We stepped out of the elevator and into the tech bay. It was a vast storeroom full of crates. The entirety of the walls, floor, and ceiling were white. Portal surfaces. I knew that was one of the reasons the Doctor had brought me down there. We walked a short distance through the stacks.
“Let’s try out your wings,” he said. “Can you spread them?”
I tried, but nothing happened. “I don’t know how.”
“OS, open wings.” They remained folded at my sides. “Oh, no. They’ve been improperly connected. I’ll have the team redo them later. Moving on to the next test. Pull up your console.”
The image appeared in my mind.
“Put in ‘run horn’.”
After I did, an oval-shaped ring popped into my vision. It looked like someone had cut it from the top right to the bottom left and rounded the corners created. The top half was hollow with an orange border, and the bottom was the same except blue. In the center of the ring was a barely-visible cross.
“What am I looking at, Doctor? There’s this ring in the center of my vision.”
“That would be the targeting reticule. Move it over a white surface and put ‘b’ into your console.”
I did as he told me and saw a flash of blue light above my head. A solid, oval blue portal was on the wall. In addition, the blue half of the reticule was now solid.
“Aim somewhere else and put in ‘o’.”
I looked at the floor. An orange light flashed where the blue had, and an orange oval appeared in front of me. This portal, however, was not solid, but only the edge of it glowed orange. On the inside was how the room looked from the wall. I looked over to the blue portal, and sure enough, I saw my side through it.
“Well, go on. Jump in,” said Whooves.
I cautiously put a metal hoof in before leaping into the orange portal. I fell through and landed on my back where I had been standing not a second before.
The Doctor laughed. “Portal systems online and functional.”
“So is that it?” I asked, getting up.
“Looks like it. Except for your wings, but we’ll take care of that later. In the meantime, why don’t you practice more with that horn? You’re probably going to need to use it sometime or another.”
“Sounds like a good idea. What about you?”
“I’m going to give the results to Cranky. He won’t be happy about your wing situation, but that’s not too important. What is important is that you're alive.” He turned and headed back to the elevator.
“Hey, before you go, how do I get out of this portal mode?”
“Input 'close horn'. Anything else?”
“No, I think that should do me until you get back.”
“All right then. Good bye!” The door closed him off from me. I was all alone in the cavernous room.
I decided to start with a few basic portal techniques. I placed the orange portal on the wall next to me and the blue farther away on the same wall. Stepping through the orange brought me out of the blue. I then put the orange portal directly above the blue. The first orange portal disappeared, and the blue portal briefly flashed. I jumped through the blue and landed a few feet from where I jumped but facing the opposite direction. My robotic hooves absorbed most of the shock.
For the next ten minutes, I practiced using those simple moves. Then an idea popped into my head. I placed the blue portal directly in front of me on the ground. I then looked straight up and put the orange one on the high ceiling. I jumped through the blue and fell through the air. As I fell, I replaced the blue portal directly under me so that I wouldn't land on the floor. I was falling, but I wasn't worried. If it looked like I was going to miss the blue portal, I would just put it under me again. It worked until I accidentally put the orange portal under me instead of the blue. Then I was flying up until I reached my peak height, almost touching the ceiling. Then I started to fall again, only to be rocketed upwards through the portals. Again, I nearly touched the ceiling and fell down through the portals. On my way up, I placed the blue portal on the wall about halfway from the floor to the ceiling. I passed through the portals and flew for quite some time before landing hard on my hooves and crashing to the floor. I got up and checked if I had injured myself. To my surprise, I found no traces of anything. My hooves must have saved me from the long fall.
The Doctor chose that moment to reappear. “I see that you’ve been using your horn,” he said.
“Portals are dangerous,” I replied. “I almost died just now.”
“They can be. Speaking of, I forgot to mention another command that you’re going to need.”
“What would that be?”
“Input ‘gravity’. The system's gyroscope will automatically orient your hooves towards the ground.”
“That would have been useful to know BEFORE I fell from the ceiling to the floor several times.”
“You WHAT?” He sighed. “ROBoCORN, you’re going to have to be more careful with yourself.”
“Or what?”
“Or you'll kill yourself! I didn't invest this much time into developing your systems only to have you die on me an hour later!”
“And ruin your plans to study me?”
“Yes!”
“If only I could without dying! I don't want to see more ponies put through that procedure!”
“Then help me build a true AI.”
That stopped me short. Building a robot from scratch was much better than helping roboticize anypony else.
“Fine. What do you need me to do?” I asked.
“First, let me give you your primary programming. Second, I need a secret terminal to work at. Don't want anypony screwing around with the code. Finally, I need you to go to sleep.”
“Sleep? Why?”
“I need to test the interactions between your unconscious mind and the computer. It will help me create an emergency shutdown code in the new AI.”
“Okay, but I don't know. I still think that this is all so that you can continue to create monsters like me.”
We exited the tech bay through a set of doors that led to the rest of the facility. As large as the tech bay was, I felt like I had just stepped outside of a cramped closet and into a vast cavern of machinery. I couldn't even see the walls, ceiling, or floor of the outside. The Doctor and I stood on one of countless catwalks that led to specific areas of the facility.
“So, where to, Doctor?” I said.
“We're headed down a few stories.”
“Can't we just take the elevator?”
“No. Our destination is isolated from the rest of the facility. It will be the perfect place to do our research.”
“Ah. What's down there?”
“Mostly old, broken-down machinery from past times. A few pieces will still be functional, but most of it is piles of scrap metal overgrown with some form of vegetation we can't identify. But we are on the moon, after all. Who knows what else is left to be discovered here?”
“Princess Luna.”
“Point taken. Anyways, let's get moving.” He led me down through the endless abyss of catwalks and technology. I felt more comfortable down there. I would have been relaxed if I wasn’t half robot. We walked for what seemed like miles before reaching a circular door. The right half of it was black and depicted a light blue silhouette of a pony. A small circle in the center rotated halfway and the door slid open. Whooves and I went in and found piles on piles of scrap metal haphazardly placed around the room. Green vines grew in cracks on the walls. This place obviously hadn’t been used in a long, long time.
“Here we are! This wing was abandoned quite some time ago. The experiments conducted here never produced any results. As a result, Cranky ordered it emptied, and nopony has touched it since,” said the Doctor.
“I noticed. So, what do we do now?”
“Go over there.” He pointed to a computer terminal. Next to it was a docking port for a computer sphere. I walked to the terminal.
“Now what?”
“Face the sphere port,” he said as he came up beside me, “and put your eye into it.”
“My eye?”
“Just trust me.”
“Okay…” I pressed my face to the port. Mechanical arms wrapped around my head an held me there. A small pole extended from the center of the port. I felt a hole in the tip of my nose open and the pole plug into it. My computer’s console appeared in my mind, but I wasn’t in complete control. The facility’s computer tried to identify me, but its search turned up a blank. “ACCESS DENIED” flashed across my console.
“Hang on a minute, I’m trying to override the security,” said the Doctor. He then started to curse under his breath before eventually shouting, “Success!”
My mental image immediately changed to “ACCESS GRANTED” and I could interact freely with the computer again.
“Well, now that you’re in, I can give you your first set of programs,” Whooves said. “I’m giving you the first one now.”
A file name briefly appeared in my head before disappearing in a flurry of other functions.
“Now for the rest.”
More text flew up the console, all as quickly as the first. I couldn’t read any of it. After a few minutes, it stopped.
“Now input ‘disengage’,” the Doctor said to me. As soon as I did, the metal pole retracted out of the hole in my nose and back into the wall. The hole shut, and the port released my head. I took a few steps backwards.
“What was that?” I asked.
“That was this section’s old mainframe. It isn’t exactly state-of-the-art, but it will do.”
“No, I mean what did you do to me?”
“I uploaded a few simple commands into your computer. Nothing too difficult. You shouldn’t feel too different from before.”
“Apart from having my head being held against a wall for several minutes, I’m doing just fine. Exactly what kind of commands are you talking about?”
Whooves heaved a sigh. “The main function was to have you bring escaped test subjects to the medical wing for robotization.”
I was both horrified and enraged by this piece of news. Not only was I the only pony ever to survive the procedure, but now I had to bring in more ponies to go through the same process.
“Oh, why, why, WHY?” I screamed. “You know I hate robotization. You know that I don’t want anypony else going through it. But still you treat me like just another robot, like your blindly obedient slave. You say that you look at me no different than before, but your actions tell me otherwise.”
“ROBoCORN, I’m only doing this because I have to!”
“Programming me to stand motionless in front of Cranky is one thing. Programming me to act against my will is another.”
“Number One, please…”
I ignored his pleas and ran. I didn’t know where I was going, nor did I care, as long as it was away from Doctor Whooves. I eventually stopped and found myself lost among overgrown piles of old, worn-out machinery. I sat down to think about my condition. None of the scientists who created me cared about me. The head of the facility and my old friend didn’t care. Even the Doctor, whom I had trusted ever since my robotization, treated me no better than the others. The weight of the realization came crashing down upon me. Nopony cared about my thoughts or feelings. I was truly alone.
Somehow I picked myself up from my misery and began to wander. I soon became disoriented and even more lost than I had been before. I looked at my surroundings. I quickly recognized that I had wandered into a test chamber. I figured that the track it was on had to lead somewhere, so I started to solve it. At the bottom of a small pit next to me was a cube, and on the floor behind me was a large button. Opening my testing program, I placed the blue portal under the cube and the orange one on the wall. The cube fell through the floor and came out next to me. Then I faced another problem: picking up the cube. I couldn’t pick it up using my hooves, and even if I could, I couldn’t walk over to put it on the button. Though I knew that it probably would do absolutely nothing, I focused my energy into my horn. To my surprise, the cube suddenly levitated a few inches off the ground and stopped, motionless.
“At least something about me hasn’t changed,” I mumbled to myself.
I walked to the button on the floor and dropped the cube on it. A door leading out of the chamber opened. I went through it and entered the lift beyond. The lift tube shut behind me. After a short ride, it opened again and I entered another test chamber.
It was a small room, with very few portalable surfaces. As such, it only took me five seconds total to portal over the wall that separated me from the exit door. When I reached the other side, I saw a docking port like the one the Doctor had programmed me at.
I walked over to it and plugged my head in. The first thing I noticed was the flashing "SECRET PANEL: CLOSED" option. I took two seconds and switched it to "SECRET PANEL: OPEN".
I disengaged from the port and looked to see what I had done. Right next to the docking port, one of the test chamber's panels had slid open, revealing a walkway and a closed door. I went in through the panel and the door and followed the walkway. Eventually I came to a wide open area. The walkway led to a door in a sphere at the center of the room. I walked over to the door, and it automatically opened.
Waiting on the other side was the Doctor.
"Hello, Number One," he said.
I backpedaled in surprise.
"Oh, no need to be afraid," he said. "Come on in. I want you to see what we're doing in here."
"And if I don't want to?" I asked.
"You don't have a choice," he stated flatly.
I sighed and hung my head. "Better get this over with, then." I stepped into the spherical room.
I wasn't prepared for what I saw. Countless technicians were building a massive robot in the center of the room. It hung from the ceiling by its chassis. But the head was what really caught me off guard.
"ROBoCORN, this is why you were created. By studying how you react to your computer, we will be able to program the first AI system.
"This, Number One, is CELeSTiA!"