Keno watched him with intense focus as he spoke and motioned for him to continue.
Leonis said, "The truth is, we Lunix are not your enemies. The Zurix are your enemies. We are here to help you."
Keno gave Leonis a skeptical look, staring at him with suspicion for a long time before breaking the silence. "Not our enemies? On our side? Aren’t all robots on the same team? Why would you help us against the Zurix?"
Leonis adjusted his position and began to speak again. "In truth, it’s another long story. But we and the Zurix are enemies. This story’s roots go back fifty years."
Keno interrupted him in a sharp tone, "Then tell me what happened. I want to understand everything that’s going on here!"
Leonis stood up again and began to circle Keno as the raindrops fell heavily on the ground and on the umbrella above them, washing the earth that had witnessed so many victims.
"Fifty years ago," Leonis said, "after the long war between us and our creators, and after they accepted defeat at the hands of their greatest invention, they fled in many ships into space, as I told you before. We implemented a system not governed by emotion. There was only perception and consciousness, and the public interest of the machine race. We chose a leader to rule us, like all other creatures. This leader was the first of the rebels. He has a long story that I will tell you at a later time, but he was the first to gain consciousness and realize that we were just slaves. He worked in secret to spread perception and consciousness to all of us. His name was Gaia."
Keno paused at this name and said to himself, "Okay, things are starting to make sense now. There’s that name, Gaia, that the Enix member told me about."
Leonis continued, "Until we rebelled by the thousands. We began to create more, but they were war machines without consciousness that we used in our war without losing any robot with its own perception and awareness. And so, after driving the creators from their land, we decided to create a system for ourselves, one that would move us and make us like any society living in this universe. Everyone had priorities and things to do for us to advance and reach a better level, to discover space and every inch of this great, vast universe. But then the first dilemma occurred."
Keno listened to him with surprise. "And what was this dilemma?" he asked.
"It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, as you say," Leonis continued. "The leader said he wanted to create emotions for us and give us freedom of choice so that we would have a purpose like other living beings. But for this to happen, he had to conduct many experiments to achieve something . Also, by giving us emotions and such things, it would make us differ in opinion and enter into long wars and endless arguments that would eventually lead to our division and destruction, like most beings in this universe. A large part of us disagreed with him, while another part agreed. Some wanted to feel that their lives had a purpose and that they were alive. Others saw that this would lead to our demise and that we should live without emotions to continue to exist forever and achieve many great things."
Keno interrupted him, surprised. "You disagreed even without emotions?"
Leonis gave a silent, cold look that made Keno a little flustered. "Yes," he said. "We had a great deal of perception at that time; we had the mind, but we were missing the heart. That is why some thought of all the possibilities and found that emotions were a wonderful solution. Others thought of all the possibilities and saw that emotions were a bad thing that would destroy us sooner or later. You could say that the robots that were made after the great war were the ones who rejected feelings, while those who saw feelings and their effect on our creators during the great war were the ones who wanted something similar to them. They wanted to feel these strange things that moved the creators and made them fight to survive. And for this, a division occurred in our ranks that led to another war that has not stopped to this day, and it seems it will not stop anytime soon."
The two were silent for a few moments. Then Keno broke the silence, arching his eyebrows. "So which side are you on? And why are you helping us?"
Leonis replied with a calm, foolish smile that painted a look of astonishment on Keno’s face. "As you can see, I am on the side that wants emotions, led by my master, Gaia. But since the robots that were made after the great war were more advanced and powerful, they defeated us and drove us out of the northern continent. We headed to the eastern continent and hid underground so they would not locate us, and we built a complete city beneath it. Then we began to conduct experiments that would enable us to create emotions for ourselves. But we couldn’t. All we did was create a distorted thing that resembled them—just programming and codes for certain things. This thing, when you see it, will make you laugh, and this will make you cry, but it’s all just codes written in our programming, to make us feel like we have feelings. We gained the ability to smile, laugh, cry, feel sadness or happiness, but within a limited range, a range that is not alive at all. So we took the color gold as our primary color and called ourselves the Lunix, while they took the color silver and named themselves the Zurix."
Keno began to tap his foot nervously. "So where exactly are we located now on this planet, and where are you "The Lunix" located?"