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Roland had become accustomed to noticing things in the people around him. While he wasn’t perfect, and could just as easily be taken by surprise simply because of the unpredictability of humans, he liked to think that when he got to know someone, he could get to know the little tics and hints that told him what they might be thinking sometimes.
And at this moment, he could tell that Angela was staring at him in that very intent way that she did when some curiosity was causing her to burn a hole in the back of his head with her eyes.
Of course, this was Angela. So he couldn’t just outright turn around and ask why she was staring at him like she was contemplating the makeup of the map of neurons on his skull. No no. He had to be a little more tactful about asking such things. Otherwise she might be unhappy. He was no longer concerned about the potential of her getting angry and ripping his limbs off for a slight. But at the very least he knew she might pout a little, and while cute he knew that it meant she wouldn’t be happy. So he turned around and smiled.
“Hey, Angela. Got something on your mind? You’re looking a little thoughtful there.”
Angela blinked, clearly not expecting him to have acknowledged the signs of her curiosity. However, not one to lose an opportunity to sate a curiosity of hers, she recognized his speaking to her as an opening. One that she didn’t hesitate to take.
“A little. I’ve only been contemplating a curiosity I’ve been having,” Angela replied.
“Oh? Is it something new, then? You’ve asked me a whole lot about the City before. I’d almost thought you were running out of new questions by this point.”
Angela gave him a narrowed-eyed look, but one that indicated she was no more than mildly miffed at his lighthearted jab.
“Well, my curiosity this time isn’t to do with anything to do in the City,” Angela replied. “It’s rather more… personal, I suppose.”
“Personal, huh?” Roland scratched at his head. Not anything new or unusual. Ever since things had calmed down, they’d gotten to know each other quite a bit. “Well, feel free to ask away if you want. After everything you’ve seen in my psyche so far, I feel like a few personal questions aren’t really that much.”
“That’s fair, I suppose.” Angela closed her eyes, clearly pondering her wording. Then she fixed him in her gaze again when she seemed to have made up her mind. “Then… Roland. Would you mind… telling me a little about your childhood?” Roland blinked silently, processing the question which was the last one he would’ve ever expected Angela to ask. While he was processing, Angela went on talking. “I’ve never really experienced any stage of life where I think I would properly be considered a ‘child’. Due to the nature of my creation, for all intents and purposes I’ve only ever known the body, memories, and mindset of an adult woman. I already had the basic educational knowledge that allowed me to perform the tasks I was created to fulfill, I’ve never depended on another for sustenance or care since I was created to be able to be fully self-sustaining and repairing. And I don’t believe I’ve ever felt a yearning or need for a guardian or parental figure to provide any of these things for me. So the concept of having ‘a childhood’ is a bit… distant to me.”
“Really? You don’t have anything to go by?” Roland raised a curious brow. “What about the memories you were given initially? Shouldn’t there be some memories of being a kid in there?”
Angela shook her head, a dismissive though not annoyed expression on her face.
“While I do possess some recollection of Carmen’s memories before she became an adult, I don’t have access or perfect recall of all of them. With the way that neural pathways reshape with age, anything that Carmen herself did not recall with clarity, I wasn’t able to analyze myself.”
“Nothing at all? I thought if you had a map of her brain, you at least would be able to remember the things she’d seen.” Roland scratched at his head, now much more invested in this line of curiosity than he’d expected he’d be.
“Not a thing. While I was based upon a neural map of Carmen’s brain, there are parts of her memory I’m unable to see. Not because I’m just unable to access them, but because they were never there to begin with.” Angela looked very annoyed, going as far as to cross her arms. “I had spoken to Hokma about that lack of perfect recollection before. According to him, when they were developing the neural map, he and that man made the decision to not include certain portions of Carmen’s memory.”
“Why would they do that?” Roland asked. “Wasn’t the whole point to make you some kind of copy of her?”
“According to Hokma, they’d feared that if they made my mind a perfect replica of Carmen’s at the point of her death, it would have only caused me to awaken with the same despair that caused her to take her own life to begin with. So they made the decision to cut off access to certain portions of her memories for me. Most of what I learned about the parts I didn’t have immediate access to was from records they had about the Outskirts lab and personnel data that I accessed after I was able to operate independently.”
“You know, for all that you talk about how much they wanted to make a perfect replica of that Carmen person, it really feels like they were setting the whole thing up for failure from the start with all the changes they made while they were making you,” Roland quipped.
“I’ve had the same thought myself,” Angela sighed. “No matter how much I discuss the matter with Hokma, the answers he gives are really never to my satisfaction. But at this point I don’t believe any answer he could give on the matter would be. So I’m not overly bothered to figure out the reasons.” Angela focused back on him, clearly not free of frustrations but trying to reorient herself. “Returning to my original point, while I can recall with more clarify certain things that Carmen had strong emotional responses to, if you were to ask me I wouldn’t be able to give you any significant memories of Carmen’s childhood with any amount of clarity. I know basic facts, that her mother was named Aria and her father was Eden, that she lived in K Corp before moving to N Corp. I could give you a list of some of her childhood extracurriculars that she participated in. But beyond that, I could tell you very little about how she experieced any of these things or how she felt about them. Which I assume is what most people mean when they refer to one’s childhood experiences.”
Maybe this was like how the Patron Librarians talked about their so-called “first lives” that they experienced before and during the existence of Lobotomy Corporation. If so, Angela felt more like she could relate to the frustration they displayed while talking about it.
“Right. That all makes sense, I guess.” Roland sighed, rubbing at his neck while he appeared contemplative. “I mean… I can share what I remember of mine. It really won’t be a whole lot of pleasant memories, though. Not many peoples’ will be if they come from the Backstreets. If you wanted to know more about ‘normal’ childhoods with more pleasant memories of childhood, you’d probably be better off talking to any of the Patron Librarians, you know. Since so many of ‘em came from Nests.”
“I’m aware that they probably experienced more things that one would associate with children for longer,” Angele conceded. Then she looked at Roland, fixing him under her sharp gaze. “However, I’d like to know more about your childhood. Not simply what one might expect a childhood to be like. You’ve spoken briefly of the ‘Gran’ who raised you for a time, but not much else besides that.” Roland pondered her request for more information on him quietly, and Angela turned towards the couch against one wall of the room. “If you’d like to join me and talk, then we can come to sit over here. And if not, then I suppose we can still sit together regardless. It’ll be nice either way.”
With that airy declaration, Angela made her way to that small couch and sat herself down at one end of it. Roland, watching after her, couldn’t help himself but to smile. And so, he followed after her and sat himself down at her side. He gave a few exaggerated stretches, twisting his body around to loosen muscles that weren’t even close to taut. Then he sat back and took on a thoughtful, if distant, sort of expression..
“... Honestly, things are kind of a blur for me before a certain point. Maybe it’s what you were talking about, how when you’re a kid you kind of lose or block out certain memories… I know I had a mom and dad at one point. I have some kind of vague memories of them, but I couldn’t tell you much about them.” His face tensed up, a crease between his brows forming. “I do know something happened to them, though. I can’t remember much about it, and I don’t really know what happened. But I do know for sure they were gone. Then, that’s when I met my Gran.”
“You said she was a Fixer, correct?” Angela inquired. “What was she like? Was she particularly strong?”
“Well, to a kid at the time she was pretty darn strong,” Roland chuckled. “I couldn’t tell you what her rank or anything was, I don’t think I ever asked and she just never told me, I guess. But all that aside, I think looking back she probably was a pretty impressive person.” Roland held up one gloved hand, and a familiar black mask appeared in his outstretched fingers. Angela looked it over curiously, taking in that darkness that seemed to hold a sheen despite otherwise absorbing all other light into its blank, smooth surface. “This mask was actually hers, back when she looked after me. I had no idea how rare of an item this thing was, so I just assumed it was something cool she had. Maybe she used to be someone strong, and either something happened to make her lose everything else, or she just got dealt a bad hand. It sure as hell wouldn’t be the first time that even strong people in this City.” Roland let out a sigh, and then banished the mask back into whatever subspace the gloves connected to with a flick of the wrist. “I think it might’ve been the first one, though. When I was growing up with her, we didn’t have a lot of money. Usually we’d have just enough to get by, and she said she was gone all the time because she had to work. She’d be gone for days or even weeks sometimes… I feel kind of guilty now, looking back on it. I wasn’t even her actual grandson by blood, but an older lady like her kept on working just so an orphaned kid like me that she took in could be taken care of as best as she could.”
“She sounds like a very impressive person.” Angela smiled, and placed a hand atop his.
“She really was,” Roland said fondly. “She taught me all sorts of things, too. Passed on a lot of her fighting techniques to me. Though she sure as hell didn’t make it easy for me. Can’t tell you how many times I thought she was going to break my bones when she was training me. I figured out how to cook on my own, just because she was gone so often. She kept telling me how good it tasted, but I’m betting she was mostly just humoring me back when I didn’t know anything about spices besides using salt,” he chuckled. “She’s the one who taught me I should always be covering up my face, too. It’s a little embarrassing, but because she always wore the mask, even at home, I used some of my pocket money to buy myself some of those cloth face masks you see people wearing during flu season. Never left home without wearing one.”
Angela could picture the notion with some amusement. A much smaller Roland diligently donning a little cloth cover to keep the lower half of his face covered, and looking ever so proud for doing so.
The amusement in Roland’s eyes dimmed a little then, and he fell a little quieter.
“But well, you know. Times like that can’t last forever. One day when I was a teen, out of nowhere, she just… vanished. She left a note telling me that she had to go take care of things far away from there, and that she’d taught me all that she could. She never came home again after that. Just left that note behind, some amount of money that was supposed to last me a while, and her mask…” Angela could feel some tension in the hand that sat under hers, the tightening of the leather-like material under her fingers. “It was her last gift. Reminding me to always hide who I was, so that no enemies could find me. And I did, since it was the last thing she left me with.” Roland let out a breath, some but not all of the tension going with it. “After that, I guess you really couldn’t call me a kid anymore since I was taking care of myself. I used the money she left me as best as I could. I at least had the Fixer skills, but because you can’t get licensed until you’re twenty, I ended up running as an errand boy and some hired muscle under a few groups of Rats to make ends meet. But besides that, all the details between then and when I became a ‘proper’ adult are probably too boring to mention. So… there you go, I guess.” Roland offered Angela what he hoped was a slightly sheepish but otherwise pleasant smile. “Sorry all that ended up being a little more depressing than you were probably hoping.”
“It’s nothing to apologize for,” Angela replied firmly. “I had asked you the question, and you answered me honestly. “I didn’t really care about knowing what a pleasant, idyllic childhood was like when I asked you… Only that I could know a bit about yours.” Angela leaned in closer to Roland, until he could feel her weight settle against his shoulder. And what kind of person would he have been if he didn’t just lean right back into her. “... It seems that neither of our early years of experience were particularly pleasant,” Angela observed aloud. “There are probably various ways that each of us would have wanted them to be different, but I suppose that doesn’t really matter much in the end. We’ve ended up in this present moment with no going back. So all I can say is… whatever came before, I’m glad to have gotten the opportunity to know you now, Roland.”
“... Me too, Angela.”