The thief was good at keeping track of time; great, even. It was as much a part of their being as any physical part and could be wielded with just as much precision. They had been accounting for it ever since the theft had been accomplished and then after it had been discovered. They would have wanted to keep going with it, but the discovery had forced them into temporary idleness. Now, though, the opportunity had opened for the act to continue; they had learned that Logistics’ head was not set to return for a few more days, and the investigation into the theft had stalled. If they were quick, the thief could succeed again—though they were aware that time still was not fully on their side.
The station had an automatic dimming system in place which, at the allotted hour, would decrease output and render non-priority areas in darkness. All occupants were asleep, even the guards, but the thief knew that even if they were awake, those security personnel would have no reason to care about their presence. Dissatisfaction with the job, thief had found, inversely correlated with wanting to do the job well.
The thief stole across the station, heading for their goal. The cramped, shadowy outline of Logistics stood out like a lonely mountain, and inside, some LED strips glowed, outlining the edges of the paneling in a sickly, translucent paleness. . The thief was not put off by the sight. They approached the door and gently opened it, and entered without a peep. They knew of the camera, what it could see, and more importantly, what it could not. Deftly, it made sure to avoid its gaze.
The thief paused a moment against the side wall, waiting.
A few seconds passed. The slow, winding rotation of the camera was the only sound. Once they were sure nothing was amiss, the thief continued. It followed the edge of the room to its end, then slipped into the corridor.
The storeroom was closed, as expected. It was darkened, too—good. Reaching out, the thief carefully twisted the knob to ensure no squeak escaped. They then allowed themselves entrance into that dim storage. For a moment, they paused, debating if they should stop while they could. But they were not programmed to do a task halfway, even the ones they came up with. So they scuttled silently ahead, past the shelves and piles of reports left over, towards the boxes which contained what they needed. They thought they felt a tingly sensation along their body, like a current; but this was absurd—so such things existed in its parameters. They had a goal. To complete it was natural. But to anticipate its completion…
They opened a box and reached inside, shuffling around.
But the box was empty.
A switch was pulled, and if the thief had eyes, they would have been made blind by the sudden illumination. Nevertheless, they waited a few seconds, out of a default sense of courtesy, before saying, “I suppose this means you’ve figured it out, Master Cypress?”
Cypress Flash stood next to the light switch. “Most of it, I think,” he said. There wasn’t any smugness in his voice, however.
Kai appeared from the other side of the door. “But we were hoping that you’d be able to fill in the blanks.”
Slowly, the thief turned around. Cypress peered into the blank faceless hull and watched the lights flicker across the front. He glanced at Kai, but did not say anything. The two of them had agreed to be careful about whatever happened next, and that involved not saying or doing anything that might incite the thief.
“What have you figured out?” the thief asked.
Cypress stepped away from the switch. “You probably first heard of this storeroom when my supervisor was grumbling about it. You mentioned having heard about it before I did, after all. I don’t know what she would have said, but it probably involved some of the items stored back here. I imagine that got you thinking.”
“What happened next is a little speculative, since we don’t know all your steps, but it’s likely that sometime after you heard that, you went to the guard booth,” Kai added. “You went under the guise of cleaning, but I suspect you wanted information about the camera, what it watched over, what it didn’t. Neither Lux nor Alto wanted to engage in ‘shop talk,’ but, your duties meant they couldn’t turn you away.” Kai paused. “Though, it didn’t seem like you managed to do your job.”
“I did my job,” the thief replied without offense. “Unfortunately, I think those two guards are more comfortable in a pigsty than a booth.”
“I can see that.”
“Anyway,” Cypress said, “you learned from them how the camera was positioned in Logistics. That meant you knew how to evade it. But you also learned that the storeroom had no cameras—in all likelihood, you learned that nopony else knew about the storeroom aside from my supervisor.”
“Additionally,” said Kai, “you’ve got a perfect understanding of everyone’s schedule on this station, so you’d know relatively where everypony is, and, especially, isn’t. You’d be able to move to areas where nopony would know you were in, on account of nopony being around.”
“You’d know where I am, where my supervisor would be—and if she were to tell you off-hoof she’d be away for a few days, well…”
The thief had fallen silent. But they seemed to regard the two of them with what could have been amusement if Cypress stretched his imagination a bit. He glanced at Kai, and saw that they were looking more ponderously at the thief. There was no contempt in their face, no anger. Only curious bafflement—a feeling Cypress certainly shared.
Kai cleared their throat and continued. “At any rate, you had learned what you needed to learn, and thus, were able to seize the opportunity to act on it. After Cypress’s supervisor had left, you came into the storeroom, searched the shelves for what you needed, and took what you could.”
“But not a whole lot, though. You could have grabbed more. I suspect there are two main reasons for why you didn’t.” Cypress raised his left hoof. “The first: you simply didn’t know how much to get the first time. Now, you could have grabbed more—no one was here and nopony would be for a little while—but that brings us to the second reason.”
“The room was dusty.” Kai flashed one of their wings in the air Pointed it towards the top of one of the shelves. “Filled to the brim. Makes sense, since nopony had been in here in ages. Anyone could have ignored all that dirtiness, though. Anyone—but you.” They lowered their wing, and their voice chittered with sympathy. “The compulsion must have been astounding.”
“You were forced to clean the room,” Cypress said. “But by the time you were done, the optimal space for your theft had passed, and you needed to leave. You probably thought you’d be able to come back later. But by that point, I’d discovered the missing supplies, and you had no choice but to lay low for a time, hoping you’d get the chance.”
“And I thought I did,” the thief said. “But I gather that was not really the case.”
Here, Kai offered a somewhat apologetic smile. “A lie we cooked up and allowed you to hear. Cypress’s supervisor will be returning soon, I am sorry to say.”
“Still,” Cypress said, no less looking apologetic, “we were counting on you being unable to pass up the opportunity. Didn’t think you’d give up easily after all.”
“Am I really that predictable?” Was the thief affronted by the implication? Cypress couldn’t tell. Emotionally, they were as unreadable as a boulder.
“Actions and behavior are predictable,” Kai said. “But reasons? No one can guess those.”
“No one but their owners.”
Cypress stepped forward and lit his horn. He lifted from one of the many boxes the plastic bags containing each of the remaining supplies. These he laid down in front of the thief. “We know what you did, when you did it, where, and how,” he said softly. He raised his eyes. “But we don’t know why, Roccu.”
Cypress would have thought he’d grown comfortable with those periods of silence which had, for the last several minutes, broken up the explanation. But hearing it again, in the context of all that was revealed, and hearing it come from Roccu in front of him, made the silence weigh heavier, with a weight only the wordless could fathom. He became aware of his own heartbeat, which, despite the rather relaxed situation, thundered somewhere in his head. Kai’s presence a short distance away became accentuated; Cypress was cognizant of their breathing, of the brief fluttering of their wings, the way they stared at the cleaning robot with baffled curiosity, as though trying to gauge what “emotions” its faceless hull was trying to convey through that stark silence.
Throughout, Roccu continued to say nothing. It leveraged its limbs in a slow manner, gently touching the bags of components placed on the ground with a gentleness that seemed almost paternal in scope. The strips of light running perpendicular along its front sequenced between its three primary outputs—green, yellow, red. It was thinking, Cypress surmised. Or maybe a better word was reflecting—reflecting on what was said and done.
“Every word,” Roccu said. “Every word, true.” It sounded awed, even impressed, which caused a flutter of embarrassment to rise up in Cypress’s chest.
Roccu’s lights became monochromatic and white. “Do you happen to know what Station Thirteen’s primary purpose is?” it asked.
Cypress only hesitated a moment before answering. “Comet observation. Kai told me about it. This station is looking for two specific ones, which have been regularly sighted for years.”
The lights flashed approvingly. “So you do know about them. Good. But do you know the story behind those comets? Why we started observing them?”
Cypress and Kai glanced at each other. Then they both shook their heads.
Roccu put the components down and rested its arms on the cold storeroom floor. “Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria, two ponies from feuding farmer families—a mare and a stallion—fell in love. They could not tell their families, of course, but neither could they deny themselves their passion. Soon, secret meetings became secret musical interludes, all spiraling towards an inevitable clash between their families and their destiny. Not that that mattered to the two of them. Passion either clouded their senses or improved their ability to tolerate the limits of their existence, which they exploited to the best of their ability. It didn’t matter that they could not, when they were together, be with each other for very long, so long as they could be together. But one day, the mare learned that she and her family would move to another city, far from the old farm—from her love. The stallion, unwilling to let the relationship die due to the machinations of migration, arranged for the two of them to wed in secret.”
Roccu began to roll across the floor, its limbs touching the other boxes on the shelves. “In secret, yes—but things are hardly ever that simple. The mare’s father found out and crashed the wedding right as the vows were spoken. Incensed, he demanded the mare abandon her new husband and join her father in that distant city. But the father failed to anticipate that mare’s resolve. She had promised to be by her husband’s side through life and through death, and even though it would break her father’s heart, she would not break that vow. That’s the story, anyhow. But the legend… The legend comes out of that mare’s choice to be by her husband’s side in life and in death. Such a promise must have held its own kind of power, one to rival even the greatest sorcerers. That mare’s new family would later speak of the appearance of a pair of comets every year after the couple’s death, always on the anniversary of their wedding.”
Roccu stopped at one of the shelves. At first, Cypress thought they had found something of interest, but their one limb was frozen in the air, longingly, like it was reaching for something which no longer existed.
“Where did you hear this story?” Kai asked quietly.
“I didn’t. It came prepackaged in my programming, as one possible topic under my ‘small talk’ sub-routine.” Roccu paused. It lowered its voice, spoke with melancholy and nostalgia—tones that Cypress would have previously deemed impossible. “It’s one of my favorite stories. But because it’s not something that could come up in casual conversation, I’ve never talked about it before. I guess I would have wanted…” But it would say no more.
They waited. Cypress glanced back through the storeroom door to see if anypony was coming, but no nosy presence revealed themselves. Kai scuffed a hoof on the floor—they were unsure how to continue the conversation. “It’s a nice story,” Cypress began, “but I’m afraid I don’t see how that explains what you did. Or why.”
Here, Roccu turned in its spot to look at him. It folded its limbs together, like it was folding arms. “I’ve worked this station for years, you know. I’ve carried out my duties to the best of my ability. And I never minded the work—I am incapable of minding it. And every year, I would hear about these comets. The way ponies talked about them—you would think they were some gift from the stars. There were even some superstitious ponies who’d swear that if you brought somepony you liked to Station Thirteen to watch the comets with you, you’d end up happily together.” It made a strange motion with its appendages, making them rise and fall over an invisible spherical surface—Cypress realized it was a robot’s interpretation of a shrug. “And I suppose… I suppose at some point, I wondered. What would that be like? To watch them with somepony else?”
Roccu’s appendages returned to the ground. But there was more, wasn’t there? Cypress could tell. He stared deep into that faceless hull, scanning the lights, the colors, scanning that blankness for something beyond what his eyes could see. Then, after a moment, he had it. “To watch them… with something like yourself.”
“Yes,” Roccu whispered. “I didn’t want to watch them alone.”
The explanation came haltingly, yet energetically, as though each following word could not wait to follow the previous one. Roccu did not know how to build another one of itself, so it operated with only the vaguest of knowledge about robotics. That was why it had chosen such a perplexing quantity of what was stolen. It had realized very quickly it would need more, but by that point, Cypress had made the discovery, and everything had stalled. Roccu had hoped to have another chance before the comets came.
But truthfully, Cypress was only half-listening. What Roccu had said—about not wanting to watch them alone—paraded about his mind like a haunting aria. He thought about every time he’d seen Roccu cleaning Station Thirteen, every time he’d marveled at the fact that this single robot covered so much. True, he had help from the cleaner crew, but that wasn’t the same. It had to do it all on its own, with itself for its own company. It was a culture of one—but one too few.
He looked at Kai. He could tell they, too, were wrestling with the admission. But when their gaze met his like poles aligning, all stormy emotions and spiraling thoughts vanished in an instant. Without a word or a waste of a second, both had an entire conversation—one that ended with a tacit agreement.
“But so it goes,” Roccu said. “I suppose I always knew I’d be caught eventually." It paused, lights flickering. “So, then… what now?”
Cypress offered a daring smile. “Now? Now we make things right.”