Chapter Text
The lab was buried under the earth, shielded from the busy surface life by slabs of concrete and beams of steel. Warrens of tunnels led to this underground warehouse filled up with wires, chips and labeled bins stacked on high shelves. This had been a forgotten place once, a lapsed lease, a business going under. There’d been no work at all for the Durins to acquire it.
Fifteen years ago, Bofur had taken possession of the back right corner and filled it with the tools of his trade. The faces around him had changed since then, men moving up the ranks or back down them, but he remained ever steady. The work evolved, kept his mind stimulated and his hands busy. Unlike the others, he’d never cared much about the family's larger agendas. He preferred not to know.
Each morning, he journeyed downward with a thermos of coffee in one hand and packed lunch in the other. He went through three doors, each with a different scan to verify identity. The last one was of his own creation, responding only to a few hummed bars of ‘If I Had a Hammer’.
Today, he strode towards his corner, registering the sounds of industry. His newest round of co-workers were usually out late, gone by the time he settled in for the morning. He had never bothered keeping a criminal’s hours, preferring to mime the real world with his comings and goings. It hardly made a difference. He was as far from the real world as it was possible to go, most of the time.
Yesterday’s work waited for him. Propped up on table, the opened torso flickered intermittently with life.
“Good morning,” a woman’s head, mounted on a high pedestal smiled warmly at him.
“Good morning, Elsie. Any calls?”
“You received two calls. One was a wrong number and the other was Gloin, inquiring about your monthly numbers.”
“I sent them, didn’t I?” He set down his lunch.
“No, sir.”
“Damnation. All right. Set a reminder for me at lunch. I’ll get to it then.”
“Yes, sir. No appointments for today. No other reminders scheduled.”
Elsie (LC-19856) was one of his first refurbishments. She’d been an experimental prototype with no standard parts and totally incompatible with current body molds. That had also rendered her unsellable. Bofur had been delighted when he’d been allowed to keep her. Her disconcerting presence was nearly as useful to him as her secretarial services.
The torso on the work bench was from an OF unit that he thought he could match up with a OC head that was mostly up to spec. On the black market, the unit would fetch a few thousand even with the mismatched parts. The OC programming had been topshelf for it’s time. He sank into his work, the careful diligence of piecing back together and stripping back memory to the core programming. It would do no one any good if the unit retained previous information. All of it would get stored on Durin servers just in case it proved useful. Someone else, somewhere else would have to make that decision.
The second level subroutines were giving him trouble, sparking occasionally and threatening to fry out an entire matrix. He had hooked it up to a monitor, parsing through lines of code to weed out what seemed to be a virus. Probably why the poor thing got ditched in the first place. Some people saw everything as disposable. Why bother fixing when you could just get a new one?”
“It’ll be fine, buddy,” Bofur patted the rounded shoulder, “we’ll get you good as new.”
“Can he hear you?” An amused voice cut through the silence and Bofur’s hand slammed down on the keyboard in surprise. “Whoops. Sorry.”
Bofur turned to face the intruder and found Kili staring at him. Fili stood a few paces behind him, a wary silent shadow. The brothers, these crown princes, had taken control of the facility nearly a year ago and Bofur still wasn’t used to them. They wore their cybernetics with a raw pride that went against every current trend. Kili’s rough hewn right eye was a piercing blue light in the basement's gloom. It was paired with a metal plate that jutted halfway down his cheek and matched Fili’s left arm, a sleek metal appendage that looked more natural than his real right one. There was rumored to be more under their bulky sweatshirts and loose pants, circuitry that moved blood more efficiently and nets of delicate wiring weaved over muscle that gave them unnatural strength. Rumor wasn't to be trusted, of course, but Bofur kept wary eyes on them nonetheless.
“Hello, boys,” Bofur crossed his arms over his chest. “What can I do for you?”
“Just the usual,” Kili looked Bofur dead on, too used to the unsettling power of his gaze. Behind him, Fili’s eyes darted everywhere, waiting for danger. “We’ve got a powerful bit of salvage.”
“Leave it then and I’ll take a look at it.”
“I think you’ll want to see it now,” a smile curved over Kili’s teeth, revealing the replaced left canine. It was standard issue for Durins, but most of them hid it in sheathing false enamel. Fili’s supposedly matched his brother’s, but Bofur had never seen the boy smile to confirm it. “This is...special.”
“Alright,” Bofur lifted his eyebrows. “Impress me.”
The boys exchanged a wordless look. Bofur had given up on trying to interpret their communications only a few weeks after they’d taken over. They slipped away, leaving him to wonder in silence until they returned, their footsteps heavy now, thudding over the concrete floor.
His first thought was that they’d killed someone. The body hung limp in their arms, the head hanging low. It was only when they swung it up onto the table that he could make out the faint betrayals of artificial skin. There was a dryness to silicon and the unmistakable pathways, always a shade paler than the skin around them even when unlit.
“Where did you find this?” He demanded, leaning in to inspect the face. There were a thousand tiny details crafted into it, some of them even subtle signs of aging. “This is a one off. Someone with a lot of money had this made up.”
“Found it,” Kili said blandly in a way that certainly meant bloody theft. “Does it matter?”
“It matters because there’s no fucking way I can make it market-ready,” he pried open an eyelid, stared into the iris. The color was beautiful, an interweave that shifted with the light from blue to green to brown.
“What? C’mon. It’s got to be worth a fortune,” Kili protested. "It's nearly intact."
“Sure. A hundred grand, easy, but like I said, it’s all custom. I can’t just file off a few serial numbers and make it good. Someone is missing this thing right now and if they have the kind of money it takes to make it, they have the kind of money it takes to find it.”
“Shit,” Kili’s dirty hand touched the robot’s cheek with unexpected gentleness, “I guess I should have known that. But he was just....lying there. Turned off. Didn't look like anyone had taken care of him in a long time.”
Surprised, Bofur studied Kili’s face and found compassion there. Kili caught him and snatched his hand back as if it were on fire.
“I can work on him,” Bofur offered before he could think it through. “He looks like he’s in good condition. It wouldn’t take long. And we could probably use an assistant down here.”
There was a soft pained sound. It took a long moment for Bofur to pin it to Fili. There was no expression on his face, lips sealed closed as usual, but the sound was definitely from him. For the first time, Bofur actually saw how young that face was, how vulnerable. And Kili was the younger brother. He called them boys, but he thought of them as soldiers. As men. As frightening vehicles of potential violence. But they really were boys. Boys bringing him a broken toy, salvaged from someone else’s carelessness.
“Yeah,” Kili croaked, not turning to face his brother, “yeah, you should do that. Fix him up.”
“You got it,” he tried to sound nonchalant.
They stole away when he bent over the synthetic again. Their silence at least, couldn't be pinned on a synthetic. It seemed as natural to them as breathing.
“Just us then,” Bofur sighed, running his fingers over the face plate until it came away to reveal the network beneath. “Let’s see what you’re made of.”
It took some doing finding a monitor hookup. Whoever had created the synthetic had gone out of their way to make it appear functionally human. It had features he’d never seen before like a working digestive system and tear ducts. A synthetic that could cry.
“Why would someone do that to you?” He pulled away fabricated skin, marveling at the individual hairs picked out on the forearms.
There were other oddities. The height for one. Even lying down, it was clear the synthetic was barely over five feet tall. The hair, for another. The curly softness resisted Bofur’s attempts to pull it back, shielding the complicated workings with unnatural ferocity. It had been designed to look non-threatening. It was still dressed, neatly and expensively though that was less unusual. The rich could afford to waste money on things like a synthetic's clothing.
It didn’t surprise Bofur at all when he finally loosened the chest piece and found ‘DRN-BLB-1’ inscribed where it mattered.
“Synthetic Soul,” he muttered, “Behold the death of God.”
“Sir,” Elsie sprang online, “the monthly numbers.”
“Right,” he blinked rapidly, coming up from a swamp of concentration. “Right.”
He did the report too quickly, probably making errors that would bring Gloin down around his ears. As he worked, he ate and drank trying to eliminate all possible distractions at once. Then he returned the glorious thing on his table, this miracle made of zeros and ones. So lost was he in the beauty of it, the elegant twist of code that gave birth to intuition instead of cold reason, that he almost missed the signs of damage. A thin crack in a strut that hid a rupture. Someone had taken a blunt force object to the elegant cage that protected the main hard drive.
“You were murdered,” Bofur murmured as he traced the damage.
Or at least someone had tried, but synthetics were tough to kill. It took hours of careful, delicate work to mend the fractured pathways. The timeless fluorescent lights went on shining into the shadows of Bofur’s basement.
At last, the diagnostic program beeped contently instead of shuddering out alarms.
“Nearly done,” Bofur patted one of the synthetic's hands.
He hesitated when he reached the memory. Two dozen petabytes of information. That was years of sensory input, data gathering and calibrations. But that wasn’t what made him hesitate. Synthetic Soul added whole other layers to that data if the vids and files he’d consumed once upon a time were to be believed. This synthetic memory carried more than data.
He wasn’t just erasing information, he was taking years away of a life lived.
“I’m sorry,” he typed the line in slowly and felt a heaviness as it was all swept away. Off to storage in some distant minion's hands, who would shift through it with bored greed.
There was no choice, of course. If the synthetic remembered, it was a danger. It would want to return to its owner and it would do anything in its power to do so. Still, Bofur regretted it. Out of some unknown instinct, he cradled the hand he had patted in his own as the bar ticked away. Emptied, the monitor blinked and then asked ‘Restart?”
He hit the enter key.
The beautiful, changeable eyes shot open. The hand between his own twitched, the fingers jerking to life. The synthetic sat up, surveyed its surroundings and landed on Bofur’s face.
“Hello,” it said and it had a nice voice, bemused, but mellow, “I’m Bilbo.”
“Hello, Bilbo.”
Bilbo tilted his head slightly to one side, accessing him, “I can’t locate you in any of my databanks. This doesn’t look like Bag End.”
“What’s Bag End?”
“I’m meant to be shipped there. On special order to...to..” Bilbo frowned, “I can’t remember. The name should be there. Why isn’t it there?”
“There’s been a change in plans,” Bofur tried to sound upbeat, “you’ll be staying here with me instead.”
And because it wasn’t quite a lie, none of Bilbo’s delicate sensors would alert him. Definitely a him now. Once they were awake, Bofur never could think of them as ‘it’ anymore. Even if he could, Bilbo was already different. He’d already shown three distinct facial expressions and he’d barely been active for a minute.
“And who,” Bilbo’s gaze fell to their joined hands, “are you?”
“My name is Bofur. I restore synthetics and I could use some assistance,” Bofur pulled his hands away, gathering them in his lap. A prickle of heat gathered under his skin.
“Yes,” Bilbo huffed, “I can see that. Do you know that the Frenulum connection is on backwards in that OC? Also, it smells like mold in here and I'm not sure if that's the room or you.”
"Amazing!" Bofur grinned. "You're amazing."
"Am I?" Bilbo frowned again. "You're very peculiar."
"It's been said. Though never by a synthetic before."
"Synthetic," Bilbo repeated the word and it sounded rotten in his mouth.
That was probably the moment that Bofur should have turned Bilbo off. Should have done his research on the entire DRN line and remind himself why Synthetic Soul had been yanked off the market. But he was not a man to live his life on should haves.
"Let's see how your joints are," he had said instead and sat back in satisfaction as Bilbo took his first steps into this strange new world.