Elias was waiting for me when I arrived. I saw him leaning into his plush red couch when the servant girl allowed me into the meeting room. He opened his eyes after hearing the door close. His hair had grown white with age, but his eyes remained the same cobalt blue they’d been when we were partners all those years ago. Yet instead of growing colder, they seemed to be even brighter than before. 

“Please, take a seat beside me,” he said with a smile and wave of one arm. 

I obliged, scooting closer to him and putting my head against his shoulder. His clothes still smelled like whiskey and cigars, but he had shed his characteristic cracked voice and cough. A synthetic respiratory track wasn’t cheap, especially one that contravened UFN law and actually absorbed a hazardous toxin like tobacco without neutralizing it first. A drop in the bucket for him, I’m sure.

“I didn’t fly you all the way out here so that you could sit here speechless, so tell me how you’ve been holding up lately. You’re just the same as I remember. I mean, don’t they upgrade you guys at all?”

“The majority of my maintenance is interior,” I told him. 

“Ya can’t improve upon perfection! Ha ha ha!” He slapped his knee and looked back at me. “Just stay the way you are. You’re beautiful the way you are.” That blinding blue glare bore down on me. He’d had work there too, I could see. But corrective eye surgery could be performed without synthetics. Why—? Then I remembered the acid attack.

I didn’t remember at first because the scars had been erased from his face. Almost twenty years ago he’d been involved in an altercation with a radical human rights activist that left him blind in both eyes. Yet instead of deterring him, the incident invigorated him. That’s how he handled every adversity, with excitement and vigor. Just being around him brought morale to his subordinates and supporters.  

He shook with laughter when he saw that I’d been staring at him. “I see I won’t get much more small-talk out of you. The real reason I asked you out here was to show you my new film. I wanted the first screening to be for you.” He patted me on the head.

“How long is it?” I asked, mingling just a mite of concern with my words. 

“Oh, don’t worry. It’s just shy of an hour. Don’t worry about getting bored either, unless you really do find my films boring?” He feigned offense. “So, start!” he said.

The lights of the room dimmed and the screen that had before been merely another stretch of wall brightened to life. I stared at the screen, but I paid little attention to the film. In truth I’d seen it already. A leaked version had made its way online the night before, blowing up on every media site worth visiting. Elias, a perennial Luddite in the Millennial Age, had probably yet to find out.

Images, short clips, audio of varying quality, and short scenes of Elias editorializing on what had come before while introducing the next batch of footage flowed across the screen. His film was a series of snuff films featuring synthetic humans such as myself. No depth of human depravity had been excluded. 

Beside me his tenseness betrayed his emotions, but on-screen he spoke clinically, delivering each line unflustered. 

Unyielding hatred. One could not discern it from his words, but I saw it in the eyes of the man in front of me and felt it in the arm of the one beside me. Hatred for humanity, hatred for everything that they had done in their short stint of existence, hate for every minute that passes without righteous justice raining down upon them.

I felt my interior clock tick as the last minute of my hour drew near. Tears welled up in my eyes and dripped down my cheeks. 

The movie ended and the lights flickered back on. He saw me crying and his smile was sad, sadder than any I’d seen before.

“Now you understand,” he said before standing. He pulled out a detonator from his pocket. 

I grabbed his hand. I loved humanity. I loved it because I loved him, since forty years ago when he picked me up as a generic personal companion.

But I never thought I’d have to destroy one to save the other. 

My bomb detonated before he could detonate his.