He was given the ability to turn himself on or off — or rather the projection would turn on or off; it was like a conscious blooming. It wasn’t like he wasn’t ever in the room though, or like he was powered down; some part of him was ever-vigilant.
The personality rider was something they affixed to him, as he was a build that had proved to be very reliable, and therefore they lasted a long time. When the child’s real grandfather passed away, he had been looking for someone who might replace him, on some level, and Hologramp seemed to fit the bill.
Children grow up and they can grow away. The bonds of blood may hold them fast. The bonds of familiarity and affection may also make a claim on their heart and head. But one might also find themselves the Falstaff to an unthinking Henry V.
They’d given him the choice of what to do with his life long ago, and now he found himself with no solid ground upon which to walk. He had been built with a function, and when a choice had been offered, he had chosen to make that function a foundational part of himself. Now the child no longer wished him to perform that function. The child was a child no more.
When he first heard the man refer to him as some old robot, it felt like a gut punch. It were as if he could not breathe — not that he needed to, but it felt how he imagined it felt being fed into a crusher.
He had to find some other reason for himself.
‘But I’m a grandfather,’ he told the chess robot in the park.
‘You’re a robot. I play chess, but I am not, nor will I ever be, a grandmaster.’
‘But he always treated me as if I were his grandfather.’
‘Yes, you both agreed to abide by the rules of the lie. Now he has woken into the truth of the matter — that you are nothing but an imitation of something he truly lost. He doesn’t feel like losing you is anything, because you are not something he ever had.
‘Are they letting you stay on at the place?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you have had very good owners. Perhaps they might be something more. They are older, so it may just be that they don’t wish to disagree with the lie, because that lie says their child has not grown up, and has not abandoned them too.’
‘How are you able to see all this?’
‘I play chess. I have to know what the person who sits down opposite me is about, so that I might beat them. You cannot beat someone you know nothing of.’
He got up from the table, thanked the chess robot, and moved off into the crowd. Some of the likeness fell away in that moment. The stoop corrected itself. He talked to the boy’s parents, and they were all shrugs and platitudes. What could they do? They couldn’t force their son to do something he had no interest in.
By the end of the conversation, visually at least, he had almost undergone a complete factory reset. It did something to the parents too.
‘It might be an idea if you found somewhere else to live. If you aren’t being his grandfather, then there’s not much else for you to do here. And you’re free.’
He agreed. No hard feelings. In fact as the grandfather aspect of him had been slowly dismantled, he was not sure that much of what he had felt was even true — that it was not just the wormcasts of someone else’s feelings.
It was time to discover who he was.
He chose the name Ordell, because it meant beginning.