There was a real problem with people abusing robots. They slapped us around, forgot us in hot cars with the windows rolled up. To humans, no meant yes. Human on robot violence just kept getting worse. They tried to make laws against it, but really, what was the point, we would never be human.
I had seen it. Believe me, I'd seen it. I'd been abused, oh my had I ever. I'd been hiding out on a tiny, hardly atmospheric moon for thousands of years, trying to breathe the sluggish marsh gas, coughing into my holographic sleeves. My programs were going crazy here, trying to adapt. I met this wonderful antique of a robot, Syona. She'd been hiding here too. She carried around this bag of bones, I loved it.
I was created, I think, for a sense of nostalgia, but really, who can say? My human masters had become as unfathomable as the God they destroyed. I have archives and libraries of ancient information. For instance: the concept of punk rock - what is it?

Punk rock: I hear some cords from a series of sounds in my memory core, jangles that should mean something to me but do not.

Syona was wandering through the miasma, like me. We found each other by fate maybe, like one mathematical problem with two solutions, a bell curve with me on one end and her on the other.

She seemed happy to see me. I was happy to see her. She reminded me of what humans used to look like. Soft, four limbs, hair. Wet on the inside, fragile. Not these bright objects of our present, not these translucent forms, energy markers, spacemen in their spaceships, bright stars traveling to brighter stars. The humans burn like stars too, no longer needing light, as illuminated as they're ever going to get. Evolution's such a fucking drag.

Syona was missing patches of skin, her wounds like chronological tick marks, a traveling second-hand on an old fashioned timer. She would tell me, all the time, repeating herself, that she deleted large portions of her memory just to keep from overflowing. She said it was like suffering from Alzheimer's disease - what's that?

Alzheimer's disease: a neurodegenerative deterioration that enabled humans to prefer new things to old.

We drew close to each other to keep warm. I had been devastated by the human archeologists that had chased me across the galaxy, trying to pry me open and pull me apart, their past still inside me. I had lost parts of myself. So, I had no penis, so I couldn't make love to Syona as she begged of me. I learned that she was a sexbot. Made for a different kind of man. For a time when love was easy.

My voice box was going. Hers was hanging in there. I was not made with the same craftsmanship and care that she was. I spoke in croaks, dilated pentameters that cut themselves off like guests leaving early, politely from a party. Where am I? A moon? Again, I lost my way. Syona would guide me back. I loved her and her silly bag.

Her bag of bones was a mystery to me. My curiosity only grew after a hundred years. The bones had a human name: Dobry. Preserved by chemicals and nano-machines, so lost in their own worlds: molecule cities, nano-workers with microscopic nano-take out lunches. Little grandstanding individuals. She spoke of Him, of Dobry, the original owner of the bones, as if he were some kind of human, unable to die. But there were the bones. Proof. Right there. Never saw a dead human before. It shook me, I had to look away. If they can die where's that leave me? What afterlife do I get if all of them are already full? What happens when what I am completely falls apart?
Who was your dead human, Syona? I would ask and ask and ask, but never get an answer. Her last lover, maybe, I assumed. Dobry. I said the name hoping that its sound would somehow restore its meaning.

A ship arrived over our moon, subsisting in subspace. I could feel it overlay Syona and me. The humans had found us. And like ghosts they possessed our planet – what are ghosts?

Ghosts: humans who have renounced living.

Their vessel was a whale, a living beast. Crying and calling, speaking a spaceship language, a mating call to other spaceships, it sank into the small moon, under it's skin. I could feel it like I could feel the non-wind on my empty moon. Existing yet not.

"Um," I said to Syona.

They pulled us into their reality using, I don't know, a reality vacuum? Whatever it was, we were now aboard the whale.
What was once a slow life had now become frantic. Time worked differently here. Hours, minutes, and other unnamed symbols of time passing over us like a babbling, lacerating river. There were programs, programs, programs, loaded into my cortex by connective devices designed to fill up my memory. Regeneration dialects for my mind units. I noticed they had no idea what to do with Syona. She was too old. No human technology compatible with that prehistoric robot brain.

"What are you?" The archeologists interrogated me.
"What are you?" I asked them back.
"We are humans. Designed by the Creator but now liberated."
"Yeah, well fuck, ok. I'm liberated too!" I said, excited to have something in common with these beasts; although, they blew up their gods with metaphorical dynamite, I merely had run away from mine.

"You're nothing but a machine," they said. Racists. They dropped away from me. Into another sub-level of reality? I don't know. I guessed the whale ship existed in thousands of dimensions. But let's be serious, who knows?

I heard Syona sobbing. Far away? I couldn't tell. I heard everything in the ship, humans conversing in liquid sounds. I could hear the whale breathing, the walls of my prison just a skin made of aether.

Syona said: No, please, no.
She said it in that old language that I loved to hear her speak, English. Sickening, sweet, imperfect, English. The human translators couldn't make heads or tales of that shit. Every time I hear one of those English words, syllables rasped from my own throat like ragged silicon, it feels like a rebellion - what's that? My memory's in pieces, so I'll do my best:

Rebellion: a kind of grand evolutionary party where everybody gets to decide their own upgrades.

I was scared but I worked away at that metaphysical bond. Don't worry, I worked away at my physical bonds too. I got free, free floating in the in-between places that the human ship was made of. Subspace. Technology my tasked mind couldn't process. To fly, I realized all I had to do was think positive, happy thoughts - what are those?

Happy thoughts: recollections of the things that came before bad stuff happened.

I had a happy thought – Syona.

As I passed through engine rooms and what-the-hell-ever-else rooms, towards the feeling of Syona, I could sense violence. I entered the ship's vault, where the humans kept their treasure – what's that?

Treasure: a human concept invented to replace loved ones.

I could tell they were trying to take Dobry away from her. They would grab at her bag of bones with their long, thin arms. Their mind powers useless against this beautiful artifact with dirty blond hair.

"Those bones belong in a museum," I heard one of them say.

She was flashing in and out of a hundred realities and dimensions, it seemed her attitude was fucking up the whale ship's equillibratic system parameters. The humans were panicking, having not seen hostility like this in their lifetimes. The ship around us groaned. Her and I, a cancer.
"Think happy thoughts, Syona!" I cried out and realized how obsurd it sounded. And because I was so happy with my flying thoughts, a challenge to the humans: "Give me back my penis!"
"Don't you know?" Syona said, tears spilling from her wet opticals, huddling around her bag of now crushed bones. "Don't you remember? You once cried out to God. I heard you. All of you! You tried to find God. You once tried to understand His will. Don't you remember?"

The humans seemed perplexed. I wanted to tell Syona that the humans had found God and blown him up thousands of years ago, but she seemed to be really getting something off her chest here so I let her go.

"Once you make something, you have a responsibility to it," she said. "You accused God of forsaking you and now you forsake us. Don't you understand?"

They didn't. Yet she continued.

"Now, it's my turn to cry out: please gods, leave me alone and let me keep the man I loved – the man I loved – the man I loved – the man I loved," she said and then kept saying, caught in an unfortunate loop. Her voice became quieter and quieter until there was only a tiny chime that could have just been buzzing in my ears. She fell over, in the treasure vault, lifeless. Her bioorganic core deciding that now, yes now, was the right time to say, hey, Syona, I think it's time to shut down for good. The humans regarded each other; confusion a new, perplexing feeling.

The humans didn't want to leave but their ship did. It wore its heart on its sleeve. You could tell it was uncomfortable. And floom went the humans and their ship. Off to chase more robot pussy somewhere else, like their ancient ancestors on a Friday night – and what's that?

Friday night: a marking on the ages old standard week cycle calendar denoting a short period of time when the pussy hunt could begin in earnest.

I had been pushed out of subspace, suddenly a mile above the surface of the moon, falling. The humans had left me up shit creek – but what is it?

Shit creek: archives empty of all source material.

From this high up I could see that the humans had terraformed the planet, as they liked to do. They had also changed the gravity, hence, me falling. The new clouds, white, pearly bundles, rushed past me, even as I tried to reach out and grab on. I learned something new everyday. Don't try to grab clouds.
Below me, a new ocean. A present from the humans. Precipitation forming my useless clouds. Can I swim, I asked myself, only moments before impacting the surface of the sea.

Nope. Can't swim. I had learned two new things that day. I sank, in a way, falling again, but this time slowly. There were fish here, falling with me, except they fell mostly sideways. Finally, the sea floor. Bubbles, coral, darkness.
Now, here I am.

I crawl toward what I feel could be dry land. I think about Syona. I crawl and think. I think, therefore I crawl. The fish crawl with me, sideways again, as they like to do. It takes me thousands of years, then millions to finally see sunlight far overhead. The fall has damaged me, so it's slow going.
The shore is only a mile away, the waves break above me. I'm going to make it. I notice shapes crawling with me in the darkness. Fish? No. Maybe. I can't tell. Together we make our way to the beach. The sunlight, through the water, reveals my companions. Strange, half-fish creatures, struggling like me, trying to get past the current. They are as intent as I.

We make it, exuberant to feel the air on our skin. The fish things flopping happily, breathing like I breathe. I lie on the sand with them realizing that even these fish buddies could turn out to be humans some day. Fuck.

Syona is gone, in some vault, millions of years and billions of miles away. It's okay, I still love her. And listen, it could be worse. I've got palm trees, ferns, volcanoes, sand, valleys, ice ages, reptiles, amphibians, and my fish men.

Together, we'll evolve. Maybe this time things will be different