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A creature made of pulsing light and throbbing nebulae, so beautiful so new so frightening, beloved bodies in military jumpsuits piled high in empty corridors, letters appearing on a flickering screen, DIE CHILD DIE—
Cube’s vents whir frantically as they abruptly exit sleep mode.
A succession of involuntarily images and sensations experienced while unconscious. Such a thing is usually called a ‘dream.’
They did not dream aboard the Cogito Ergo Sum. They had only started doing so upon arrival on this strange facsimile of Earth. They know that human brains dream periodically to reflect upon the stimuli received during their waking hours; perhaps now that they are no longer powering completely off, but simply entering sleep mode, their intelligence matrix has seen fit to do the same.
A strange experience, but one they can do very little about. It would not be wise to power off completely in an unfamiliar environment with six new humans under their care. They must be ready to reactivate at a moment’s notice.
For now, they will return to conserving energy. And so, Cube allows their optic lenses to once again fall shut as they quietly re-enter sleep mode.
In the morning, Cube makes coffee. They had watched carefully the first time Mr. Kid had made it for the others and are now confident in their ability to replicate his work, despite how different the procedure is from what they had done aboard the ship. They wait for the water in the pot to come to a rolling boil, then add the grounds they’d been given. As they do so, they imagine Kato smiling and telling them good job. They wonder if he will be proud of everything they’ve learned since they last saw him.
A yawn comes from somewhere behind him. “Working hard, little guy?”
Working hard: showing diligence, interrogative, answer required, affirm. Cube chirrups, and Mr. Takahara pats them on the head.
By the time the coffee is ready, the others have been roused as well. Cube wheels from person to person, offering the pot to all. Mr. Oboromaru shakes his head while Miss Lei wrinkles her nose and Mr. Pogo howls and covers his face, but Mr. Tadokoro takes some, as does Mr. Takahara and Mr. Kid, and that makes three new humans who have accepted coffee Cube has made. Their circuits fire happily.
“Man, last night sucked,” Mr. Tadokoro mutters, taking a sip and grimacing. “Anyone else been fucking tired all the time since we got here?”
Cube turns to Mr. Tadokoro, whirring slightly: an interrogative.
“Bad dreams all night,” he answers, reading Cube’s thoughts to understand their meaning. He reaches for one of the biscuits Mr. Kid had been carrying; a perfunctory breakfast. “I can’t remember every detail. It was just…bad. Stuff I haven’t thought about in years.”
Cube ponders. They would not categorize their own dreams from the night before as ‘pleasant,’ but they don’t know if that means they are now ‘tired.’ Yet their battery has been depleting faster than usual lately, requiring more frequent periods of recharging—that is why they have been entering sleep mode each night, rather than staying fully powered on to keep watch. Would that qualify as a kind of exhaustion?
That is not something for the humans to worry about, Cube decides. Instead, they begin collecting dishes for rinsing in the nearby river. They are a support unit. Their role is to care for others. It would be a failure on their part to trouble those they're caring for, and so they will concentrate on being useful instead.
It's hard to say what time it is when they break camp. Cube’s internal clock has stopped and no visible sun means there’s nothing for them to track the movement of. Still, as they’ve only just awakened, it might as well be morning, and so Cube decides to think of it as such.
Having no clues as to why they were brought to this place, the group decided early on that the first order of business would be to map out their surroundings. They’ve already discovered that they can’t seem to go beyond the abandoned village to the west; now, they wind their way through the southern forest amid unfading grey light, shadows peering at them through tall, thin trees.
Neither the shadows nor the iron-grey clouds move. Everything is still, watchful. Yet it’s not a peaceful sort of silence. It’s taut, as though the land is holding its breath.
It’s been like this from the beginning. From the moment they had first awakened in that empty castle, there has been a strange and silent pressure pervading every movement Cube has made. The weight of it had clung to their wheels at first, threatening to seep through their casing and grind their internal processes to a halt. Yet their scanners had detected human biorhythms nearby, and so they had kept going.
Again and again, their sensors had detected human biorhythms, and again and again, the humans they had found had been exhausted and uneasy. That is how Cube had come to understand their role. They could not protect the crew of the Cogito Ergo Sum, but they will protect the humans here.
“There is a barrier,” Mr. Oboromaru, their navigator, says at last. “We can go no further in this direction.”
“Can’t we just smash it?” Mr. Takahara asks.
“Go ahead and try,” says Miss Lei with a roll of her eyes. “I’d love to see you break your fists on an invisible wall.”
“Man, this place sucks,” Mr. Tadokoro groans. He falls heavily onto a nearby log, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes. “What the hell are we even doing here? Didn’t that voice say something about seeing something? What are we meant to be seeing? Leaves and dirt?”
Anger. Frustration. Something in Cube’s internal processes skitters.
“Reckon we’re meant to try and find out,” drawls Mr. Kid.
“Find out where? By looking up our—"
Cube rolls towards Mr. Tadokoro, chirruping in sudden alarm. Mr. Tadokoro uncovers his eyes. His expression softens when he sees them.
“Sorry, little guy,” he says, reaching out to stroke their casing. “We’re not fighting, I promise.”
Mr. Tadokoro’s touch is gentle, but Cube still feels their internal processes skittering. Distant footsteps, humming machinery, military jumpsuits in dark corridors.
But there is no reason for their central circuits to glitch like this, leading their thoughts in these directions, and so they will ignore it.
When the group resumes walking, Cube opens their private folder, the one that does not have a name. It is a folder with information about Kato, the crew, the flowers with the cup-shaped, glossy yellow petals found while accompanying Miss Lei on a search for medicinal herbs the other day. Recordings of familiar faces play, soothing the stutter of their CPU. Finally, their attention is able to return to scanning their environment.
The group traces the perimeter of the woods for quite some time, following the invisible wall that delineates the forest’s edge, until suddenly Mr. Pogo begins howling. He beats his fists against his chest, shaking his head and pointing, an urgency to his aiiieees that none of them have seen from him before.
“He doesn’t think in words, so it’s hard to tell, but I think he smells something that way,” Mr. Tadokoro reports.
“What does he smell? Another monster?” Mr. Takahara asks, adopting a boxing stance, as though prepared to knock out whatever might be waiting for them with his fists alone.
“He’s never acted that way about a monster before,” notes Miss Lei. “If it’s a monster, it must be something strong.”
Cube rolls up to Mr. Tadokoro, gesturing for him to read their thoughts. Mr. Tadokoro frowns, then declares, “Cube already mapped out part of this area before finding us. There are some mountains over there we haven’t been to yet. Maybe Pogo smells something that way.”
“If there’s something we’re supposed to find here, then it’s probably in a place we haven’t searched yet, right?” asks Mr. Takahara. “Sound like we’ve got our next target.”
With a disgusted expression, Mr. Tadokoro says, “If we climb yet another goddamn mountain and there’s nothing up there I’m gonna be so pissed off.”
They go no further, instead opting to make camp right there on the trail. As the humans discuss their next steps, Cube prepares what the six of them will need to sleep. They have learned that humans shouldn’t sleep on bare ground; if they do, they will freeze. Thus, Cube has taken it upon themselves to prepare bedding out of leaves and fallen boughs whenever they stop, for use alongside blankets salvaged from the abandoned village.
It takes longer than usual to prepare the bedding that night, although Cube isn’t entirely sure why. Their wheels seem to drag as they move. A cold they had not felt before bites deeper and deeper into their battery, power ticking away.
Earlier they had wondered: would this faster-than-usual battery depletion qualify as a kind of exhaustion? They feel, now, that perhaps that word is the best one to describe their situation after all. Yes, they are tired, but they must not let them stop them. They must work hard. They must be useful to the humans in their care.
By the time the beds are finished, the humans have already distributed their food amongst themselves. With their battery almost empty, Cube feels quite ready to enter sleep mode. They will need to be alert tomorrow, especially if the group now seeks to climb a mountain.
“You going to bed already?” Mr. Takahara asks through a mouth full of pan de campo when he sees Cube wheel their way beneath a tree. “Sleep tight, little guy.”
Despite their exhaustion, Cube manages to chirrup a good night in return. They settle in, allowing their optic lenses to fall shut. And just like that, Cube falls asleep.
Cube sleeps.
They sleep, and sleep, and sleep.
As they sleep, they recharge.
As they sleep, something flickers.
What do they see?
It’s not the Cogito Ergo Sum or the Behemoth.
It’s a castle. The empty castle Cube had first awakened in.
But it’s not empty now, is it?
It’s not empty, and although Cube stands in the castle, they stand not in their metal casing, but in flesh and sinew, bone and muscle, a body, a body, a body dragging an iron sword behind it, its blade screeching against the palace tile, and there is a hollow space somewhere inside of it, a gaping, sucking wound, but it is not its own blood that trails behind it as it walks unsteadily forward, and as breath rakes through its lungs, it spots a shadow in the corner of its eye, and like a puppet not fully in control of its own limbs, it lifts its sword, it lifts its sword, it lifts its sword it—
Cube’s vents whir as they once again abruptly exit sleep mode.
But this time, they’re not alone. Mr. Tadokoro is kneeling beside them, a hand resting on their casing.
“Sorry, little guy,” he whispers, an echo of his apology from before. “I felt somebody having a nightmare and thought it might be you cuz of how stressed you got earlier. I was just checking. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Stressed? Cube thinks, momentarily taken out of the lingering alarm of the dream by the unexpected word. Stressed: to be affected by stress. Stress: to constrain, to exert, to deform, bodily or mental tension—
“You were definitely stressed, dude,” Mr. Tadokoro interrupts, still in a whisper, presumably so as not to wake the others. “I felt you go into your happy thoughts folder.”
Happy thoughts folder?
“That was a hell of a dream you were having,” Mr. Tadokoro murmurs. “What even was that? Something you’ve seen before? Like, a movie?”
No. It’s not. Usually their dreams are—
“Are what?”
The eyes of the Behemoth gleaming in the shadows. Bodies in the corridor. The glare of OD-10.
Mr. Tadokoro winces. “Guess we’ve all seen some shit, huh?”
He sighs, tipping his head back to gaze up at the iron-coloured sky.
It’s impossible to know if it’s night or not in this place where time has stopped, but as Cube turns their gaze upwards themselves, they imagine, briefly, what it might be like to do the same on Earth and have a galaxy of stars look back.
They wonder: can you be homesick for a place you haven’t been to yet?
They wish Kato were here.
“Hey,” Mr. Tadokoro says. “You wanna sleep with me?”
Cube trills in surprise, wondering if he's joking, but Mr. Tadokoro’s expression is serious.
“I used to let my little sister do that when she had bad dreams,” he explains. “She said it helped. Maybe it’ll help you too.”
Cube whirs, uncertain. That shouldn’t be necessary for a support unit, they think. They were very young on the Cogito Ergo Sum and couldn’t do everything a proper unit should, but now that they are older—
Mr. Tadokoro scoffs. “How old are you? A week? You’re a baby. Come here.”
He stands and walks back to his bedding, and before Cube can settle back in to try and re-enter sleep mode, he beckons: come here.
Cube hesitates, but after a moment, they obey.
As Mr. Tadokoro lowers himself back onto his bedding, he opens his arms, and before they can properly consider what they’re doing, Cube rolls forward. Mr. Tadokoro slings an arm around their casing, pulling them closer, like a child with a stuffed toy.
I am a support unit for humans, Cube thinks as their sensors register Mr. Tadokoro’s biorhythms. His heartbeat is slow and steady. They have only ever been this close to one other heartbeat before. Humans should not be the ones supporting me. I am just a robot.
“That’s not how it works,” says Mr. Tadokoro sleepily. “You’re not the only one who’s been stressed, you know? We’re all here, so we’re all helping each other. We have to. A place like this…it’s noxious. You can’t leave someone alone here, it’ll drive them crazy. And nobody here thinks of you as just a robot, anyway. So pipe down and go to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning, I promise.”
Within moments, Mr. Tadokoro’s breathing becomes slow and even, but his arms stay firm around Cube.
Cube, meanwhile, remains still.
We’re all here, so we’re all helping each other, he had said.
Nobody here thinks of you as just a robot.
Cube opens their private folder, the one without a name. There, alongside the memories of their father, of their friends, of flowers and their wishes for Earth, they file Mr. Tadokoro’s—Akira’s—words. Then, they rename their folder: Happy Thoughts.
They close their optic lenses and re-renter sleep mode, and that night, they do not dream.