AL14. Eng (3rd part)

A robotic voice, the same as in my first memory, sound inside my head: "Complete database recovery". Pictures flood my mind rapidly and randomly; sounds get mixed and I have the feeling that my ears are going to explode. I fall to my knees and I take my head in my hands. It hurts, but not in a physical way.
When I wake again it's getting dark. Did I faint? No, I rebooted. It took its time, my system had to recover from all the damage received and reorganise my memories. But now I know what happened...
Yes, Elijah got better, and we lived safely in the factory for some time. Of course, I didn’t let my guard down in the beginning, but I allowed myself to enjoy my new life. I adored little Rob, who was fascinated with me. Although I couldn't tell him too much about my performance and my pieces, I preferred not to tell him about the reason of my creation, Rob seemed to enjoy time with me. He was an intelligent child, very intelligent. He would have been a great engineer if he had had the chance, I'm sure. Moreover, he was always smiling and he illuminated every corner of our new home with his laugh. Rob... my little boy... Diane seemed to be quiet, and although sometimes a trace of fear could be seen in her face, generally she was always cheerful. She often said how she had everything she needed to be happy by her side. Although I am a machine, Diane had something, something that made me share her enthusiasm with surprising ease. I could say happiness could be like breath in the atmosphere, happiness to know we were safe, we were alive.
There was only one thing that disturbed that happiness: Elijah's attitude. I don't know how the child was before becoming a fugitive, but seeing Diane's face when she spoke with him, I deducted that his nature had changed. He was an aloof person, who rejected any contact or a chat with us. Other than the moments when we healed his wounds, which Elijah tried to make as short as he could, he spent his time walking alone through the factory. We thought it could be because of the surely traumatic he’d had with the cleaners so we just gave him space, waiting for him to recover physically and mentally. Waiting for him to be himself again.
But that never happened. How could it have occurred? How didn't I realize it?
We had been in the factory for two years, more or less. Elijah had recovered from his physical wounds, but he kept cold and distant. I saw the pain in Diane's eyes but I could do nothing but give her comfort. It had been a while since Rob had last asked him to play together. On the contrary, after exploring my robotic anatomy  with all the detail and dedication a boy like him could have, he had started to build small machines with the items he found in his explorations throughout the factory. And, to be honest, I let my guard down and I just enjoyed my time with them.
It was dawn on a fresh day, it was spring. It looked like everything was going to be okay as always. After those two years, it seemed that my bosses had forgotten about their three fugitives and their treacherous robot. And it should have been like that, because, what special thing did we have?  A luchador woman, yes, but she had nothing more than her two sons, two little boys who contributed nothing to no-one (at least, for their eyes, Rob's intelligence should have been harnessed as soon as possible). And a defective unit, whose single utility was her pieces.
But it wasn't like that. And I admit that their strategy was impeccable. There weren't new cleaners, better than me. There weren't any security agents nor weapons that would attract attention. There was a boy, and it was enough.
Diane and I were sat down, she was lying against my chest and I hugged her by her shoulders, smelling her sweet hair. We were talking and smiling while, in front of us, Rob was improving Finn, a little robot he had created months before. Elijah was kneeling far away from us, more sombre than usual, and he seemed to be focused on something. Diane woke up suddenly and went closer to him. She sat down by his side and wrapped her arm around his waist. I heard her telling him something that I wasn’t able to understand.
It all was so fast. I saw Elijah make a quick movement and Diane moaned. I saw how a metallic bar crossed her body and how she collapsed to the floor. And I made a mistake. I ran to her, shouting, although I knew she had died immediately and there was nothing I could do for her. I ran over to her body and held it in my arms, calling for her desperately, with all the strength my artificial lungs, or whatever I have instead, allowed me to.
And I had left Rob at the mercy of his brother. It was only a few seconds, I hadn’t been distracted for long but when I turned to them it was already too late. The last thing I saw was Rob's face, terrified, before the shine in his eyes faded.
Elijah turned to me. His impersonal face made me doubt his humanity, and his indifference about the murder of his own family made clear something that I should have known a long time ago: Elijah was dead. He had been dead for two years. We didn't find him, not him.
In theory, cloning is forbidden on human beings. It is used on livestock and crops, of course, but not on humans. And the modification of those human clones which should not exist wasn't even legalised. But let's be honest, technological companies don't care too much about legality, and they have such advanced techniques that it's pretty obvious they never did leave those practices. Elijah's case made it clear: in the hours he had been missing from us, my bosses had time enough to clone him, profiling each detail of his entire body, modifying it to have unbecoming speed and strength for a boy and implanting many cerebral chips to control him even inside the isolated factory. They had tortured him to look like the cleaners would have thought he was dead.
With a more powerful jump than I could have anticipated, he pounced onto my back. He took my neck and started to fidget with it. He wasn't pretending to strangle me, because he knew that it would be no use. No, he was trying to deactivate me. All the cleaners had a button which immobilized us and uncovered another button, so much more important: the one which made our brain self-abort, leaving our head empty. This way, if any unit became violent towards its creators, it was enough to simply press the first bottom to render it completely useless. The second one was to take that defective brain and introduce a new one, benefiting all the materials of the robot. Enterprises don't become rich by throwing away raw material or losing time creating something new.
As I could, I got rid of "Elijah" and approached Rob, just to confirm what I already knew. Regretfully, I took one of my guns from my body and aimed it at my opponent. An image of the true Elijah came to my mind and prevented me from firing. The clone realized it and ran towards me. He struck me in the waist with the same bar that had killed Diane. It still had her blood glistening over the rusty metal.
I fell heavily to the floor, and in a desperate movement I shot at the boy. With superhuman speed, he interposed the bar between the bullet and his head. I understood my only option was to disarm him. In the quickest way I could, I got up and took a pipeline from the floor. I held my guard, waiting for him to attack me. It wasn't too long.
We engaged in a fast and complicated fight. I didn't want to hurt him, even when I knew he wasn't the true Elijah, even after I’d seen how he killed Rob and Diane. I felt like I couldn't injure him. And he didn't want to damage any part of me if he could avoid it, but his interests were different. The metals hit each other; the echo of our fight must be heard uproariously in every corner of the factory. Sunshine which entered by the windows tore rusty reflexes from our weapons.
I don't know how long we were fighting, none of us gave up, until I made another mistake. I got to snatch the bar from his hands, true, but it was a trap. In the moment I did his free hand slid to my neck again. And this time one of his fingers found the button and pressed it. I immediately felt how my entire body lost its energy and my strength left me. I fell heavily to the floor, and as much as I tried to move any part of my body, I couldn't even blink. I had never been immobilized until then and I had never seen anyone do it, and I always thought in that moment the unit also lost its sense. Then I understood that humanity’s cruelty has no limits: cleaners' acts were something as fast and painless as possible, that is to say, as the victim allowed. But the ability to thieve an A.I unit of its brain, who feels and understands in the same way as a human, means that the unit is conscious that its end has come. It's conscious it's going to die and it can do nothing to avoid it. It can just watch, not being able to move.
That was what I was undergoing. The fake Elijah crouched on top of me and took my left arm. I tried to concentrate, to make my mind order my arms and legs to move and wrestle free of him, to get up and continue fighting. But it was useless. I felt all the connections of my body closed to my mind's call. The clone rolled up my jacket's sleeve, looking for the button situated in the internal part of my elbow. He had to press it with his finger so his human fingerprint was detected by my system to work.
And when he had almost reached my articulation, he stopped. I saw how his face acquired a rictus of shock and pain, and how his body collapsed over mine. He was dead.