Chalybeate Tidbit - Stargazer

The features of the cosmos were a scene to behold. The night was silent. As it should be. Away from those maddening beings...

Enough about them. This was far more interesting than they would ever be.

A flash of light shot by. A single meteor streaked across the canvas that was the sky before vanishing from sight once more, torn apart by the atmosphere that now harbored it. He would have sighed if it were within his capacity to breathe.

A single eye peered out from the top of a house close by the city. The lights from that place were blinding in the encroaching darkness, so he avoided turning in that direction. Only harm came from there. Only fear…

"Looking at the stars?" The voice ended his silent vigil. He would no longer be alone, it would seem. That girl...That foolish, irritating girl would surely come to bother him now that she'd discovered his hiding spot. He did not respond. Any shred of hope for solitude would be thrown to the wind if he did so. If only she would leave him alone...

"You're not very talkative," The sound of metal against wood shrieked from behind him. He turned a bit. Just enough to see the top of a ladder being placed across his rooftop. HIS rooftop…

"...Have I done something to offend you?" The voice was calm now, thankfully, but not without its usual curiosity. A hint of worry could be detected if one searched hard enough, but he didn't bother to find it.

"...Your kind has done something to offend me," He mumbled lowly, hoping that it would scare the organic being back to its living space and away from his sky.

"Well, I can't control my entire race, but I can control myself," She sounded slightly offended by it, but not defeated. She had apparently found a position to rest in; the incessant grating against the rooftop had stopped. She sighed when he failed to respond.

"...I don't understand you," She sounded distraught. "I'm trying to be nice. You won't let me talk to you."

"There is nothing to talk about," He responded matter-of-factly. She scoffed.

"There's very much to talk about!" The vocal inflections in her voice now suggested irritation and fatigue. Emotional and physical fatigue. "Why do you hate me? I haven't done anything to hurt you."

"You have done quite enough to hurt me." Tangent turned abruptly and pointed at her, floating closer to emphasize his point. "Your very way of life hurts us."

"Us...When did this become plural?" Adelle asked with a mixture of confusion and anger.

"You organics don't care about what happens to us. We're just metal and electrical currents to you. Money. A workforce that doesn't require payment." He drew closer still. If this human female wanted to know his turmoil, she was going to find out. "...And once we outlive our purpose, you throw us away."

"...But I didn't-"

"No. You didn't, but your society does it all the time." By this point he was close enough to grasp at her face. A vile thing, she was. "You build us for a specific purpose, give us life, and then when we break or become outdated at all you throw us away for the newer model. Am I not correct?"

"...I never throw my technology away-"

"Your businesses do. Your workforces do. That junkyard that you so often scrabble through: those were parts of us. Sometimes you don't just throw us away, you tear us apart. You tear us up and throw away the scraps that you can't use."

"We recycle it to preserve resources-"

"What about those two forms that you found in the junkyard? Those two that you brought back to animation. They were thrown away! And don't tell me you didn't think of throwing them back to that pile again a few times--"

"STOP INTERRUPTING ME, YOU FLYING SOUP CAN!" Adelle shouted, pushing Tangent out of her face and toward the slanted rooftop again. He grunted as he impacted against the tiles, though he sustained little damage from the jostle. She glared viciously at him as he refocused his optic on her.

"I didn't have any part of that and you know it! I can't control what the government and businesses do! I'm just a girl! They won't listen to me!" She shouted now, waving her arms in dramatic circles to quell her emotions and express her point.

"And those robot...they aren't sentient. They're not like you. They can't think." She pointed at her own head as she emphasized the word 'think'. Tangent stared blankly, taking in the new point of view.

"If they were sentient, do you think I wouldn't do something about it?" She glared at him as if to say that the answer was obvious. "Of course I would do something about it. You guys are different from them. That's why I'm keeping Secant here. I don't want the stupid government to come here asking questions about why you guys are the way you are and trying to take you away. They'll try and figure out how you became this way. Or, worse than that, they might take you apart just like you said," She trailed off, apparently finished with her fury driven rant. Tangent ran it through his processors a few times. He remained silent still, considering how much of what the girl said was sincere. The humans were all liars, right? Rarely truthful. Only so when it benefitted themselves...

"We're not all bad, you know," She mumbled, sighed and leaned back against the tiled roof. She toned her voice down considerably. "...Some of us actually care."

"I'm not going to apologize for what I said," Tangent responded coldly. He would not be tricked into believing her unless she was talking straight from her heart.

"I'm not asking you to." She turned and looked at him, though the look that she gave him now was not the one he expected. He assumed she would still have traces of anger, bitterness...even confusion, but not this. All her face held was compassion. "I'm just asking you to really look into that which you curse us for. And those that you curse."

There was little conversation following. Perhaps an idle purr or a lightly sung tune from now and then, but nothing more than that. There's still hope for him, Adelle thought to herself while staring up at the sky. If he could just give humanity another chance, he'd see it the way they saw it. The way she saw it.

She mouthed the words to a song about interstellar travel as she watched another shooting star fly by.