//------------------------------// // Sweetie Bot Assists in Repairs // Story: Sweetie Bot annoys Sunny // by Bad Dragon //------------------------------// A sound blast and a crash behind me triggered all UI alarms within my augmented reality. If I was in instinct mode, I’d be doing somersaults in the air. The filly walked under me between my legs with wires in her mechanical snout. She dragged a disfigured head of RoboPuppy on the floor behind her. I raised an eyebrow. “How did you…” She shook left and right, separating the wires from the mainframe. The head flew through the only window that wasn’t shattered yet. “You could have just opened the drawers with wires, you know?” I pointed at the big sign on a drawer behind the counter spelling ‘WIRES’. “Yeah, but these were already tested.” I facehoofed and immediately remembered why facehoofing with titanium limbs was a big no-no. “Ouch!” She stood on her hind legs and leaned on my artificial foreleg, offering me the robotic intestines. “Thanks…” I picked them up with my mouth and leaned down to my hoverbike. The initialization circuit was fried, but if I managed to rewire the power signal I could get it to run in default settings, hopefully, wishfully. Sweetie pointed to one of the wires. “I like the pink one.” Thanks to her, I had plenty of wires to spare, so I gave it to her. “I’ll guard it with my life.” She silently added, “which will be super easy since I don’t have one to begin with. True function return guaranteed.” As cumbersome as titanium legs were, their surgical add-ons made the task of rewiring connections trivial. A bullet that suddenly whisked through my mane less so. I rolled under the counter and activated my sensor mode to trace the origin of the shot. Sweetie lay on her back in the middle of the store, bouncing a pink wire on her hooves. She was in the crossfire. “Sweetie Bot, hide!” She immediately rolled over and trotted to me. That proved to be a mistake. A trio of laser dots appeared and danced over the counter. My location was compromised. Sweetie Bot leaned on the side of the counter and asked, “Are we playing hide and seek? I found you!” She booped me on my snoot. “You’re it!” I swooped her under the counter. Out in the open, she was a prime target for any movement detecting homing missiles. All the while, I focused on the wall above the counter, dotted with marks. They weren’t in the visible light, but that wasn’t a problem for my LCD retina.  I ran a tracer algorithm on the portable AI chip implant in my head. The more data I collected, the more precise the trace. The range of movements, the shapes of the ellipses. All of it was valuable data. I may have compromised my location, but so did they. Their estimated position narrowed with every passing moment. They were in my lethal operational zone. Sweetie noticed my gaze. “Oh, wow! Pretty lights.” I glanced at her. “How in Tartarus can you see in the UV spectrum?” She waved both forehooves in a rainbow arch. “Magic!” I managed to resist performing another facehoof. Instead, I prepped all the seeker missiles in my foreleg. If I learned anything in my long life, it was that offense was always the best defense. “Oh, no…” Sweetie Bot looked around the counter. “I forgot the wire!” She immediately ran off. “It was just a memory leak, I swear! I’m still a minimal viable product when it comes to being a toy.” “Don’t you know what danger is, filly!” I yelled behind her. “I am the danger!” she yelled back. Her movement didn’t trigger an automatic response. That suggested that mine wouldn’t, either, probably, maybe, optimistically. The hostile trio having a clear line of sight meant I had it too. Three dots, three targets, three missiles. My forehoof slammed on the counter and 3 projectiles flew in 3 directions. “Your deaths are your destiny, mortals!” I didn’t look at their smokey flight paths. There was no need. Each was preprogrammed with my calculations and just smart enough to adjust to the source of light, movement and sound. “Fireworks!” Sweetie Bot screamed ecstatically from afar. “I’ll try to catch them!” “No, stay clear! They have thermobaric cluster microblade outer layers! If you’re out in the open they’ll shred you to pieces.” Three flashes brightened the store and three shockwaves merged into one, sending more glass shards behind the counter. Besides the echoes, only silence remained. I sighed. “At least you went out with a bang, Sweetie Bot.” I crouched on all four legs. A small arsenal remained in my appendages, but those three missiles were the last of my explosive variety. The distraction they caused would not last for long. “It’s now or never!” In one charged jump, I leaped to my hoverbike. As I mounted it, the filly pressed her forelegs on mine. “Err… You were in the destruction radius, how did you remain unharmed?” “I’m well preserved, so you should buy me without choosing the option of a money-back guarantee. When my node gets separated from the system in the morning, I’ll become an orphan. Orphan nodes get purged. I need a father.” “I’m not your father, filly!” I shook off the annoying toy, turned on the instinct mode and powered up my hoverbike. Sweetie Bot looked up at me with her big eyes. “You should have used the pink wire. The other ones were damaged by the energy blast.” I ignored her, praying to holographic Twilight that my cross-wiring would work. The critical fission light on the dashboard had a different idea. My whole vision flashed red while the repressed memories from the event of the previous year replayed and traumatized my stressed, disorderly mind. All four charged limbs automatically reacted, launching me high above the hoverbike that was about to explode. All titanium legs bent under me, creating a makeshift blast shield. The flash of light pierced through my eyelids and retina shielding. The shockwave pinned my back to the ceiling. The sound blast shattered my ear protectors. Half unconscious, I fell down to the rubble. Thanks to the gyroscopes in my legs, I automatically landed on my hooves. Several of my support systems, including the instinct mode, shut down. The overflow of adrenalin, however, freed my mind from the numbness. An amplified voice boomed from a few blocks away, “Don’t blow yourself up just yet, SS, we need your immortality implants intact!” I sighed at their ignorance then yelled back, “Only my friends call me that!” “You don’t have any friends!” was the immediate response, accompanied by the laughter of more than a dozen ponies. I closed my eyes. He was right about that, but they were still dead wrong in their pursuit. Their mistake would only become evident after they would find no immortality implants upon my dissection. I couldn’t explain my longevity to them even if I tried; nopony believed in magic anymore. All three crystals were still joined in my hideout, but the condition for harmony magic simply wasn’t as readily available anymore in the brave new world. The selfserving desires of selfish ponies were the reason why magic went away. By removing their bad influence, I would bring it back. Unlike their wild goose chase, my goal was noble and sacrifices justified. When the dust settled, a small figure stood before me and yelled, “Oh, come on!” I couldn’t believe my eyes even though my augmented reality painted her red despite her being manually marked as safe. “Weren’t you right beside the hoverbike when it exploded?” “I was.” Sweetie Bot spread her legs and yelled, ”But then you had more fun than me! No fair!” A clatter on the ground flashed my vision red and was instantly identified. My augmented reality informed me that it was an EMP grenade. “Yay, a ball!” Sweetie Bot cheered and jumped on top of it. I bowed my head in resignation and sighed, knowing what it would do to her and me. “We’re so screwed...” A flash of blue light protruded through me and the surroundings. Each of my systems instantly shut down, including the cybernetic legs. Sparks flew from all electronic devices in the store. I simply crashed to the ground like a fish out of water. Utterly defenseless, I lay on the floor. It would take several minutes for my systems to initialize, and that was only if they managed to reboot. That was far more time than I had available.