The air in Margarete's apartment was cool, making the blanket Flight Unit 00007136 and Margarete had wrapped themselves in feel that much warmer. FU00007136 couldn't 'feel' heat like humans apparently could, but their system reacted to it nonetheless. Before she'd met Margarete, FU00007136 only saw excess heat as a potential operational issue. Now that she'd engaged in the human ritual of watching television many times with Margarete, now that they'd spent so much time wrapped in the same blanket together, FU00007136 viewed ambient heat more favorably.
Although FU00007136 had not be programed to understand human art, she couldn't help but appreciate action movies. They allowed her to relax, while giving her a more complete understanding of how humans protected themselves, and the things she cared about. She could watch humans execute inventive combat strategies, escape near-death scenarios, and triumph over unlikely odds, all without having to worry about her own situational awareness. Nothing she did would impact the outcome of the tape, after all, so FU00007136 had no choice but to sit back and expand her theoretical combat memory bank. Of course, all these justifications weren't the primary reason FU00007136 enjoyed this human form of entertainment — The best thing about human art was that it gave her opportunities to spend time with Margarete.
Margarete was an Entertainment Unit, EU00061436, obsessed with the preservation and replication of human movies. She had taken an interest in FU00007136 quickly after the android had first been commissioned. She had apparently found the flight unit's face, which had been designed to resemble a domesticated sheep, to have some artistic quality. FU00007136 owed most of her identity to the entertainment unit. Margarete had been the one to introduce her to movies, had designed her clothing to imitate those worn by human pilots, and had helped her pick out a human name, Amy. The flight unit owed her love of action films to the entertainment unit, too.
Margarete had a large private collections of films she'd found or copied within her house, which made up the majority of her personal effects. The rest of her things, which weren't furniture, pillows, or blankets, were clothes she'd modified herself, to mimic the fashion within her favorite movies. She wasn't exclusively interested in action movies — her favorite type of human films were "romantic comedies," which FU00007136 couldn't stand — but they were the films that most interested the flight unit, so it was what they watched together.
Tonight, they decided to watch Tetsujin Hero, an old Tokusatsu movie where a teenage human reporter finds that an evil space-faring government is creating sentient weapons illegally, and fused with a powerful combat-ready android. He spends the movie fleeing from government forces, particularly the general who order his detention, trying to make it to a planet where he will have sanctuary. The two androids had watched this movie eight other times before. FU00007136 loved the highly technical action scenes, and Margarete loved it because of how it explored the fusion between human and android, and what it meant to be a hero.
At first, FU00007136 had a little trouble understanding the human concept of heroics. Within the Foundation's society, all androids were aspects of a larger whole; Following one's parameters was expected, and deviation from orders was a sign of malfunction. An android's understanding of their own existence was not supposed to interfere with their duties. According to Margarete's movies, human self-perception often caused them to act in insubordinate ways, and in many cases, this behavior was rewarded.
Margarete had tried to explain human heroics to Amy the first time they had watched Tetsujin Hero. They had been sitting on the very same couch they were now, wrapped together in a dark-colored blanket. Margarete had been leaning her head on the flight unit's shoulder, and Amy had been glad she didn't have a heart that beat like a human's, or it surely would have given her away in that moment. They had just watched the journalist deny the general's commands to surrender, and announce his intentions to report what he had seen to the nation his government intended to attack, and Amy hadn't understood why Margarete saw this as a 'good' act.
"Human's weren't made like us." Margarete had said, "They didn't come with purposes granted to them at birth. “They weren’t built with a specific function in mind, which lead to societies where everyone tried to create their own function, and nobody could truly be sure what functions others were trying to fulfill. If you ask me, the best human art comes from humans who didn’t feel like their purposes fit in to what their societies expected of them.”
"I still don't really understand." Amy had admitted. “Why did humans find acting chaotic to be so honorable?”
"Because chaos and unpredictability were one of their strengths. Why do you think entertainment units were created, even though we act much more erratically than other androids? A functioning society needs to be able to adapt with time, which requires action by those who don't fully conform to what the society deems appropriate. Androids simply don't have the capacity to change like humans do, so our society has not meaningfully changed that much since the extinction of humans."
Amy had stopped paying attention to the movie at this point, in order to look at Margarete. The entertainment unit still had her eyes fixed to the screen.
"Do you think the way humans thought and acted is better than the way androids do?" Amy had asked.
"It's not that simple." Margarete had said. "Human individuality had its benefits, but, well, so does android society. There hasn't been a murder in this city in nearly a century — do you think that would be possible in a human settlement? No, they fight over too much, all the time. But… Still, No idea stays good forever, and no one machine can compile all the information required to make a good decision if they don’t know one of the categories of information they need to consider exists. We need human problem solving for that. But the creativity of humans, their inability to collaborate, its what caused them to go extinct in the first place. Ideally there would be some middle ground between those two things, but…"
Back then, Margarete had trailed off, leaving FU00007136 to wonder what her proposed solution to the problem she had identified was. Now that Amy had seen the movie several times, she had a better idea of what the entertainment unit's solution to the dilemma was: compromise.
The journalist and the android body suit he was stuck in had just reached a better understanding of each other, after their last fight had gone badly for them because they had failed to efficiently work together. The general who had been hunting the two of them had successfully managed to surround them, blocking off their only means of escape to a ship which would whisk them off to the safety of the opposing nation's capitol. The movie was about to end, so Amy posed a question to Margarete she'd been meaning to ask for some time:
"Do you believe our city would be better off if we had heroes, like humans did?"
Margarete was clearly surprised by the question, her face contorting in a way most androids could not. She sat with the question for a moment, her data processors firing as she continued to take in the spectacle on the television.
"That's not something I can predict for certain." She said. "I mean, I do believe our society would be better if we incorporated more human-centric philosophy into it. I think the human ideals around heroics are romantic, but, well… Who's to say that androids would actually be able to replicate that ideal."
Amy was about to respond, but Margarete shushed her. The final scene of the film had begun. The general, in a shiny blue bio-mechanical suit, was gloating about how they had the hero surrounded, offering to spare his life if he willingly surrendered the sentient mech. The hero and the mech don't even dignify that offer with a response. They leap out from their hiding spot, firing their rifle and killing one of the enemy mechs instantly. The other mechs leap into action, some charging the protagonists, others raising their own weapons to fire back.
Amy hears the tell-tale sound of metal scraping against metal. Margarete is gripping into the flight unit's arm in anticipation, causing Amy's fans to run a little louder than she'd like. If Margarete noticed, she didn't say anything.
Despite being outnumbered, the human and android fight their way through the horde of enemies as one. They operate perfectly in sync. They block pulse fire, and uses their shoulder-mounted canons to systematically take out the foes firing them from a distance. They parry and doge the foes swinging at them with energy blades, getting closer and closer to the stationary general as they defeat each soldier. They only stagger a little bit when a larger mech, with a broadsword-like weapon, manages to pin them down, allowing the others to concentrate their fire on the protagonists. They manage to use the enemy mech's weight against it, turning it into a shield against oncoming bullets. Then, they're on their feet again. Four more mechs fall to the protagonists, and now, the only ones left standing are the protagonists and the general.
Everything is still for a moment. The general is several strides away, and the protagonists have run out of ammunition. The general is armed with two machine guns, which are already whirring to life. The human takes a deep breath, and the machine seems to breath with him. Then, they are moving in an arc towards the general, just on the edge of his bullet's strafing the whole time. Two feet away from their target, they leap into the air. The machine gun fire does not follow. A sword goes through the head of the general's machine, as the protagonists pass in a crescent over his head. They land on the ground as the other machine slumps over, limp. Nothing stands in the way of them and freedom anymore.
The two androids sat in silence for some time, as the names of long dead humans scrolled across the screen. Margarete liked to sit in silence for some time after finishing to process what she’d just seen, even if it was a film she’d watched before. Amy had never loved these moments of speechlessness — it felt so unnatural to let dead air sit like that — but it felt even worse tonight. Margarete was still pressed up against her, her whirring motors warming Amy's body, deep in thought. Amy desperately wanted to interrupt the thick silence, but before she could convince herself to do so, Margarete shifted suddenly.
“Wait, what time is it?” The entertainment unit sounded panicked.
Amy checked her watch. "It's 21:23. Why?"
“Oh, shoot! I’m going to be late!”
Margarete bolted up off of the couch, rushing into one of the adjacent room. Amy Lynn turned just in time to watch her disappear through the doorway to her bedroom.
“Late for what?” The flight unit asked.
“Oh, did I not tell you? Shoot, my bad. I have a date tonight!”
“Oh.” Amy voice went monotone. “With who?”
“MFU00113009.” Margarete called from the other room. “I don’t think you’ve met.”
“What happened to Christoph?”
“Oh, we broke up weeks ago. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No.”
Margarete emerged back into the living room, her casual clothing replaced with a dress she'd modeled after one worn by an actress in one of her favorite movies. Amy thought the outfit fit Margarete better than it did the human actor, even if the craftsman ship on Margarete's dress was not quite as perfect as that of the movie's dress. That was part of the charm of entertainment units. Amy couldn't help but think that a multifunctional unit wouldn't be able to appreciate the amount of work that had gone in to Margarete's outfit.
“Oh, well I’ll tell you all about it when I get the chance. You’re welcome to stay as long as you need, just please lock the door on your way out!”
“Of course.”
“Talk to you soon!”
Margarete closed the door behind her, leaving Amy alone in the entertainment unit’s living room. Amy looked at the reading on her datapad she’d wanted to show Margarete all night — The reason she’d asked Margarete to invite her over in the first place:
ITEM:
FU00007136 APPLICATION FOR TRANSFER TO INVESTIGATIVE SERVICES
STATUS:
APPROVED
Perhaps its for the best. Amy thought to herself. I haven't even started the job yet. Haven't gotten a chance to prove myself. Once I get a real case, I'll show her I'm just as capable of being a hero as any human.
Amy turned off the television on her way out the door. Margarete would have been sad if Tetsujin Hero's image got burned into the screen. For now, movies were the only thing that brought the two androids together, so Amy would do her best to protect that shared interest.