Winterwing walked into Tanya’s lab, and as he crossed the threshold, he realized that a pair of red eyes were already on him. The artificial lighting came on as it sensed movement.

“Were you… On this whole time?” he asked BRAWN’s head.

“Oh sure, but that isn’t a thing that bothers me,” BRAWN chirped back from the workbench in the far corner. “Where’s Tanya?”

“I have graduated to either being trusted enough or being annoying enough I have been sent in on my own today,” Winterwing said, setting his handwritten notes on the bench next to the head, and then sitting down himself.

“That does not answer my query,” the robot said.

“Wildwing decided to make some enemies today and practice is twice as long,” Winterwing said. “Can’t for the life of me figure out why but it does mean it’s quiet down here.”

“Oh,” the head said.

“Yes?”

“Yes, what?”

“You were going to mention that I look like him,” Winterwing sighed.

“Is… that remarkable?”

“Everyone seems to think so.”

“Huh,” BRAWN said, though the affectation of a verbal tic seemed strange from an artificial person. “There are several thousand units in my production line. I am identical to all of them,” it glanced downward, as if remembering the lack of a body, “minus some glaring maintenance issues.” It looked back up to Winterwing, “Is that not the case with you?”

Winterwing blinked. “You… thought we were built in the same factory?”

“You don’t have a production line?”

“Fuck, I hope not.”

BRAWN blinked. “How very confusing. How does everyone know their assigned task?”

“It’s not assigned? We decide for ourselves.”

BRAWN shook its head, the little servos in the neck whirring as it did. “Unbelievable. How does anything get done?”

Winterwing surveyed the piles of half-finished work occupying the lab. “A good question.”

The pause as he considered the room went overlong, and the head jumped subjects. “You look as though you could use a system diagnostic.”

Winterwing chose his words carefully. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”

BRAWN nodded, haltingly. “Sleep is one of those things I never really understood. Strange to have a routine that can so easily fail.”

“I don’t think we really understand it either. We just sleep because we get tired,” Winterwing shrugged.

BRAWN gave another shake of the head. “It is a very strange thing to be sure. To be inactive and hallucinating for a third of your life.”

“Is it that much different from the time you spent in that little safe?”

“Oh, it’s not as bad as it sounds. If I feel a little lonely I can turn off the social simulation software until its needed again. Time is an expression of entropy, it doesn’t bother me.”

“You don’t consider that sleep?” Winterwing asked.

“Why does it matter?”

“It probably doesn’t. It’s just interesting to think that the people that built you never slept, or they forgot why,” Winterwing said. “I’m trying to remember if I know of any species that doesn't. Tea-” and then he stopped himself, before starting again. “I had a friend who would have known.”

“I’m afraid I was not programmed with this knowledge either.”

“What about boredom?” Winterwing asked.

“I am not programmed with boredom.”

“No?”

“My primary function is the supervision and imprisonment of prisoner 476. Boredom is an expression of fatigue in biological subjects that require novel experiences. Novel experiences in a prison are…. Undesirable.”

“Why do you have a concept of a dramatic pause?” Winterwing asked.

“The interface is supposed to be endearing,” BRAWN said.

“Was that all you did, stand guard?”

BRAWN turned cold, in a way a mechanical face should not have been able to. “You do not have clearance to know my entire functionality.”

“Don’t take it so literally. I mean were you allowed to have any fun?”

“I am allocated some measure of amusement in the form of randomized audiovisual and tactile stimulus in my standby setting."

“Randomized audiovisual-” Winterwing stifled a laugh. “You’re describing dreams .”

“Am I?” said the head, now audibly confused. “I don’t think I would have called them that. They’re just simulated scenarios.”

“You’re describing sensory experiences during time when you’re not fully alert,” Winterwing tapped a few more notes into his provided blue pad. “Well, that answers our question, doesn’t it?”

“Our question?” BRAWN echoed.

Winterwing nodded. “Maybe they never figured out the mechanisms of sleep but it seems they carried it with them, in any case.”

“I… I’m not sure I understand,” there it was again, that simulated verbal pause.

“You were built by creatures far beyond anything I’ve ever encountered, for one task,” Winterwingsaid. “Why did they program you with anything beyond prison protocol?”

“I-” the head began, and then it faltered, before looking at him, mystified. “Do not know!”

“Maybe they weren’t as rude as you thought.”

“That is interesting,” BRAWN mused. “I think you’ve taught me something about myself today.” The head was uncharacteristically silent for a moment, before speaking again. “I would like to help you.”

“I know,” Winterwing said.

“Listen to me, please. I am going to try, but you have to listen.”

Winterwing looked up from his notes, interest caught by the loss of jovial tone.

"Do you think I'm alive?" BRAWN asked him.

It was, perhaps, the most difficult question it could have presented him.

"I think for most definitions of alive that I know, yes. You might strain the more conservative ones," Winterwing settled on a truthful non-answer.

"Why is that?"

He thought carefully about constructing his words, while taking fast notes. "Because the forms of life that we know grow from internal processes. You were talking about being built in a production line. The day you were brought online, you were the exact size you were specced for and contained most of the knowledge you were intended to hold," Winerwing said. And then, with a little more contemplation, "I suppose most of those would also suggest you don't seem to have the same imperative to reproduce that organic life supposedly does. But... that's an assumption I'm making."

"It's complicated," BRAWN said, and there was a silent agreement between them that Winterwing was not to ask for elaboration. "But, you personally, you'd at least accept the assumption that I'm alive?"

"I'll accept it’s equally difficult to prove that I’m alive, and any test of traditional criteria I passed, you likely would as well.”

BRAWN seemed to find this amusing, and gave it a sensible chuckle. "You downplay it, but that impressive, even if it takes a couple millennia for biology to get to there."

"I suppose I find it more mundane than it is."

BRAWN nodded, and moved on. "Perhaps it's easier to answer the opposite, then. Can I die?"

Winterwing frowned, looking at the robotic head directly. Again, there was the question, why would anyone have programmed a simple guard with the complexity to contemplate the nature of its existence?

"I'm going to say yes," Winterwing said. "You look like you're a bit harder to kill than I am." He gestured, implying the entire lack of a torso. "But, I imagine that whatever houses your memory isn't infallible, and probably has a limited source of energy as well."

"Indeed," BRAWN agreed, with considerably less cheer. "If we were to be a little more scientific, and define death as maximum entropy, as Tanya might choose to, all things must die, eventually, to obey the laws of physics. You and I have been granted the ability to push back the inevitable for a time, but fighting it is a long and impossible task. We all fail."

This left a somber mood in the room. It was a technological marvel, to behold a machine that understood, and seemed to readily accept, its own eventual death.

Winterwing surveyed his scribbled notes, and leaned back in his chair, contemplating. “This is pushing closer to philosophy than programming.”

“Not necessarily,” the head said. “All it means is we have a common enemy. The builders had a phrase they liked: ‘Time is long and time is short’. As the first beings that reached sentience they were very aware they had the most opportunity to control the galaxy, but they also understood that all things that begin eventually end. All things. Programming, biology, energy, it all becomes perfectly uniform nothing as creation meets its eventual cessation.

“Whether or not a robot is alive enough to die, they centered their entire civilization on exceeding the limits of the universe. They were afraid of everything that biological beings feared: Predators, famine, competition, scarcity, ignorance, and sickness.”

Winterwing stopped his notes in mid-sentence, brow knit in confusion. “I thought you weren’t able to tell us any of this.”

Now the head reached the end of its usefulness, either because he had reminded it or it had said all that it intended to say. BRAWN watched him finish his notes, and gave a firm shake of servos when prompted for anything further.