Archive of Our Own ^beta

John Robinson had a lot of work to do.

It was hectic, this thing called life. Time seemed like an elusive target he was always chasing. It was forever racing away from him, outrunning him, doing laps around him. He could never catch up.

He was home now—for the first time in a while. He had another place to be soon, another departure looming, and this time in the house with his family was suffering under that heavy shadow. His daughters talked to him like you might talk to a friendly acquaintance who lived somewhere down the block. Lots of upbeat chatter. Small talk. Nothing too personal. No sign of any investment in future conversations.

John didn’t know how to crack the surface. He was best at work-talk. The personal stuff had never been his strong suit. The whole “Dad” thing was like an atrophied muscle, a part of his identity weak and shriveled from disuse.

As for his marriage… Could he even still call himself a husband? Maureen walked briskly past when he tried to hold her and barely acknowledged him at all.

Will was different. Younger. More tender-hearted, maybe, than the rest of them. He only got sad when John left. Never angry. And when John came back, Will was still purely happy. He didn’t hold his absence against him. He was just appreciative of whatever scraps of time with John he could get.

In some ways, that was better. In most ways, it just made John feel worse.

John never worried about being replaced by a machine.

Some of the guys he worked with did. They cast a suspicious eye on any equipment that was too smart. They didn’t like when things changed, when they were asked to do things different than how they’d always done them before.

John prided himself on being good at adjusting to new parameters—he’d spent too much time around Maureen not to be willing to embrace evolving solutions.

Right out of the gate, the robot saved his family in ways John could not.

Maybe that wasn’t so bad when it was doing things like pulling Judy from the ice, impossible, physical feats that no human would ever be expected to match. As a mere mortal of flesh and blood, John couldn’t feel too resentful of the fact that his hands could not produce enough heat to keep everyone from freezing to death during their overnight stay on a glacier.

No, what really got under John’s skin was the robot’s absolute devotion to his son—the fact that it and Will had a seemingly instant, effortless connection. The thing didn’t even speak, and still it seemed to know exactly what Will was thinking or feeling. John had been struggling to decipher the kid for years. At some point or other, he’d come home and found a child he didn’t even recognize, one who couldn’t say enough about volcanic ash and rocket ships and seemed to keep his face hidden behind the open pages of intimidatingly thick books.

The robot was actually like John in at least one fundamental way. It too gave itself completely to its purpose—had a job and was determined to carry it out successfully.

The only difference was that John didn’t have the programming or the luxury to devote himself to a singular goal. And, before they got lost, when he tried to balance everything on his plate, his family was usually the piece that he let slide. They were put on the back burner with promises of Next Christmas and Next Birthday, always banking on a distant vision of the future when he would be and do better and make up for all he’d missed out on before.

But you couldn’t make up lost time. Not really. Time changed things faster than any technology known to man.

As John watched his son hurl a baseball into one of the robot’s mechanical hands, he flinched. The sight itself was painful. The truth was a much-needed slap in the face.

Will might never have shouted or called John names. Might never have admitted how much it hurt him when John took on another lengthy assignment without a stop home after the last one.

But the way his eyes lit up as the robot caught his throw, the way he grinned from ear to ear as the robot returned the ball, it said everything John had never wanted but always needed to hear.