Chapter 133: Book 2 Chapter 40.1: Old and Busted

Harley always looked forward to interesting mixups at the morning looper meetings, but the absence of Lee was not the kind of shakeup she’d been hoping for. The post-breakup blues were not being kind to their dear leader.

“It’s been three days,” Kim said. “Is it supposed to last this long?”

“I’d have no way of knowing,” Vell said. Every breakup he’d ever had involved a magic rune to some extent.

“It’s fine,” Harley said. “Lee’s always had a lot of emotions bottled up in there. It’ll take her a while to work through them all.”

“We’ve made it one and a half apocalypses without her,” Vell said. Even he didn’t consider everybody getting turned into chimpanzees a full apocalypse. They were basically hairier people anyway. “Let’s just let her enjoy her, uh, let’s call it a vacation.”

“We’re doing fine, yeah,” Kim said. “But why are we still having meetings?”

Nobody other than Lee was ever doing anything vaguely meeting-y at these meetings. As the only one with any meaningful organizational skills, Lee was the only one who ever kept them on task and on schedule. When they had a schedule, which admittedly was not often. Most of the time they just ate breakfast and chatted for a bit.

“I just like to hang out with you guys, and sometimes the morning is the only time we get to do that,” Harley said.

“And Lee spent a lot of her parent’s money on that coffee machine,” Vell said, as he sipped at his own coffee. “I like to justify the purchase.”

“It is pretty good coffee,” Hawke agreed.

Someone’s phone started to buzz. All of the usual suspects checked theirs and found nothing before Kim realized it was her own phone. Her surprise was understandable, considering how little she used the device. The only people she regularly contacted were also the same people who knew she was a robot, so she just contacted them with the wi-fi built into her brain.

“Who’s calling?” Hawke said. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“It’s the Dean,” Kim said, slightly confused. “He says I need to come to his office. I can bring friends if I want.”

“That’s...weird,” Vell said. This wasn’t usually the kind of school where people got called to the principal’s office. “Are you in trouble?”

“You were sort of the front man when we ruined Banana Day,” Harley said. “Again.”

“It’s not our fault there were banana snakes, we were just the messenger!”

“Still, people are weirdly into Banana Day around here. Wouldn’t be surprised if people complained.”

“It could be something else,” Kim said. “The Dean knows what I am, remember?”

Dean Lichman was the whole reason Kim was at the school instead of disassembled in a lab somewhere. The school had offered its facilities to study Kim, and then Dean Lichman had made the decision that the best person to ‘study’ Kim was Kim herself -much to the chagrin of many scientists who would’ve relished a chance to take her apart and find out what made her tick.

“Oh yeah. I always forget people other than us know about that kind of stuff,” Hawke said. “Do you want us to come with?”

“If it’s not too much trouble,” Kim said. “I could use the company.”

Talking to normal people about being a robot always made Kim feel on edge. The loopers were better on that subject, since their lives were so weird that a sapient robot barely stood out.

“Alright, our morning plans just got made,” Vell said. “Let’s go talk to the Dean.”

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“Hi, Dean...and friends,” Vell said stiffly.

Every chair in Dean Lichman’s office was occupied by a group of men who somehow looked less alive than the actual undead Wight in the room. They were all unimaginably old, their lives artificially extended by technological devices and a suite of magical enchantments imbued into their ancient, decrepit bodies.

“Hello everyone,” Dean Lichman said, his usually chipper voice clearly strained. “Kim. This is the Board of Directors.”

The members of the Board nodded their heads in acknowledgment, and Vell would swear he could hear their bones creaking. Kim, who had previously assumed human skin was incapable of being semi-transparent, just stared at the ancient board members.

“Hi, nice to meet you guys,” Harley said, once again becoming the social steering wheel of the loopers. “Can we help you with something?”

“We are here to discuss misappropriated assets,” one of the Board croaked.

“Oh, like all the assets Goodwell misappropriated to kidnap Vell?”

Harley knew it was entirely unrelated, but she felt like bringing it up. The Board had signed off on every bit of equipment that had had been used to capture and restrain Vell without batting an eye.

“No,” the Board said. “We’re here to discuss the usage of Kim E. Komi.”

“Usage?” Harley snapped. Kim, as usually happened when the topic of her personhood was brought up, froze. Thankfully others were there to speak up for her.

“Kim’s not a thing you can use,” Hawke said.

“A topic we have already discussed at length among the school board,” Dean Lichman insisted. “Kim is capable of giving or denying consent to experimental procedures. Without her express permission, we can’t experiment on her without violating the school’s own code of ethics.”

The Einstein-Odinson Academy had a frighteningly lax policy on human experimentation, but it did at least require that all participants give consent to any experiments. While Kim didn’t quite fit into the “human” part of human experimentation, the rules were vaguely worded enough to still apply to her.

“An initial ruling based on a rule written without consideration for our current situation,” the Board said. “This matter will be discussed further and resolved based on new information.”

“You mean it’ll be resolved when you get what you want,” Harley said. The board simply stared at her in response.

“Considering the circumstances, I thought it appropriate to let Kim know about the discussions that will be happening this week,” Dean Lichman said. He kept his tone calm and civil, but a very pointed glance in the direction of the Board made it clear they had been hoping to keep this a secret.

“Your input will be accepted, but is not mandatory,” the Board said. “We have already gathered the pertinent information.”

“I would consider her input pertinent,” Harley said. “Since she is the her for her input to...be pertinent...to...you know what I mean!”

The Board did not acknowledge her awkwardly worded statement in any way. Harley wondered if they were deliberately ignoring her or just so borderline dead they couldn’t have reacted if they wanted to.

“We look forward to resolving this matter,” The Board eventually said. “And clarifying the machine’s status as school property.”

Hawke let out an indignant gasp that they would say such a thing to Kim’s face, but Kim didn’t even blink. The members of the board, with much gasping for breath and creaking of ancient bones, stood from their seats and shuffled lethargically out of the room. Harley gave them a wide berth as they passed, but still could not avoid the smell of the preservative chemicals that kept the Board alive.

“Is it rude of me to say that every one of those dudes should probably be dead?”

“Not really, considering that most of them have died,” Dean Lichman said. “More than once, even. They have implants on their hearts that restart them in emergencies.”

“Why not just become a wight or something, like you?”

“Well, there are some disadvantages,” Lichman said. He very casually removed one of his partially decayed fingers and then reattached it with some tape he had on his desk. “And some people just personally disagree with being undead, for various reasons. The members of the Board are alive -technically- and intent on staying that way as long as possible.”

“And intent on being assholes,” Harley said.

“What’s their interest in Kim, anyway?” Vell said. “As far as I know the Board usually keeps their hands off of projects here.”

The Board as an institution rarely had any direct intervention in the college. They simply provided money and let the experiments run their course, knowing that the brilliants minds of the college would usually provide a return on their investments somehow.

“If I had to guess, it comes back to what Harley was talking about,” Dean Lichman said. “Wanting to live forever.”

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“Oh, I get it now,” Hawke said. “They want robot bodies instead of their current super old and decrepit mortal bodies.”

“They looked about thirty percent machine already,” Harley noted. One of the Board even had a visible air pump on their chest to compensate for non-functioning lungs. “Maybe they want to go the other seventy percent. If I were in their state, I’d want a replacement too.”

“Immortality does seem to be their primary concern nowadays,” Dean Lichman agreed. Their proposed budgets for the future of the school all involved a great deal of focus on medicine and health related technology.

“And they’ve decided to exploit Kim to get it,” Vell concluded. “So, what do we do about it?”

Everyone waited for Kim to be the first to say something. She didn’t, so Harley took over the conversation once again.

“We could threaten to sneeze in the general direction of the Board. It’d probably kill them all on the spot.”

“Harley B Harley, as a representative of this school I have to admonish you for those threats,” Dean Lichman said. “Wait until you’re outside of my office to make them.”

“I’m good, I just got to get the violent impulses out of my system up front,” Harley said. “Obviously the more rational course of action is just to find out what arguments the Board of Directors plans on making to the larger school board and then find a way to refute them.”

“That seems too boring to possibly work,” Vell said.

“Yeah, but it’s a starting point.”

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Acquiring data on the Board’s standards for sapience was easy, with their connections to the neurology department. Though Cane didn’t know exactly what he was digging for, since he still didn’t know Kim was a robot, he dug regardless, then handed what he found over to Vell, who explained the three things he’d managed to turn up.

“Alright, so these guys want to challenge you on three major points,” Vell explained. “Number one: creativity.”

“Easy peasy, Kim was painting with us just the other day,” Harley said.

“Not the kind of creativity that helps you copy a bowl of fruit,” Vell said. “The ability to create something new, to problem solve in unexpected situations, that kind of thing.”

“Nobody knows more about unexpected situations than us, right? You got this,” Hawke assured Kim. She mumbled “yeah” under her breath in response.

“What’s item two?”

“Option two is empathy,” Vell said. “The ability to understand and sympathize with the experiences of other living things.”

The response to that one was not quite so laid back as the first.

“Well, that’s not- uh, it’s not like you’re not empathetic, it’s just, uh…”

“You just sort of lack a frame of reference for some human experiences,” Harley said. “But you get empathy. It might get a little thorny if they try and ask you about like, childhoods and stuff, but we can contest the bias in those questions. It’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, we’ll handle it. What about item three?”

“It gets a bit more esoteric here,” Vell said. “They basically want to test whether you, uh, ‘are a neurally unique individual despite being digital’.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means they want to make a digital copy of your brain,” Vell said, cringing even as he said it. “If the copy behaves identically to the original, well...it gets weird.”

The second point of contention had slowed them down, but the third brought them to a screeching halt.

“So, in case anyone was wondering,” Vell said. ‘That won’t work. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons that won’t work, but if they even tried it, it could get real bad real fast.”

Kim’s sapience was presumably tied to the rune Quenay had inscribed in her chest -a rune that could get very dangerous in the wrong circumstances. Joan’s misguided attempt to experiment on it had resulted in a sizable explosion last year, and she’d been doing a fairly minor probe at the time. A more extensive experiment could easily result in more extensive damage.

“Yeah, we can’t let them do that under any circumstances,” Harley said.

“So I guess we just knock it out of the park on the first two, yeah?”

“Don’t go and make it sound easy,” Harley chided. “You’ll jinx us.”

“Right, let’s just stop talking about this altogether and let Kim do her thing.” Vell said. Optimism and pessimism would both put undue pressure on Kim right now. Better to let her act on her own terms. Vell had complete faith she could showcase her creativity easily.

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Vell had, to his own surprise, been proven right. A little too right.

“You know, you probably could’ve stopped at one.”

The walls of Kim’s dormitory had been coated, floor to ceiling, in a colorful mishmash of artistic mediums. Colorful paintings and portraits vied for space with vibrant landscapes, all of them framing the occasional sculpture or carving.

“I know, I know,” Kim whined. “I told myself I was just going to try a few things, and then I did, and I started worrying if they were going to be good enough, so I did them all over again, and then I had the thought again, and I did them over again, and...well…”

Kim gestured to a stack of eighty-seven drawings of a dog. She hadn’t been able to get the nose right the first eighty-six times.

“I feel like you might be overthinking it.”

“Of course I’m overthinking it, the future of my entire existence depends on it,” Kim snapped.

“You’re not wrong, but there’s still such a thing as doing too much,” Harley said.

“Maybe this is on the far side of average, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Kim to be worried,” Hawke said. “It’d be one thing if she were just trying to prove it to herself, or us, but she’s got a whole other group of actively hostile assholes she’s got to convince.”

“Exactly! Like these, these portraits, do they even count as ‘creative’ since they’re just someone’s face? They could say the landscapes are just a mishmash of generic topography. I even painted a huge purple platypus with wings to try and create something new, but that’s just mashing a bunch of existing things together. Is any of this really creative? Any of it at all?”

Kim threw her hands through a stack of papers, sending a dozen sketches of faces flying.

“Even if it is creative, is it creative enough to change anyone’s mind?”

Kim sat down in one of the only chairs that wasn’t occupied by her artwork and let out a heavy, exasperated sigh.

“My life is already an ongoing existential crisis,” Kim said. “I really didn’t need this.”

As she often did when she was nervous, Kim snapped her fingers, trying to mimic the motions of basic pyrokinesis. None of this would be necessary if she could do magic. Magic required a soul.

“Vell, try and teach me pyromancy, right now,” Kim demanded. He’d refused her before, but now the stakes were higher.

“Okay, not right now-”

“Then when, Vell?”

“When we’re out of this room, for starters,” Vell said. “It’s covered in paper, Kim. This is a fire hazard.”

“Oh, right.”

“Also, we’re going to the beach and calling a nurse bot, because I will definitely set myself on fire,” Vell said. Kim’s dire circumstances had finally tipped the scales in the battle between his desire to help versus his desire to not be on fire. “And maybe we can work on your empathy while you’re begging me to set myself on fire for your benefit.”

“...Please?”

“Better.”

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“Alright, you really have to put all your muscles into it,” Vell said. “Almost like you’re trying to throw something. Fire’s the element of energy, you have to be, uh, energetic, to control it, I guess.”

Vell was trying his best to demonstrate the basic techniques of pyrokinesis without immolating himself in the process. His teenage forays into fire magic had never progressed beyond the basics of ignition. The basics were all Kim needed, though. A single spark would prove everything she needed to prove.

Even that single spark proved to be beyond her. She threw her hand out, mimicking Vell’s movements exactly, and produced nothing more than a snap of her fingers.

“Damn it,” she grunted. “Can we try again? At the same time.”

“Alright, let’s do it. On three,” Vell said. He took up the right posture for pyrokinesis, and Kim mimicked him exactly. “One, two three-”

They snapped their fingers at the exact same time. Kim felt a very brief moment of hope when sparks started to fly. Hope that quickly transmuted into panic when she saw those sparks start to climb up Vell’s forearm.

Vell said “fuck” approximately eighteen times in a single second and then plunged his arm into the nearby ocean. The magical flames hissed loudly as they were doused, and Vell gave it a second before pulling his arm out. Thankfully, his perpetual awareness of his own flammability meant Vell had acted quickly and doused the flames before they did any actual damage. He stuck his arm out towards the medical drone they’d brought along anyway.

“Alright, I think that’s enough of that,” Vell said. The drone beeped and displayed a green check mark on its face screen. Vell was fine for now, but he didn’t want to tempt fate or fire by trying again. “Was that good enough?”

“No,” Kim said flatly. “But that’s not your fault. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. I’ve done worse things for worse reasons,” Vell said. The only casualty of today’s incident was the hair on his forearm, at least. “I could try to find you a new teacher, if you want to keep trying.”

“No. If it doesn’t work with you, it won’t work with anyone,” Kim said. “In spite of everything, you and I still ‘resonate’, I guess.”

Vell nodded in understanding. The same connection that had overwhelmed them both at the beginning of the year still existed, linking the matching runes they both bore. Vell had gotten better at tuning it out -especially the parts that made him want to be physically near Kim at all times- but he could still feel that magnetic link pulling them together. Occasionally, when he leaned into it, he could even get a general sense of what Kim was feeling. He assumed it also worked the other way, and Kim had apparently been relying on that synchronicity to enhance their lessons.

“Makes sense. Shame it didn’t help more,” Vell said.

“Am I allowed to worry now?”

“No. This is going to be fine, Kim,”Vell assured her. “You’ve got the Dean on your side and everything. You’ll barely have to prove anything to anyone.”

“I’d kind of like to prove something to myself,” Kim sighed. She snapped her fingers one more time, and felt nothing. “Thank you for helping me, Vell. I know I can snap at you sometimes, but-”

“Pushing me away makes it easier to keep from getting too close,” Vell said. “I figured.”

“Thanks. You’ve been a lot more patient with me than I deserve.”

“Well, you do have a bunch of old dudes actively trying to disassemble you,” Vell said. “Got to balance the scales somehow.”

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“Alright, so Kim’s probably overloaded herself on creativity-”

“Thanks again for all the help cleaning up, guys.”

“-don’t mention it,” Harley said. “Now we come to the slightly harder part: how to prove empathy.”

“Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another,” Kim said. “I’m pretty sure I have that. But how do we prove it?”

“Well, we have a quick litmus test,” Harley said. “Vell?”

“Say the thing first.”

“Okay, fine,” Harley groaned. “For the record, nothing that is about to happen was Vell Harlan’s idea. Good?”

“Good,” Vell said, before very reluctantly carrying out an idea that Harley herself had come up with and insisted on executing entirely on her own. Namely, punching Harley right in the chest.

Even though she’d seen Harley die a few dozen times by now, Kim still winced as the punch knocked Harley off her feet, and put her hands on her chest in the same spot Harley had been punched.

“Looks pretty empathic to me,” Harley groaned from the ground. “Fuck, when did you get that strong?”

“It was your idea,” Vell said, as he helped Harley to her feet.

“In retrospect I really should’ve put you in front of a punching bag or something first,” Harley said.

“We have literally fought the undead together in multiple occasions, I don’t know why you’d underestimate me on this.”

“You’re a gunslinger, not a punchslinger.”

“The important part,” Hawke said, trying to rerail a thoroughly derailed conversation. “Is that Kim made a strong showing of empathy.”

“Yeah, but I’m not exactly excited to repeat our little demonstration.”

“You could punch Vell next time,” Kim suggested. Vell shook his head emphatically. “Alright, Hawke it is then.”

“Hey, wait, no.”

“Well somebody has to get punched for my sake,” Kim protested.

“You’re kind of proving you feel the opposite of empathy right now, lady.”

“Shit.”