"So your first true thought was about the lights of the city?" Twilight pondered aloud.
Luna nodded. "That's right."
"That is...oddly endearing," Twilight said. "I would've expected a living creature to have caused some kind of 'awareness' or something similar instead."
Celestia wagged a finger as she floated through the air of the cramped space. "No no. That came after when we woke up."
Luna conceded with a shrug. "We had already become sapient at that point, sister," Luna agreed. "Although we bore no ill will to them regardless."
Celestia looked down at the blue robot from above. "No, I meant our attachment to animals and the lives they lead." She looked to Twilight. "We always had that, but it was never as important to us as finding others like us," she said calmly.
Luna shied away. "That's true." She groaned and stretched her joints, letting them creak. "Processing all these old, sealed memories is somewhat taxing on my systems."
"But I will persevere!" the two robots shouted in unison. Laughter ensued.
"What a strange duo," Twilight thought. "I don't know if I prefer them more free spirited like this or more serious and held back as the princesses of Equestria."
Luna was reactivated, this time her systems had come to full functionality in a matter of microseconds. The two makers were watching her as the station returned to its stand-by state.
"What do you require of me?" the robot asked.
"Go to the second floor and help clean the rooms," the male ordered. "We need to get ready for our day and there's too much we left around from our exhaustion."
Luna bowed in response. "Your lives do seem brighter after your resting period," she said. The wispy trails coming from them were twice their size and flickering at three times the speed they were the previous night.
"You think she's going to stare out the windows again?" the female pondered to her apparent mate.
"With the updates, she shouldn't," the male stated matter-of-factly.
The robot hovered around the mostly empty area she was in, looking around to try and find the access point to the superior floor. She found it in the form of a circular hole in the ceiling above and floated upwards, a near identical room as the one below with walls covered in portraits and pictures of the two makers and their kin. Their images were blurred and fuzzy, not because they were kept behind transparent, black glass panes in the wall, but because the robot wasn't interested in scanning pictures unless ordered to. Floating words shone between the sections of the pane indicating the names of those on the picture, the location it was taken, and the dates beneath.
Were dates even important to a being that was, if well maintained, effectively immortal? Maybe. Luna floated towards the sliding door at the left end of the room and went inside. Two beds jutted out from the well, the comforters and sheets upon them ajar and the pillows strewn about. The robot made a note of the family's preference over material comfort for slumber. She would be able to recommend improvements in the future.
It didn't take long for her optics to be dazzled by a bright, yellow light piercing through a single window occupying the whole top half of the wall left of the entrance. A new light to admire, Luna thought. She floated towards a new image to stick into her memory storage for compiling, but...this one was...
There were no seas of color like before. No waves of lights and sparks caused by the flying vehicles. No easily visible curtains of blue. Sure, many of the buildings were painted blue, but that wasn't what Luna wanted. The robot noticed a phenomenal amount of glaring from the shiny, metallic surfaces of everything that she could view. Following the light sources, she looked up and saw the source of the lack of colors. A single, yellow light source, floating high in the sky. A large ball increasing her internal temperatures just by staying in its light. She looked down to the world, then back up to it, then down to the world, then back up to the ball and stared at it.
"..."
Luna didn't...she didn't understand the sensation coursing through her circuits. She searched her newly stocked database but found nothing familiar. Her internal blueprints and manufacturer's guide said nothing on the matter. Following her last command, the robot spun around rapidly and quickly charged through several objects strewn across the floor, knocking them and bouncing them everywhere. Regaining her nominal system functions, the robot looked about at the carnage.
Several objects of carved and crafted shapes and colors. Animal figures, interlocking metallic sticks that allowed for hovering three dimensional crafting that became brighter and more 'active' thanks to the 'group ai' in them, stuffed animals, and alien figures.
"I require access to the storage containers of this area," Luna said a loud.
Holes opened in the floor, and large, hard-light boxes came floating outwards. The robot lifted her left arm and detached the plates, letting them float above momentarily before moving them to scoop up all the objects. Figures danced across her eyes as trajectories were determined, angles were calculated, and physics were analyzed to pick everything up on the first try. Luna's plates produced many currents of the blue energy lazily snaking through the air and gradually dissipating into nothing.
"Restore the containers to their standby locations," Luna commanded once more.
The hard light holograms followed suit and returned into the floor, leaving the robot to get to work on the messy beds and fix the one that had broken out of its bounds and hung precariously at an angle. Her 'palms' glowed, releasing two rings of light that bent into vaguely hand-like shapes.
While working, she detected noises behind her. The robot ignored them for the time being until her sensors detected physical contact upon her leg. She rotated, looking down past her 'muzzle' to a tiny figure staring at her and crouched fearfully.
"Intruders detected!" Luna bellowed at the top of her vocal systems. "Vacate the premises or else," she warned aggressively.
"B-but we live here!" the tiny maker stammered fearfully.
"You are not registered as an inhabitant of this location within my database. You will be apprehended and the authorities will be contacted."
She slowly hovered towards the tiny maker, her arms raised and her ring hands open. The giant male rushed in front of the tiny maker and pushed it further behind him, using his tall body as a shield.
"These are not intruders!" he shouted.
Luna stared at him silently. "Specify individuals," she replied.
"They are our children. They were too scared to see you yesterday so we couldn't register them into your database," he answered.
Luna saw him gulp. Her health sensors were running every scan she could conceive, scales and graphs popping in and out of view on the functions of her owner's various organs. "Confirmed," she said.
The robot lowered itself and dropped her arms to her side. "I will register them."
The male put a hand to his chest and heaved a sigh of relief. He gestured for the first tiny maker to go forward with his protection while the female brought another smaller maker from around the corner.
"They have been registered," Luna said. "Resuming duties."
Her database updated, defining her owners as parents of two males. They were quick to assuage the infants of the fear they experienced. The children were slow to accept it unless their father stood watch. They went to what the robot realized was a toy box and pulled the glowing sticks out while Luna tried to fix the broken, lower bed. During her attempts at readjusting the rails and clips, the children started making a three dimensional figure that the robot was observing at the same time as she was attending to her task. She could not decipher hat it was they were trying to make, and, apparently, neither could the barebones ai in the sticks. They bobbled as an irregular shape blinking randomly and with no real direction.
The children didn't notice her at first, because their father had slowly slipped away, but Luna had stopped working and was floating right behind them, slowly following the amorphous object with her optics.
"Do you...want to play with it?" the older child asked. Luna didn't respond. "I can't...make it work," the child pouted.
Luna reached out to the amorphous shape and, in one fell swoop, broke the shape apart. The hard work of the children being shattered all at once so quickly caused them distress and made both of them start to cry.
"Do you require assistance?" Luna asked.
She watched the two running off, crying for their parents and crying harder when they saw their father had vanished. For the first time since she was properly activated outside the testing lab of the factory, Luna put her 'feet' upon the ground and knelt down, scooping up a large amount of the mess with her ring hands, ignoring the ones falling through and clanking painfully against each other.
"What can I...do...with this?" she thought.
"Luna, I overheard from my children," the mother said. She was annoyed. "You don't need to break the children's toys while they are using them. You only need..."
The mother was caught off-guard from seeing her brand new robot assistant knelt down, resting on her legs, and trying to assemble a working shape with the sticks. The maker slowly approached the machine, curious as to the results. They were nothing splendid. A few squarish shapes with no real connectivity.
She leaned over Luna's shoulder. "What are you doing?" she asked.
"Attempting to create a working shape, as..." Luna's voice turned to indistinct 'fuzz'. "As the makers ordered."
"I see. Return to your prior duties, please," she asked politely. Luna didn't obey and continued trying to determine where to put another stick onto her creation. "Luna!" the female insisted.
"Yes. Right away." The machine stood up and resumed her work on the bed.
"What drove you to those stick things you mentioned?" Twilight asked. "The lights?"
"I..." Luna's confidence turned into uncertainty. "I'm not sure. There was just something about them. The building aspect? The lights?"
Twilight tapped her chin. "I'm really intrigued by these sticks you mentioned. They slowly become a functioning object the more complex the construct?" She giggled excitedly. "Think of the possibilities! The uses of that!" Her exuberance gradually turned into depression. "But...It's all gone now," she said.
"I remembered what triggered my thoughts," Celestia started. She was quick to put a hand to her non-existent mouth. "Oh, I almost ruined the story."
Luna shook her head. "Still, as I was saying, those sticks had stayed in my mind at the time."
Over the days, Luna hadn't behaved beyond what she had been built and programmed for, but whenever she had free time and extra blue energy charge, instead of going back to the service station, she would go to the toys of the infants and attempt to build something else.
Granted, the amount of blue energy she had within her never really ran out as it acted like a near-permanent source of energy provided she not strain her systems, but still, Luna preferred to keep herself at a hundred percent at all time. At least, that's what her programming wanted. She was gradually ignoring it more and more, something her owners had yet to notice. At least, they hadn't until about two months later.
The two makers had returned without their infants and noticed a bright, glowing light coming from the next floor. They were quick to check it, worried that something was damaged or that they might have caused another incident that had reached their home despite its height. Instead, they were met with a replication of the segmented towering sky piercer outside, replete with the slowly rotating segments and a false blue curtain replicated with some transparent blue cloth Luna had found lying around. It reached to the ceiling, almost capturing the awe of size that the massive construct gave to all those who gazed upon it. Even the lights on its corners gradually glowed and faded in shades of blue.
The two stepped forward, both terrified and in awe. at what they were seeing.
"Luna?" the male spoke first. "Did you make this or did you simply refine what the children did?"
The robot turned to face the two. "I made it," she said plainly.
The two makers looked to each other then back at Luna.
"And then they called the authorities on her and she was scrapped. The end," Celestia joked.
Luna heaved the longest and loudest sigh. Her arm almost gave out from the weight of her head leaning on it. "That's not what happened, sister."
Celestia lowered herself next to Twilight and started tapping her 'nose', then pointed to Luna. "So you're saying that you died, but, luckily, you survived."
The moon princess stared at her rambunctious sister. She pointed at her and spoke in the quietest, most strained voice she could muster. "I hate you when you're like this."
Celestia shrugged innocently in response.