The halls of the hospital were quiet and the lights were dim. In this wing, there were very few staff at this hour. It was the sort of wing where the inpatients were largely stable. As the pair walked past the nurse’s station, the person in the chair didn’t so much as look up from their book as the taller of the two passerby flashed her badge. Their combined footsteps clicked softly down the hall, around a corner, around another… finally, they were outside their destination.
“Seriously keep this quick. You owe me.”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll hash it out afterwards.”
Tanuki Man entered the room. It was a standard hospital bedroom for humans- monitoring equipment, a locker for personal effects, and an adjustable bed with railings. The bed was at chest level for the robot, who stood at a mere 4 feet tall. In the bed lay the sleeping form of Stanislaus Simon. Tanuki Man couldn’t remember the man’s various ranks, but in his mind, he remembered the approximate roles the man had held.
Major figure of authority within the UN at one point. Acting military commander for the UN’s response to the impending Second Stardroid Invasion. Afterwards, stepped down to be the human overseer of the Maverick Hunters. Still held much authority and sway as far as the inner politics of the UN were concerned, especially as it pertained to the military. Strong lobbyist for ratifying laws that expanded robotic rights. Despite being deep in an organization that Tanuki Man was, at best, on neutral terms with, he considered Simon to be an ally- as much as his station could allow, anyway.
Reaching one paw up, Tanuki Man gently shook Simon’s arm. He whispered, “Hey. Simon. Wake up.”
It didn’t take much effort. The man’s eyes opened, and they looked in the direction of the disturbance. He focused on the dull green glow of Tanuki Man’s irises. He mumbled, “You… the hell are you doing here?”
“I had to come talk to you. I heard… I heard that I might not have the chance soon.”
Simon raised an eyebrow, sitting up shakily. “Okay. Hold on.”
Reaching over, he turned on the lamp. The room was bathed in a warm, inviting light, quite unlike the clinical harshness of hospital fluorescents. Tanuki Man got a good look at his features. He was thin and his skin was marked with blemishes. His bright blue hair, side effect of many experimental augmentations, was cut short, still growing back in. There were deep bags under the man’s eyes. For the first time, he looked something approaching his age- the augments had always given him a timeless look before.
“How the hell did you get in here? This is a secure UN facility. Last I checked, we’re not in the habit of giving security credentials out to persons of interest, let alone anyone not under our employ.”
The woman Tanuki Man had been walking with stuck her head in the door with a guilty expression across her olive-skinned face. She then walked in, stammering, “Um. Hi. Yeah. I kinda… used my clearance. Let him in. As a favor.”
For a moment, Simon pinched at the bridge of his nose, his eyes screwed shut in deep annoyance- though, both the woman and the robot were relieved to see it wasn’t a look of disappointment. Opening his eyes, the man forced a smile at the woman, though after only a moment, it turned genuine. “Well. Before anything else- am I to address you as Doctor, now?”
The woman smiled back. “Sadly, not quite yet. By the end of the semester, you’ll be able to- well. I’ll be a doctor then. So for now, it’s still just Tomato.”
His eyes, ever hunting for minute details, noticed the wedding band on Tomato’s ring finger. “That’s new.”
“Oh, yeah! Few weeks ago now. Took their surname. I’ll be Doctor Tomato Durand soon. I- look, don’t feel bad you missed it. It really wasn’t anything extravagant.” She felt bad that Simon hadn’t been able to attend, but of course, the man was bedridden. Simon and Tomato had first met over an open UN employee comms channel that had been set up in the weeks leading up to the Second Invasion. It had been an unusual, informal service divided by locale, meant to connect anyone who needed preemptive evacuation to the shelters, and by a miracle, most of the employees in the Arcadia area had made it on their own. The channel had mostly been used by a few random employees, robotic and human, that had gotten bored despite everything.
Though they were in vastly different spheres of the UN, at vastly different levels of seniority and organizational importance, Tomato and Simon had bonded, and had remained in touch over the years after the invasion. Tomato resumed her education in robotic psychology, and Simon had gone off to run the Maverick Hunters, but every once in a while, they found the time to meet for a coffee.
“Damn. I’ll regret missing the wedding. I really will… Now, have a seat and tell me why the two of you are here.” His gaze turned stern, flicking between the two as they dragged up chairs and sat beside the bed. It was no mystery how she’d done it- early in her education, she had been given course credit for running a basic therapeutic practice for robots within the city of Arcadia, naturally under supervision. After the Invasion, as need remained high, the UN kept pressuring the college to offer the position to students in the major as a work study program. It gradually became her proper job, expanding in scope as her qualifications within the fledgling field expanded.
By this point, Tomato was, legally, a recognized healthcare employee with access to myriad low-security facilities, all to expedite access to potential cases- robots in need of the kind of maintenance a wrench couldn’t provide. And, given that the UN didn’t feel like writing up new laws for robotic healthcare, robots were simply stapled onto the existing laws as valid clients. This meant that her credentials were universal between human and robotic facilities. Obviously, this didn’t mean she could waltz into an active operating room, but certainly, she could authenticate past the main entrance of a hospital after hours and walk to a patient’s room.
It was also no mystery why Tomato had committed this breach- at least, in the sense that she was friends with Tanuki Man. During the Invasion, for reasons he still could not fathom, she chose to lodge in Tin Can, braving low-intensity radiation and minimal access to human supplies to study residents that were initially none too pleased to have a human nosing around. Hell, in the Maverick Hunters’ dossier on Tin Can, there was a loose photo of Tomato, standing around with several of the renegade robots, all gripping the settlement’s signature homemade buster rifles- her included.
Presently, Tanuki Man answered Simon’s question. “We’re here, because I got it on good authority that for some reason, they don’t think you’re gonna be around in a few days. In the document I read, the language was vague and I wasn’t sure if they meant you were going to… hospice, or if you were being whisked to a black site to have experimental surgery or augmentation to fight the disease.”
Simon repeated his irritated gesture from earlier- eyes shut, bridge of nose pinched, count to three. “You know, we probably wouldn’t have to keep any kind of dossier on your settlement if you just learned to keep your nose out of things that it shouldn’t be in. I suppose that’s probably my fault, though. You never did face any repercussions, because I fought damn hard to make sure of it after the Invasion. Well, there’s no keeping any damn secret from you, so I’m just gonna save you the trouble of having to dig.”
Simon pulled out a stick of nicotine gum from a container on the bedside. Naturally, he couldn’t smoke in a hospital. He popped it into his mouth, pausing to chew it until it was sufficiently softened by his teeth. “They’ve already tried every black site surgery and experimental augment they could on me. Hell, some of the shit they put in me before the Invasion was supposed to shore up my resistance to radiation. None of it mattered when the Bradley I was in ran into Sunstar. You ever hear the story of the Demon Core?”
Tanuki Man shook his head, but Tomato intoned, “Yeah. Shit.”
“Tell ‘m. Gives me a sec to catch my breath.”
Tomato faced the robot. “Back in the Cold War. They had this lab. Los Alamos. It’s where they developed nukes. The cores of these nukes were little half-balls of radioactive metal. When you put ‘em together, they emitted a shitton of radiation, and that was like half of the principle behind the bomb. As the halves got close, they emitted more and more radiation.”
Tomato pantomimed her hands as the halves of the spheres, closing on each other. “And they ran these experiments where they would get the cores closer and closer to being together, without ever touching. But one time, the guy running it slipped and they closed together. Room was flooded with blue light.”
Her pantomime became an explosion, with an accompanying mouth sound. “Guy who fucked up, he knocked the cores back apart, but he knew it was too late. He died within a month. Body just stopped working. But in the act of separating the cores, it bought everyone else in the room time. Time on the orders of years or a few decades. Their DNA, it was still scrambled. They all eventually died of cancers.”
With a short cough, Simon took over, drawing Tanuki Man’s morose gaze. “In that blast, I took… well, they don’t know the exact number of rads. But it was comparable, I suppose. They kept scooping the tumors out of me, but they kept coming back. It’s been a slow, losing battle. I had a lot buying me time. A lot keeping me mobile. Hell, a lot keeping me hopeful. At first, it really did seem like I’d be more or less fine. But it’s been getting worse for a year now.”
Tanuki Man felt nauseous. The diseases humans faced were truly harrowing. “So that’s it then? They really are just… releasing you to hospice and keeping you comfortable until it’s over?”
Simon chuckled spitefully. “I wish I could finally rest, but no, they have something worse in mind. It’s the freezer for me.”
“The freezer?”
“Cryogenic stasis. It’s experimental. It’s the closest option we’ve got to how you robots can just be put back together as long as the brain’s intact. It’s the closest thing to how if you shut down, it’s just a matter of rebooting you.”
Tomato exclaimed, “Experimental?! Simon, it’s unproven!”
“Isn’t that a bitch. Yeah. They don’t have an unfreezing method ready. Hell, I don’t know that they actually have the freezing method itself worked out. They had a batch go under a few years back. Fatally injured soldiers and sick executives. After a few years, routine peek at the tubes revealed they had liquified. Goo stuck to the bottom of them. But, hey, they swear they got it right this time. So they just gotta freeze me. And make sure my tube never runs out of power. And eventually, they’ll develop both the method to unfreeze me, and cure turbo full body radiation cancer. And it’ll be back to work for me. Because they say my mind is too valuable to lose.”
Tomato swore under her breath. Tanuki, trying to distract from the horrid prospect, focused on the technical details. “What do you mean by tube? What’s it look like?”
“Well, you were involved with Wily’s stuff. Surely you remember when the Infinity project got sealed. Before we found him and he became Zero.”
That was some genuinely forbidden knowledge, but of all things, Simon knew Tanuki Man was already well aware of it. He was also simply past caring what Tomato absorbed.
“So it’s just gonna be you. Stuck in that tube. And they got a glass window to look at you. Make sure you haven’t rotted.”
“Yup. They already cut my morphine supply. I don’t heal well anymore, but they’re trying to see if my needle punctures will go from scabs to all the way healed over. Supposed to help give me better odds if I don’t have any holes in me. So they’ve got me on oral painkillers. And, Tanuki Man, if you ever become a human, be aware- oral painkillers really aren’t the same. I am in a remarkable amount of pain right now.”
Tomato just stared in angry silence.
“So. You came all this way and, best case, committed a few misdemeanors that, if caught, could cost Tomato here her job, let alone her shot at the doctorate. What was so important?”
Suddenly, Tanuki Man felt self-conscious. It did feel frivolous when the man put it that way. “Well, I guess I just… needed you to know that I appreciate all you’ve done for us in Tin Can. And I need you to know that… ironically, you’re the reason we do what we do. Because Simon, you’re just one man. You’re a good man. You’ve fought really hard within the system by its rules, all to make things better for our species. But even at the best of times, you weren’t gonna be around forever. If this sleep works for you, and you come back… Well, I plan to be there, waiting, on the other end. No matter how long it takes. Things like the Limited Lifespan Law?”
Tanuki Man was referring to a piece of legislation that imposed a fixed lifespan for robots who would otherwise live forever. When first drafted, it was brutal, and directly threatened even the lives of robots that had become famous and beloved. It had been bad enough to cause an entire war fought with the backing of Dr. Wily, ever the bleeding heart. After it, they had expanded the law to one hundred years, and eventually, the legislation was entirely dissolved.
“If they bring it back, well. Not that I’m going to submit to it. Not that I ever would have. But I’ll have to become a criminal for the mere act of being alive too long. But whether you’re gone for now or gone forever, that’s the problem with the system. There’s only one Simon, and no guarantee of other people who are nearly as good and nearly as in a position to protect us. I mean, even in just these last few years, there’s been some concerning backslides, all on the back of paranoia about Mavericks. And the thing is, at a certain point, a lot of these Mavericks don’t seem too different from me and my own.”
Simon groaned, sinking into his pillow a bit. “I know it’s not… it’s not great. The Hunters have had their damn hands full. And believe me, I’ve tried to keep their doctrine reasonable. Far be it from me to wish to visit needless suffering to the Tanuki Men of the world… even if your type really would benefit from just following the rules.”
For a moment, he chewed at his gum.
“I think someone else will come along. I’m not the only one who cares. Really, I never was. I was just the guy that spoke for a lot of the people that did. Lots of good people in the government.”
Wryly, Tanuki Man smiled. “Simon… that’s electoralism. That was always the big difference between humans like you and robots like me. You see the system as fundamentally just, simply needing tweaking to eventually account for new variables. You think you just gotta get the right flow of good people forever and it’ll work fine. But that sucks! It can’t lapse even a moment or we slide back! The problem is, it was a status quo built only for the human perspective. The way I see it, we need a new system that accounts for us, the uncomfortable new children of man. I don’t know what that’ll look like, but I’ll tell you what I do know: I’m scared to see you go, Simon. And not just because I like you. I think it’s gonna get a lot worse before it gets better.”
Simon closed his eyes, his gaunt features softening somewhat in an expression of defeat. “You… may be right about some of that, at least. I wish I could assure you that I had some kind of plan set up, but I don’t. I’m just… making phone calls and filling out paperwork, the same as always, until they prep me for the tube. And that’ll be that. I’ll do my best to make sure Tin Can stays ignored.”
“We’ll fight back if the Hunters or bluehelmet regulars roll on us.”
“I know. You’ll lose if it comes to that.”
“…I know.”
“Tanuki Man… you can’t live forever.”
“Simon… I will live forever.”
The man sighed. “Maybe that’s the real difference between us. You’re a different kind of stubborn. I ought to tell you that whatever the world looks like if- when- they unfreeze me, you probably won’t have such an easy time of greeting me.”
Tomato chimed in, glumly, “If I’m even still around by that time to get you in the door. Could be centuries.”
Simon nodded. “What she said. But… well, I guess that’s a problem you’ll try to solve anyway.”
Tanuki Man responded. “I’ll make it happen. Can’t let you get too complacent and unbothered, whenever you’re back around.”
With his eyes still closed, Simon let out a chuckle- not spiteful, but genuine.
“Alright. I’m tired. The two of you ought to go.”
The pair obeyed, standing up and pushing their seats back to where they had been. Tomato leaned down to gingerly hug the man. It was an unusual gesture- the two friends had never really embraced. They were more like a pair of cats that occasionally sat in the same alley. Still, he weakly reciprocated. It was a potential regret removed from the young woman’s list.
“Be seeing you, Doctor Durand.”
“I’ll see you sometime, Simon.”