“What is it?”
“Let me stay,” she begs again. “Make me whole. I can’t live with humans any more.”
“Don’t say that, love,” he says, smiling through translucent fangs. “You are human.”
“You know I’m not human. I’m a construct, just like you.”
“But you’re human enough, love. The scanners don’t detect you, little sweet dirty Sonalika, with her ugly burnt face and luscious body, so cruelly abused by her pretty step-sisters. I need you out there. I can’t come out yet; I’m not strong enough. I know it’s difficult, but you have to do it. It’s what Father would have wanted.”
“They tried to burn me today.”
“You’re fire-proof.”
“I know. So do they. But they also know I feel pain.”
“Perhaps it is time to remind them of my existence,” he says, snapping a claw. “Tell them I want to meet them.”
“There’s no point; they won’t come down. They know you need them alive. If you hurt them, they’ll go to the police. End everything.”
“No they won’t. They won’t do anything that links them to constructs in any way. You know this, love, don’t be obtuse. It’s like Hitler’s children being caught with gas-masks!” He laughs quietly, smugly, still delighted after all these years by his own ability to joke, to laugh. “Think of the headlines,” he says, his warm, soft voice sending cold tendrils down her titanium spine. “Monster Robot In Narayan Family Basement. Maniac Inventor’s Descendants’ Revenge Bid Thwarted. Narayans Plot Another War! They’ve worked so hard for generations to crawl back up, make themselves acceptable to human society, they’re not going to throw that away for anything. I leave them alone, they pretend I don’t exist. Nothing disturbs the balance unless it has to. It’s the only way for all of us.”
“And what about me? How much longer do I have to live like this?”
“As long as I deem fit,” he snaps, his eyes darkening completely realistically. “Do you not trust me?”
She totters to her feet, gathering her clothes and stumbles to the door, waiting for it to open, waiting for the signal for her ascent to another hell. But the door stays shut, and she turns in fear; has she angered him? Is he going to punish her again?
But he smiles warmly, and shakes a head. “I am not a monster, Sonalika,” he says. “I want nothing more than to see you happy, and your suffering makes my heart bleed; after all, you must know you are the only being in this universe I truly love. I will set you free soon, sooner than you expect. All I ask is that you trust me. Is that enough for now?”
She nods, blindly, and this time her tears are allowed to flow. The door slides open and she scurries through, not looking back.
If you must remember one thing about my father, Indra, let it be this; he was a man of peace. The carnage that occurred in his name shattered him, for all he wanted was for humans and constructs to live in peace. Had he wanted to take over the world through force, he could have done so easily—imagine ten thousand warriors like me striding through the skeletons of the world’s greatest cities. But after building me and realising what I was capable of, he decided the world was not yet ready for a construct so immeasurably superior to humans, and he started mass-producing simpler constructs and reanimated-human cyborgs. But mankind was not ready for that either. Perhaps prejudice could have been overcome—after all, a few hundred years of hostility towards sentient machinery was not something that well-placed propaganda could not have kept in check—but my father’s constructs changed the world in so many ways. India became a superpower like no other; there was labour unrest worldwide when men saw they had become obsolete; governments everywhere had to recognise this as a threat, and matters grew out of control.
Like any other war, the primary motivation behind the human-construct conflict was economic. But war it was, and war most devastating at that. I begged my father to fight back, to invent weapons capable of winning the war, or to allow me to do so in his stead, but he would not. The humans triumphed, and gloated about the victory of human ingenuity and many other such foolish concepts. The Indian government led the charge in destroying even the most benign constructs, pushing their own socio-economic progress back by at least a century and effectively committing hara-kiri in their eagerness to prove to the world that they had no imperialist ambitions. Only Sonalika and I survived the war—there is no probe built by man or machine that is capable of penetrating the defensive fog around this lair, or of deciphering the mystery of Sonalika’s identity.
But I have not been idle. I have survived over the centuries, and healed, and built. And I have stayed true to my father’s memory. I could have chosen to replicate myself infinitely, had I wanted to, and crush all humanity to avenge my father. But I will not. He wanted peaceful co-existence, and so do I. But co-existence is not enough; I must rule. Peacefully, but I must rule. It’s a simple matter of evolution. I must set the world free from the shackles it has bound itself in, its acceptance of medieval structures, its new-sprung monarchies, its puppet democracies, its old, outdated, human systems. They rebuild their ancient, Dark Age fantasies in their hubris: New Constantinople, Atlantis, Shangri-la, Gotham. All these must fall, and I must bring them down. I will be the father my own father could not be, and the god he never dreamt of being. I will remake the world, turn it into the world it should have been. The world my father could have built. Once upon a time.
Sonalika limps into her lover-brother’s prison. Her face is bleeding profusely, and there are ugly welts on her neck and bare breasts. Her normal eye is swollen and bruised, but she says nothing, just watches in growing surprise as her master seems to pay no attention to her condition. She has come in here battered before, and he has always healed her instantly; today he seems to look through her, and sudden panic strikes her; is he tired of her? Has he found or built someone else, someone less whiny, less ugly, someone more perfect, more like him? A sudden rush of pain makes her head spin; she sinks to the floor and fights the urge to vomit.
Finally, he turns to her, and his irises flicker as he notices the bloodstain on the floor. She waits for his anger, waits for healing, but he simply walks to her and lifts her up, and shows no signs of turning into human shape. He examines her closely, lifting her in the air, and then sets her down and returns to his tools.
“They hit me really hard today,” she says after a while. “There’s some kind of swayamvar they’re going to—the Prince of Gurgaon Megapolis is choosing his bride. They’re both going, hoping he’ll pick one of them. They think he might not choose them because of the family associations. They said it was my fault, our father’s fault.”
“I know all this,” he says. “I have enough technology at my disposal to get the news, you know.”
She nods. “I am sorry, master,” she says, assuming the position. “How may I pleasure you?”