69
About a week later, Mila sat on his workbench, her legs dangling playfully off the edge. She kicked them gently while Milo stood between them.
His hands were firmly on the bench on either side of her knees.
She gazed into his eyes with an expression he couldn’t identify.
Her ears were red. Her cheeks were a soft pink.
The reason for that was the knowledge that her robe, cut very short, was riding up and showing off her underwear in a way that Tania would have been proud to see. But being less forward than Tania, Mila struggled with indecision and had almost changed her mind.
She was holding up a spoon loaded with cereal.
Milo was still trying to blink sleep out of his eyes. He’d been up late and managed only a few hours of restless snoozing in the Security Room.
His back ached. His shoulders felt knotted.
And the point between his neck and head was throbbing.
He should have gone upstairs to his bed, but had wanted to keep working on cracking the code to the dwarven language. Every time he thought he’d discovered how a word might sound, he was proven wrong by something in the recordings.
Even now, he wasn’t sure that what he’d translated was correct.
He’d managed a few simple words.
Like screw, nut, and bolt. These were words the dwarves would use and point to in their recordings. But he still had to account for their diverse accents.
Mila held the spoon up. “Say ah,” she said.
He really needed to talk to them about this.
It was humiliating now.
“Do I have to?”
Mila nodded. “Say it for me, Milo. Please?”
He opened his mouth, unable to resist her soft voice. Unlike the other two, Mila had developed into a shy golem. Almost painfully shy. She could hardly look him in the eye most days.
That shyness made her seem more vulnerable, and he found himself unconsciously feeling more protective towards her in a more outwardly way than to the others.
He felt the warmth of her legs radiating into his hips.
How had he gotten into this position? She’d just asked him to come closer.
Closer.
Right up to the desk.
And then she’d spread her legs like it was natural, before reaching out with her little hand and pulling him even closer.
Her soft breath quickened. Her eyes widened.
Anyone who walked in might have thought he’d forced her into that position rather than the other way around.
“Ah,” he said, exaggerating it a bit more than normal.
Which made her giggle. “Wow! Look!”
“Look at what?”
“The way your tongue sits. It’s sort of funny, isn’t it? Like, up and down like that.”
Up and down?
What was she talking about?
And why were his golems so obsessed with his tongue and saying ah all the time? Was this some game of Tania’s? It’d be just the sort of thing she’d recruit the others into doing.
Did she think it was funny?
There was absolutely no difference to the way he said ah and the way they did! Come to think of it, even the dwarves said it the same way, so they couldn’t say it was that humans spoke differently.
In fact—
He could almost feel the click in his head as if his brain wasn’t made of meat but was instead made of gears.
Slowly, mouth open, he felt thoughts race through his head.
His golems couldn’t teach him the language because the Prime forbid them. They couldn’t tell him anything.
So, they’d been showing him.
And he was too stupid to know it.
As Mila made to shove the spoon into his mouth, he grabbed her hand.
And thought about his tongue. The shape of it in his mouth. A line leading down. If he thought of it as though the top of his mouth was a line across and the tongue was a line down, then it’d look like a capital T. And that corresponded to one of the common runes.
In fact, it was the second most common rune.
It was so simple. The runes were written with the concept of where the tongue, mouth, and maybe lips sit when saying the letter.
Of course the dwarves would never have just written out random lines and squiggles. They’d have engineered their written language. Judging by their complaints, they wouldn’t have been able to help themselves.
He could almost imagine them arguing for centuries about it.
“Are you okay, Milo?”
She was looking at him with a mix of concern and hope.
He suddenly understood the hope. She was hoping he’d get what they’d been hinting at. What they’d been trying to tell him.
He leaned in and kissed her.
“You’re amazing, Mila,” he said. He pushed away and gave her thigh a light slap. “Go tell them I get it now. Thank you.”
“Really?” She dropped the spoon into the bowl and clapped her hands. “You really do? And it was me who made it happen, right?”
“It was all of you,” he said. “But I guess you finally turned the light on in my dumb brain.”
She giggled at him. “Oh, boy, is Tania gonna be mad. I just got an achievement!”
“What?”
“Achievement. I’m the one who inspired you, so I get to mark it off as mine. It’s worth a lot of points.”
“Points?” He frowned at her. He shook his head. He didn’t need another rabbit hole. Not yet. “Alright. I need to get to work.”
“Nope,” Mila said, picking up the spoon and patting the desk between her crotch. “I gotta feed ya, too!”
“You don’t need to do that anymore.”
“I know.” She smiled widely. “But I want to. It’s cute.”
Cute?
He felt a brief flash of annoyance. He wasn’t a baby. Why didn’t they respect him enough to treat him like more of a… Like a…
Guiltily, he took a step closer and put himself back between her legs.
There was no point in making her sad. She’d earned the right to be happy. He could do her this one simple favor, couldn’t he?
“Good boy, Milo,” she purred and lifted the spoon. “Say ah.”
“Ah.”
He let her feed him. When she was done, she skipped away with a happy hum.
Leaving him alone. He pulled out his notebook and scribbled out the alphabet he’d prepared.
Starting fresh, he began to sound things out. Testing how his tongue sat. How the air moved through his throat. Anything that helped define the letters of the dwarven language.
Thinking not like a scholar trying to decipher an ancient tongue.
But like an engineer trying to describe how words could be emitted through the throat and mouth.
Because they’d have needed to know those things to build their golems who could talk. It was clearly important to them.
He berated himself more than once.
How could he be so stupid not to see it. It was all so obvious now he was doing it. And it only took a few hours to get to a point where he was mostly sure he’d got it right.
Holding up the piece of paper which was about to change his life, he felt a warm sense of satisfaction. He’d done something even the mages hadn’t been able to do.
He wondered what they’d think if he showed them.
Grinning, he did a little jig. The weight of months of constant worry and stress slid from his shoulders, down through his hips and legs.
As he realized something else.
He wanted to drink.
And sing.
And dance.
And then the reason for Stonks became incredibly clear. If the dwarves often felt moments like this, it was no wonder they went out and lost themselves to an over-abundance of celebration. They didn’t seem the type to hold back anything, not even their joy.
Maybe he wasn’t so different to them after all.
Except in their perversions.
Which reminded him of how he was still confused about the golems. How to react to them. How to treat them. How to feel about them.
They weren’t human.
That stubborn voice kept repeating in his head.
They were just metal. Wires. Cores. And golemskin.
And what was he?
Bones and muscle. A heart and a brain. Covered in skin.
Was the difference because he saw them as only complicated clocks? What if he hadn’t made them himself? What if he’d met them in the street on a late night after some drinks?
Would he have felt differently about them then?
Of course he would.
Because he wouldn’t have known they were constructs.
“So confusing,” he muttered, looking down at the paper in his hands. Now he wanted a drink for sure. But for other reasons than joy.
Without the golems he might have never cracked the language.
They’d worked hard to get around their limitations and give him clues.
Was that what a clock would do?
Was it?
Pressing his hand to his head, he sighed.
Maybe he owed them all an apology. No. If he gave them that, they’d think he thought of them as only a collection of machine parts. It’d hurt their feelings.
What a strange thought.
To think they had feelings. To know they had feelings.
Milo Mooney stood alone in the Workshop, his mind flipping between examining his emotions to examining his logic. All the while going nowhere.
Which was very human of him.