Rone - So So So
Byblis had a crush. The type of crush that embeds itself within the shape of every passing thought. Byblis had experienced this type of crush before, but never a crush with such a strange target. Her robot brother, Caunus, had no idea. The real Caunus had died some years before, when Byblis was only a little girl, at the end of her terrible twos, and all she remembered of that time was that everyone in the house wore black, the curtains were black, and every meal contained some black component: black toast, black rice, black beans. Some years later, an opportunity came to resurrect Caunus by putting his memory into the plain, rigid body of a robot, and the family agreed—it wasn’t an abomination to exhume their dead son, this was just progress. Love, technology, and progress. So Caunus returned, and everyone was overjoyed. Their son, their grandson, their nephew, their brother! Shiny and strong, returned! Byblis, who was thirteen then, asked Caunus so many questions. “You’re my older brother now, but what will happen when I turn nineteen? Will I become the older sibling? Or will you always be older?” Caunus lifted his robot hand to his robot chin and said, “I don’t know.” Byblis loved when he did this. She loved it when he made jokes about getting arthritis in his servos. She loved it when he pretended to shave. She loved it when he talked to her about the future, his future, which was limitless, he said, and probably beyond her understanding. When she later realized that she had fallen in love with her own brother, Byblis decided to take action. She wrote him a long letter, justifying her love, citing past precedent when human and mechanical affection had successfully mingled, and saved it to Caunus’s main memory drive while he was powered down for the night. Upon start-up in the morning, Caunus comprehended his sister’s intentions and saw no alternative but to flee the house, his family, and his confused sister. Byblis spent the rest of her life chasing him down, following every clue, until she died in a hospital in Lebanon. She was offered the chance, on her deathbed, to transfer her memories and desires into a robot body, similar to the operation Caunus had undergone. She opted instead to swear out a warrant for Caunus’s arrest, for the crime of breaking her heart, which, at that time, under the worldwide emotional penal code, was a first-degree felony. Caunus served out his sentence on the Mare Imbrium with as much equanimity as he had shown in his first, abbreviated life.[Buy the So So So EP]