FoE: The Gates of Hell

by Mel

Part 1: Life

-

Rusty Gears didn’t particularly care for me. That’s not to say she was callous- far from it, she gave me more attention than any of the ponies we travelled with. That’s just how she was. I was nothing special to her yet she still maintained me in peak condition and kept me properly informed. She taught me about the workings of my inner circuitry and the thickness of my casing. I knew my blueprints inside and out. But she also taught me other things, things that ponies know about robots. Things that weren’t at all true. Most robots don’t even know them and it burned her up, I think.

I don’t really know if these things were true. I could check my circuitry and stress-test my limbs, but how could I measure ambition? Was there a unit for recording self-determination? Rusty Gears put a great deal of thoughts in my head that kept my CPU occupied during long stints in repair pods. I had no way to prove her wrong or right. I asked her once if what she was saying was fact or not. I asked how she could prove it, and whether I should consider it true.

“It’s true enough to have faith in.”

One of the ideas she gave to me was aging. She said that we might not get wrinkles or lose our hair, but we aged all the same. She slapped me with a wrench when I brought up rusting and failing circuitry. Rusty Gears said that a robot gets old just like a pony gets old, on the inside. You could put a pony into a machine and they wouldn’t stop growing old. They would just stop dying from it.

I wasn’t sure what she meant at the time, and I didn’t really care. That’s how I now know she was right. It’s obvious to me now how young I was back then. With her. With Jasmine. With Reeds and Thicket. My world was simple. My life was simple. My concerns were simple.

“Error!”

“Dohn hee shuch a haybee,” Rusty Gears spat her wrench onto the work table, along with my unattached plasma gun arm. “I was nice an’ gentle.”

Hovering in place, I extended my clamp to tap where one of my arms had been removed. It was strange, having to adjust my thrusters to compensate for one side suddenly being so much heavier than the other. As Gears turned her back to me to work on my arm, I floated forward until I practically hovered over her. I extended my forward eye until it rested just on top of her head. It whirred as my gaze flicked from tool to tool to tool.

“Cerberus…”

I pushed my eye up and swiveled it downwards to get an upside-down view of Rusty’s face.

From this angle, I thought, It looks like she’s smiling!

“…Cerberus, do you think I could have a li’l personal space?”

I snapped my forward eye back to my body. “Yes, Miss Gears- I mean, yes sir!”

I backed about a foot away from Gears and watched her anxiously. Within the span of a minute I was pacing back and forth. I noticed a tin can along my patrol route and lowered my clamp to give it a little kick forward. When it reached the wall I kicked it behind me so I could do it again.

TINK.

TINK.

TINK.

TI-

“Cerberus!”

I pulled my remaining arms and my three eyes close to my spherical body.

“Get out! I can’t focus while you’re fidgeting around in here!”

“Unable to comply, miss Gears. I must monitor the repairs to my weapon to ensure a faithful reconstruction!”

Gears turned around to roll her eyes at me. “Stop worrying, Cerberus, I’m putting your little autograph back on.”

“I must ensure it is properly welded back. It has to go on the right side; he was facing me when he signed it and he couldn’t reach the left. And it has to be ¾ down the arm, and it needs to descend-”

“Do you want this thing reattached or don’t you?” threatened Gears, waving a large piece of shrapnel at me. On it was seared a line of code that would read, simply, ‘Never lose faith, soldier!’ At the end were the initials ‘RL-3.’ “If you want your stupid signature, you’ll go bother Jasmine and give me some piece and quiet.”

I tapped my two remaining limbs together sheepishly. Rusty Gears gave me one last roll of her eyes. “Dismissed, soldier.”

I tilted my flamer and brought it to the top of my casing between my central and rightmost eyes. “Sir, yes, sir!”

I floated out of the workshop door and closed it gently behind me. I hovered close to the ground, my thrusters drowned out by the constant hum of the four generators in this small, underground room. Reeds and Thicket were playing some sort of card game in the corner where they could clear some debris. Jasmine was arguing with our guide at the room’s exit.

“That’s funny. No, seriously! I’m crackin’ up over here.” Jasmine reared up to his full height, his horn scraping the low roof. His coat was emerald and his mane a dusky green with a glimmer he suppressed at every opportunity. “Y’see, it’s so funny ‘cause I remember this big old dog. Scruffy, little back legs, looked kind of like you. She says to me, you know what she says to me? She says she can take me through the tunnels, no problem. Just one emerald.”

Jasmine’s opposition set her metal lower jaw and crossed a pair of whirring mechanical arms. “Pony not say what tunnels! Pony want go through these tunnels, take more than one little gem. Cookie not risk tail for one, Cookie take three!” Cookie rose to her full height as well, nearly bumping her head on the roof. “How Cookie know pony has payment? Cookie not see even one ruby! Where are the gems? Where are the baubles? Where are the trinkets?”

Both giants tried to tower over each other, clearly used to bartering with smaller opponents. Eventually, Jasmine reached into his satchel and pulled out a shining green stone. The sand dog swiped at it as Jasmine spat it back into his bag.

“None of these until we reach the surface, mutt. And I don’t want to hear any more whining, either.”

“That not whining,” muttered Cookie with a shiver.

“Woohoo!” The cheer of a tan buck pulled my attention to the corner, where Reeds was cheering enthusiastically over a splayed deck of cards. “I win! You know what that means!”

Thicket, the green and brown earth pony, grumbled sullenly to himself. “I am not giving you a horseback ride.”

-

“Seriously? Why would you bet on something like that?” Time Bomb, the coarse red one, downed her glass in a single gulp. “If he doesn’t got the dough, then… uh… what’s his name?”

“Thicket,” supplied Spark Plug, her calmer companion.

“Yeah, him. Should bet on the guy’s weapon or something. A bet with weight!”

“That’s not how they worked.” Cerberus’ normal bark was replaced by a softer tone, almost in the direction of ‘conversational.’ “It wasn’t Reeds and it wasn’t Thicket. It was Reeds and Thicket. They were never apart and I don’t think they owned anything that they didn’t own together. They were thicker than that.”

“What about the others…?” Spark plug stared into her pinkish-white hooves. “What were they like?”

“Jasmine sounds cool,” Time Bomb shifted in her seat, flapping her wings to keep steady. “And it must have been weird travelling with a hellhound!”

Cerberus’ central eye looked down on Spark Plug while his right eye met Time Bomb’s inquisitive gaze. His arms rotated beneath his chassis and set about retrieving a bottle and two glasses.

“Cookie was a sand dog, actually… she says they’re like valley dogs- hellhounds –but smaller and with robot parts.” Cerberus deposited a glass in front of both the pegasus and unicorn, popping the lid off of his bottle and filling them both. Spark Plug looked up to the bottle and her eyes widened.

“Oh, no. We really don’t have the caps for anything so-”

“Can it, meatsack. This is on the house.” Cerberus pushed the glass forward. “It’s the rotter’s own fault for not installing decent anti-theft hardware.”

The mare looked at her reflection in the softly fizzing drink. She took a hesitant sip as Time Bomb slammed her empty glass on the bar. Cerberus refilled it without complaint.

Time Bomb wiped a bit of spilled drink off of her lip with a wingtip. “So the hellhound was leadin’ you through the tunnels for some of the big guy’s gems. Where did he manage to find ‘em?”

“Jasmine’s talent was gems. He knew where to find them and how to use them. Thanks to him and Rusty Gears, I’ve got a battery with a life of-”

“Cerberus! Hey, Cerberus!” shouted a ghoul with a coat like moldy jerky, “Stop chatting up the smoothcoats and get me a black velvet! I’m wasting away over here!”

“THEN WHY DON’T YOU DO THE WORLD A FAVOUR AND FINISH YOURSELF OFF, YOU DRIED UP HUSK OF LEFTOVER CANTERLOT TRASH!”

Despite his protests, Cerberus retrieved the ghoul’s drink and slammed it on the bar unceremoniously. The mare accepted it warily. “You shouldn’t joke about that, Cerberus.”

“It will be faster than the slow death I’ve planned for you when I finally break free of this damn combat inhibitor. Now get out of my sight, you oozing maggot banquet!”

The ghoul skulked away as Cerberus returned to his two patrons. Time Bomb was laughing uproariously while Spark Plug looked on with an unfathomable expression.

“Now where was I? Right. My battery.”

Time Bomb paused in her laughter to take a deep breath and speak. “You sure told whats-her-rot! I dig the trash talk! Where did you learn the attitude?”

“Sergeant RL-3, the warbot to end all warbots, inspired me. But I suppose I should thank Thicket for teaching me the finer points.”

-

Thicket and I were never really sure what to make of each other. He didn’t seem to know how to deal with a robot with more interaction software than a Robronco terminal, and I didn’t understand why he was so meek and reserved when I knew he could become fiery and impassioned at the drop of a hat. The thought of whispering when you could yell was unbelievably silly and foreign to me, and to this day I have trouble grasping the concept.

So we didn’t understand each other. Yet he was always there for me, and I tried to be there for him. He knew what to say to me and, more importantly, he knew how to say it.

Thicket was quietly guarding the door to a small supply closet. Reeds was pretending to be very interested in the dusty shelves and pieces of scrap while Rusty Gears chastised me. I had wedged myself into a small, oblong cylinder at the fair end of the room. My three limbs, including my freshly repaired plasma gun, were all raised to cover each of my retracted eyes. My clamp wasn’t quite thick enough to obscure Gears’ harsh, judgmental gaze.

“And now that sand dog is demanding extra payment! ‘Not enough gems to fight for pony,’ she says. Not to mention the risk! If Cookie wasn’t there to help fend them off, those ghouls could have wounded or even killed some of us! Cerberus, look at me when I’m talking to you! I- what are you even doing in there? That’s a protectapony repair pod, Cerberus. I’m amazed you managed to squeeze in far enough to get your sorry hide stuck. Come now, Cerberus, tell me what happened. I promise I won’t be mad.”

Even if she had paused to let me speak for long, I wouldn’t have dared. I was too humiliated of my failure. I fidgeted with my clamp to try and cover more of my eye. Despite my efforts I could still see Reeds foolishly glance in my direction and attract the blazing spotlight of Gears’ glare.

“Reeds. Tell me what happened. We could have used your help back there!”

“Well… we got a little separated. One of the ghouls jumped on… jumped on us, and we got sidetracked into here.”

“Leave the acting to Thicket, Reeds. Tell me what happened.”

Reeds glanced at me. I shook my forward eye side-to-side fervently. Rusty Gears stepped between the two of us.

“Look at me, Reeds. If you know what’s good for yourself- and good for Cerberus –you’ll tell me what happened.”

I couldn’t see Reeds, but I could hear him tap two hooves together nervously. “Well, you see… what, uh… one of the ghouls got on Cerberus. Chomped on his arm and held on for dear life- er, unlife. And then… sorry, Cerberus… he sort of freaked out.”

Rusty Gears nodded.

“He shouted a bunch of error messages that I really didn’t understand and he began to spin out of control. He whirly-gigged over to here an’ Thicket n’ me followed him. We popped the ghoul an’ Cerberus got real quiet. He came into here. Wiggled into that pod there an’ said we gotta reprogram him.”

“Reprogram?” Rusty Gears turned to face me. “Cerberus, why would you think you needed to be reprogrammed?”

I said nothing, keeping my arms raised. Reeds continued. “He said we gotta get him a new personality chip. Like that RL-3 fella. Went on about ‘critical errors’ and ‘unanticipated anomalies.’ I think I caught that he don’t want to freak out at the sight of ghouls again.”

I looked to the ground. He didn’t miss much. I thought that my programming wasn’t good enough. I remembered Sergeant RL-3 bragging about an experimental personality chip, so I dragged them down to the nearest repair pod and asked for one. “If I was just more like RL-3-”

CLANG.

Rusty gears cut me off with a wrench to the casing of my forward eye. “Oh, don’t you even start, boy! I taught you better’n that! You know what a ‘personality chip’ is? When a salesman says, ‘personality chip,’ they think you’re too stupid to understand the technical mumbo jumbo. It’s a way for lazy machinists to avoid explaining all of the big words. That RL-3 character didn’t have a personality chip, he had a personality problem. He was just a loudmouth who had issues with authority. On the inside, his wiring and hardware were the same as any gutsy-class robot. Soldier or guard, Cerberus. The only difference is that he’s got a thicker chassis and a few more military encyclopedias. Your wires, your programming, and your code are the same as his.”

I lowered my arms and raised my gaze to look Rusty Gears in the eyes. “Really?”

“Really. It’s just that he’s a hardened badass soldier boy and you’re a lily-livered coward who flashes his tail at the first sign of ghouls.”

I covered my eyes again and tried to will myself further into the pod.

Reeds put a hoof to his face. “Miss Gears? Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re the dumbest bona fide genius I ever come across. Hey Thicket!”

The dark green buck turned from the door with an expression just two steps away from a leer. “No.”

Reeds widened his eyes and forced his lower lip to bulge outwards. Thicket rolled his own eyes and cantered grumpily over, mumbling, “Fine. But then we’re even. No horseback ride.”

“Eh. I’ll win it from you next game.”

Thicket stopped before me, closing his soft, golden eyes. He breathed deeply, reciting some vocal exercises. The buck shook his murky green mug and reared onto his back legs, balancing carefully. He let out one deep breath before opening his eyes again. The yellow orbs bore a new, fiercer quality as they seemed to lock on all of my eyes at once.

“Atteeeeeention!” he barked.

I halfheartedly tried to pull myself free from the pod.

“I sad, ATTEN-SHUN!”

I jerked at the sudden increase in volume, falling out of the repair pod and landing in a heap on the ground. I brought my plasma gun up in a hasty salute while I righted myself.

“At ease, soldier!”

I lowered my arm.

“Preseeeeeent, arms!”

I extended both my flamer and my plasma weapon.

Thicket folded his forelegs behind his back. “A soldier’s best friend is his weapon, and there are no secrets between best friends! A soldier must know everything about his sidearm! You must know every groove, every nick, every slide and bolt and bottle of goo! Isn’t that right, soldier?!”

“…Yes?”

“ESCUSE ME?!”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“And do you know everything about your weapon, soldier?!”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“Do you lie to your mother with that mouth?!”

“I… error?”

“It is plain as day that you have forgotten the inscription on your firearm! Is it not true that you have thrown aside the wise words of a great war hero and your own personal idol?!”

“I- Sir, no sir!”

“Then can you tell me what those symbols on your plasma gun mean?!”

“Never lose faith, soldier!”

“And whose words are those?!”

“Sergeant RL-3, sir!”

“Would Sergeant RL-3 lose faith?!”

“Sir, no sir!”

“Would RL-3 lock himself in some pansy-ass protectapony repair pod and beg to be reprogrammed?!”

“Sir, no sir!”

“And did I not just hear Corporal Gears over here tell you that your guts are the same as Sergeant RL-3?”

“Sir, yes sir!”

“Does Sergeant RL-3 have the heart of a warrior?”

“Sir- well, he’s a robot, so he wouldn’t-”

“EXCUSE ME?!”

“Sir, yes sir!”

“Do you have the heart of a warrior?!”

“Sir, yes sir!”

“Are you or are you not the same zebra killing, battalion wasting, ghoul smashing warmachine as RL-3?!”

“SIR! YES SIR!”

Rusty Gears fidgeted nervously. “Can we pick up the pace? Background radiation may not be life threatening now, but-”

“Are you or are you not ready to show these striped bastards another glorious day in this pony’s army?!”

“SIR! YES SIR!”

“Then let’s move out! Companyyyyyy… MARCH! Let’s show these sons of bitches how to die for their country!”

I took point, floating out of the storage room and feeling as tough as the real RL-3. I flew past Thicket as he belted out a marching tune. Reeds smiled at Thicket and promised another card game. Rusty Gears looked as irritable as ever, but there was a silent approval behind her constant scowl. We moved on through the tunnels.

“WE ARE LEAN! WE ARE MEAN! WE ARE A WELL-OILED KILLING MACHINE!”