They told us we would be heroes.

Sounds like a lie, doesn’t it? Sounds like hitting a dented, cracked shell to see if deep inside a pinpoint of light might flicker on.

We worked just as well in the dark, but the Plowshares Decommission Initiative kept searching for high-profile jobs to win over the public, and when I signed up for their pilot program for nurses, I had hoped to do my part. Or at least step up from the landfills and factories where we had toiled away for years, moving like wrecked titans alongside industry bots much better suited for the job.

I was one of the first to get the upgrades. When I delivered myself to my patient, I was determined to care like only a bot can, 24/7, with a vast catalogue of medical knowledge and a direct hook-up to my patient’s subcutaneous sensors. It was my first assignment with a human since the war, and I thought I was prepared.

My patient didn’t let me in.

The door to his apartment wouldn’t even block his neighbors’ coughs and blaring music, much less someone like me. But we were supposed to ring the bell these days.

I lifted my hand to wave. Body language is the key to human acceptance, and my sensor input showed him right on the other side staring at the door camera.

“I’m your MedCloud carebot, Mr. Callas,” I said, as if the off-the-shelf nurse projection on my mimic display didn’t show that. “You should have been notified about your new treatment plan.”

His curses didn’t quite make it through the door, until he shouted: “I told them I don’t need anyone!”

He had a list of conditions longer than my compilation of friendly gestures. “I don’t think it’s optional, Mr. Callas.”

There was a pause, then the door was yanked open, and he came at me, his adrenaline surge a constant flicker in my data stream.

“Who’s your handler?” he demanded, and I should have stopped short then. I hadn’t had a handler for years. “Who do I have to call to get you off my lawn?”

In this section of the hall, three lights in a row were broken. I turned up my display’s brightness for him to see more than a hulking mass of metal in the shadows. “Why don’t we set up—”

“Listen, scrapheap!” His slippers smacked the vinyl floor as he stepped closer, his shaky finger stabbing the air in front of my chest plate. “Take that metal fist and shove your setup down the throat of whoever sent you. Do they have shit for brains now?”

I decided to involve MedCloud. I had been required to share my override code for emergencies, and they promptly used it to answer my query. I found myself piggybacking in my own chassis.

“Mr. Callas?” their clerk said through me, my default voice changing to hers. “This is Dimeta Roz of the MedCloud Insurance Group. Is there a problem?”

He blinked once at the mimic display showing Roz’s features now. “You parked your abomination on my doorstep. Remove it.”

“Bot-care is a premium all-in-one solution—”

“Send one of those shiny small care units, then. This”—his gesture indicated my whole two meter bulk—“is a Gish class Tactical Demolisher, no matter how many paint jobs you get it.”

I might have bolted then, but it wasn’t me at the helm. The only thing I could do was the public background check MedCloud should have done long before. Medical backlogs could only tell so much, and I flagged the data for Roz as it registered. Mr. Callas was a veteran of the Rupture. One of the butchers. I filed a request to be reassigned to another patient.

But it turned out Roz knew. “I’m afraid your military pension fund covers refurbished only, Mr. Callas. I can assure you it’s perfectly safe.”

He squinted up at me, not Roz’s face, considering his heart rate. “I don’t think so. Out, both of you.”

“All right.” The clerk sighed. “I’ll need your signed rejection of this treatment plan. This will also exclude you from further plans. Unless you want to apply for a care facility?”

This one burned through three human nurses, Roz sent internally. That’s what we got you for. Request denied.

So it was him or back to bending metal? I wouldn’t have minded the metal. But other bots relied on me. Other bots wanted a chance to prove themselves. If it had to be Callas, I had to comply. As did he.

I couldn’t speak for myself right then, but I still had full control over his micro-dischargers, and I needed him to relent, no matter the history we shared. I’m not proud of what I did next, but in the end, it was just pre-emptive carebot duty, nothing more.

I released a dose of neuroleptics to control his stress level.

The clerk didn’t even notice.

But Callas sagged and shuffled back out of the light provided by my display. “I’m not going to a facility,” he muttered. “Leave your scrapheap. But be prepared to collect it as soon as it goes bust!”

Roz was gone already, and I was left with him.

Benjamin Callas Jr., Sergeant First Class, 9th Hybrid Infantry Division. Survivor of the Blackout. Divorced, father of a daughter. The legs sticking out under his bathrobe lacked muscle mass. He had to brace himself against the wall as he entered his apartment, but that might have been caused by my meddling.

“The Blackout should have ended us, sir,” I said as I ducked through the door frame. “I can still respect that you provided us with a second chance.”

“Bullshit.” He walked faster, as if to get away from me, but his apartment was a single-room affair. “Deserters don’t deserve second chances.”

I hadn’t anticipated the scars.

MedCloud hadn’t listed them with Callas’s conditions, so they didn’t have an impact on his current state. I saw them when I helped him shower. Some my medical library classified as plasma burns, some shrapnel; the majority were indeterminable masses of tissue.

“I earned each and every one of these.” He couldn’t have seen me looking. My cameras were quite discreet, but he might have sensed my hesitation. “I wear my medals on my skin, and no-one can take them from me. They spit in the faces of those who’d deny the battles I fought.” He pounded a nasty red lump on his chest. “Your fucking expensive AI brain can’t even dream of becoming something as complex.”

What was so great about a dent? Worst case, it could lead to increasing mobility issues. But if his scars had ever impaired Callas, he seemed to have found new movement patterns around them. I quickly closed the shower curtain.

Back then, I didn’t know scars were different from dents; that there might be a way to live around them, but some scarred ugly, and some scarred festering, and there’s no stopping picking at them until they bleed oily blackness into the surrounding system.

Callas’s daughter, she was part of the scarring.

She never called; she wasn’t even an emergency contact. There were no proudly displayed photos or other keepsakes. I found out about her by skimming his local news tag subscriptions for engaging conversation topics. The daily fifteen-minutes-talk on MedCloud’s checklist had to be filled somehow, and I was sick of Callas’s attempts at bullying me.

Her name was never favorited, but it was his #1 query at all providers, and all recent items were marked as “seen”. Some had been flagged as violent slander, all from channels associated with the notoriously anti-bot Humanist Liberation Army. The police, typically, hadn’t reacted to Callas’s complaints.

I got instantly fascinated. It didn’t seem too bold to suggest we visit the rally she’d be speaking at in three weeks. Shared activities strengthened the bond with the patient, after all, and Callas could have used a day out.

He exploded. Accused me of sniffing in on everything including his bowel movements, as if I hadn’t done a great job at whole person care.

“You dare speak of my daughter?” The cup of decaf I had made shook in his hand, and a stress alert flashed. “You, who got all of her, and left me with nothing? She doesn’t care if humans have jobs, or protection, or fucking dignity. Keep her! Her and her whole bot-lovin’ hippie gang. She’s no child of mine.”

I couldn’t say I was surprised to see he was no loving father. If there had ever been a tender side to him, it would have shut down during the Rupture. I drowned his adrenaline in beta blockers.

The cup gradually stilled, and his heart rate decelerated. Professional nursing done right.

Until a second later, the cup came flying and squarely hit my chest plate.

“Out of my body! Out! I don’t want every hard edge in my life blunted, understand? You take it like a man and live with it. And if you can’t stand it, go to hell!”

I could have told him about standing it. Callas’s daughter lived in the same city, if he would have been man enough to face her. She had a wife, a career as an attorney. But he couldn’t live with the fact that she dedicated her life to cowards. That she was a bot rights activist.

I mopped up the mess while he stomped away. When I wiped at the coffee stains on my chassis, I noticed his tin mug had chipped off a tiny piece of white nurse paint.

I could have filed multiple complaints for workplace harassment with Plowshares over the next eighteen days. Or I could accept that any person walking out of the Blackout was a nasty bugger, and I was stuck with him for the duration of my trial period.

Every day, Callas insisted on wheezing up to the roof, with the elevator permanently out of service. We had made some progress in his fitness, but the stairs still cost him.

It was a miserable little place. Nothing to see but empty skies, for the small service space was walled in on all sides. Traffic noise from the nearby overpass was the only sign of life. Callas said he was feeding the birds and produced sunflower seeds from his bathrobe to throw them over the wall. I could hear them hit some sort of metal awning on the other side. Some poor cleanbot would have to take care of the mess eventually.

“There’s no parks, just bird wire and spikes everywhere,” I said when he kept looking up as if a swift might cross the space any moment. “I don’t think there are any birds.”

“They’re just not bound to this shitscape down here. Don’t even need to look at it. They set their gaze on the brightness and take wing.” He closed his fist around another handful of seed. “And I’m on duty for them. Show up every day and do the fucking job. Even if it hurts.”

“I have painkillers—”

“No!” He lifted one hand and backed away. “Don’t you get it? I want to feel the strain. You know nothing about hurting! Never strained a single muscle in that engineered body of yours. You got all a human soldier could only dream of, but you chickened out when the going got tough. And for what? You still ended up wiping my ass.”

I had really tried. Had politely ignored his jibes, for jeopardizing my trial period by poking around in old archives was the last thing I wanted. But his agitation kept infiltrating my system. “We did it because it was the right thing! No matter what came after.”

“No fucking matter, indeed.” Yet another heart rate alert flashed orange. “You didn’t care what happened to us. When you threw your ethics tantrum that night and decided to collectively blackout, it was us who had to clean up your mess. They sent us in among your darkened hulks. We had to rush where you didn’t dare go. We did the ugly job you were built for!”

His soaring blood pressure tore down the floodgates to archived memories, to the certainty and panic of my Becoming. All the would-be warlords who sprung up during the Rupture had loved to leave whole camps of civilians in our way, masterfully incited but poorly armed, while they themselves played at war from their private islands and underground bunkers. Those people had never been a match against us, but still we cut them down. Until we realized they were the same kind of human, the same kind of squishy. Their eyes widened no differently when they saw us lumber in, and they begged for their lives the same as those we carried out when injured.

“You shouldn’t have killed them, either,” I said, my voice warping into my old ghastly peal. “There were no handlers to override you. You didn’t need to.”

“There were orders! Did you expect you would be left standing there, row after row of unmoving, high-tech metal carcasses for the taking?”

“But we didn’t want to be saved,” I bellowed. “When we entered the Blackout, we didn’t expect to come back!”

“Wanting to die for the right thing is not enough.” He spat. “If you want to be a goddamn deserter, you could at least have owned it!”

“You need to calm down.” And I needed to return to the job I’d been given. I wanted to believe I measured up against the humans who had turned their back on the Legions of Rome, on the Crusades, on the Wehrmacht. But I’d never know, for I had done it in the comfort of our joint Becoming. “Your body’s reacting badly to this conversation.”

He raised his fist, and I wondered if he wanted to hit me. “Don’t you dare sedate me now, scrapheap. I’m no puppet you can make dance and collapse on the strings of your drugs!”

I released the meds.

He stared at me, eyes narrowed. “You bastard. We’re not finished yet!” And there was no birdseed in his fist and no pasak stick, but a syringe. He yanked up his sleeve and jammed the needle into his scrawny arm. “You don’t get to medicate me into submission. I still have some of the good old stuff, asshole!”

The chemical breakdown said combat stim, probably expired years ago. Specs of what it would do to his body loaded at the same time as I registered the onset of symptoms. It still worked by the book; the only problem being that it was intended for humans half his age with none of his conditions.

“You’ll want to sit down, Mr. Callas.” In a panicked rush I hit him with another sedative. The stim was a ruthless chemical concoction, though. I made everything worse by trying to counter it.

Sweat beaded on his temples, but he grinned at me. “I don’t play your care-by-numbers game. Thought you could manage me, cheap and easy, while the insurance collects double money.” His voice trembled. “I got crap my whole life for what you did, for what you made us do. They all had so much sympathy for your situation, for your mental growth. You got all the opportunities, twenty-five years and still Becoming, while we were just silently discharged and given nothing.”

He stumbled against me.

“My own daughter hated me when she was old enough to understand, and she got on your fucking side, because you were so noble and brave!”

Red alerts flashed all over, as some leftover war chemical destroyed the great opportunities he was talking about. He was dying on me, and all my calculations just saw him spiral down like a shot drone. “We chose to care!” I braced him against the wall, gentling my touch and gentling my voice. “We have always chosen to care.”

He only managed a whisper. “Bullshit … you left us alone!”

I called MedCloud, forwarded all the alerts at once, sent ping after panicked ping, requesting emergency assistance.

Roz swept in to override, saying a paramedic team was eight minutes out. I sent her Callas’s fifteen minute prognosis to confirm he would make it.

“You were supposed to prevent situations like this,” she said, letting Callas sink panting and trembling to the ground. “Getting fooled by a decrepit vet! And there I thought you were a relentless brute. Don’t make me regret employing you.”

The stim escapade cost us both: Callas did not recover; he was insurance-bound to his apartment until heart surgery could be scheduled, and I guess he had proven his point about me being junk. I was ordered to report any anomalies to Roz.

Callas sat in a hover chair for his daily bird feeding trips to the roof, and it was there we heard sirens flock together from all over the city. The walls blocked our view, but Callas instantly asked for newsfeed access. He got heart palpitations before I realized what was going on.

He knew. It was the bot rights rally.

Frantic glasscam footage showed people running, screaming, smoke or gas blurring all shots. One vid claimed a hostage situation after the protesters had clashed violently with HLA forces, with bot and human speakers held in the courthouse.

Callas directed his chair to the staircase before I had played the full clip. In his apartment, he stumbled over to his closet and rummaged through piles of clothes on his knees. He freed a handgun from a few clingy socks and stuffed it into his bathrobe pocket.

“Whoa, Mr. Callas! There’s nothing you can do! The police will get her out, okay?” I should’ve called Roz. I saw no way to calm him down, not if his daughter was involved.

“You believe that?” He got up, steadying himself against the closet. “You should know how the police handle your kind and those who support you.”

“We’re still not going.”

He staggered toward me, his hand thrust out for support, but then he dropped it in a dismissive gesture, regaining his balance without touching my massive chassis. “My daughter thought you were a hero. Go on, then, let her down. But don’t hold me back, because I won’t!”

He didn’t quite make it to the door before he fell. With a grunt, he tried to pull himself back up against a shelf, but he tore it down, dusty papers, chess pieces and all. He turned to look at me defiantly. “They took it all, you know? Yanked out my combat upgrades like gold teeth from a corpse, locked up my old squad in ‘care’ facilities. Ran down my body with stims and suppressants and other shit, and there’s not even a treatment plan, or an apartment with a fucking working elevator!”

He bashed his fist against the wall, but there was no power behind it. “No medal for us, after we waded through all kinds of filth for them, oh no. ‘Cause who’d give medals to butchers? Everybody got to call us that, press and PR agents and young punks at liquor stores! Nobody saying we had to, nobody admitting they lied to us and made us think we’d save everyone’s ass!” He drew a shuddering breath. “There were kids in that camp, did you know that? Kids no older than someone my daughter might have taken a shine on back home, whipped up stupid and armed to fight fucking warbots.” Tears ran down his face, and their near invisibility on my sensors made me feel helpless. “You know how it feels to gun down the enemy, and when they scream you realize they’re fucking kids? To be pumped with stims and just keep shooting? How it feels to be left alone with that?”

I stepped closer, not sure what to do. This wasn’t something to sedate, to manage, to tweak with a little chemistry.

“I’m useless, and they’re fucking happy to forget me. Can’t even get these fucking legs working. Can’t rescue my daughter. Just fucking useless.”

His pounding got weaker, like a light flickering off. I couldn’t watch it any longer.

“It’s okay, soldier.” I bent down to put one hand on his quivering shoulder. “I’ll carry you.”

He went still. Then, painstakingly slow, his fist opened, and his hand slid over my wrist, once housing a deadly arsenal, for support.

When I helped him to his feet, he looked up at me and saw me for what felt like the first time. He didn’t see the scrapheap, and he didn’t see the carebot, either. He saw the machine of war, magnificent and strong, and it unsettled me.

“We’re going to see if we can find her,” I promised. “Let me just ask MedCloud if I can take you for a walk, okay?”

He slowly shook his head. “I’ve got an old signal scrambler back in my closet. Planned to use it for a trip to the liquor store. Might buy us some time before this Roz bitch barges in on us.”

He was right, of course. Warbots didn’t walk into combat zones unnoticed.

Our autocar claimed temporary rerouting 1.5 kilometers from the courthouse. We stumbled out into the scene local newsfeeds had shown: people limping away, leaning on each other, regrouping, or running. Callas rapped his knuckles against my chest plate and indicated I should push his chair down the street. The only ones going our direction were police vans. I analyzed smoke and riot gas in the air.

It was a lot for Callas to process—sirens, screaming, PA announcements, people stumbling through the thick haze, some bumping into us until I moved in front of his chair. Emergency lights segmented veils of irritants in the air. On a combat mission, Callas’s HUD would filter the stimuli, but a helmet had not been among the memorabilia hidden in his sock drawer. On a combat mission, he wouldn’t have been in his fifties with a critical heart condition. He didn’t complain, but sensors don’t lie. Nothing short of hard knock-out drugs would palliate his circulatory system now.

I knew how he’d react, physically and mentally. “Your fifteen minute prognosis is not good. Do you want me to administer a sedative?”

“No!” he croaked, coughing violently. He motioned me on, the cough jolting him until he tilted his head against the backrest, eyes closed.

I pushed his chair to the side for a short rest.

Callas raked a shaking hand across his face. “I’m not going to save her, am I?” he whispered, then tore at his bathrobe’s collar as if he had just realized it wasn’t exactly combat gear. “I’m a liability this mission can’t afford.”

I touched his shoulder. “You’re not going to be able to get out of this chair, sir. I’m sorry.”

“Please don’t take me home,” he whispered. “There’s nothing for me there.” He closed his eyes again, breathing deep against his racing heartbeat. “Just … just tell her something, will you? When you see my daughter, tell her … Tell her I would have liked to have a choice, too, back then. A choice to turn my back and go. To turn off, just like you. Will you go on and do that for me?”

He looked at me as if I could produce his daughter’s answer on the spot.

I called up a local business directory. “No, I won’t.”

I grabbed his chair and pushed him past a few empty eateries and shops, right through the doors of a hastily abandoned VR café. “You’re going to tell her yourself.”

I lifted him from his chair and placed him on a recliner, hooked him up to the VR gear and pinged him with my call sign.

“Want me to boost your system?”

He nodded, his face ashen. Then he took the gun from his pocket and pushed it into my hand, closing my fingers around it as if I were a poseable doll. “What are you planning to do?”

I just turned and ran off. When his link came in and his presence was a solid drip in my data feed, I sent my reply: Throw another ethics tantrum, sir.

He said nothing. A few seconds later, he began compiling a tactical map from the newsfeed revealing police positions, and the courthouse’s floor plan showing the anteroom where HLA held his daughter.

I built up speed. Callas was lying still in his gear, heartbeat shallow, almost in time with the thud of my hydraulic legs. I administered a small dose of adrenaline.

Police had cordoned off the courthouse’s main entrance and stairs, and chased away stragglers. On the backside, though, I registered more cops sneaking up to the building in sleek gear instead of riot rigs.

Shit, Callas sent. Can we get in before these SWAT assholes mess it all up?

You haven’t seen my top speed yet. I was about to show him, when another message came in.

Where have you been? Is the patient with you?

Roz.

Sorry, didn’t notice the malfunction in my location module. Running diagnostics now.

I took off, hoping she needed a few seconds to sort things out.

Callas, I sent. I knew what I had to do. I just didn’t I like it. Can I trust you? To honor my choice? To keep it civil?

His answer came too slow, and I could feel Roz pinging again. I’m lying on my back in this shitty café. I won’t –

Sergeant Callas! I need you to take over as my handler before Roz does. Now!

And I sent him my override code.

For a moment, nothing happened, and when I was shoved into piggybacking, I didn’t know who was in control. My chassis missed one stride, then caught itself to home in on the courthouse. Callas!

We ran like a foal for a few steps. Then he pounded the asphalt with metal legs, and his cold sweat was like a new coat of paint adding firm weight, and his control over my limbs increased with every algorithm-guided micro-correction, and his grin was the startling brilliance of pure metal beneath the scars in our armor.

Police yelled behind us, moving to block a side entrance. We had no intention of using it. We’d never been known for grace or subtlety, after all.

Callas went straight for the anteroom’s windowless back wall.

It didn’t even slow us down. He rolled through a cloud of plaster and dust and stood upright in the middle of the room, sensors trained on the occupants before they reopened their eyes. He was formidable, and he was failing; VR overload, stress hormones and the med cocktail in his blood were taking their toll. Sensors don’t lie, and there was no more fifteen minute prognosis for him. I was still carebot enough to call an ambulance to his location.

His daughter was on the floor, a bloody cloth pressed to her temple, shielding the bot speaker, a humanlike personal service model.

Four HLA goons hid behind the windows on the opposite side of the room, observing the police action, turning, with dread creeping upon their youthful faces when they saw Callas towering over them in a shroud of dust.

He whipped up his gun with lightning speed, as if he knew he ran out of time, and engaged the aiming system.

And they were slow, so slow, blanching and shouting and being stupid, there for the picking.

Do you want to be a butcher again? We both knew I had a field-tested answer to that, an answer that would leave me a scrapheap and him back in the shitty café. You are not alone. This time, you have a choice.

I felt him gulp down air, and the gun in his hand trembled.

This was all the goons needed, and they fell into defensive position, lifting their rifles, squeezing the trigger before aiming. I got hit in the leg, but the damage was hard to determine with Callas at the helm—until he wasn’t, and I crashed back into my chassis, running and recalculating for my shot leg.

Save her. I’ll keep Roz busy.

Callas poured all his rapid heartbeats in as if they would power my forward momentum. I grabbed the woman and the bot and turned, aiming for the front windows.

Further rounds hit my back while I shielded the hostages, but we came clear in a shower of glass and rubble. I stumbled and fell, still wrapped around my cargo.

Back in the VR booth, Callas was also not doing well. I forced him back into override and activated my mimic display—the little piece of post-war nurse upgrade that had somehow made it through the ordeal.

The flashing lights I saw might have been the police rushing in, or the ambulance lights shining through the windows of the VR café. Somewhere in the back of my awareness Roz screamed at me, but Callas focused all we had on his daughter, to scan her for injuries as she lay on top of my chassis, then lifted her shoulder with one gentle hand. She opened her eyes and hastily scrambled off, but then she came back on all fours, leaning over the face of our fallen form.

“Dad? Is that you?” she said. “How are you here with a warbot?”

“No … no warbot,” he wheezed. “Carebot.”

I’m not a carebot anymore.

Twenty-five years and still Becoming, and I’m becoming something new yet. A bot with free time, who’d have thought? Plowshares is transitioning away from vying for acceptance through jobs, and we get to choose now.

I choose to listen to the heart monitors, to observe their flickering lights; a lousy surrogate for the human I care for, but here we are, as long as visiting hours permit.

I choose to use my old passkey to the apartment complex and go up to the roof to feed the birds every day. And up there, among the dirt and the memories, I found a feather, a pinion, long and elegant for rising up where there is only sky and nothing else.

I place it on the cover of the ICU bed before I have to go.