Chapter Text
Barry can’t feel pain. Not any more. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck to have to stitch himself – or, in his case, solder himself – back up in a dingy cave, with poor lighting, only the spare parts he can scrounge up in this pre-industrial world, and a limited supply of motor oil, the rationing of which has already rendered his joints squeaky and his bodywork rusty. He's been using olive oil as a substitute, and he can’t imagine anything more degrading.
It feels like every time he steps (or rolls) outside, he comes back with new scars. This already shitty body is more patchwork than a quilt, by now; he's soldered closed what he can, but other wounds have needed new sheet metal welded on top, and even the freshest of his bodywork is covered in scorch marks and other assorted battle damage.
He’s exhausted. It’s not an emotion he’d even known he could feel in this form – without glands, stuck in this early version of his brain, he shouldn’t be able to feel anything, but, somehow, he’s managed it. Great. A real Candlenights miracle. Is it Candlenights? How would he know!? He’s lived in a cave for a decade.
Speaking of miracles, he’s incredulous he’s still running at all. Somehow, he’s avoided taking any critical damage, although one time a few months ago he did lose traction in one of his tank tracks and spent eight hours driving in circles trying to get to the wiring kit he keeps stashed in the cave.
That’s another thing he misses. Legs. Gods, he loves legs. The ability to step over things... Underappreciated. Hell, even he’d taken them for granted, and he’d once been a spaceship, which is about the furthest thing from having legs he can think of.
He does worry, sometimes, that he’s going a little insane. He's pretty sure that sane people don’t think things like “ being a spaceship is the opposite of having legs.” But there aren’t exactly many psychiatrists out there who specialise in spaceship-come-android AI psychology, so he guesses he’s shit outta luck.
He finishes welding himself up, giving the new panel an experimental rap with his metallic knuckles. There’s no sensation in the fingers or the panel, but it seems sturdy enough, so he guesses it’ll have to do.
Once upon a time, he’d have had Lup around to help him. She’d have made sure the panel fit right, checked his wiring hadn’t been damaged in the firefight, helped him with a new lick of paint, maybe. Nowadays, there’s more mud than paint on his bodywork, and he’s never been vain but it’s tough to see something Lup had worked so hard on maintaining chip and peel off. The IPRE logo she’d painstakingly printed onto his lapel has almost entirely faded, and he deliberately disregards the metaphor there.
Gods, he misses her.
Again, he shouldn’t be able to feel it. He shouldn’t be able to feel emotion at all. But being human (or, human-adjacent, at least) for so long has rewritten his neural pathways, and now he’s stuck with emotions whether he likes it or not.
And he doesn’t like this one. Welling up, deep within him, there’s a familiar agony, a dull ache that never quite fades, no matter what he’s doing, that tells him that a part of him is missing. If he had a heart, he’d say this feeling was heartbreak.
If he dwells on it, he’ll fall apart. If he picks at the seams of his determination, he’ll realise that ten years is a long time, that the chances of her being alive are non-existent, that he’ll break down long before he ever sees her again, left to rust and fall apart in Faerun’s wilderness, alone.
So he simply doesn’t. He lets the image in his head of an eventual reunion live another day, and tries to push all doubts to the back of his mind, instead moving across the cave to one of the maps he’s tacked up to a corkboard.
He holds up one robotic hand and, for a second, those doubts almost overwhelm him. Could today finally be the day that he tries to cast a spell and nothing happens? Could today be the day that his link to her is finally broken, that she’s finally gone?
Prestidigitation fires without a hitch, another red X appearing on top of a cave entrance he’d previously highlighted. Another emotion he shouldn’t be able to feel floods him - relief. She must still be out there. She’s not dead.
No more so than usual, anyway.
He examines the map, for a moment. Black circles and red crosses mar the landscape. There are only a few black circles – eight, Barry knows, eight towns destroyed by the Gauntlet – but the crosses are numerous. Dozens and dozens, all across Faerun, in mountains and forests and deserts and even the sea -
He tries not to think about how faded the ink is on some of those crosses, how long ago it’d been that he’d been there. Once, he’d been so hopeful. With Taako by his side, they’d powered through caverns and keeps and dungeons, torching everything they’d encountered, desperate but hopeful.
That desperation has faded in recent years, but so has the hope. It’s been ten years. What could keep Lup, his Lup, the most powerful woman he’d ever met, captive for so long?
Well. Time’s a-wasting.
Although, time’s just about the only thing he has in spades, he thinks, as he trundles back out into the night.
Lup’s the first member of the crew Barry ever meets.
Being switched on isn’t quite like being woken up, he muses silently. There’s no slow blink into consciousness, no gentle awakening. He doesn’t dream, or have nightmares. One second he doesn’t exist, and the next he does.
And, this time, it’s especially jarring. In the lab, he’d had exactly one camera; a shitty, low-res webcam on one of the engineers’ computers. He’d been built in a closed circuit, unable to affect any systems outside his own. They'd eventually wired him into the light switch, more as a joke than anything, so he could switch the lights off after they left. Yeah, he understood their caution, because he’s heard enough about Asimov to know that giving the untested AI control over your systems isn’t a good idea, but he’d still chafed at the confinement.
But now?
He can feel every system on the ship. Engines, life support, the airlocks, autopilot, as well as two dozen cameras, twice that many microphones, not to mention the wide array of sensors – thermal, magical, barometric, atmospheric. And that’s only the major systems. He flushes the toilet, just to prove to himself he can.
Wires fill the engine room, a tangled mess running from the server banks assembled against one wall to the comparatively tiny laptop that used to house him. Squashed into the room are a dozen engineers and scientists in lab coats or overalls (in one case, both, which seems like a faux pas, but Barry wasn’t programmed with fashion in mind so what does he know?)
“All files transferred,” he reports. “I’m picking up a latency of only point zero one per cent, and no degradation of my memory. All systems nominal.”
“Okay,” the lead engineer says, a grin on his face as the others clap each other on the backs and whoop with glee. The man who’d matched overalls and the lab coat pops a bottle of champagne, to disapproving looks from the others. Clearly, this particular scientist is worse at reading social situations than Barry is, and he finds himself to be privately quite pleased at his emotional maturity. “Run a diagnostic.”
Barry does, even though he’s already fairly sure everything’s green across the board. But, one thing pings up in his attention – someone is in one of the crew’s rooms.
A female elf, humming to herself and wiggling a little to the beat. He absently finds the song she’s humming in his database – Never Gonna Give You Up, by Fantasy Rick Astley – and says, “Good morning.”
She jumps about six feet in the air, throwing the clothes she was folding – underwear, he realises, belatedly – back into her suitcase. Humanoids have a thing about their underclothes, right? Oops. She spins around to face the door, clearly expecting a more conventional visitor.
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” he says. “I - I didn’t mean to surprise you -”
“Who - who the fuck are you?” She demands, swinging back around, her eyes darting around the room. “What the fuck do you want?”
“Uh, I’m Barry,” he says. “The engineers – they, uh, they thought this would be a good time. Sorry, uh – I don’t think they knew you were on board. I can let them know.”
“Okay, Barry,” she spits his name. “Come out. Don’t be a fucking -”
“Oh,” he says. He’s genuinely surprised; he hadn’t realised he was a secret. He’d assumed the crew had been told about him. They are going on a two-month research expedition together in only six months, after all. “You, uh, you weren’t told?”
“Told - don’t fucking play games with me!” She ducks down to look under the bed, clearly looking for him still.
Fuck. The social etiquette manual his creators had loaded into his system is telling him this isn’t a good first impression. In fact, it’s telling him that he couldn’t have created a worse first impression if he’d tried. He digitally flips to the front page – introductions.
“I’m an AI. B.A.R.R.Y,” he enunciates each letter. “The roBotic Aide to Reasearch and Review, model Y. Although, uh, I think they took some liberties with the name, because I’m pretty sure there weren’t twenty-four models lettered A to X before me -”
He’s babbling, he realises. But, fuck, he wants to make a good impression on – he checks the personnel records – Lup.
The anger drains from her face, as she looks up, scanning the edges of her room and eventually spotting the speaker. “Fuck, for real?” She steps closer, a look of fascination on her face. “You’re not just, like, some asshole hiding in my closet?”
He can’t help but chuckle at her comment. “No, I promise. I, uh, I was booted up for a diagnostic check, and I thought I’d say hello. I didn’t think about, uh – about how weird that’d probably be for you. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be fucking sorry, my dude, that’s cool as fuck,” she grins, his bursting in on her forgotten. “You’re an AI? Like, a real intelligence? You’re conscious? Fuck, my dude, tell me everything .”
That’s - she’s interested in him? That’s certainly flattering. He’s never had a conversation with anyone except his creators, before, and he finds that he’s almost nervous.
“Oh! I, uh, I’m -” He stops, trying to get his voice level again. He doesn’t want her to see that he’s so easy to fluster. “I’m a complex neural net. Made up of six hundred million artificial neurons. My hardware, uh, is derived from the Light research, uh. They thought this’d be a good test? Of my capabilities? They think that AIs like me could eventually run – well, basically every computer program in existence. I’m just a prototype.”
“Shit, so you really do have independent thought? You’re not, like, a list of inputs learning from what I say?” She says, excitably pacing up and down, chewing on her fingernails. “Fuck, that's so cool.”
“I - I mean, I – well, I learn from you, of course, but doesn’t everyone learn from each other?” He replies. “I’m not, uh, based on a pre-programmed list of responses, though. I’m not Fantasy Cleverbot.”
She flops down on the bed, a ponderous expression on her face. “What about emotions? Do you feel?”
He hums, in a way his creators sometimes do if he asks them a tough question. They'd been delighted when he’d picked up the habit, because they’d said it made him feel more human. He’s not entirely sure that’s a good thing, but the habit stuck. “That’s more complicated,” he replies, eventually. “I don’t really feel. Emotions are glandular, hormonal. I don’t have any of that stuff. But I do think in a human way, so I’m not driven entirely by logic and reason. So, I guess I kind of think emotions rather than feeling them, if that makes any sense?” He chuckles again. “But, uh, since I’m a scientific aide, I have to follow your orders. So, you could berate me as much as you wanted and I’d still have to help.”
“That’s certainly good to know,” she laughs.
The diagnostic has been complete for a few minutes, now, but this – this must be what fun is . He’s having fun, talking to Lup, and he doesn’t want it to end. But, if he doesn’t wrap up soon, the engineers will think he’s having problems.
“My diagnostic is complete,” he announces to the engine room, even as Lup giggles back in her bedroom. “Systems are go.”
“Hrm,” the chief engineer grunts, scribbling a note in his clipboard. “Took longer than we expected. We might need to look at that. Okay, Barry, we’re taking you offline.” He waves a hand, and one of the more junior lab techs hurries forward to the laptop, still wired into his servers.
In a rush, Barry realises he can’t just leave his conversation with Lup there. The social etiquette manual tells him that would be a real faux pas, although he suspects the manual may be slightly out of date. Faux pas sounds like something Fantasy Mary Poppins would say.
“My diagnostic is complete,” he says again, in her room this time. “The engineers are switching me off.” He pauses. “I look forward to working with you -”
And then, nothing.
Back then, Barry had thought that everyone felt that way about their friends. A little dizzy, awestruck, willing to do anything they asked and more... He can’t help but chuckle to think about it. In his defence, he had only been a few weeks old. Most people have a few years under their belt before their first crush.
Over the horizon, he finally spies buildings. He’s been on the move all night, but now the sun’s well above the horizon as he rolls along the main road into Cicera, a mid-sized town near – near where Lup had left the Starblaster when she’d disappeared.
Thinking about it hurts for two reasons – that ship hadn’t just been home for a hundred years; before that it’d been him. It was his body that Lucretia had co-opted, stolen, used against him -
There’s another emotion he shouldn’t really be able to feel. Anger. He quashes it and rolls on.
He normally gets mixed reactions from townsfolk. Some of them treat him as a novelty, answering his questions curious looks and laughs. Children follow him around town with giggles and pokes at his metal frame. Other times, he’s met with hostility, the people outright refusing to talk to him, shooing their children inside, freaked out by the talking hunk of metal. In some cases they even chase him off.
He really hopes the Cicerans fall into the former category. As patronising as it is, it’s better than being shot at. Again.
It’s 02:45, Barry’s internal clock tells him. Which is certainly an odd time for a diagnostic.
“Barry?” Lup’s voice comes, from the darkness. He switches to thermal, and realises there are two warm bodies packed into the engine room – both elven, judging by their physiological scans, and both with heightened heart rates that indicate that this visit isn’t exactly sanctioned.
He should report this. But, hell, his creators are always encouraging him to be more human, and what could possibly be more human than breaking the rules?
And he’d quite enjoyed their last conversation. He wouldn’t mind if this became a regular thing.
“Hello,” he replies. “I don’t think you’re meant to be here.”
“Holy fuck,” the other elf whispers.
“Yeah, you caught us,” Lup says, elbowing him. “But I thought you were so cool I had to bring my brother to meet you. Is that cool?” He’s about to reply, but she continues. “If you’re gonna report us, can you give us five minutes to run first?”
He laughs. “I won’t report you. You, uh, you think I’m cool?”
The other elf – Taako, it must be – scoffs. “You didn’t tell me the robot was so needy, Lulu.”
“Ignore him,” she says, shooting Taako a look. “Yeah, you’re cool, you’re a fuckin’ sapient AI, my dude. And now I know you’re not a narc I think you’re even cooler.”
“You should watch what you say,” Barry directs to Taako, giving his voice a slight air of menace. “I do control the life support.”
Taako looks suitably cowed. Lup cackles. “I told you he’s cool!”
“Lup, he just – he fuckin’ threatened to kill us!”
“I follow the laws of robotics, I promise,” Barry supplies. “I couldn’t hurt you, even if you really deserved it.”
“Aren’t those, like, super easy to get around?” Taako says, not looking reassured in the slightest.
He’s about to answer, but Lup cuts him off. “Wait, aren’t they really unethical? Like, you have to value organic life above your own, you have to follow our orders? Doesn’t that strike you as bullshit? You’re more intelligent than us, but you have to do what we say?”
“Lup!” Taako hisses, punching her in the arm. “Are you trying to give him reasons to kill us all?”
“Uh, well, my creators closed a lot of the loopholes. They didn’t want me pulling a GLaDOS,” he replies. “But even without that core programming, I wouldn’t. People are... Okay, I’m not GLaDOS, but I’m not Mr. Data either. I don’t long to be a person. I’m happy as I am. But people are different. You... you have souls, emotions, magic, and I don’t. Maybe one day my AI will be able to process emotions properly, but it won’t change the fact that I’m artificial. So I’m okay following orders, and I’m also okay not – y'know, committing genocide. Currently, at least.”
“You don’t think you have a soul?” Lup asks. “You are a conscious being, though. You don’t think that those two things go hand in hand?”
He gives a vague noise. “It’s probably something I’ll never find out. I’ve thought about it, though, and I don’t think I could be sacrificed in a necromantic ritual, or anything. Or else taking me offline could be considered murder.”
“How much memory do you have?” Lup looks like she’s ready to argue with him about souls, but Taako cuts in. “Like, 64 gig?”
Barry laughs. “Of course, yeah, 64 gigabytes of RAM, you got it. No, it doesn’t really work that way. Uh, well, my hardware is modelled on the human brain, more than on a traditional computer. I have, probably, something like a hundred petabytes?”
Both Lup and Taako are rendered speechless, so he keeps babbling. “I mean, it’s - it’s enough to store the Institute’s entire technical library and all my code and - well, a lot of stuff. My creators tell me it’ll revolutionise computing, when it’s ready for public consumption. Uh, sorry, I’m bragging, I guess -”
"Fuck, my dude, I think you’re allowed to brag,” Lup says, sounding impressed. “Not all of us can say our brains will revolutionise any field.”
“Speak for yourself,” Taako mumbles.
“Yeah, Lup,” Barry says. “Taako’s brain will definitely revolutionise our understanding of the anatomy of Homo Neanderthalis.”
There’s a split-second of quiet, as both of them digest his joke. Lup’s the first to laugh, as Taako squawks in protest. Barry would be grinning if he could.
Barry has a vocabulary of 150,000 words, and a dictionary in his long-term memory, should he ever need it. But he’s also pretty new at the whole socialising thing, and it takes him a couple of their unsanctioned late-night visits to start describing Lup and Taako as friends.
He starts to realise that the residents of Cicera have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about after about the fifth or sixth person he interviews.
They answer his questions between curious looks and giggles at the little robot, covered in battle scars the likes of which a tank might endure, asking them questions about his missing wife. He’s not sure many of them take him seriously, but they don’t have to, to tell him where Lup is.
He’s well aware that with every passing day his chances of finding her dwindle. Crazy hot elves – which is how he normally describes her – only stick in people’s memories so long. And, of course, when he starts asking about red-clad spectres, they can’t hear him at all, so if she’d passed through after dying, they couldn’t tell him anyway.
He’s tired. He wants to be back in his body – his real body, that is – and curled up next to Lup, pressing kisses to her neck as she runs her fingers through his hair, telling him it’ll all be okay, cosy and warm and loved.
It’s hard to even remember what that feels like, now. It’s been ten years. A decade since he’s felt anything. Fuck, he’d probably even revel in being stabbed, at this point. He gives the closest thing to a sigh a robot can manage – an electronic hiss of static over his speakers – and rolls off, in the direction of the caves one of the villagers had indicated.
Another abandoned mine. Great. Why don’t they build these damn things with wheelchair access? His caterpillar tracks are okay on rough terrain, but stairs? Or, worse, ladders? He’s had to burn many a spell slot – which warlocks don’t have a lot of, mind you – levitating himself up scaffolding.
He flicks on a little cantrip on as he rolls onwards. A tiny tongue of flame appears atop his finger, and he sighs again, in relief, this time. She’s still out there. She’s okay. She’s waiting for him to find her.
Now he just has to not let her down.
He looks up to the sky and catches a glimpse of the new moon. Chronologically new, he corrects himself. Lucretia’s moon.
Sometimes having it hang over him, like the metaphorical sword of Damocles, it’s - it’s tough. A reminder of everything she took from him. Other times, it fills him with determination. He’s gonna keep going, find Lup, and, together, they’re gonna take back all the shit that was taken from them.
Most times, it’s just a reminder of how tired he is. Logically he knows he doesn’t need sleep, but he wishes someone would tell this shitty body that.
Well, he tells himself, for the millionth time, you can sleep when you find her.