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From his earliest memory, Dave knew that he didn’t have a father.
It first hit him during that annoying period when he was a toddler, where he would ask “why?” to everything.
His mom would never reply, just smile at him sadly.
She showed him pictures, of course. He would look and look, trying to memorise his dad’s face in his little brain despite not entirely understanding why his dad couldn’t reach out and pick him up.
Dave treasured those photos of his dad along with the photos of his granddad, which his mom kept in his room. At night, Dave would say goodnight to his dad’s pictures and go to bed, imagining his granddad tucking him in. Sometimes it felt too real, and Dave would suddenly bolt up after feeling the intense gaze of someone. It never made him feel unsafe, but instead warm and protected. He kept it as a special secret from his mom.
The next time he asked about his dad was when he was a bit older. It was during kindergarten, and he was sitting around a circle as his teacher asked everyone to tell something about their families. All the kids were able to babble to their heart’s content, but when it was Dave’s turn the teacher ushered the next kid on as soon as Dave said he lived with his mom. He didn’t even get a chance to talk about his grandma Ellen or his aunt MIST. Carefully, he observed the next few kids, and realised that they all had two parents.
When his grandma Ellen picked him up later that day, Dave was quiet. She grew worried and kept asking if he was okay, but he was just thoughtful.
“Granma?” Dave inquired, looking up as he held her hand. “Why don’t I have a daddy?”
His grandma’s face morphed into shock before it was quickly smoothed over in sadness.
“Why don’t I buy you an ice cream? Do you want an ice cream, Dave?”
He nodded, then shook his head.
“It’s okay,” she comforted, “I’m not ignoring your question. Let’s get ice cream and we’ll tell you everything when we get home, okay?”
Dave finally nodded. They got their ice cream (he asked for chocolate) and went home. As soon as they passed through the door, Dave handed his ice cream to his grandma and rushed to the couch, throwing himself into his mom’s lap.
“Woah, watch out there,” she laughed, ruffling his hair.
Dave has his face buried in her stomach, but he can hear his grandma clear her throat and whisper something to his mom. Her hands stilled on the top of his head before gently tilting his face up.
“Come sit beside me, Dave,” she offered softly.
He hoisted himself onto the couch to the spot beside her as she carefully placed her computer on the counter. His grandma came and sat near them.
“Mommy, why don’t I have a daddy?” he muttered again, picking at his hands.
“You do, Dave,” his mom corrected. “You have a daddy, his pictures are in your room, aren’t they?”
Dave was confused, but he tried not to show that he didn’t understand.
“You know how Auntie MIST sometimes sleeps?” his mom carried on. “When she’s sleeping, she’s in another world online.”
He thought he recognised that word. “Online? Like the TV and your ‘puter?”
She smiled. “Yes, like the TV and my computer. They have a special world to themselves, like we have our earth.”
Dave listened attentively, though he didn’t know where this was going.
“Some people——evil people——decided that they were going to hurt us so everyone would choose to leave Earth and go to that world. And your daddy stopped them. He saved a lot of people.”
“Like a hero?” Dave interrupted.
“Yes, like a hero.” his mom agreed. “But heroes don’t always get a happy ending, and your daddy couldn’t either.”
A thought suddenly struck Dave.
“Is daddy dead?” he asked, and was surprised to see his mom and grandma’s shocked expressions. He shrugged. “Manny told us that his brother died. He said that dying means that the person will never come back.”
“Yes, Dave,” his grandma said hurriedly, taking over the conversation. “You’re right, and Manny’s right too.”
Dave looked up at his mom, whose face was contorted in pain. She spotted him staring and quickly tried to smile reassuringly.
“Are you going to die?” Dave asked her.
“No, Dave, I won’t die, not until a long, long, time.”
“Not after ten years?”
His mom laughed. “Not for many, many ten years.”
Comforted, Dave said “Okay!” before reaching for his ice cream from his grandma and hopping off the couch. He ran to the dining room, where he knew his aunt MIST would be charging. Behind him, he heard his grandma say something about how it went as well as they could expect. He didn’t think much of it.
As Dave grew older, he eventually learnt of his dad’s name. Caspian Keyes.
He had also begun hearing more about his dad, mostly from kids at school.
Everyone called him a hero, and Dave was also cool by proxy. All the people in his class wanted to be his friend, and while he enjoyed all the attention, he found it hard to answer their questions about his dad. He didn’t know anything about him, after all.
They’ve moved out of his grandma Ellen’s house, he and his mom. MIST alternated between the two houses at first but ultimately stayed with Dave and his mom the most often. She had a physical body now, though Dave could only see her as a hologram when he wore the Logorhythms AR lenses. She looked like a normal human, more or less, though her electric-blue eyes and bright, flowing blue hair separated her as a CI.
“Hah,” Dave’s mom had said when she first saw MIST’s physical form. “You look like Hatsune Miku.”
“Well, I would not say that the colours really match. The virtual singer Hatsune Miku has teal hair, usually in #39C5BB or #33BBAD, sometimes even——“
“Forget I said anything.”
Another thing the AR lenses allowed Dave to see was holograms of his dad.
He had been mesmerised when the holograms loaded and he could see his dad in front of him. He was taller than Dave had thought, and much younger too. Dave knew his mother was young——there was a clear difference in age between her and the other parents at his school——but seeing the version of her in the hologram still surprised him. She looked like the teens in the high school near their house. It was weird to think that this same young girl would give birth to Dave less than a year later.
Dave was always quiet when he loaded the image of his parents. He would stand in the middle of them, watching their expressions as they looked at each other. Sometimes he only stared at his dad, comparing their features and wondering when he would grow tall enough to be at eye-level with him.
His mom rarely stayed in the room while he used the lenses. Her expression when she turned around from her work to see Dave standing next to his dad’s hologram was always complicated, a mixture of longing and a need to escape.
This time, however, she joined him.
“You look so much like him,” she whispered as she stared at the 3D image in front of them.
“Everyone says that,” Dave grumbled, weirdly upset that his time alone was cut short.
“That’s because you do look alike, almost too much.” she ruffled his hair without turning her eyes away. “All you got from me was the darker hair. Everything else is all him.”
“Do you think I’ll be as tall as him in the future?”
“Mm,” she hummed vaguely, which wasn’t very reassuring. “If you get his genes again, which is very likely, you’d probably grow to be around the same height he was.”
Dave thought for a while. “What about my grandparents?”
“Well, Grandma Ellen is average height, and your grandad David was even taller than your dad. Don’t know where I went wrong with my height.”
“No, I meant my grandparents from my dad’s side.”
A familiar stretch of silence followed, and Dave knew it was a sign of his mom not wanting to talk.
“Fine, I’ll ask grandma Ellen then, or MIST——“
“No, Dave,” she interrupted, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I… I have something to tell you. There’s something else you need to know about your dad, and I want you to hear it from me, not from someone else or on the internet.”
Dave had assumed she told him everything she could about his dad, and he was surprised to find that there was more.
His mom took off her lenses and made her way to the chair at her desk. Dave followed and took the chair opposite her.
“Tell me,” he implored.
“I knew you would get around to asking this, and I knew I could never lie to you about anything concerning him, but…” she paused again. “It’s just… hard to explain.”
Dave tried to wait patiently as his mom grappled with her words.
“Your father….” she finally said, “He wasn’t born in a normal way. He was a clone. Of Stephen Holstrom.”
Honestly, that didn’t shock Dave as much as it should’ve. He supposed that in a world of UIs (and his aunt being a CI), hearing that your father was a clone loses its shock factor. He recognised the name Stephen Holstrom, though.
“Isn’t the Holstrom the guy who tried to spread the pandemic?” he asked, confused.
“Yes.” his mom nodded. “That’s how your dad was able to stop him in the end. He merged with Holstrom and, because their codes were identical…the server deleted them.”
Dave was astonished. He knew his dad had sacrificed himself to save the world, but he never knew the details of it, nor the connection between his dad and Holstrom.
A terrible thought suddenly hit him.
“So I’m genetically related to Stephen Holstrom?” he gasped, horrified.
His mom scrunched her nose in distaste. “Yeah, I tend not to think too much about that.” She stood up then, and Dave knew it meant the conversation was over.
The next day at school, Dave tried to subtly probe his friends to see how much they knew about his dad, and realised that it seemed like everyone knew about the clone part except for him. It almost made him feel scared, the fact that random people he saw around the school had more knowledge about his dad than he did.
His mom wasn’t home when he returned from school that day, and she left a message via MIST to tell him that she won’t be back from work until late at night. Normally, Dave would use the time to play Reign of Winter and skip homework, but he wanted to do something else that evening.
“What are you doing?” MIST asked him as he emerged from his mom’s room, holding her old laptop. He started guiltily but didn’t answer her.
“Is that Maddie’s laptop?” she asked, tilting her head. His mom had installed projectors around certain areas of the apartment which allowed MIST to appear in her physical form.
“Yes,” Dave confirmed, stepping aside to go into his room; MIST wouldn’t be able to follow him there.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Dave,” MIST said worriedly. “Maddie never specified to me, but from what I could infer she wouldn’t like you accessing her laptop.”
Dave ignored her as he closed the door to his room. Once inside, he set the laptop down on his desk and opened it. He knew an approximate password from closely watching his mom’s typing patterns, and the laptop was eventually unlocked after a few tries.
He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, exactly. Some traces of his dad for sure, but he wasn’t sure what.
The laptop was largely filled with files or pictures that Dave flicked past without a second thought. Then he saw it.
Project Caspian.
The files were a total of two terabytes. Dave gulped and tried to click on the video at the top, the one titled “Hannah”, before the laptop went dark.
“You shouldn’t look at that,” MIST’s voice came from outside.
Dave opened the door, his hands shaking.
“I…I just wanted to——“
“You shouldn’t,” MIST said again, though her voice was softer. “Your mom never looked through them, and I think that you should not either.”
“Why did she keep them on her laptop, if she was never going to look at them?” he demanded.
MIST paused. “I’m not sure. Maddie didn’t tell me. But if I were to assume, I think it’s because those files are the biggest proof there is that Caspian existed.”
He didn’t say anything to that. MIST didn’t tell his mom what happened when she eventually came home. They both pretended nothing happened the next morning.
When Dave was 14, he stopped visiting his dad’s grave.
The grave was near his grandma’s old house, in a private area that only a few knew of. He and his mom used to go every year, and Dave would always feel connected with his dad when he was standing in the quiet wind. Logically, Dave knew that where the body was buried didn’t necessarily matter since his dad died as a UI, but he still felt closer when he was near the grave.
That year, however, was the year he decided to stop going.
“Dave?” his mom was standing near the door, calling out to him. He didn’t come out of his room.
“Uhh… It’s fine, Mom. Just go without me this time. I’m not feeling up to it,” he called back.
A pause.
“Okay, Dave,” his mom finally answered. He couldn’t discern anything from her levelled voice. “I’m leaving now, take care, and don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.”
Dave sank his face into his pillow as he heard the front door shut with more force than his mom usually used.
What he said wasn’t false; he genuinely didn’t feel up to visiting his dad’s grave anymore. As he grew older, the hero worship he felt towards his dad as a kid faded as his age grew. He was now only four years younger than his father when he died. For god sake, he was nearly his mom’s age when she gave birth to him.
People who knew or knew of his dad always told Dave how much he looked like him. He could see it for himself through the pictures kept around his house and online. What’s more, it seemed like people expected Dave to also inherit his dad’s brain along with his looks. His mom being Maddie Kim, world-renowned engineer and innovator, didn’t ease up his pressure either.
Some days it was like the entire world had their eyes on him. The thought was self-centered, but it genuinely felt like everyone was waiting for him to grow up to become the next Caspian Keyes.
To make things more complicated, the more Dave thought about his dad the more he decided that he wasn’t the all-powerful hero everyone made him out to be. He was raised by a bunch of spies. He was ignorant of everything around him until he was 18, and when he finally figured out the truth about his life he immediately had to sacrifice himself for the world. It was a noble life, sure. A noble but pathetic one.
He never shared those thoughts with anyone. His mom probably sensed them, but she always avoided talking about his dad and Dave never tried to push her. Still, he wished that she would stop wearing that sad, soulful expression whenever his dad was mentioned.
Dave didn’t understand what made his dad so important to his mom. She could’ve moved on, should’ve moved on. It definitely wasn’t normal to stay stuck in a teenage relationship more than a decade after it ended. He just didn’t get it.
His mom would be gone for most of the day for the visit, and she took MIST with her too. Dave lolled around in his room before deciding to go around the shops to clear his mind.
It was a sunny day, and the streets were bustling with people. Everyone was looking happier since the UI uploads became more frequent and his mom’s robots allowed them to visit Earth despite joining the Cloud. His mom called it the Golden Age. Dave didn’t like that she named it, as if it were something bound to pass by time.
He stopped in front of the comic store he was a regular of, but before he could go in he heard someone’s voice from behind him.
“Caspian?”
He stopped dead.
Slowly, he turned around and found himself facing a man in his fifties. The man wore glasses and had a large frame. His eyes, which were light brown, widened in shock as he stared at Dave.
“I…” Dave stuttered. “I’m not—I’m not him.”
And he ran off in the opposite direction.
He could hear the man yell something apologetic behind him but he didn’t slow down. He didn’t slow until he was back to his apartment building and panting in the elevator.
His mom and MIST came back earlier than normal this time. Dave tried not to notice how his mom’s eyes were red.
The next year, when she called for him at the door again, Dave refused a second time.
And she didn’t try a third time after that.
Dave was 17 when he decided by himself that he wanted to upload.
It had always felt like a given, everyone was uploading now, and the number of UIs coming down to visit Earth dwindled in numbers. Even his grandma, whom he once knew as someone hating the uploading process, had already been living in the Cloud for five years.
There was another reason why he wanted to upload, though. A reason he never told anyone. People would probably think he’s gone crazy, yearning for upload because he wanted to meet his dead granddad. Dave couldn’t explain it, but he knew that the day he uploaded, his granddad would be there.
He was looking at pictures of the Cloud that his older friends sent him one night when his mom knocked on his open door.
“Can I come in?” she asked.
He nodded, though he was surprised. She rarely came into his room after he entered his teenage years, and he barely saw her at all during afternoons like this when she would be at work.
Gingerly, she stepped into his room as if he might change his mind. She sat down next to him on his bed and looked around.
“How come it feels so much emptier in here than it used to be, hm?”
“You obviously know why,” Dave sulked. There was no way his mom didn’t realise he had removed all the photos of his dad.
Her expression softened. “Can I have the pictures back, then? Since you don’t seem to need them anymore,”
“I never needed them,” Dave lied crossly. “Why are you home at this time anyway? You’re scarcely here most of the days.”
“That’s exactly why. I scarcely get to talk to you,” she said as she went over to the box he kept in the corner of his room.
“Don’t go over my stuff,” he suddenly snapped.
His mom paused. Her back was facing him and he couldn’t see her expression.
“I wasn’t going to open it unless you gave me permission,” she protested, voice barely above a whisper.
Dave hated how the conversation was going. He should’ve been happy that his mom came home early and they could spend time together to catch up. He loved his mom, he truly did, but he hated how both of them reacted every time the topic of his dad threatened to come up.
What he felt towards his dad as a kid was long gone by now. There wasn’t any resentment. There wasn’t anything, really. He couldn’t bring himself to feel anything towards someone who died before he was even born. People around him still brought up the name Caspian Keyes, especially now that he looked even more like his father. Dave never engaged in those conversations, and eventually the subject would be awkwardly changed.
His grandma and step-granddad tried to coax him into talking about his dad but MIST, to everyone’s surprise, didn’t try to do that. In fact, it felt like MIST was almost reluctant to talk to Dave some days. Maybe he was just overthinking, but it hurt him, especially because he was so close to her when he was young.
He was drawn out of his thoughts as his mom came back to sit next to him again, this time with a bit more space between them.
“Please may you go through the box and return your dad’s photos to me?” she asked, looking down at the floor.
He nodded and went to get the box. Nothing was kept in it except for the photos, really. A few certificates from school here and there, but that was it. He wasn’t even sure why he snapped at his mom. Everything just frustrated him.
Dave returned to her side, holding the photos lightly. Some were framed, and others were Polaroid films worn out over the years. When he was young he used to trace them with his fingers, imagining his dad being there with him.
“I’m sorry for yelling,” he murmured.
“Dave, it’s fine, honestly,” His mom said, raising a hand to smooth over his bangs. “I know you haven’t been feeling the best recently. Or maybe for a long time.”
There was a stretch of silence, but he didn’t speak.
The bed shifted in weight as he felt his mom sigh and stand up. She muttered something about going back to the company for the time being.
“Wait,” Dave said before she reached the door. He wrapped his arms around her and engulfed her in a hug. A beat passed before she returned it, one of her hands smoothing the back of his hair.
It was nice, being this close to his mom again. As Dave grew older he wasn’t as physically affectionate as before, but he still found his mom’s embrace comforting.
He eventually stepped back.
“I’m sorry,” he apologised again. This time he wasn’t sure for what. “I’ll make dinner tonight.”
“Well, I’ll definitely have to come back early to supervise, then.” his mom gave a small smile. “Who knows what you’ll get up to in the kitchen?”
Dave chuckled. Looking down at her, he realised that he was nearly a head taller than his mom. He vaguely remembered being nine or ten, staring up at holograms of his dad and wondering when he’d grow as tall as him. He shook that memory off.
His dad didn’t matter. Dave had his mom, and she was enough.
“How’d you feel about a summer internship at Logorhythms?”
Dave hummed but didn’t answer. He was sulking into his bowl of rice, glaring as if each grain had personally done him wrong.
He could hear his mom sigh. The sound was getting familiar to him over the past two years.
“If you’re not against it I’ll contact a few departments to see if they have anything suitable for you.” She said from where she stood at the sink. “You got any preferences for where you wanna go? Other than engineering?”
Dave shook his head and his mom went into the other room, calling someone on her phone.
Their relationship was becoming more and more strained as time went on. Dave already had a lot of pent-up resentment throughout his life and, though weren’t necessarily directed at his mom, her refusing to sign him up for early upload was the match to the dry fuse. Then she had blocked MIST from their contacts, making things worse.
Their home was quiet without MIST zooming around. Though she seldom spoke to Dave as he grew older, he still found solace in her presence. She was in most of his earliest memories after all, sometimes even more prominent than his mom.
That was why he went straight to her after his mom refused to give permission for early upload. He regretted it bitterly, because now he was still stuck on earth, and he probably wasn’t going to see MIST again until a year later. His grandma too, most likely. She visited two weeks ago, but Dave knew that in her version of time, she probably hadn’t seen him in months or even years.
Everything in his life was falling apart, and as much as Dave hated to admit it, he thought that he would be so much happier next year when he’d finally be in the Cloud. Away from Earth. Away from his mom.
He still loved her, it was just a strained love. He knew she felt the same towards him, too.
They didn’t speak again that evening. Dave received an email the next morning informing him that his internship would start the next week, and that was that.
“Grandma? Is that you?”
Dave was astonished to see his grandma at Logorhythms. Her visits were dwindling, especially after his mom cut MIST off. Seeing her mere weeks after her last visit was abnormal, to say the least.
He approached his grandma and her ex-husband Peter before noticing that they had someone else with them.
“Who…Who’s this?” Dave asked, looking at the guy skeptically. He had his face turned away from Dave, but upon feeling Dave’s eyes on him he turned around and glared back. Something about the guy’s face screamed familiarity to him, though he couldn’t quite pinpoint it yet.
Then Dave looked properly. He looked at the face in front of him that almost completely resembled his own.
No fucking way.
His expression broke in disbelief as he gave the guy a once-over.
That’s Caspian Keyes.
No, no, it couldn’t be. He took half a step back and gave the guy a twice-over, as if his form would shift after a moment and what had initially hit his eyes was just a trick of light.
It wasn’t. Dave found himself looking at what was his identical size, identical build, and finally identical eyes staring back, unimpressed.
Out of the buzzing in his mind, he vaguely heard his grandma Ellen mutter, “Oh my God, MIST,” under her breath. Peter said something indignantly from the side, but Dave couldn’t bring his brain to decipher what it was.
The guy, his dad——no, Caspian——was looking confused. “I’m getting tired of hearing myself say this, but… What is going on?”
Dave clenched his fists and braced himself.
“Caspian,” his grandma said slowly, “this is Dave. This is your son,”
His da—Caspian’s face morphed into shock, an expression which Dave could unfortunately recognise the likeliness on himself.
His mom came down the stairs before anyone could say anything else. She ignored all of Dave’s questions along with his demand to speak to her, and left the lobby with Caspian. (God, he’s not gonna get used to saying that name)
In the end, it was Dave’s grandma who caught him up to speed.
“And MIST never mentioned anything to you about…?”
“Sh-She mentioned his name would help me out, but if she had him stored away somewhere…That could’ve helped me out,” He said truthfully. “I mean, I don’t care about this guy. He’s not my dad—“ His voice broke a little. “He…He didn’t even know I was…”
His grandma and Peter watched him sadly, not interrupting. They never asked, but everyone could tell Dave’s complicated feelings towards his dad as he grew older.
“He…He’s two years younger than me,” Dave finally got out. “But he is my father, and he can make legal decisions as my father. He could sign off on early upload.”
And that brought on another familiar conversation about why Dave was so desperate to upload. He argued his case truthfully enough: the Embodied were going extinct, the UIs were leaving Earth behind, and he felt himself being abandoned by the rest of the world. He didn’t mention anything about having a feeling that his granddad would be waiting for him in the Cloud.
His mom didn’t return to the lobby for a long time, and his grandma told Dave to give her some space.
“It’s hard for her to see him again,” She reasoned.
Dave wanted to scream. It’s been 20 years! 20 years is more than enough time to get over a teenager who didn’t even know you had a son together! Why wasn’t she satisfied with the life she had? Why stay stuck in the past?
For the rest of that day, Logorhythms bustled with news of Caspian Keyes’s resurrection, and eventually Dave slipped away from his work to go home. He just couldn’t focus.
He sat near the front door, face stern, waiting for his mom to return home. It was late when she finally did, but the look on her heavy-hearted face was so horrible that instead of asking for answers, Dave embraced her instead.
“I’m so sorry,” She kept muttering, voice shaking with barely contained sobs. Dave felt his own eyes sting at the words, though he didn’t know why she was apologising.
Seeing her like that terrified him. His mom had always seemed so strong, even when she was barely an adult herself, and he rarely saw her lose her composure. Something akin to resentment dug at Dave, who was sure that she was only this upset because of who they saw that morning.
Eventually, she calmed down enough that they could both sit side by side on the sofa.
“So…” Dave prompted. He was impatient for answers, though he didn’t want to rush her. “What’s going to happen now? I mean, he’s obviously staying on the Cloud because he’s a UI, but is he going to use our robots a lot to come down?”
His mom’s eyes welled up once more. Dave hurriedly stopped talking.
“No, Dave, he’s not,” She whispered. “He—he still has a bit of that antiviral inside of him. MIST only brought him back so he could address the problem with the UIs and the Embodied. He doesn’t have any strength to last long, unless——“
Her breath hitched on the last word, and she covered her mouth as she rushed into her room, leaving Dave sitting alone. He couldn’t hear her crying through the walls, but he felt as if someone was playing an audio of it inside his brain nonetheless.
He took a deep, shuddering breath and tried to wrap his head around everything that happened that day. Within 12 hours, he had learnt that MIST resurrected his...dad, whom he had met, then he watched his mom break apart, and found out that his dad was going to die again soon.
For the thousandth time, Dave wasn’t sure what to think about his dad. MIST had brought him back to deal with the problem regarding the attack on the Covilha data centre, and that was seemingly the only thing he was expected to focus on in his final days (or weeks?). Dave wondered if his dad wanted to squeeze out time to talk to him, or if he thought the whole situation was too complicated and would rather ignore Dave’s existence.
He wasn’t going to let that happen, Dave decided in the end. He was going to properly speak to his dad, tell him everything he had missed during the 20 years, not let his mom’s sacrifice of her youth go to waste, and hopefully get his dad to sign him off for early upload. His mom would probably take the ordeal to court if that happened, but Dave needed to at least try it.
One other thing bugged him. Something his mom had said. He doesn’t have any strength to last long, unless——
What was the unless? It must be something terrible, if it made his mom react like that.
Dave drifted off into sleep on the sofa as he pondered.
When he woke up the next day, he found that he was lying down, and someone had put a blanket over him. He called out for his mom, only to realise that she had already left.
Dave changed quickly and rushed to Logorhythms. He nearly got cornered outside by a couple of desperate protesters who recognised him, but a security guard intervened and helped Dave enter the building.
He approached the reception counter to ask when they would be expecting the UI negotiator, when he heard footsteps coming up the stairs.
It was his dad, but he looked different. Half of his hair was white, and a part of his face was grey, the texture of it looking almost like eroded metal. A red glint shone from his right eye, and the right side of his body also resembled that of a robot.
He walked past Dave without looking at him, but Dave called out anyway.
“Hey. Hey, can you…” He approached, before being motioned to stop by one of the bodyguards. “Can we uh…after?”
His dad didn’t stop or look back, but he answered, “Yes,”
Dave didn’t say anything else after that, just watched the group disappear down a doorway.
He waited in the lobby for the negotiation to be over. Plans of what to say to his dad afterwards swivelled around his head for a bit before he gave up; he couldn’t get a single thought straight.
Somehow, he knew there was trouble before it even began. The lobby wasn’t that busy, and everyone was chatting civilly with one another. Nothing seemed to be amiss.
Then why did he have this deeply uncomfortable feeling in his guts that something was going to go wrong?
A single shot of a bullet and a woman’s high-pitched scream answered his question.
The lobby went still for a split second before it descended into chaos. People ran for the doors, screaming and shoving each other out of the way. Dave would’ve followed them, but at that moment, a large group of the Logorhythms robots entered from outside, bearing guns. They ran right into the escaping crowd.
His mom had told him that in Norse mythology, there was an eventual end to the gods in an event named Ragnarok. The ultimate destruction, she had called it.
Dave saw Ragnarok rain down over the blood-soaked lobby.
I need to find my mom, he thought to himself from where he hid behind a potted plant. A robot fell to the floor beside him at that moment, its body convulsing as multiple shots were fired at its torso. So bullet wounds do affect them to a certain extent.
He lunged forward and grabbed the robot’s gun before it could sit up, and sprinted to the flight of stairs he knew would take him to the negotiation room. With great relief, he saw his mom running towards the same stairs, his dad following close behind.
Suddenly, a robot Dave hadn’t noticed before aimed its fire at his parents. He watched in horror as his mom was shoved aside and several bullet holes emerged on his dad’s robotic body, pulling it apart.
Dave shot the robot in its vital point and rushed to help his mom up, who looked like she was still in shock. They ran down the stairs and Dave glanced at the severed remains of his dad’s robotic head. He would’ve left him there, truth to be told, but his mom retreated for it when she heard his voice asking her for help to get to the load-in bay.
A couple of robots tailed them on their way to the bay, but Dave shot them down. The sound of his heart beating drowned out the gunshots, and the whole experience felt so surreal that Dave could hardly believe what he was doing.
The dark lights of the load-in bay were now red, as if it too sensed the intrusions of the robots. Dave hurriedly tried to shut the door to give his mom time to plug the head in, but something on the other side was banging against him, refusing to be shut out. He could feel his own body turn to stone and lose function, but he still tried to push his body weight against the door.
In the end, the robot overpowered him. It stepped into the bay and Dave backed away from it, cursing as his muscles turned to liquid and he couldn’t hold up the gun in time.
A loud bang and excruciating pain hit him the next moment, and he fell to the floor in agony. Red clouded his vision as he heard his mom scream.
“—ave? Dave!”
When he regained consciousness, he found himself in his mom’s arms.
“Mom, my…my head…” he tried to say. “My head’s not hit. It’s okay. It’s okay. Just…just get me to deep scan, upload…I’m good as new….” But even as he spoke those words he knew it wasn’t practical. He was far too hurt and his mom was too shaken for them both to leave the area. That realisation scared him.
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” His mom soothed, though he could see tears in her eyes.
I’m sorry for being mad at you, Mom. He wanted to say.
I’m sorry I was mad because you couldn’t be content with our family. I’m sorry I tried to break apart this family.
I didn’t even get to talk to dad, in the end.
But his dad didn’t matter. It was always Dave and his mom, from the moment he was born to right now, when he’s bleeding out on the floor and gasping for air. It’s always been them.
He tried to speak, but his mouth wouldn’t work.
As his mom’s face slowly faded into darkness, he knew his time was up.