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Mr. Matthews was a slobbering mess of the trained killer he used to be. Sixty years ago, he was one of the top soldiers of the military, but now, he was just another old man withering away in a nursing home.

"He's doesn't appear to be all there, sir," a young man dressed in green fatigues spoke into his phone. "He won't answer a thing. I'm not sure if he even understands what I'm saying to him."

Across the table, Mr. Matthews's eyes were closed and some drool began to drip down the side of his lip like a stalactite.

"Did you ask the nurses about his condition?" a voice came from the phone. "It's not uncommon for veterans to shut down when they grow old, but-"

"Wait," the young soldier whispered, "he's waking up now."

Mr. Matthews's eyelids opened, revealing bright, piercing blue diamonds. He looked across the table, and the young soldier shivered.

"Who are you?" Mr. Matthews said.

"Hello, sir," the soldier said. "I'm from the military, same branch as you were. I've been tasked with-"

Mr. Matthews squinted his eyes and it went through the young soldier like an icicle. "Oh fuck off. I'm retired."

"Sir, it's about your engram. A robot we created based on your neural pathways has gone rogu-"

With a strength a man so old shouldn't possess, Matthews slammed the table. "I'm not gonna tell you again. I'm retired."

The young soldier frowned. He studied the man, searching for some way to connect. "Who's that?" he asked, pointing to an open locket around Matthews's neck. On the surface was an old picture of a young woman.

"You should know that," Matthews said. "You looked me up before coming here, didn't you? Or has the army gone that downhill since the robots? It's my wife. The ones you fuckers killed."

The young soldier did indeed know who it was. In Matthews's records, a melancholy story was hidden. The man, thought to be made of stone, had finally been softened during his last deployment overseas. There, he met a woman, and they took to each other like flies to a trap. She barely spoke his language, and he barely spoke hers, but it didn't matter. When two people are meant to be together, the communication happens in silence.

He married her after a month. She moved into the base and stayed with him. Everybody was amazed to see the change that occurred in Matthews. Things that would have once angered him no longer did, and he even let people borrow money from him. Nothing seemed to matter to him besides him and his wife. After a year, his deployment was over, and so he was sent back home. Before he left, though, after much tears and hurting, he promised his wife he'd come back for her as soon as he could. Because her husband was no longer living on the base, she couldn't either. She returned to her home in the war-torn land.

Matthews came back the next month on a civvy plane. He was too late. His wife had been killed during a raid on her town. He learned about it through a report handed to him by a soldier he had given spare change to once before. She had been killed by his own people.

Matthews was not stupid. He did not go berserk, or make a scene out of it. Although he wanted to, he knew nothing good would come of it. Instead, he went back home, not even stopping to visit her grave. It was easier that way, he told himself. Seeing it would only make things harder.

Sixty years later, in a half-lucid state, confined to a wheelchair and trapped in a nursing home, there was nothing more he wanted to do than to see his wife one last time.

"I'm sorry about your wife, sir," the young soldier said. "Protocol has changed drastically since then. Things like that don't happen anymore. Now, about that engram..."

The old man began to raise his hand with a certain finger pointing up, but midway through the motion he fell back asleep. The next time he'd awake, he wouldn't remember a thing about this interaction.

"I don't think we're going to learn anything from him," the young soldier said through his phone.

"God damn it," the voice on the other side said, "where could that robot be?"

Far away, on the other side of the planet, in a nation that spoke a different language, the waves crashed against the beach, the sky showed a golden-purple as the sun set, and a military robot, not understanding why it needed to do it so badly, gently touched a worn-out tombstone.

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Submitted by ApprehensivePen on Fri, Aug 12, 2022 to /r/WritingPrompts/

The prompt

The use of human soldiers stopped with the rise combat droids. To make them effective the memory engrams of veterans were imprinted onto them. However one droid outperformed the others and went rogue. The military and the droid seek the veteran they used to imprint to understand what went wrong