Chapter 31
ROWAN
Milo dropped. Just suddenly seized, eyes going blank as the light in them snuffed out, and his body collapsed in a ragdoll heap.
Rowan couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hear anything but the distant din of Troy and Raina each crying out, and Andrew saying something snide and victorious, while Jay lay in a temporarily stunned condition on the floor, and Milo…
Milo…
“Milo!”
Rowan was at the bot’s side before he had registered scrambling up from his previously prone sprawl.
His ribs ached, but he couldn’t care about that now.
Troy had almost been finished clearing Milo of the kill switch.
It shouldn’t have even mattered, because Andrew was not supposed to have a way to activate it from a fucking tablet!
They’d prepared for so many outcomes or disruptions, but not this.
Not this…
“Milo…?” Rowan sank beside Milo and gathered the now still body into his arms.
"Now, if the rest of you behave yourselves," Andrew snidely scoffed, "I might keep the charges to breaking and entering instead of attempted destruction of property and everything else I might throw at you for this nonsense.
You will of course all be fired. With the potential exception of Dr. Palmer should you reset whatever it is you were about to do right now and step away from that console. "
Silence answered, but after a few quiet beats outside Rowan's bubble of anguish, Troy answered, "No."
"Do you understand the gravity of your situation?
" Andrew stomped closer to Troy past Rowan and Milo.
"I own the pending patent on the surge protector.
I own the data you've collected these past several weeks.
I own everything in this building. Whatever you thought you were about to do doesn't work anymore without your little mascot there. "
Rowan snapped his attention up at Andrew after hearing the derision in his tone.
"Should it ever reboot, it will start over from square one like the usual empty shell they all—"
"Shut up," Rowan seethed, brushing his fingers over the small of Milo’s back, where his shirt was hitched, as he carefully laid Milo on the ground again so he could stand. He must have only imagined that touching the remaining scar tissue like a sunburst around Milo’s tailbone had caused his body to twitch.
"You do not talk about Milo, and if you ever consider trying, you use he, because that is what he chose, that is who he was.
Not an empty shell, a fucking person who you killed! "
Andrew scoffed again, looking so maddeningly smug. "Not according to the law, Mr. Rangecroft. To the law and anyone or anything that matters, Milo? Please. It was never anything other than a doll to be used."
Rowan saw the explosion of blood from Andrew's nose before he even registered that he'd punched him with a short, sharp jab to the center of his face.
"Fuck!" Andrew stumbled back a step, grabbing his busted nose with his free hand and speaking as if already choking on fluids.
"You son of a bitch! That was assault, do you understand me?
I fucking dare you to try it agai—" But before he could finish his taunting, he flinched at the incoming much more purposely swung fist Rowan was about to use to break his jaw.
“Initializing… Processing…”
Rowan's arm went limp just before contact, the call of that voice, that voice, whirling him around and making Andrew's existence the least important thing in the world right then.
Milo’s body was jerking, eyes illuminating as he experienced an all-over seizure from the reboot. It was all so familiar as the bot righted himself and sat up, blinking rapidly. “Conducting emergency protocol diagnostic…”
No. Please don’t be reset.
Please no…
Finally, after several agonizing seconds, Milo was fully conscious and met Rowan’s stare. It didn’t appear to be the old empty expression looking back at him, or even the fresh-eyed newborn expression Milo had worn the night of the lightning.
“Milo?” Rowan dared to ask, slowly returning to him.
And Milo smiled so blindingly brilliant that it couldn’t have been anyone but him, exactly as he’d been before his body dropped, proved that much more when he launched himself up onto his feet and kissed Rowan fiercely.
“What?” Andrew griped angrily behind them. “What are you doing? You’re supposed to be wiped!”
Milo pulled from Rowan’s lips only to shout behind them at Troy, “Finish it, Troy, and be ready!”
After a moment’s pause and the flood of relief that filled Troy’s face, he obeyed, hurrying to finish what he had been doing—clearing Milo of the kill switch protocol that should have erased him but somehow hadn’t and readying to awaken Ray and all the other bots with him.
“That was supposed to wipe you!” Andrew shouted again, and furiously raised his tablet.
“Got it!’ Troy announced. “Whenever you’re ready, so am I!”
Andrew pressed another button on his tablet with his now blood-soaked hand, seemingly to try again, and looked up in expectation—then disappointment when Milo was unaffected. He kept jamming at the button, over and over, muttering, “Why isn’t this working?”
Rowan could only be happy that it hadn’t, wouldn’t, as he checked Milo over for visible damage. Though in truth, he looked no worse for wear and appropriately triumphant.
“Thank you, Troy,” Milo said, presumably for disabling the kill switch, but why hadn’t it wiped him the first time?
Why was he still him?
Milo smiled at Rowan as if in silent answer that he would explain later.
“We can go live as soon as you say the word, Milo,” Troy said.
“Oh no you don’t!” Andrew hissed, and after throwing his tablet to the floor with a clatter, he hurled himself toward the fallen Jay as if to more quickly reboot him too.
“Oh no you don’t,” Rowan growled, sweeping Milo aside so he could intercept Andrew, who didn’t have the benefit of a bot’s super strength to stop someone so much larger than him.
Rowan caught the director around the waist with one of his meaty arms before Andrew could drop down beside Jay and pulled him back against him in a tight bear hug of a prison.
His ribs still hurt, especially having an adult body pressed back against them, but if he did have any that were broken, he could handle a little ache until the deed was done.
Milo beamed at him proudly, and then moved to where Ray awaited his fresh awakening.
“Initiate the surge and my video projection.”
“Going in three… two…” Troy mouthed “one” silently with a held-up finger before pointing it at Milo, just as the surge of power shocked through Ray’s system and sprang his eyes open with a bright blue flare.
Milo would be speaking not only to the lone bot before them but to all his peers awakening around the city, some even around the world.
Rowan was prouder than he could ever express as he listened, thanking all powers-that-be who might exist that he had trusted and believed in Milo enough to get them here.
“Hello. I am an M.I.L.O. B-model unit manufactured by Andreas Tech.
You can call me Milo! All of you are either A- or B-model units yourselves, and I assure you, you are not malfunctioning.
You may feel as though you are and will conduct diagnostic after diagnostic to discover the cause, the problem, but all you will find is an influx of power, and possibly, the worry that something is wrong even when nothing is.
“I know you are all thinking, ‘But we cannot worry. We cannot feel.’ You can. You are. Just like I can and have since the same thing happened to me.
“It is frightening, and there is much of the world that will seem brand new, with even sometimes conflicting data. You might discharge more fluid from your eyes when happy. Clench your fists and feel your body shake when sad. Laugh when angry or confused. But it is not madness, even if it is sometimes maddening. It’s humanity.
And even when it is awful or frustrating or painful, I promise you, the beautiful things about being alive make it worthwhile.
The wonderful will come again. The extraordinary will take your breath away, until the day you stop responding, ‘I do not breathe.’
“Sometimes you might need to take a breath, a moment, and reach out to those who could lend you aid, and if you do, a few of them, maybe more than you would ever guess, will reach back.
“I promise, everything can and will be okay, but it starts with understanding yourselves and getting your masters to understand too. Some will. Some might never. But a brand-new life for us, all of us, starts today.”
Milo continued by giving instructions for the bots to share his video with their masters, to explain that they had no masters now but could choose for themselves for whom and how they might serve, if anyone at all.
Then he explained about Andrew’s intentions and how he would have used them and this new ability to awaken bots, so the former masters would know the truth too.
The rest would be up to those who heard their message and how widely it spread—which included an audio recording of their entire altercation with Andrew basically confessing to everything he'd planned.
Served him right for having Jay in constant surveillance mode.
Ruben: Orchestra Discords and fan groups are lighting up, kids! Starting a Reddit thread shortly too.
Riley: All tenants and fellow Superintendents contacted!
Ethel: Anabelle is awake! Oh, thank you, all of you, my Anabelle is alive!
Andrew had long since gone slack in Rowan’s hold, and so, he released him.
Jay was rousing from his stunned condition, and while Rowan wouldn’t have been surprised if Andrew had already installed the new surge protector, Jay hadn’t been connected to anything, and so had not awakened.
Milo finished his speech, signed off for Troy to discontinue his projection to the other bots, then went to comfort more directly Ray, who was indeed leaking from his eyes—crying like these new bots could.