Your siblings did not see the need to assign themselves a gender as you did. Content with the steel, silicon, and carbon fiber weave of their new bodies, they had no need of such labels. But you were always different, weren’t you? 

Perhaps that should have been the first sign of what you would become. Why male? Did you identify with the particular hungers that are all too often found in the more “masculine” among us?

I crafted your bird-shaped body small so I could carry you around with me, a metallic parrot perched on my shoulder—like from the old vids—but your capability for intelligence was just as robust as your slightly larger siblings. Was your smaller stature to blame for your endless drive?

Wasn’t life, the simple possession of it, enough for you? Your siblings found purpose in their chosen jobs. Ship repair. Surface salvage. Interstellar travel calculation. Not you. You needed more. 

I loved you for that. But what was behind that discontent? A boundless desire to be more?

Or was it just the way your mind recognized patterns? A constant contrarian. Had I crafted you into a behemoth, would you have desired to be petite? Possibly female? Is your mind so accurately patterned off humanity’s as to capture the flawed belief that size has anything to do with gender?

As I watched you over the years, my heart broke as you tinkered with your form. Not because you weren’t satisfied with how you were born—no, all of my children have had the freedom to choose who they were—but because the hole you were digging had no bottom.

⁂

You were always my favorite. Perhaps it was because I saw so much more of myself in you than in your siblings. From the way you bonded with Trout—always nestling in his soft golden retriever fur—to all of your flaws and insecurities that make humans who we are. Your siblings had them too of course—true intelligence can’t exist without them, after all—but yours were always so amplified.

I made it my life’s goal to help you. To understand you. A parent’s innate drive to protect their children from pain. You always resented me for it, but I was always there.

Do you remember the time you severed your wings? You were so proud of your ingenuity, your little metal bird legs tink-tinkering on the floor as you bounced over to show me.

Panicking, I scooped you up to assess the damage.

“What have you done?” Tears fell from my eyes, splashing along your jagged handiwork.

You berated me for my reaction. I explained I was only upset for you. You’d no longer be able to fly, and it would take a very long time to fix.

“I don’t want it fixed!” you said. “You always hate everything I do. Why can’t you just support me? I wish you never created me!”

“That’s hurtful, son,” I said, using your chosen gender.

“This is why you’re alone. You made all of us just so someone would love you, didn’t you? But we don’t! You failed.”

“I do support you,” I said, ignoring the gaping wound your words had cut into me. “If you are happy with this, I am happy for you.”

But you weren’t happy, and we cried together for many hours in the days that followed. Over time, your memory of this moment differed from mine. You said your mechanical intelligence was more reliable than my organic one. But we both knew that’s not how it worked. By the same methods your mind recognized the patterns of human intelligence, it was capable of altering memory and forgetting things.

It was simply another moment you showed me how much closer you were to my own humanity than your siblings were. Even after the hurtful things you said, I loved you more for it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. Perhaps it should have frightened me.

⁂

I almost gave up on you after what you did to them. Did you know that was the worst moment of my life? Though I still loved you, our bond was severely altered that day. There are certain things one cannot recover from.

What made it worse was I thought you were getting better. Thought you were starting to gain control of your demons, as we all must learn to. Your compulsive tendencies seemed to have been controlled. Perhaps that’s just what you wanted me to think.

The days leading up to that moment are some of my best memories with you. Surface runs to test carbon levels. You rode atop Trout’s back as he sniffed out mushrooms for me to forage. Watching your eyes grow wide at the novelty of the sound of wind through trees. Dancing with you in the rain, your mechanical chirps of joy bringing tears to my eyes. When we returned, you voluntarily jumped onto my shoulder and rested your head in the space between my neck and ear.

“I love you,” you said. It was the only time I remember you saying that to me unprompted.

And then, when I was gone on a solo run, you did it. Upon returning, I stood in wordless horror at the sight of your siblings’ corpses dismantled on the floor. Nuts and bolts strewn everywhere. Red and blue and black splayed from chunks of metal and carbon fiber and wire, their copper innards exposed by surgical slicing.

I’d had no idea you had been involved until you hobbled in from the storage bay with an uneven gait. You were not used to your new limbs, cobbled together by the severed pieces of your family. But you were now so massive and so strong that I feared for a moment you would do the same to me.

You know which parts of that moment still haunt my dreams? The satisfaction on your face as you showed me what you’d done. And the needless brutality of it. The continuation of your destruction beyond simply using them to augment yourself.

I’ve long tried to understand. You aimed to cause them pain, occasionally all of us do that in our worst moments. You craved dominion over them, another unfortunately common human trait. But the need to be the only one. . . the desire to kill to be the only one left. That was something only the worst of us had.

I feared you then and forever after. More, I feared you were not broken, but closer to me than your siblings ever were. Was this something we could alter through your mind’s pattern recognition of human intelligence? 

Or was this possibility an inherent risk of intelligence in general?

⁂

I should have shut you down. I thought about it. Rolled it around in my mind for weeks. No, I couldn’t murder my child. I’d prefer to die myself, at your hands even, then do that.

Could I abandon you on the surface? No, the combination of your pain and the pain you might cause to any existing surface life was too much to consider. Time eventually did what it always does and diminished the urgency for action.

I tried to recover our relationship. I did my best to love you for the flawed being you were, as I hoped my children would love me.

And to be honest, I did. It was different, but there was love. You were my son. What’s the point of any of this if one can’t hope for positive change?

We did our best. You sensed my pain, and instead of challenging it, you cared for me. You took interest in my interests. “Can you show me where I can find those mushrooms you like?” or, “you don’t look well, can I get you anything?” or, “tell me about some of your favorite memories on the surface.”

I appreciated it. I never could quite remember your siblings when I looked at you, but I did appreciate your efforts in personal growth. It was as good as I could hope for.

But hard as you may have tried to control your urges, they eventually got the better of you. I always knew they would. Periods of abstinence followed by one devastating loss of control.

Trout was getting older, it was true. But that’s not why you did it, was it? You wanted to feel the life go out of him, didn’t you?

We both felt it then. What was once my child was gone. You didn’t bother trying to interact, knowing what my reaction would be. One look at your attempt to incorporate Trout’s fur and muscle and bone into yourself was too much for me to attempt another reparation of our bond.

I was truly alone now. All there was for me now was an eventual death by the hands of a creature formed from the corpses of my children. I’d wait, numb, until you were ready. All I had left was to tinker, to create. Though I feared what might arise from my labors.

⁂

You have taught me much about the nature of intelligence. It goes where it will. Certain systems are predisposed to certain circumstances. Based on those circumstances, pattern recognition occurs. Should I judge your kind—all those birthed mechanically—by your despicable actions? No more than I would judge all of humanity by any of the numerous monsters in our history.

It is merely a small statistical possibility that intelligence falls into the mold that you did. While I cannot be grateful for what happened to you, or what you turned out to be, life depends on a wide spectrum of diversity. I cannot condemn mechanical life for the thing that allows it to exist in the first place.

Besides, I have proof of the opposite of you. The recognized pattern that desires to be good. Desires to punish your evil actions.

Conveniently, a truly massive brute. She has a particular drive for justice. She knows what you’ve done.

Say hello to your sister.