Tanjelavi

Rods

Rods was nervously walking to and fro in his office, occasionally changing direction to back and forth to not make his head spin—especially after such several days as he spent recently...

Having convinced police there indeed was something off, he looked around the entire town along with them—to find no trace of him whatsoever. As if he took an additional bottle of energy or went out of the town and committed suicide this way... But he was still in the Center: and he was still in the garage... Except for he wasn't

Rods wasn't a fool: he was a madman to confess it was his fault one of his workers disappeared—and who else's fault could it be?—and was ready to take the responsibility for that, convincing police to take a closer look at the garage first to make them cooperate. Recently, humans started to suddenly care for every weird thing going on inside the Federation as well—especially workers' suddenly fleeing from their hometown and/or disappearing without a trace. There was a ninety nine point nine percent probability there was the bomb gang involved in such a disappearance after all

Except for Rods was crossing his heart and hoping to die if Ree could ever get involved with that damned terroristic group

And it all happened after I told him the truth, he thought, desperately wanting to feel nicotine in his body at least once in his lifetime; Rods opened the upper drawer and took out his picture that was lying above those of the others. He looked old. His face, his entire body—even his eyes seemed old and withered, or better to say faded and veiled... And even to others, he looked damn old, too—he couldn't possibly explain such a look of his, he was just born like this: already old and tired of the system he was meant to exist till his death... "Exist: such a perfect word to describe the situation...!" he caught himself thinking with a sad smile

At least, he wasn't arrested by the police this time for letting one of his workers escape because he confessed right away and was ready to take Ree's punishment as his boss if Ree turned out to be a part of the bomb gang after all...

Below Rods's, there was Ree's picture just idly lying by after serving the police: young, handsome, average-heighten, dark brown hair, green eyes... Rods knew his appearance by heart though—mainly because he designed it himself. He put the two pictures beside each other on the table and indeed: they looked like a father and a son, with the son's being taller than his elderly father, with much brighter, younger green eyes—"Oh!" did Rods sigh, "if only we truly were a family..."

He desperately wanted to cry, but he couldn't of course, putting the two pictures back in the drawer and was nervously smoking an imaginary cigarette with one hand and leaning on the table with the other, thinking, "But we aren't... And I hurt him... He buried his head in the hand that was now free from the imaginary cigarette: It's all my fault..."

Rods desperately wanted Ree to return—to just apologize to him and hug him tight, to tell him he could drop that sir formality, that it was even worse than all that familiarity, that he still loved him, that he still needed him—Ree was the only one Rods could talk to freely after all... No matter if Ree was his son or not: he was still his creation, so in a way, he'll always be his son... He was so obsessed with the idea to have a son, his descendant, he didn't calculate the possible consequences and side effects of his experiment... He wanted Ree to be different from others to begin with, it's true: he wanted him to develop, to go beyond his initial program—to become an inventor like him... "AIs can do that, we are flexible by nature after a", Rods calmed himself. "It's not something unnatural: it's not a crime..."

He was so happy of Ree's asking him questions: he thought it was all going in the exact same direction he'd planned him to go to at the very beginning—but got worried when Ree obviously built his own bike—no bike there could be tuned that great: the limitations to speed were set in any bike right when it was built—which Ree, as a mechanic, couldn't have possibly known. And also because it was possible to soften the limits—if you got all the time in the world to prove you were in a perilous situation and would've died otherwise to the police of course