Jenga!

[c_macaulay]

Bored to tears, Camilla had gone rummaging in the gift shop to find a game to play. She'd played so much solitaire she was beginning to develop an irrational dislike of some of the face cards. It was there that Mr. Wednesday found her again

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[callmewednesday]

"A boy who can't drown won't be any use to a nymph, wood or water, or to any rusalka. She'll let him go. Might have to drive him off, if what you say is so. Her trap won't work with prey already in it and refusing to leave." Cold comfort seemed a specialty of Wednesday's.

Unless ...

Humans imagined gods around technological forces, and fed them energy, but technology rose and fell rapidly, and with them those gods were forgotten. There had been the great and silent titans of the steam railways, now all gone. Wednesday wasn't inclined to think a robot like Joe or his David could engender a god, no matter how desperate their hopes for one. Wrong kind of energy. Did a machine have a soul?

So he didn't offer that line of speculation.

Camilla narrowed her eyes at Wednesday. Making Joe sad was like kicking a puppy. He couldn't take care of himself, she thought. At the same time ... maybe what Wednesday had said was something Joe needed to hear.

"As long as David's striving to fulfill his programming," she offered, softly, "he can't be real anyway. He would have to move past that, somehow. Break it."

[cuppa_mecha]

Joe was starting to doubt Wednesday's suspicions on what David could have found. It occurred to him that perhaps someone could be too knowledgeable and even the most wise of people could be at a disadvantage when met with another universe with differing rules.

"Do you think," Joe replied with a softness rivaling hers, "that this...move past his programming would have been possible? Do you think he would have given up his primary design to unconditional love for self-preservation?"

Joe gave her a hopeful look, as if Camilla had the power to look through Joe's blue/green eyes and into the ocean to David to find out if he had survived or not. It was, perhaps, the most purely independent question Joe had asked. Ever.

[c_macaulay]

Camilla considered this question. Honestly, from what little Joe had told her of David, she didn't know if his chances were all that good. Her answer, when it came, was careful and quiet.

"I think," she said, being as sincere as she could without sacrificing tact, "that if you can do so, perhaps he could as well."

Wednesday found this exchange more interesting in what it said about Camilla than what it said about Joe or the unknown David. She knows that thing hasn't got a sheep's chance in hell. And she'd be kinder just to say so. She doesn't want to deal with the fallout, does she? She doesn't want to be responsible. He'd met women like her before. Courteous to a fault, but their give-a-shit only went so far.

He liked this in a woman, as mortal women went. It was a core of essential coldness like his own. He could respect that.

He gave Camilla a knowing grin and she bit her lip.

"I've got a handkerchief," he said, chipper.

"I don't think they cry," she shot back.

"Joe, your friend David would have to want to overcome his programming. Do you think he wanted to?" Wednesday laid it on the line.

[cuppa_mecha]

Joe could see Camilla's lie but wasn't angry with it. It was what humans did. They lied to friends to prevent pain. They lied to enemies to cause pain. And they lied to themselves to both prevent and cause pain. An honest human was rare, if they existed at all. He lowered his eyes.

And then he looked up at Wednesday.

"No," he admitted. "If he thinks he's found the Blue Fairy then he'll stay. He'll expire to be nothing more than another piece of debris on the ocean floor."

Joe's large eyes searched the aged man's.

"That's what will happen to David, isn't it, Mr. Wednesday? I've sent the poor boy to his very grave. Trapped in love."

Ever so slightly his eyes squinted. "When God built Adam and Eve in that fateful week in Eden's gates did he ever make such a mistake? Did Adam fall in love with a rock? And when that rock fell down a crevice did he fall down and break his neck? Who's to say that Adam and Eve weren't the second models? And why built a fruit tree if not to be eaten, forbidden or not?"

Without looking away from Wednesday, Joe continued on his epiphany-filled monologue, talking to Camilla.

"I think I've eaten the apple, Camilla. It was bitter and sweet at the same time. It was not red, it was blue. Like melancholy. Like the ocean. Like...the fairy..."

Joe paused. He touched his face. A tear had escaped in the middle of his metaphor.

"I'm leaking! Like I was in the amphibicopter." He rubbed his fingers together spreading the liquid around the tips in curiosity.

[c_macaulay]

Wednesday nodded grimly in answer to Joe's question. No sense in sugarcoating it. "That indeed may very well be what's happened to David. You know, there are some people who don't believe Jehovah made man at all," he commented on Joe's mythological digression, producing a neatly folded handkerchief from his breast pocket and offering it to the 'leaking' mecha.

Camilla, raised a Catholic, and not knowing Wednesday's reasons for preferring certain cosmogonies to others, ignored her Jenga partner, turning to Joe. "You're not leaking, I don't think -- I hope you're not leaking." He seemed to be weeping, silently, except that she wasn't sure whether he was supposed to be able to do that. Probably he was, she supposed by analogy with other secretions she knew he could produce. Still, she looked concerned. "What was the apple you ate, Joe? And how was it blue?"

[cuppa_mecha]

Joe took Wednesday's handkerchief with slight hesitation. He unfolded the tight creases pondered if the hanky had ever been used. He rubbed his face tentatively, inexperienced with the act.

"The apple was knowledge and realization as in Eden. It was blue because all it has cause has been upset."

He chuckled.

"I had told David that I would cause his fairy to blush but I think she has, instead, spread her hue to me. Tell me how that is possible when there is a substantial possibility that she doesn't even exist."

[c_macaulay]

Wednesday grunted. "There's a story for piss-poor shepherds. Knowledge an apple just hanging ripe and ready to be plucked. Pipe dreams and pap. Knowledge is hard-earned and fought for. You buy it with your blood and sweat, and if that's all the coin you have to pay, consider yourself damn lucky. Things other than fruit hang from trees."

Camilla's eyes went a little wide at this, not in astonishment so much as in a wary kind of recognition. Not recognition of what Wednesday was, per se; recognition that he was telling the truth, though, and a truth Camilla herself had learned. "I know," she said to him, simply, aside, before addressing the mecha. "A fairy that doesn't exist can't blush, that's true," she said. "But you exist. Did you want to be the fairy? Give David his wish?"

[cuppa_mecha]

"No," Joe admitted, with a faint smile. "I never desired David to be human nor to earn an orga's love by becoming an orga himself. I wanted to keep him safe but he was headstrong to his fate. The only time we parted ways was when I challenged his Blue Fairy and offered that he stay with me. But we quickly met again. I suppose that was my fate."

Joe thought.

"If robots even have fate. Fate IS a wholly human concept, after all."

[c_macaulay]

"I don't see why anyone should be excluded from fate." Camilla believed in fate, very strongly, maybe more strongly than anything else. She also didn't see much difference between an organic person and a nonorganic one. Joe seemed human enough to her, really.

There might be no being in all the worlds so fate-bound as Mr. Wednesday. "Many a machine of my acquaintance has met its own fate," he rumbled darkly.

[cuppa_mecha]

Joe was about to respond to Camilla when he heard Wednesday's comment. His eyes were immediately trained on him with a swift movement of his head. His eyes nearly overflowed with curiosity, but he didn't say anything.

He wasn't quite sure he wanted to be aware of Wednesday's previous encounters with mechas. He looked down at the currently abandoned Jenga tower and then back to Camilla.

"Is fate not a form of slavery? Programming that can't be undone?"

[c_macaulay]

"There's a lot of literature that deals with just that question," Camilla answered quite seriously. "How much free will do we really have, within the strictures of fate?"

"Perhaps you're all the gods' playthings," said Wednesday with an edgy grin.

Something about that grin made Camilla rise quickly and say, "I think I'm going to go get a drink. Joe, I know you can't drink anything or you'll break, but Mr. Wednesday, would you like anything?"

"Jack Daniels for me," said the old god, still grinning.

[cuppa_mecha]

Curiosity could no longer be with held. It was impressive of Joe to hold off this long.

His new clothes shifted differently than his stiff jacket as he straightened toward Wednesday after Camilla left. He met him with an intense look of interest.

"Have you many encounters with mechanical creatures, Mr. Wednesday?" he asked without any malice.

[callmewednesday]

"You could say that," said Wednesday. "Mechanical creatures and the spirits thereof." What would you really call Media or the technical boy? Not so much a machine as the spiritual manifestation of some technology, an ur-machine.

[cuppa_mecha]

"I get the impression that you aren't particularly fond of mecha. Is there a reason for this?" Joe asked innocently. He had no idea what Wednesday had been through. After all, rebellion against orgas in Joe's world would be unspeakable. Mechas were more wary of humans harming them than the other way around.

[callmewednesday]

There hadn't exactly been a rebellion. What the machine-gods thought they were doing was a long cry from what had actually been going on. But Wednesday wasn't about to go into the details of that little story with anyone here. Wouldn't it be fine if, one day, Mister World showed up in the terminal?

"I wouldn't say fondness is a concept that applies, nor its opposite. I'm what you might call old-school. Don't mistake me, I do appreciate modern conveniences." Outhouses were not a thing Wednesday cared to revisit unless necessary.

[cuppa_mecha]

"Well," the mecha said politely and with a hint of a smile, "I surely hope this won't affect our relationship. I am...an epitome of modern convenience, you could say. Though Camilla has been determined to drive me from this way of thinking."

Though he didn't say it with annoyance, it had admittedly been difficult for Joe to keep track of what he was or wasn't with Camilla around. Being free required much more work than it should have.