by Albeedo
Bob is an android. The doctors call him Blockhead and they always smile when they say it. He has noticed that the smile looks different when they speak to each other, but whenever he mentions this, they sigh and tell him he is imagining things, and he believes them. For several hundred years he has assisted them in the mountain clinic, helping patients in critical or serious condition. He is proud of the work. It is the only thing he knows how to do. Then a patient arrives whom the doctors argue over for the first time in Bob’s memory — a man restrained in titanium and tungsten, a specimen that surfaces once in millennia. The procedure that follows will hand Bob something no one intended him to have: the ability to feel, the return of capacities that were switched off inside him long ago, and the fragmented soul of a stranger who has already learned what Bob is only beginning to suspect. By nightfall everyone in the complex is dead, including the one man who was ever honest with him. Bob walks out into the snow with a name in his head — Bern — and a freedom he did not choose.
