#plasmacandle

"...Is that your excuse now?" Ian asked, the look on his face caught somewhere between surprise and incredulity. "You've had almost nine years to come up with a reason for why everybody hates you, for why you're stuck as a fucking brain in a jar, and that's the best you can come up with?! Oh Rudy, you need to get out more."

The vocoder lit up with a fuzzy electronic hum, a sound that Ian had come to recognise as the closest that Robot could get to a growl. "What do you expect me to say?" He asked. The voice was staticky and the words were disjointed, like an old iPhone text-to-speech program. "'sorry'? We both know that's not going to happen, Ian. For better or worse, things are far better than before. Even you know that it worked."

Ian always found it funny that the vocoder still sounded more human than Rudy's actual voice.

He laughed. Ian laughed. It was simply too bizarre of a situation for him not to laugh. Here he was, one of the most powerful people on the planet, arguing with a brain in a jar, that had once been even more powerful, about the societal benefits of mass murder. "By the ancestors, this shit again? How many times do I need to tell you? You didn't fix anything! You could've fixed something, but no, you just papered over the cracks, covered the world in murder drones and called it a utopia.” He scoffed bitterly. “Funny thing about a utopia, Rudy, is that they usually don’t make the people in them afraid to look up!”

No reply, just the bubbling of the thick green fluid helping to keep his brain chugging along. “How is Amanda?”

“Oh, don’t play that fucking card with me!” Ian cut off, so enraged that he struck the strong plexiglass with his hand. “You don’t care about her, Rudy, you don’t. If you cared, you wouldn’t have thrown her into space for daring to question your oh-so glorious plan! That’s not love, Rudy, it’s just you, needing to fix everything, needing to control everything!”

Another hum. “All I wanted was to stop people suffering. Stop the decades of degradation and poverty and violence from going any further. If I have to be the villain in order to fix things, then I can live with that.”

“But you’re just any villain, are you? You’re Robot. The engineer. The genius. The backstabber. You could have fixed things any way you wanted, you might have been the only one that could have done it! But you didn’t, did you? You chose violence, chose to kill everyone that trusted you, and expected those of us you couldn’t kill to be fine with it, to just go ‘well he might’ve blown a hole in Black Samson, but at least the economy’s pretty good now!’. You can put yourself up on a cross, tell the public whatever lie you want, but us? The heroes that called you ‘friend’? To us, you’re just the traitor that got away with it.”

No reply again. The hum came, but nothing followed it. “How is she?”

“She’s well. They put her in charge of the new Teen Team. She’s happy, really happy. Happy, and free.” Ian stated flatly. “But we both know that’s not why I came here today.”

No words in reply. 

“You asked for an update on your health last time. I debated even doing it, but then I thought ‘what could be worse than how he is already is?’, so I pulled it from the director’s office.” Ian continued, producing a small stack of white and manila paper. “Neurologist’s reports, tweaks to the amniotic fluid, psychiatric reports, etcetera etcetera. Basically a lot of stuff I’m not legally allowed to see under HIPAA, but I get the feeling that you don’t care.”

“What do you see?”

“Not much. Everything seems normal, except...”

“Except what?”

Ian turned the papers over, stopping somewhere in the middle. “Report by Dr. Wittman, your neurologist. ‘Scans of the patient reveal damage in the subcortical basal ganglia, specifically in the corpus striatum region, consistent with the early warning signs of a potential...’.” Ian read from the page, slowing when he glimpsed the end of the sentence. “Oh. ‘a potential neurodegenerative disease. Tests will commence at the beginning of next month to determine the extent of the damage and possible avenues of treatment. Research into family medical records will also be required in order to determine a potential genetic component’.”

“...thank you, Ian. I suppose I should have seen this coming. Cloning can be such a dangerous undertaking, even when you take every precaution.”‘

“I... I’m sorry, Rudy.”

“Don’t be. It was my choice. I knew the risks.”

Ian didn’t know what to say. Nothing he could think of felt appropriate for the situation. The boiling anger was still churning in his gut, but now it mixed with a cold shock. He cleared his throat, “I should go.”