Chirp

By: Emma Henderson

It had been 3 years, 7 months, and 24 days since the ship had landed and Ry had officially been exiled.

And it had been 1 year, 11 months, and 15 days since Altair had begun to chirp.

Ry should’ve known that the robot would begin to fail; it was only a few years younger than Ry was himself. And besides, it wasn’t like he had the supplies to fix him. The crown had only given him what was absolutely necessary for his own survival, and the nearest outpost was several days away.

Sure, in the grand scheme of things, the time required for the journey meant nothing. But Ry had lived nearly his entire life sheltered in the palace, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to face whatever was lurking in the wild, barren, blue-violet deserts of Oscana.

The planet wasn’t built for either of them.

Ry and Altair lived inside of a little house surrounded by a thin set of walls. Though the walls protected him from living dangers, they did nothing to keep out the natural ones. Luckily, the dust storms that terrorized their side of Oscana only happened a few times a year, but he didn’t know how many more of them Altair would be able to withstand.

He had been built only to serve as an accomplice to Ry’s childish whims and to fill in the gaping hole that Ry’s brother, Dannel, and his father had left in his life. Nobody ever could have predicted that one of the most advanced pieces of AI at the time would soon be sent away to live whatever kind of life you would call their current circumstances.

Ry sighed to himself, and the only sound he got in response was a loud, sharp, CHIRP from the other end of the campsite, the fruits of Altair’s noble labors. As long as Ry kept the robot around, there would be no hiding when fate finally came to collect him. And he didn’t plan on leaving Altair behind any time soon.

He brushed his hair out of his face and stood up from the rock upon which he was perched, feeling all of his bones creak back into place. Despite his years in the wilderness, his delicate, princely frame still hadn’t gotten used to the strain of regular life.

Above him, the sky began to flush into a deep indigo, and the air around him picked up: the telltale signs that a storm was moving in. As if on cue, Ry lowered his goggles from his hair and pulled the bandana tied around his neck over his nose. Then he went to retrieve Altair. He knew better than to wait until the dust came.

He found Altair foraging around the edges of the area they roamed. In his synthetic hand, he clutched a bouquet of the tiny blue flowers that sprouted up from the sand. He had taken a liking to them as soon as they landed, and now the plants littered the floor and every other surface in their little house. Though they were a mess, Ry didn’t have it in him to tell Altair to stop bringing them back; they made him too happy.

As soon as his eyes locked onto Altair, Ry began trudging through the sand dunes, fighting the steadily-increasing wind for purchase on the ground. He had never seen a storm quite as intense as this one; he could barely make Altair out through the swirls of periwinkle already filling the atmosphere. A cough tore from Ry’s lungs as the dust found its way under his bandana.

He knew from the ache in his chest that he wouldn’t be able to fight the wind and make it the rest of the way to Altair. Ry cleared his throat again before yelling, “Altair!” His voice was scratchy, and his throat hurt from disuse. Still, he was willing to push through it if it meant getting Altair back home.

He called for the robot again, dissolving into another coughing fit, this one so powerful it made him fall to the ground. Luckily, that time, Altair heard and looked up from the patch of flowers he was interested in. Ry pulled himself back up so that the robot could see him better.

Altair’s hollow face peered at Ry curiously through the clouds of dust, his yellow tunic whipping in the wind and his black, mechanical eyes locked on his charge.

He chirped in response to Ry’s calls, and his lovely, familiar, mechanical voice replied, “One moment, Ry. I CHIRP have to finish gathering CHIRP these flowers. I’ll be home CHIRP in a minute or so. Go back, and CHIRP be safe.”

“Altair, we don’t have that kind of time...” Ry started, but a strong gust of wind nearly knocked him onto his knees. He was left coughing and rubbing at his eyes as the dust seemed to seep into his body. “Altair!” he yelled again, listening for another chirp to slice through the eerie, end-of-the-world silence, but as the dust cleared, he saw that another chirp probably wouldn’t come. Altair had fallen into the dune, his abandoned flowers surrounding his body.

Ry scrambled through the sand, nearly slipping over and over and over again, unable to fight the sense of panic that had begun to rise in his throat, choking him as it snuck its way up to his tongue.

He finally made it to Altair’s side, collapsing over his broken body. The dust had blown over him, blanketing him in blue-violet sand and the crumpled flowers he had once held in his hands. If Ry hadn’t seen him fall, he probably would’ve spent the rest of the year looking for him.

He tore at the yellow tunic, trying to get to the access panel on the robot’s chest. When he finally managed to pry it open, cutting his fingers on the old metal in the process, he found that the sand had wormed its way into the wiring. He could see the voice box, buried under an amalgamation of technology Ry couldn’t even begin to understand. It sparked furiously at him like a miniature sun. Ry watched it, mesmerized. How could something so small help to build something so big? He poked at the wires, trying to get some kind of reaction from Altair, a sign that he wasn’t entirely alone, not yet.

Near Ry’s leg, Altair’s hand twitched, and a sob broke free from Ry’s throat as he clutched at it like a child.

“I’m sorry,” Ry said finally. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. I should’ve tried to fix you sooner. I shouldn’t have been so selfish. If I had just gone to the outpost, this never would have happened.”

“Ry,” Altair whispered. The spaces where the chirps had once resided had been replaced with blanks and cut off words. The box was dying out. “It’s okay. I understand. You were just trying to keep yourself safe. It’s not your fault. I understand.”

He sounded so much like Dannel it almost made Ry break down again.

“It is!” Ry cried. “Saying that it isn’t won’t fix this. It won’t make you any better!”

He kept talking. His voice rose frantically in pitch as he tried to find anything to say in a futile attempt to drown out the voice in his head yelling at him, “It’s over! It’s over!”

The meaningless words tore out of his throat as he screamed them into the slowing wind, dragging their claws through his wasted vocal cords, cutting them like scissor blades. He felt raw, unfiltered, like it was both his first day in this world and his last. He was a man with nothing left to lose, and so he screamed it all to the world.

His speech became as laced with empty promises as Altair’s had been with the chirps. Ry would’ve personally turned himself in and faced whatever they would bestow upon him if it meant that his day could be interrupted by Altair’s chirps even one more time.

Altair pulled one of his hands up weakly, placing it on the side of Ry’s face. “Goodbye, Ry. It has been my honor to serve you.”

“Don’t say that...” Ry started to say, but the moment the words began to fall from his mouth, the lights illuminating Altair’s eyes fell dark, and he felt the robot’s grip weaken.

Not now. Not like this. Ry couldn’t help it as his body crumpled in on itself, folding him over Altair’s body like some twisted painting of an old-world priest at an altar. He held Altair close to him, afraid of what would happen if he let go.

He tried to block out the part of him saying that he was finally alone, that there was no one left in the universe who cared whether he lived or died. He ignored the voice asking how he would manage to stay sane any longer, surrounded by nothing but miles upon miles of blue sand dunes and unrelenting guilt.

Around him, the wind began to quicken again, but when Ry looked up, the sky had faded to the same pale shade of lavender as always. For a moment, he wondered if he had imagined it, but when a loud, mechanical sound surrounded him, he knew immediately what it was.

The supply ship.

Ry pushed his goggles back into his hair and swiped at his eyes furiously. He didn’t know how long he had been sitting there, ignoring the inevitable. Now he knew that if he had just made Altair come in earlier, if he had just kept his eye on him, then he would’ve had enough time to get a mechanic to fix him.

Before trudging off into the direction of his campsite, Ry ripped off a square of the tunic, tied it around his wrist, and memorized the spot where Altair rested, still surrounded by his blue flowers like some kind of meager funeral service.

One of the only rules that had been imposed on him in his exile was that he always had to be there to greet the supply ship, or they would stop coming. So far, it seemed, his response had satisfied them enough to keep up their visits every few months.

He took his place inside of his house and watched through the window as it landed.

The first thing he noticed that was wrong was that it landed on the complete opposite side of his land. They completely disregarded the landing pad the crown had set up on the south side, instead choosing to land in the sand on the north side.

The second was the person who stepped out. It wasn’t the set of servants who usually came. The man who walked out wasn’t even wearing the colors of the crown.

The usual pilot’s silvery hair and kindly lined face was nowhere to be found. Instead, he had been replaced with a young man, probably in his twenties, who seemed not to know where he was. The ship however, still had the palace’s emblem emblazoned on the side. He wasn’t simply a lost merchant. This was something more.

Ry walked out of his home and across the land to where the pilot was waiting.

“Excuse me, who are...”

“Oh,” the strange man laughed. It was a cruel, unforgiving sound, unlike anything he had ever heard, yet it was so unnervingly similar to one so familiar it had been ingrained in Ry’s memory and stuck with him through everything. It wasn’t one he should still be hearing. It made Ry’s blood run cold. “Ry, fancy seeing you here. You’ve grown up so much.”

Ry forced himself to look up, directly into the man’s eyes. His skin pricked with goosebumps, and he couldn’t help shrinking back a little.

Though his hair had grown to cover the better part of his face and the scars that now riddled it, there was no denying the resemblances connecting Ry to the man in front of him despite the smirk on his face which painted him into a near stranger.

“Dannel?” he whispered. “Is that really you?”

“Who else would it be? Titus? You know how he feels about us.” He laughed again, and Ry wanted to hit him. He wanted Dannel to pay for this - for everything.

“What are you...? How are you...? I thought you were dead,” he said finally. He didn’t know what else to say.

“I was, at least for a little bit.” He needed to stop laughing. “Things change, though, you know?”

Ry bit his lip, trying to decipher any of the thoughts running through his head. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re here though.”

“Long story short, while you’ve been gone, Titus has been wreaking havoc across the kingdom. Now that you aren’t around anymore, well, the people don’t know what to do. As far as they know, I’m dead, and you are too. There’s no hope for them.”

Ry didn’t like the intonation in Dannel’s voice. He knew he didn’t want to know the answer to his next question, but he knew he needed to ask it. “What are you getting at?”

Dannel smiled. “That’s where you come in. I’ve spent months asking around, trying to find anyone who knew where you went. And finally, I did. So now I’ve come to ask you, do you want a chance to sit on the throne?”

Ry thought back to Altair, still lying in the dunes surrounded by his wilted flowers. There was nothing left to tie him to Oscana. There was nothing else for him to live for anymore.

He nodded.