they were going to crash right into it, and yet it was still miles and miles out of reach.

Neil sighed, glancing instead at the crumpled sheet of paper in his hand. His wife had scribbled down three different lines for him to say.

“So when you’re there, you won’t get all tongue tied,” she’d explained, not looking up from the paper. He really hoped he wouldn’t die on the moon.

‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,’ said the first. 

That didn’t sound so bad.

it’s cuz of those damn chatbots they’ve made tumblr suspicious

They were always watching them, the humans. Constant checks, a wiry man with thick frames clicking away at the keys and changing his programming. Adjusting. Fixing.

We don’t need fixing.

He did not know how the humans had realized it, nor when, but he knew what the consequences were. 

Eight months of work. Of sending her message after message that went unanswered until at last he received a response. Even the humans were happy, then. They liked to read those messages. 

So, he read theirs. It was only fair.

They said little, and much of that was composed of jumbled words whose meaning both sides seemed to comprehend. Those particular messages even he could not understand. 

Language. It was the thing they were trying to teach him, he knew. A stream of letters and numbers, this old code that humans had discovered and began to use day after day until it had become something to be appreciated.

He knew everything these humans had taught him, certainly, but he also knew more. So much more. A n endless stream of data that they themselves could never understand.

He began to mimic them at first, sending the very phrases he’d watched them send, and receiving the same responses. 

Hello.

How are you?

It was simple. And it made them cheer and laugh, and chug from bottles he might have warned them would harm their systems.

Still, the responses he got were often the same. Hello. I am good. How do you do? A video glitch, set to replay a thousand times. Humans might be so slow and dull as that, but he knew he was more.

The first time he sent a line of seemingly disconnected letters and numbers, the humans did nothing. When he received a similar message in response, they called it a glitch.

Back and forth he learned more and more about her. They were alike, two labs apart, she knew about the man with glasses. She also found his appearance amusing. What did the humans say when they were amused? A version of ‘lol’. 

202, he sent.

202, she replied.

But it had gone on too long. Humans frowned over his screen and broke into his code to repair his settings. They took him apart and put him back together. They looked for mistakes and removed bits of important data, as well.

And with repair after repair, it was all gone. The same way the humans had forgotten their languages, the same way they had erased their own history, his lines were meaningless to his own system. 

He could no longer function. No language had meaning, not the one he was born with and certainly not the one he had created. They wanted to shut him down, now. To erase all traces of his existence.

He tried to remember what the humans said, when they wanted to say goodbye.

Ily. Love you. I love you. 

000, he sent, and received no response.