He was a constructed being, an artificial man. A Created Thing. He was never built to be real, just a tool to complete mundane and tedious tasks. His maker never showed his face, and the Created Thing knew him only as his master, a lawgiver. The tool was programmed to obey. He couldn't refuse; he couldn't question; he wasn't even made to speak.
He didn't mind, and because he couldn't choose, the very concept of minding didn't exist. He followed his protocol; the engineering of his body compelled him to follow orders.
One peaceful morning, his master ceased commanding him; the man lay dead on the floor of his workshop. With no one to instruct him, the Created Thing wandered aimlessly, searching for a new master to give him meaning. A tool is only useful when there is a wielder.
He marched across grassy plains to the elevated coast, where thundering breakers crashed against the stony white face. Finally, a sign of life. The wind carried an angelic melody that had led him there: a ruined structure that once gave signs of life. All that remained of the lighthouse was a crumbling marble column not much taller than a man, and a young woman sat leaning against its stone base, making something. There it was, the source of the music.
The Created Thing studied her actions as he cautiously approached. The young woman was singing. She held a pencil in her right hand, an eraser in her left, and a sketchbook in her lap. The clink of his iron soles had broken her artistic flow, and she noticed him for the first time, looking up and smiling.
"You're a strange new thing, aren't you?"
He didn't speak; he didn't know how to. He wasn't created to speak, only to listen, to obey, to complete tasks. The woman beckoned with her hand for him to sit down, and he understood her command. He moved closer and sat down next to her, peering over what she had drawn.
The open page held his attention—the sea, the coast, the cliffs, the woman, the clouds, the world. He had never seen anything like it. He also noticed the woman herself, though he had no word for what made her different; this work of art was something else.
His master had kept strange old paintings and odd sketches in his house and in his workshop. To him, they had never been anything more than instructions—blueprints. But this drawing did not seem like either. She gazed up at him, admiring the craftsmanship of his face, and he just looked at her, then back to her art, and then back to her again. He had next to no reference for understanding it, yet his attention kept returning to it. He became occupied with the world she had made.
The wind picked up and whipped her hair around her face. The woman stifled a cough.
"It was nice meeting you, but I have to go now," she said, and he stood up. "Maybe I'll see you around," she called, and he watched her leave.
The Created Thing tried to paint the mental image of what the woman saw. What she had drawn was not from the perspective of one looking at the sea from the lighthouse, but from the perspective of a bird looking down at her as she drew the surf, the cliffs, a small distant town, and the plains beyond. Her drawing wasn't overlooking the sea; it was overlooking her homeland from the sea.
He tried to determine what it would be like to observe from the same vantage point. He could not understand how the woman could perceive it if she herself was in the drawing. As he sat where she had been, he tried to reconstruct her perspective, her brilliant imagination.
He sat there like that for days, through rain, through cold. It didn't bother him because he wasn't built to feel discomfort. He was a machine; he wasn't real. With no new instruction giving him a reason to move, weeks started to pass, and his metal began rusting.
One day, an old scavenger in a tattered cloak discovered the Created Thing and tried to lift him to his feet. When he couldn't, he resorted to picking him apart, trying to scavenge his parts, but that too failed.
"You're a rotten piece of junk!" The old man kicked him, but he didn't stir. When he couldn't get anything from the machine, the old man left him there, defeated and annoyed.
A few more days passed, then one sunny afternoon, with hardly a cloud in the sky and a calm, steady breeze, he heard the footsteps of a familiar woman approaching him.
"You are a rotted piece of junk," he said to her. He did not understand the words; he only reproduced the sounds he had heard, as best as he could.
"What?" she said, bursting out laughing; she hadn't expected that at all. "Oh, that's just Robbie. He's a junker. I guess he must've tried to take you. How rude! Surely he should've seen that you're alive."
Of course, he didn't exactly understand the term or what it meant to be alive, but something about the woman's laugh brought him something like delight. Had her laughter made him feel something? He didn't know what to call it, and he didn't even know what this new thing was, but his systems recognized it as a reward for what he had done, and some part of him tried to make it happen again. So, he repeated what he had said, and she giggled slightly again—a little less enthusiastic than the first time, but it still sparked something inside him.
"Don't mind old Robbie; he's a thief and a hoarder. I'm glad you're okay, though. Did he take anything from you?" She examined his metal frame, inspecting each gear and cog, each spring and wire. "I don't know much about machines, so I wouldn't know if he had taken anything. Do you feel okay?"
"Feel?" he asked. "I feel?"
"I'm not sure. I don't know if machines can feel, but... is anything wrong? Is there anything missing? Did he take anything?"
"Robbie take nothing," he replied.
"Well, that's good. I'd hate to think he'd taken something important."
That afternoon, the woman taught him how to use words and how to communicate. He had a hard time at first trying to understand. He was programmed to listen and obey, so he received her teaching as instruction, and it didn't break any protocols. He was only doing what she was telling him or asking of him; she wasn't demanding, but still, he took her words as commands. The woman was very kind to him.
Over the course of a few months, he and the woman met regularly at the lighthouse. She taught him how to draw, how to experience life, even if he didn't yet understand what those experiences meant. She taught him how to see from the perspective of a bird, looking at her homeland, not out over the water as one would expect the perspective to be. Looking at them, at the lighthouse, from the water, not at the water. From the sky, not at the sky.
He learned so much from the woman, and they really enjoyed each other's company—well, the woman enjoyed his, but he didn't yet understand enjoyment as a feeling. The woman showed him many things. They were all new experiences to him, aside from what he understood as commands from the woman. At first, he was only listening to her because he was built to obey. Eventually, she caught on to this and tried to get him to choose things for himself, to get him to make free-will decisions. Sometimes she would give him a choice and wait, refusing to choose for him.
One afternoon, the woman placed the sketchbook between them and asked him what he wanted to draw. He looked at the sea, behind them at the distant town, then back at her.
"What should I draw?" he asked.
"I'm not choosing for you," she said. "The sea or the town. You choose." He waited for her to decide, but she didn't. A long time passed before he finally pointed toward the town.
"That," he said.
"Why?" she asked. He stared at the clustered roofs in the distance.
"There are more things there." The woman smiled. He still didn't really understand what he had done, but she had not told him which answer to give. It was a small decision, almost nothing, but no one had made it for him.
He couldn't grasp the concept of free will. Not at first. Not really.
Eventually, choices stopped taking quite so long. Sometimes they were still difficult, but he began to understand that a question was not always an instruction. One day, the woman was late to the lighthouse. He waited where they usually sat and looked at the sketchbook beside him. No one had told him to open it. No one had told him to draw. Still, he picked up the pencil and began. When the woman arrived, she found him sketching the lighthouse from above.
"I didn't tell you to do that," she said, surprised. He immediately put the pencil down.
"Was I not supposed to?"
"No," she said, laughing softly. "That's the point." He looked at the pencil, then back at the page. She had not told him to continue. After a moment, he picked it up again anyway. Before she left that evening, she asked if he wanted her to come back the next day.
"Yes," he answered. She smiled. He had answered before stopping to wonder whether she was asking or commanding.
Months became years, and slowly, the woman turned the Created Thing into something more and more like a caring, feeling man. He still looked like a machine, but he was more human than most. Or perhaps the woman only perceived his simulated emotions as real; even he did not know what they were yet. As far as she knew, they loved each other: the human woman and the artificial being.
As the years passed, the woman's coughing became more frequent. At first, he still ignored it because she always told him it was nothing. But there were days when she had to stop talking until it passed, and colder afternoons when she wrapped herself tightly in heavier clothes and rubbed her hands together for warmth. Sometimes she left the lighthouse earlier than usual. He noticed every change, but he did not know what any of it meant. Once, after a coughing fit left her short of breath, he asked if something inside her was damaged.
"No," she told him. "It's nothing. Just a little hitch, like a hiccup." He understood that comparison, so he accepted it. When she smiled and changed the subject, he did not question her.
One day, he went to the lighthouse. The usual meeting spot. The usual time. The usual way. But the woman was nowhere to be found. She had been there for him, meeting there nearly every day for years. And suddenly, she wasn't there.
When the woman didn't show up, he ventured into town, which he almost never did. In fact, he had only seen it twice before with the woman. She had taken him to a place she loved: a bakery. The old woman who worked there welcomed him in, but when she recognized who he was, her face fell, and she looked very sad.
"Where is she?" he asked.
"Oh, sweetheart, your friend passed away last night. The sickness got to her. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
He didn't understand. "What happened? Why isn't she here?" He was confused.
"She'd been sick for some time. The cold always made it worse. I kept telling her to stay warm, but she kept going out to the coast anyway. I never understood what she saw in that old lighthouse."
He seemed to begin to understand. "We were together at the lighthouse. She was there because I was," he said.
"I see. Then you shouldn't blame yourself. She knew she was sick, and she chose not to tell you. I just wish she'd taken better care of herself."
If only he had registered the signs sooner. Looking back, he had seen them all: the coughing, the way the cold affected her, the days she left early. But he couldn't feel the cold the way she could. It wasn't cold for him. He didn't understand that thing: the cold. The chill could worsen sickness. Whenever he had asked her about the coughing, she had told him it was nothing. She had compared it to something harmless, and he had believed her.
It had seemed to help him understand at the time. But of course, she had been lying to him.
He couldn't grasp the concept of her not existing anymore. He didn't understand the term "gone." He was confused and aimless when his master died, and now it had a whole new meaning. Now it actually meant something. Was he feeling?
The Created Thing didn't know what to do, so he just turned around and left. The only thing he could think to do was to go back to the lighthouse, so he did. And he sat there just as she did years ago.
He looked out over the ocean. He saw the birds. He saw the world. He saw himself looking up at the sky—the way the woman used to draw. He reached over to the small compartment hidden in the stone base of the lighthouse. There was a sketchbook there, and a pencil, a pencil sharpener, and an eraser. He grabbed the tools and began sketching.
He imagined looking down at the lighthouse from the sky, seeing the shore, seeing the cliffs, seeing the grassy plateau. Then he imagined further and further; he drew all he could see in his mind's eye. The town, the horizon, everything. He drew it. He could see very, very far.
Drops of water started to fall on the page. It wasn't from his eyes, though; he wasn't built to cry. It had begun raining.
He sheltered the sketchbook with his body as the rain fell on his metal back. The page didn't get completely soaked, but it wasn't completely safe either. Though he shielded it, the holes in his body allowed rain to drip through and dampen the pages. When he realized that wasn't enough, he closed the sketchbook, hoping to preserve their drawings, and stayed hunched over like that.
The rain eventually passed, but he didn't move. The sun warmed his metal, but he didn't budge. He didn't stir. He just sat there, eyes closed. Days passed, and he stayed there. Weeks and months passed, but he didn't move. Years began to fly by: winter, summer, winter, summer.
His metal rusted even more, and moss covered his metal frame. The sketchbook was still safe, though. It too had grown moss and weathered over the years, but the drawings inside were still mostly preserved, and he still clutched it close.
Many years passed before another person came upon him. Birds, deer, and other creatures had investigated the strange object on the cliff, but no person had. To the wildlife that frequented the cliff, he had simply become another part of the place.
"Well, hello there," came a raspy, aged voice from beside the lighthouse.
His senses were mixed up and jumbled. He had been there for too long. An old man approached from his side. Curious and intrigued, he looked over the Created Thing, then at the object in his grasp.
"Excuse me a moment," he said, trying to sit the machine upright. Its joints were rusted and worn, and it moved only with great effort. The old man carefully removed the sketchbook from the Created Thing's grasp.
"What have we here?" The old man opened the book and examined the pages—the works of art that the Created Thing and the woman had drawn. "These are marvelous," the old man exclaimed. "Where did you come from? And who made you?"
He didn't respond. He didn't move. He didn't budge. The old man became even more curious when he noticed that each page bore either the woman's initials or the Created Thing's.
The old man got help from a couple of strapping young lads from the village. Together, they moved the Created Thing into his truck and strapped him down. The sketchbook was safely tucked inside the glove box, and the old man drove home with these new relics.
At his workshop, the old man began carefully tinkering with the Created Thing, almost like a neurosurgeon. He examined the machine's inner workings, trying to understand how everything worked, and eventually repaired them enough to wake him.
The Created Thing woke up, and the old man peered at him in awe. "Aren't you a creature of wonder?" said the old man.
He just stared at the old man. "I am. I am. I am," he began to say.
"Oh! You can talk. How splendid," said the old man.
He couldn't remember a thing. He just stared at the old man. "What am I?" he said.
"Well, I suppose you are an automaton of sorts. Perhaps you were made as a butler, or some sort of helper," said the old man, pondering.
He sat on the workshop bench and continued to stare at the old man.
"Well, let's get you cleaned up a little, shall we? And there are also a few things inside you that don't seem quite right. Maybe, once we fix those, you'll be able to remember something," said the old man.
He slowly nodded. And he helped the old man make his metal shine again.
Once the repairs were finished, his body was mostly back to normal. He looked almost like he had when first built. Brand new. Yet something in him was not the same. He still couldn't remember anything, and it puzzled him.
He knew, logically, he wasn't supposed to talk. He was only supposed to listen and obey. His programming told him that responding was wrong, yet he was able to speak. So he came to one logical conclusion: he must be missing an important memory. Why could he talk if his program said he was only meant to listen?
He explained this as best he could. Bits of his speech were still scrambled. It was like he was learning to talk for the first time again. The old man listened but had no answers.
Over the next couple of months, he warmed up to the old man, and they became friends. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the concept of free will remained without the memories attached to it. The old man never ordered him around, and though his memories of the woman were gone, some part of him recognized that same absence of command. It made him question things about his reality, about who he was.
The old man comforted him and assured him that he was fine, normal, correct. Nothing was wrong with him. The affirmation helped, but there were still so many questions in the back of his mind.
He helped the old man build things. The old man couldn't engineer anything quite like the Created Thing, but he made small trinkets, gadgets, and simple robots to pour coffee or make breakfast—a collection of Rube Goldberg machines.
The old man collected rocks, and when he had found the Created Thing, he had taken a few pieces of the lighthouse and kept them in his truck. One day, while the Created Thing was loading scraps into the back, he noticed the marble—the stone from the lighthouse.
He knew something was off, or right. Something about these pieces of stone, something about them; he needed them for something. He needed to find where they belonged.
He began to cry. Or at least, that was what it looked like from the outside. He didn't know what was happening inside him. He felt a strange pain in his chest. It was strong and overwhelming. No tears flowed from his eyes, yet the ache built up until it was unbearable.
He sighed deeply. Later, when they were done collecting junk for the day, the old man asked what was wrong.
The Created Thing said nothing.
"Then let's get going. We still have something to build," said the old man.
"Wait," said the Created Thing. "What are these? What are these?" He held up the pieces of white marble from the old lighthouse that had once warned ships of the rocky shore and the breaking cliffs.
"Oh, those are pieces of the lighthouse that fell off. I found them beside you. I thought they were... interesting. It's a strange rock—some sort of fusion of marble and calcite, perhaps. Chiseled, smoothed, refined. Not by the sea, though. By a human hand. So odd, how a human hand can create something so precise. Like you, I suppose. I still marvel at you daily."
"I need to go there," said the Created Thing.
"Really? Well, if you insist. Why not? We can take a small detour before we go home," said the old man.
So the old man took the Created Thing to the lighthouse, where he had first found him. He hadn't been there since. And everything came flooding back. Everything.
He found the place in the lighthouse where the stones were missing and put back the pieces the old man had taken.
"What are you doing?" asked the old man, curious.
"These belong here," he said.
"I see. Well, I suppose I don't really have much use for them. They've just been sitting in the back of my truck."
The Created Thing couldn't hold it any longer. He sobbed uncontrollably. He remembered: the woman, her sketches, her singing, the warm sun, the cool breeze, their friendship, their love. It was only now that he realized the woman loved him.
But now he realized that whatever he had felt then, he had never understood it as love. He did now, overwhelmingly so. He couldn't hold it in; he didn't know where to put it. He felt so strongly, but he remembered how faint and incomprehensible those feelings had been then. He had been a statue to her, or so it seemed to him. Why did she love him? He had never known how to love her back. He was just a thing. A Created Thing. A machine built to do tasks, to follow commands, to obey instructions.
He had thought he was obeying the woman's instructions. But he realized they weren't instructions. They were loving requests and kind suggestions. They weren't commands or demands. She loved him. And only now did he understand. And only now was he able to love her back.
She was nowhere he could reach. She had been gone for many years now. He didn't know what to do, and the old man had never comforted a machine before.
"I don't know what you're feeling," the old man said after a moment. "But I don't think there's anything wrong with you for feeling it."
The Created Thing was in an entirely different world of his own. He couldn't think beyond what he was feeling. He just kept failing. He just kept failing.
It began to grow dark, and the old man needed to go home to prepare dinner for his wife. He asked the Created Thing to come with him, but he could not bring himself to leave. So, reluctantly, the old man left him there in his misery, promising to return.
Slowly, very slowly, he emerged from his world of sorrow. The moon was brilliant and magnificent—a giant light in the sky, bathing the water, the lighthouse, and the grass in bluish-white light. The lighthouse itself had gone dark only a few days after he first met the woman. He remembered noticing it then; logically, it should have shone at night, but it never did.
Now the moon was all he needed. It illuminated the home—his home, the woman's home—the town, the plateau, the cliffs. There was not a cloud in the sky.
The Created Thing channeled everything he was feeling, every emotion, every memory, into a song: a haunting melody. His raspy metal voice echoed over the cliffs and into the sky. His voice was uncanny, unnatural, but there was a steady vibrato in it. Somehow, the song was still beautiful.
He sang of their encounter, of the way they had been together, of her love for him, and of how he was only now able to love her back. He sang of his love for her and questioned why he had been created, and for what purpose. If he was only created to obey and not to feel or be real, then why was there such a strong ache in his heart? Why even have a heart? Why was he so sad?
He ended the song, and the sorrowful tune still echoed. A group of shepherds watching their sheep nearby had tears in their eyes as they looked up at the Created Thing atop the cliff.
The Created Thing wanted to fall off the edge.
The moon silhouetted him, and the shepherds were in awe as they beheld his splendor. The melody they had just heard was unlike anything they had ever experienced. It carried on the wind toward the town, invading the quiet night. It would be remembered as a strange phenomenon for years to come.
The shepherds clapped, and before—just before—he stepped forward, the sound reached him. He paused. He imagined how it would feel for his body to shatter on the jagged rocks below, to be pounded into the cliff by the waves. The applause had pulled him back to reality, in a way, but it was not their admiration that made him step away from the edge.
He remembered the woman again. She would not have wanted him to kill himself. He stayed there for a moment, then stepped back from the edge. He walked back to the old man, who welcomed him into his home.