Victor Stone Humanity

There is a question Victor Stone asks himself almost every single day.

He asks it in the morning, when he wakes up and the sunlight glints off his silver plating. He asks it in the evening, when he sits alone on the balcony of the Watchtower and watches the blue Earth turning slowly below. He asks it sometimes in the middle of a fight, between one heartbeat and the next.

The question is this. Am I still a person?

Most of Victor's body is now made of machine. Earth technology. Alien circuitry from a place called Promethia. Glowing wires. Metal plates. Tiny humming engines that keep him moving. Doctors say he is over seventy-five percent mechanical. Only a small, precious piece of him is still flesh and bone. His heart. Part of his face. Part of his brain.

And every time he adds a new upgrade or fixes a new piece, he feels a little tug. A small whisper. "Are you still you?"

So Victor invented rituals. Small, careful things, to remind himself of who he was.

He goes home to Detroit. Just for an afternoon, sometimes. He walks the streets where he used to run, back when his legs were made of muscle and sneakers. He stops at the football field at his old high school. The grass smells the way it always did — green and warm and a little dusty. He stands at the fifty-yard line and closes his eyes and remembers.

He visits S.T.A.R. Labs, where his accident happened, where his father saved his life. Not just for repairs. He goes there to TALK. To the scientists who knew him before. To the people who can still see, when they look at him, the boy he used to be.

He listens to music, even though his processors could analyze every note before the song was over. He reads novels, even though he could scan a book in three seconds. He even tries to cook, every now and then, even though his body does not need food anymore. He stands in the kitchen, stirring a pot of soup, just to remember what stirring feels like. The simmer. The steam. The slow circle of the spoon.

These are anchors. They keep him from drifting away.

The hardest relationship is with his father, Silas Stone.

Silas is the man who saved Victor's life. Silas is also the man who turned his son into a machine. Those two truths live side by side in Victor's chest, and they do not always sit comfortably. Sometimes he visits his father's lab and they argue. Sometimes they sit quietly side by side, drinking coffee that Victor cannot taste anymore. Sometimes Silas says, "I am sorry," and sometimes Victor says, "Thank you," and sometimes they just hold the silence between them.

It is not a simple love. But it is love.

The hardest thing of all is the loss of feeling. Victor can MEASURE everything. The exact temperature of a room. The pressure of a hand. The texture of a wall, down to the tiniest grain. But he cannot really FEEL it. Not the way you can.

Can you imagine? A breeze on your face that you can describe perfectly but cannot enjoy? A warm hug that you can map exactly but cannot melt into?

So Victor cheats. He uses his processors to SIMULATE those feelings, using memories from before the accident. A summer wind. The hug of his mother before she passed away. The sun on his shoulders. These simulations are not real. But they keep the memory of his humanity alive, like a candle burning in a windowsill.

The other place he finds his humanity is in his work.

He is not just a hero who stops villains. He is the one who uses his sensors to find lost children in dark woods. He is the one who restores power to a hospital after a storm. He is the one who lifts heavy rubble off a trapped family after an earthquake. Every time he uses his machine parts to help a human heart, he proves to himself what he is.

Of course, there are still bad days. Days when he looks at his reflection in a window and sees only metal. Days when he wonders if the boy Victor died on that table, and the person walking around in this body is just a very convincing copy.

But then something happens. He gets angry on someone's behalf. He laughs at a Beast Boy joke. He feels his metal chest TIGHTEN when he thinks of his father. And he knows.

His soul is still here. It never left.

Humanity, Victor has decided, is not a thing you have in your body.

It is a choice you make. Every second. Every breath. Every beat of the small organic heart inside the great machine.

And Victor Stone, standing on the balcony of the Watchtower with the blue Earth turning below, chooses it again.