To Summer, the biggest landmarks in London are Big Ben and the Millennium Eye. She orients herself toward the white wheel in the distance and keeps moving.
She thinks of it like a Ferris wheel, but as she approaches, it’s clear from the signs that it’s to be called an observation wheel. Okay, fair enough. Sounds a lot less fun to her, but it’s not her country.
She crosses one of the many bridges (“London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, London Bridge is falling down, I’m a rescue robot and I can help with thaaat…”). She’s still angling vaguely northwest, the same direction she’s been going since Dover, because this is not about going somewhere specific, but about wandering until her head clears.
She sees signs for the British Museum. She’s so not interested in that. All she remembers is the idea - gleaned from talks with the ABCs in school - Colin’s clique - god dammit, I do not need this reminder - that the British Museum is a stockpile of stolen artifacts from other cultures, an echo of empire that nobody’s really acknowledging.
Past that are signs to the zoo. Marginally more interesting, she thinks. But she reaches it, and keeps walking, before she can consciously analyze her own feelings. Guess a zoo won’t fix her problem either. But there was also signs for a park. A park would be calming.
She walks, and finds herself staring at a sign advertising “the Washington”. It looks like an old-style pub, quite fitting given the maze of streets she’s found herself walking. This whole neighborhood must have grown up organically, over how many decades - god, how many centuries?
She’s a foot off the ground, about to look around for the park, when three men come out of the Washington. The middle one sees her and raises his arms to flag her down. “Hi! Excuse me, I’m sorry, do you have a moment?”
His accent marks him as British - Summer doesn’t have an ear for the more specific aspects of language in the U.K. She touches down again and walks over. The man tells his mates something. They in turn grin, snap jaunty salutes at him, wave with big grins in Summer’s direction, and head off into the rain.
The man himself is tall, lean, with dark hair and a charming smile. It takes her a moment, but Summer recognizes him and gasps. “I know you! You’re–”
He holds up hands and shakes his head, in a self-effacing gesture that halts her in her tracks. “Call me Tom. I’m an actor. And you’re that rescue robot that saved Haven, aren’t you? Summer… Newman, was it?”
“Yes sir.”
Tom winces in pretend pain. “Please don’t call me sir. It makes me feel incredibly old. Look, I don’t know protocol for superheroes, and I apologize if I’m overstepping by calling you out like this. But you see, you saved a friend of mine aboard the station. I should like to talk to you for a bit, if you’re alright.”
He gestures behind him, toward the Washington.
Summer searches her feelings for a moment, hears no objection from her angst, and smiles. “Sure. I don’t have any money though, so I’ll pass on ordering anything.”
Tom raises his eyebrows. “You eat? Well, if you do have an appetite, let’s call it my treat.”
Summer declines a drink - “I don’t have ID and I don’t like alcohol anyway” - but the smoked bacon cheeseburger off the main menu looks enticing enough for her to request.
Tom starts working on a beer, poured into a distinctively shaped tall glass.
The early and inevitable conversation about “what is a robot” begins, and Summer handles it with a quick and elegant grace compared to her previous attempts to explain herself. She wraps it up like so.
“I don’t know acting, but I can sort of imagine from reading about it. So, you have a character you’re playing, right? That character sort of lives in your head. What’s happening is that your brain actually takes on their traits. You are being someone else for a time. Well, what if you could pour that someone, complete with memories of the life they must have had, into a waiting robot shell? That’s why I call myself human, as well as being a robot.”
To his credit, Tom is doing his best to follow the explanation without always succeeding. But he grasps this part of it very clearly. Summer can see the recognition in his eyes.
“There’s specific techniques for getting into that kind of mindset,” he explains. “Now I’m intensely curious whether those techniques could be applied to this sort of robot creation. I gather this is not something you’d do casually, of course.”
Summer shakes her head quickly. “No, oh god no. It’s terrifying, the idea of being able to just, you know, create someone. Because now you have the responsibility of their whole life. You’ve become a parent.”
“Have you done that?” Tom asks curiously.
Summer blushes. “N-no, no, I haven’t. I’m - I haven’t found - uh, found the right person.”
Only embarrassment and needlessly technical explanation lie down this path, so she whips out her phone to show off the prize of her photo gallery: pictures of the newest Newman.
“That’s Leo, and that’s Aria, and that’s Fez. Aria’s my twin sister,” she adds quickly, before Tom makes the wrong assumption. But he looks at the pictures, and marvels.
“And the young man is… your creator?”
Summer nods, and blushes more.
“It’s amazing what technology can do,” he says at last. “Holograms, robots, all the stuff you’re talking about. Makes me wonder what use an actor will be in the future.”
Summer’s eyes go wide. “Oh, no - no no no. Listen. What you are so good at - you have to be, if you’re successful, and obviously, you know, you are - but what you excel at is emotion. And all this stuff, all the stuff I’m talking about with robots and so on, emotion matters so much. People are so good at seeing through fakery, but they respond so strongly to the real thing. Really, so much of the brain is built around processing stories. We resonate with narratives. Stories, and feelings, and personas. What you do is what made someone like me possible.”
Tom finishes his beer, and grins roguishly. “Well. I’m gratified to hear that. Because that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Summer blinks.
Tom’s chicken Milanese and Summer’s burger arrive, but remain untouched for the moment. He’s too busy explaining.
“I think the headlines don’t do you justice. I wasn’t there, but my friend was. You talked to him, and everyone else, the people you’d just rescued from outer space. I hope you appreciate how frightened they really were. And how in awe of you they became, after you just casually scooped them out of space, accounted for every one of them, and then came back to tell them it would be okay, and stuck around to make sure it would be. From what I am told, they had questions, but mostly they wanted reassurance. You gave it to them.”
“You could have been some sort of, oh, faceless, impersonal figure. Many superheroes are. I’m not sure why. Maybe you know. But I suppose it’s because to them, it’s just a job, or they feel awkward talking to people, or something like that. So I feel that calling you a ‘robot’ set a certain expectations in the minds of readers. You may physically be a robot, but your heart and soul must be the most human things of all.”
Summer hangs her head, and smiles, and reaches for her burger, but doesn’t quite take hold of it. “I… I honestly am feeling sort of disconnected from things right now. I want to do the rescue work, but I feel like I haven’t committed to it the way Otto and the others have.”
Tom leans in and studies her face for a few moments. “And you’re having trouble sorting out your emotions about the matter? Because you’re not as committed as you feel you ought to be?”
Summer smiles wanly. “I guess. Let me have a bit of burger and I’ll try to put it into words.”
She works on the burger, and finds it delicious. Tom works on his chicken, and seems like he’s equally appreciative.
At length Summer is ready. “I’ve always had a problem of commitment. To things, I mean, not people. I’m - I’m kind of a sucker for love and romance, I’d never - but anyway. I need people to anchor me to something, or I drift off. I’m terrible at a buffet, because I want a plate of everything.”
She looks over at Tom, finds him watching her, and blushes slightly. The attention is distracting. But she pushes on regardless. “What you said, about your friend. That really helped. I really needed to hear that today. Because that brings me back. I care about people. I want to help people. I want to rescue people. But right now… honestly, I’m so disconnected from people. We live in - in a secret base. We’ve been kicked out of America by the State Department. I don’t know how to hold onto that feeling. But I know I have to try.”
“And what I said, about acting, and what you said, about how your friend saw me versus how I saw the experience, that makes me think maybe I can anchor myself. I just have to put myself in the place of the people I’m rescuing, don’t I.”
She puts the burger down. “God, I feel so selfish. I feel like I’m expecting praise or admiration or something for just doing–”
Tom cuts in, gently. “No. You’re looking for a human connection. The same way the people you rescue are looking for one from you. That’s one of the most natural things in the world.”
Summer chokes on a laugh. “It is, isn’t it. And I tell people that, all the time. Now it’s my turn, huh?”
“I don’t know anyone who doesn’t need the same comfort they give everyone around them,” Tom says with a kindly smile.
The burger was great. Tom didn’t finish his chicken, but Summer realizes with belated guilt that he probably ate with his mates earlier, and was just ordering more food to be polite with her.
Outside, she turns back and looks at the Washington’s sign. “I should come here again. This was so nice.”
“Book your reservation early,” Tom advises.
Summer blinks, and gasps. “Oh - oh god, I’m sorry if I–”
Tom raises his hands, and smiles disarmingly. “It was my treat, and my pleasure to meet you.”
Summer’s smile is warm. “I feel the same way. You really helped me out.”
She pulls up the Newman rescue hotline in her phone’s contacts, and shows it to him. He in turn takes a picture. “I’d feel very awkward and forward saying ‘here is my number’, but in all seriousness, I imagine someone in your position might occasionally need help from our organization, or know someone who does. Your friend did. So just in case, alright? But please don’t share it widely.”
Tom nods with a grateful smile. “I will. Thank you, Summer.”
Summer beams brightly. “Thank you, Tom. I think I should get going. There’s no emergency right now, but… there’s a whole world to see. I’m going to go see a bit of it before I go home.”
Tom waves, as Summer levitates, then launches, and spirals upward into the skies over London.