Chapter Text
The lights came up not all at once, but in reverent stages, as though the universe itself wished to savor the moment of his very arrival.
First, the footlights—warm, low, forgiving. Then the side lamps, catching the edges of chrome and lacquer, gliding every curve of his frame in gold. And finally, the great overhead blaze, an unmerciful sun that washed the set in brilliance so intense it bordered on the holy. It was the sort of light that existed only for stars and gods and those deluded enough to believe themselves both.
Calculon stood at its center.
He had always loved this moment—the breath before the world remembered him. The fraction of a second where the audience had not yet begun to breathe, where even the cameras seemed to lean forward in anticipation. This is where he lived. This is where he was real.
"And fathom, although unto those!" He cried, voice ringing with practiced grandeur, every syllable sharpened to a diamond edge. "It is I, I myself, who adored thee so!"
The line struck it's mark perfectly, resonating across the set with the force of a cathedral bell. He turned, cape sweeping in a flawless arc, aqua optics blazing with artificial anguish. His posture was immaculate: shoulder plates back, chin lifted, chest thrust forward in an intimation of a heart that beat only because the script demanded it.
In his arms lay the bride.
The actress—a fembot, silver plated and delicately jointed—was limp against him, her systems programmed to simulate the shuddering weakness of a dying lover. She clutched at his tunic with trembling slim fingers, optics dimmed to a soft, sorrowful glow.
"Antonio..." Her voice box whispered, carefully modulated to sound fragile, human. "I cannot bear to look upon thy grimaced face, for 'tis all the more tragic to behold."
The line was good. Serviceable. Not extraordinary, but then, very few were when spoken next to Calculon.
His mouthplate started to glow in order to reply.
And the world slipped.
At first it was subtle. A fractional delay in his audio sensors, like the echo of a line arriving a heartbeat too late. The bride's voice smeared, syllables bleeding into one another as if spoken underwater. The light flickered, not visibly, not to the cameras, but to him. A static ripple across his vision, thin as spider silk.
Calculon frowned. Improvisation was the enemy of perfection. He did not approve of distractions.
"Antonio?" The actress prompted, quieter now, confusion bleeding through her performance. "Your line—"
It was when he saw her once more. She stood beyond all the flashy showmanship, half-swallowed by the shadow at the edge of the very set. At first, she appear as a silhouette: narrow waist,familiar stance, the slight cant of a hip that spoke of confidence masquerading as ease. A fembots outline, unmistakable even in sudden darkness. Calculon's processors stuttered, heat spiking through his core as recognition slammed into him with the force of a dropped curtain.
No.
No, that was not—
His breath hitched, a shape, involuntary intake of air through his voice box. His grip loosened. The bride slipped from his arms with a startled cry, her body hitting the stage floor in an undignified clatter of metal and costume jewels.
Calculon staggered back a step, then another, clutching at his chest although something vital were lodged there, something wrong. His clamp hand only met polished casing—but the gesture was instinctive, ancient, learned from centuries of pretending to be alive.
"My...darling?" He whispered.
The word escaped him unbidden, stripped of theatricality. Raw. Private. The silhouette did not once move and the set erupted.
"CUT! CUT, CUT, CUT!"
The director's voice cracked through the haze, sharp and panicked. Footsteps thundered as crew members poured onto the stage, lights flaring brighter still. Someone shouted for a medic. Someone else cursed loudly about insurance. The actress was already sitting up, waving off concern with visible irritation.
But Calculon barely heard any of it. The world has narrowed to a single point. A single figure standing where she had no right to be.
"Sir?" A stagehand called, approaching cautiously. "Calculon, are you all right?"
He did not answer. The silhouette stepped forward, to which only he could hear clicking of magnificent heels. It was just enough for light to kiss her face. Coilette.
Her plating gleamed glamorously foghat grey, unmarred by time or corrosion. Her light yellow optics shone soft and warm, the exact shade he remembered from a hundred stolen glances and one impossible ill-fated engagement. She wore the some pearlescent white dress that she had worn the day she died—lace and filigree, a mockery of graduation draped over mechanical perfection. Her mouthplate seemed to smile at him through red lipstick. Calculon made a sound that was not written in any script.
"I—no," he stammered, voice warping, pitch fluctuating wildly. "This is...'tis but a jest. A rehearsal trick. Some wretched, ill-conceived method—"
"Calculon..." She said gently. It was like his mechanical mind was playing tricks on the actor. The sound of his name in her voice was a blade in between metaphorical ribs.
He lurched forward, ignoring hands that reached for him, the shouted protests of the director. The sets edge loomed behind him, a sheer drop masked by painted scenery and false stars. He did not see it for he could only see her.
"You are dead," he said, desperately, as though stating it firmly enough might make it true again. "I saw thee fall into my dire arms. Eyes not opening as I shouted into the sky at a wedding bells toll. I buried thee in my memory, where thou couldst not haunt me thus."
She appeared to tilt her head, sympathy etched into every delicate movement. "Did you?"
"Yes!" He snapped, then faltered. "I mean—aye. I did. I swore it. I swore upon every stage, every curtain call, every breath of applause that I would not look back."
"And yet," she seemed to murmur, heels clicking closer. The lights did not touch her like they did only mere seconds ago. Instead, they slid around her as if she was not truly present. "Here you are."
The buzzing began then. A low, inconsistent whine at the edge of his audio sensors, rising in pitch until it drowned out the chaos around him. Warning indicators flashed across his vision, translucent overlays that he could not dismiss.
[Power Level: High]
[Emotional Sensors: Fluctuating]
[Cognitive Dissonance Detected]
"No," Calculon whispered again, weaker now. His clamp reached out, trembling. "Sweet Coilette...if thou art a ghost, then haunt me not upon my stage. This place is sacred."
She did not stop him when his hand passed through her. There was no resistance, not even warmth. Only empty air filling a empty space.
Calculon gasped, stumbling backwards as though struck. The buzzing surged, sharp enough to sting. His vision fractured, double images sliding over one another. The set warped, stretching and bending like a painted backdrop seen too close.
"Calculon!" It must have been the director. "Get him down from there!"
He had forgotten the edge. His rectangular foot caught nothing but the open space. For a breathless instance, he hung suspended between two scenes, between realities. He thought, absurdly, of applause. Of bows he refused to take. Of love he had mistaken for a role. Then the world dropped out from under him. He hit the lower platform hard, scratching his gold paint in the process, metal ringing against metal, pain sensors screaming at him through his very system. Someone screamed, perhaps the actress, perhaps a crew member, perhaps him. His optics flickered, dimming as fluid welled into his eye sockets, leaking down his face like counterfeit tears.
Though, through it all, he heard her voice, soft and distance. Something he could not touch but oh was so desperate to touch. Every system screeched at once. His hand twitches, reaching for nothing. "Stay," he begged, the word barely audible, "pray thee, stay..."
But the silhouette was already fading, dissolving into light and static and his own memory. The last thing Calculon saw before darkness claimed him was the stage ceiling rushing up to meet him—bright, unforgiving, and utterly indifferent.
Calculon did not lose consciousness so much as he drifted through its margins, the edges of his awareness fraying first, unraveling strand by strand. The world dimmed unevenly, like a stage light falling mid-performance—one moment glaring, the next stuttering into shadow until even the idea of brightness became theoretical. Sensation retreated inwards.pained dulled into something distant and administrative, acknowledged but not felt, logged somewhere deep within his firewalls as a problem to be addressed later, when the show allowed.
Later was always a lie.
He existed in fragments now. A partial awareness humming beneath the surface of deeper processes, buried under cascading diagnostics and emergency protocols that whispered to one another in languages older than his persona. Somewhere, hands lifted him. Somewhere, gravity reasserted itself. Somewhere, the set returned to being merely a set, stripped of any meaning and myth and love. But Calculon did not follow. He sank instead into the place he had been visiting for weeks.
It had begun subtly, as these things often do. A missed calibration here. A delayed response there. Nothing worth alarming a technician over—nothing that would tarnish his record, his reputation, his dramatic pause image. He had always been meticulous about maintenance. His body was an instrument, his mind a stage, and he permitted no blemishes upon either.
Except exhaustion was not a fault he knew how to repair.
The production schedule for "All My Circuits" had grown punishing in recent months, though no one dared to phrase it as such. The show had been renewed again, and again, and again—its Immortality bound inexorably to his own—and with each renewal came rewrites, reshoots, live appearances, interviews stacked upon interviews. His days were measured in scenes. His nights in preparation. Sleep became optional, then inefficient, then indulgent. He told himself it was merely temporary. He told himself many things. Rest cycles shortened until they were little more than pauses between rehearsals. He would enter standby mode only long enough for surface-level systems to cool, for memory buffers to clear just enough to avoid overflow. Dreams, if they could be called that, bled directly into waking thought. There was no clean division anymore, no curtain separating performance from self. That was when the visions began.
At first, they were mercifully vague: impressions rather than full blown images. A presence felt rather than seen. A phantom weight at his side, just outside the arc of his peripherals. He would turn, sharply, mid-monologue or mid-makeup application, expecting to catch a glimpse of something reflective, something grey—only to find empty air and a mildly alarmed crew member.
He adjusted. He compensated. He told himself that centuries of dramatic training had taught him the danger of indulgence. Actors were prone to excess, after all. To melodrama. To delusion. Calculon was above such weaknesses. The impression sharpened anyway.
They took form in reflective surfaces first: mirrors, polished floors, the curved chrome of stage equipment. He would see her there, not directly, but as a distortion in his own reflection, an absence shaped like a body, a place where light bent incorrectly. He would blink, run a diagnostic check, recalibrate his optics. The anomoly would them vanish. Until the next time.
His processors flagged the occurrences as environmental interference. Stress artifacts. Memory echoes. Acceptable deviations given workload and historical emotional entanglements. He accepted those explanations readily, because they allowed him to continue uninterrupted. What he did not accept, what he could not, was how familiar the sensations were.
The feeling of being watched from just beyond the lights. The ache in his clunky chest plating, precisely where no ache should exist. The sudden, irrational certainty that if he turned to quickly, he might collide with someone who should not be there. Someone he had buried.
Sleep deprivation did strange things to organic minds, he knew that much. Humans hallucinated. They heard voices. They mistook dreams for memory and memory for prophecy. Robots were not immune, not truly anyways. Emotional subroutines, once awakened, did not require rest in the same way logic did. They ran hot, unchecked, bleeding into one another when deprived of structured downtime. And Calculon had never been good at stopping.
The visions intensified as opening night approached. Rehearsals blurred together into a continuous performance loop. Scenes replayed in his mind unbidden, dialogue resurfacing hours before it was ever needed, refusing to release its grip on him. He found himself rehearsing lines he had already performed, delivering soliloquies to empty dressing rooms long after the cameras had shut down. His reflection became an audience that did not applaud. Sometimes, more often than he cared to admit, he found himself bowing anyway. The presence followed him everywhere. It lingered in the wings, where shadows pooled thickest. It hovered just behind his mark on stage, a fraction of a step too close, forcing him to adjust his blocking by instinct alone. It watched from the darkened rows of the studio during late-night run throughs, sitting perfectly still among empty seats. Always silent. Always waiting.
Calculon did not speak of it. To do so would provide scrutiny, and scrutiny led to concern, and concern led to intervention. Intervention meant delays. Delays meant replacements. Replacements meant obsolescence. He had clawed his way back from irrelevance once or twice already; he did not permit himself to do so again over something so trivial as fatigue-induced phantoms.
Instead, he worked harder. He extended his preparation routines, refining each gesture until it bordered on obsession. Every movement was rehearsed, catalogued, repeated until it achieved the precise emotional resonance he demanded of himself. He poured his excess energy into his craft, letting it burn there rather than allowing it to fester. The visions did not recede. They adapted. They began to interact with the performances themselves.
During emotionally charged scenes, the air around him would feel denser, as though sound struggled to travel through it. His own smooth voice would echo strangely in his audio receptors, layered with harmonics that did not belong. Stage cues would arrive half a second too late, or too early, throwing off his timing in ways that felt intentional. Once, only once, had he missed a line. The mo.enr stretched impossibly long, silence yawning wide beneath the stage lights. His co-star prompted him gently, eyes flicking with concern, but Calculon barely registered it. He had been staring past her shoulder, transfixed by a familiar shape standing where the set ended and nothing should have existed. That night, he did not enter standby at all.
He remained seated in his dressing room, optics dimmed, replaying recorded footage of his performances at accelerated speeds. He watched himself speak, move, feel, searching for the moment where something had gone wrong. Frame by frame, he dissected his own expressions, hunting for signs of malfunction. He found none. The Calculon on screen was flawless. Which meant the problem existed elsewhere. The next vision came without a warning. No shadow. No reflection. No peripheral tease. She stood before him as clearly as any living being ever had. It was brief, barely a second, but it was complete. Her posture. Her expression. The precise configuration of her servos as she inclined her head. His systems reacted instantly, alarms screaming, emergency processes flooding his awareness, but none of it mattered. Because for that fraction of time, she was there. And she was unchanged.
Time had not touched her. Death had not marked her by harpoon. She existed exactly as she had in his memory, preserved in the amber of regret and longing. The vision vanished as abruptly as it arrived, leaving the acting unit standing alone in the rehearsal space, clamps raised as though to catch someone who had never truly been present. He remained that way for several minutes. After that, the hallucinations no longer confined themselves to waking hours.
They invaded the shallow, fragmented rest cycles he permitted himself, bleeding seamlessly into dream-space. He would find himself onstage again and again, repeating variations of the same scenes, the same tragedies, the same declarations of love and loss. The audience was always empty. The lights always too bright. And she was always there. Sometimes she watched from afar, inscrutable. Sometimes she stood close enough that he could feel the absence of heat where she should have been warm. Sometimes she lay motionless in his arms, replaying a moment that no amount of artifice could undo.
He woke from these cycles with his systems screaming, emotional buffers saturated beyond safe parameters. He ran diagnostics obsessively, searching for corrupted memory sectors, for evidence of external tampering, for anything he could excise. There was nothing. The visions did not originate from a single memory node. They were distributed, woven through his experiential matrix like threads in a tapestry. To remove them would be to unravel himself.
He began to dread the quiet. Noise—constant, relentless noise—became his refuge. Rehearsals, interviews, publicity events, any environment where sensory input overwhelmed his internal processes. Silence gave his mind room to wander, and wandering inevitably led back to her. The show became both sanctuary and torment. Onstage, he was consumed by character, subsumed into narrative. The scripts gave his emotions structure, his pain purpose. Tragedy was expected there. Love was scripted. Loss was temporary, reversible by the next episode, the next retcon, the next improbable resurrection. Offstage, there were no such safeguards. The line between performance and memory thinned until it became permeable. Scenes bled into one another. He found himself responding emotionally to cues that did not exist, delivering lines with an intensity that unsettled his fellow actors. Directors praised his commitment while quietly exchanging worried glances. Calculon mistook their concern for admiration.
By the time opening night arrived, he had not entered a full rest cycle in days. His systems ran hot, power levels elevated far beyond optimal parameters. Emotional subroutines churned continuously, unfiltered by logic or restraint. He existed in a state of near-constant hyperarousal, every sensation amplified, every stimulus charged with unbearable significance. The presence was everywhere now. It followed him onto the stage without hesitation, unbound by physical space or narrative logic. It hovered at the edge of his vision during scenes that had nothing to do with love or loss, intruding upon moments of levity and triumph alike. It watched him from the wings, from the lights, from within his own reflection. It waited. And Calculon—exhausted, unraveling, desperate to believe that art could still save him—stepped into the golden glare of the stage lights and delivered his lines with the fervor of a being who no longer knew where performance ended and truth began. Which was how he came to see her.
Calculon came back online to the low hum of his trailer. The space was smaller than the stage, narrower than the world he had just fallen out of, and it smelled faintly of oil, makeup solvent, and stale applause. The walls were lined with mirrors—too many mirrors—each one reflecting him back at a slightly different angle, each one catching the overhead light in a way that made his optics ache.
He sat up sharply, clamps digging into the vinyl edge of the couch. The motion sent a dull, delayed jolt through his frame, pain registers blooming like afterimages. His head turned instinctively, scanning the room, half-expecting—
Nothing. No silhouette. No dress. No impossible silver gleam in the corner of his vision. Good.
Calculon exhaled slowly, deliberately, the sound a controlled release of pressurized air meant to approximate calm. He straightened his posture at once, smoothing an imaginary wrinkle from his tunic, even though he was no longer wearing it. Old habits. Necessary habits. He glanced at the nearest mirror. The reflection that stared back at him was… acceptable. Minor scuffing along the jawline plating. A smear of stage blood dried dark against the edge of his cheek. One optic dimmer than the other, still recalibrating after the fall. Nothing that couldn’t be polished out. Nothing that justified what had happened.
His memory buffers began to spool, replaying the incident in merciless clarity. The lights. The line. The drop. Her. Calculon's clamps tightened. "No," he muttered, voice low and sharp, as if reprimanding a subordinate. "No, no, no. That will not do." He rose to his feet and crossed the trailer in three long strides, stopping before the largest mirror. He loomed over his own reflection, towering, immaculate even in disarray. A star still. Always a star.
"You knew the scene," he said to himself, accusatory. "A simple exchange. A moment of controlled pathos. Child's play even."
The reflection said nothing. Calculon's green optics narrowed. “And yet thou didst falter,” he continued, slipping unconsciously into archaic cadence. "Thou didst hesitate. Onstage. Before cameras. Before millions."
His clamp shot out without warning. The impact rang through the trailer, metal on metal, sharp and punishing. The force sent him staggering back half a step, pain signals flaring bright and angry across his system. The mirror rattled but did not crack. Calculon hissed through his voice box, clutching the struck plating. "Again," he snarled. He hit himself a second time, harder. "This is what comes of indulgence," he said aloud, pacing now, agitation building like a storm. "Of weakness. Of permitting ghosts to walk unbidden across one's stage."
A third blow. A fourth. Each strike was precise, measured—not a tantrum, but a ritual. Correction through consequence. He had learned long ago that pain, properly administered, could sharpen focus. "Get a grip, Calculon," he snapped. "Thou art not some trembling ingénue. Thou art not a human."
The trailer door slid open with a hydraulic sigh. Calculon froze. A director stood in the doorway—one of the mid-level ones, not important enough to be remembered fondly, not insignificant enough to be ignored. He held a clipboard under one arm and a single sheet of paper in the other. His expression was practiced: regret softened by fatigue, sympathy dulled by repetition. "Calculon," the director said, "you're awake."
Calculon straightened instantly, clamps lowering, posture snapping back into impeccable alignment as though pulled by invisible strings. "Indeed," he replied coolly. "And I trust you are here to inform me that the previous… interruption has been resolved, and that we shall resume filming at once."
The director hesitated. That hesitation told Calculon everything. "No," the man said finally. "I'm afraid not."
Calculon took one step forward. "Then thou art here in error."
The director sighed and entered the trailer, the door sliding shut behind him with a sound far too final for Calculon’s liking. He glanced around the space—at the mirrors, the scattered scripts, the awards mounted carefully along one wall.
"You know this isn't the first time," the director said. "We've covered for you before. The networks been patient. Hell, we've been patient."
Calculon laughed once, sharp and humorless. "Patient? With genius?"
The director extended the paper. "With incidents."
Calculon did not take it. "What is this?" he demanded.
The director swallowed. "Official notice. Termination of contract. Effective immediately."
The word echoed. Termination. Calculon stared at the paper as though it might burst into flames under his gaze. "You cannot be serious," he said softly. Dangerously softly. "This is...this is absurd. A misunderstanding. A minor lapse brought on by overzealous dedication."
"You dropped a co-star," the director said flatly. "You froze onstage. You had to be carried off-set."
"I fell," Calculon snapped. "Due to faulty blocking!"
"And you were talking to someone who wasn't there."
Silence stretched between them, thick and suffocating. Calculon's voice, when he spoke again, was velvet-wrapped steel. "Actors talk to ghosts all the time."
The director's shoulders slumped. "Not like that."
Calculon finally took the paper. His clamps crumpled it slightly despite his effort to remain composed. "You would discard me," he said, incredulous. "After centuries of service? After ratings spikes and award nominations and the very identity of this wretched show being bound to my name?"
The director looked tired. "The show survived your first death. And the second. It'll survive this too."
That did it. Calculon laughed again, louder now, pacing the length of the trailer. "Ah! I see. So that is what this is. A fear of obsolescence projected upon me." He turned sharply. "Tell me sir, who shall replace me? Some fresh-off-the-assembly-line emotive unit with the depth of a puddle and the charisma of a damp rag?"
"That's not—"
"I am All My Circuits," Calculon thundered. "I am its heart, its tragedy , its internal flame! Without me, it is naught but wires and melodrama!"
The director's jaw tightened. "You're done, Calculon."
The words hit harder than any clamp.
"You need to clear out," the director continued. "Security will escort you off the lot."
Calculon stopped pacing. "Escort me?" he repeated slowly.
"Yes."
"I am being removed."
"Yes."
Calculon's options burned bright. "Thou wouldst dare lay hands upon me?"
"Honestly, I'd prefer you left quietly."
Calculon stepped closer, towering, his voice dropping into a low, dangerous register. "I do not leave stages. Stages leave me."
The director took a step back. The trailer door opened again, this time admitting two security units—broad, utilitarian, paint scuffed from years of thankless labor. They did not look impressed. "Calculon," one of them said. "It's time to go."
Calculon turned on them with theatrical fury. "Unhand me, thou clanking oafs! I will not be dragged like some common extra!"
"Sir," the other said, already reaching out.
The next moments blurred together into indignity. Hands on his arms. Grips too tight. His heel caught on the threshold as they forced him forward, sending a scrape of paint along his shin. He protested loudly, floridly, every insult polished to a razor edge.
"Mark this day!" he shouted as they hauled him down the corridor. "Mark it well! For thou hast cast out brilliance in favor of mediocrity!"
Crew members stared. Some whispered. Most looked away. Security pushed him through the studio doors and out into the harsh light of the parking lot, releasing him at last with a shove that sent him stumbling.
"Don't come back," one of them said. The doors shut behind him. Calculon stood there for a long moment, staring at his reflection in the darkened glass. Paint scuffed. Plating dull. Cape gone. Stage gone. Applause absent. He straightened slowly, smoothing his tunic out of habit, then stopped when he realized it was no longer there. Great. He was homeless. His processors raced through possibilities with ruthless efficiency.
Monique. No—too complicated. Too many memories. The human. Brief. Awkward. Ended poorly. Boxy. absolutely not. Each option flickered and died as quickly as it appeared, catalogued and discarded. He had tried them all before, in different variations, different lifetimes. They never lasted. They never understood. The lot stretched out before him, vast and empty, a world that had just decided it no longer needed him. Calculon laughed softly to himself. "Well then," he murmured. "What a spectacular mess."
He had nowhere to go.