Imagine blackness. Not like ink filling an entire page, nor like dark filling a room. Imagine that you are floating amidst the nothingness of space.
Imagine a vacuum. A darkness. All around in every direction into distances unknown and unmeasured, there is absolute emptiness. Where the stars would be there is no light, simply a void that permeates everything. A million million miles in every direction, so far that you could reach out and keeping reaching for a thousand lifetimes and never touch anything. No light, no heat, no dark, no cold. No sensation. No thought.
Now imagine that in this void of nothingness, you hear a sound. It is not a small sound, or a loud one, it’s a sound that you hear all around you and yet inside your head, in every direction and coming from nowhere at all. A sound that are words being spoken, though you cannot tell if the voice is male or female. The sound is simply two words:
BEGIN PROGRAM.
All around you in the distance, the tiniest points of light begin to flicker into existence. By twos and then by threes and fours little points of white begin to exist at the most distant regions of the void, and begin to grow brighter. Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. Stars coming into existence in a rush of light and warmth all around you, spreading across the void of nothing and beginning to fill it.
The points of light begin ever so slowly to expand and spread out into the blackness, and with it comes a noise like the rumble of thunder from every direction. The rumble grows from something deep and soft into a grumble, louder and louder and louder, steadily climbing to a roar of sound that begins to fill the emptiness around you. The lights are becoming too bright, filling the nothingness and blinding you.
You want to close your eyes. The light is becoming painful. You have no eyes to shut.
You want to cover your ears. The sound is beating against your head. You have no ears to cover.
The tremendous sound rushes in at you and crashes down, and all of a sudden you feel a body that you couldn’t feel before being pulled downwards, a drop that shoves your heart to your throat. Your stomach turns and you feel a sickening sensation of plummeting. The roar has consumed everything, the light has filled in all of the blank spaces, you can feel everything in that million million miles in every direction rushing at you with a roar that is the only existent sound. You feel it all slam into you for the briefest of moments, crushing in at your entire being, and then finally, with the very softest, the very littlest of pops...
… you open your eyes and wake up.
As my eyes opened there was a long time in which I could comprehend nothing.
Somewhere in the recesses of my consciousness I was aware of a clock telling me that the time was precisely midnight, of the first day, the first month, year one... which I could simply guess was because the clock had never actually been set.
At first I could see nothing at all, but as my eyes began to widen to take in more light, I noted that there was simply very little light to see anything by. Each eye was unfocused and it took a moment to get them back into sync so I could make out what was in front of me. The blank, if grimy, metal of the table that I was laying on filled one side of my vision, but the rest was taken up by grey wall and misshapen shadows.
I knew from the moment that I had become aware that something was very wrong -- many somethings, in fact. First, I knew that the body I now inhabited had not been designed for me; the firmware aboard my chassis did not recognize me and was struggling to properly relay data. I seemed to have a fair amount of information at my disposal in the first sections of my memory, though it seemed crudely dumped and not very detailed; what little information I had about myself left me certain that my body was not precisely my body.
The body I was in was querying me yet again, asking me for make and model codes, serial numbers, anything at all of the sort. I found that I simply had nothing at all to give it. I answered with a simple null value, which did not satisfy it in the slightest, but it quieted up after a few more tries, regardless.
Besides this, my chassis was also letting me know that it wasn’t in very good condition; in fact, in the current case it seemed there were more parts with damage to some degree than parts without.Though I was having trouble making out all of the data the firmware was giving me, I made the assumption that the majority of my subsystems and modules weren’t supposed to be highlighted in shades of orange or red in my diagnostics.
By the time that I had gained proper control over motor-functions and had brought all of my available sensors online, I became aware of a living creature very close to me; my guess, of course, was that this would be the one who had activated me. All I could hear was their breathing, though listening for other breath patterns nearby let me know that this individual was alone.
Being as the one who had activated me was likely waiting for some sign of success, I brought my new motors online and slowly raised my head, bringing it about to face the individual next to me, but being disappointed in finding that they were facing away. They were a pony - a colt if I determined the proportions of the skull correctly - but I had little data at all on equine anatomy other than basic information, and the subject in question was facing away from me.
My activator was wearing a cloth coat with a plasticized outer shell and an attached hood that was currently down, that enabled me to see his grey coloration and the back of his damp, black mane. He seemed to be very intently focused on something else in the dark room. I couldn’t tell what he was so keen on, but whatever it was must have been very important, so I kept myself from interrupting him.
The grey colt was wearing a headlamp, casting a bright spot on the things in front of him. In the circle of white, I could see stacks of boxes and canisters, many of which were damaged by rocky debris and a collapsed ceiling, all of which sat in a glimmering pool of liquid that reflected the headlamp’s glow. The room we were in appeared to have either lost power or had it shut off, for the remaining overhead lamps I could see were doing nothing.
I felt starved for input. For information on where we were and who I was and who my activator was and… a dozen other things. As I looked around and tried to make sense of the situation I found myself in, the questions kept stacking up in a backlog of mystery that I determined would be pointless to maintain. I dropped the stream of curiosity for a single question, one which I felt would best benefit me if it were answered. I would have to voice this question, of course, but as I searched for some way to do so I found that there were no speaker modules listed in my hardware specs.
Oh. There it was. I must not have seen ‘Primary Vocabulator’ listed because it was firmly placed in the Damaged section of my list of modules. A sensation overcame me that I didn’t at first know how to react to, a feeling of futility and uselessness. What was I to do? This was my very first activation and I couldn’t even perform basic communication? This was unacceptable. I gave a prod to the diagnostic program built into the firmware of my chassis and very clearly informed it that it was wrong, and that it should re-evaluate its findings.
My chassis’ diagnostic software informed me that I was loony.
I found this conclusion unacceptable as well, perhaps more so than its first conclusion. Nevertheless, it did search for more information and eventually presented me with a brief rundown of what was wrong: the chassis sent along my commands just fine, but once they reached the relay in the section where my speaking unit lay it just… looped right back.
A short was the most likely scenario, according to the diagnostic process. A shorted relay would cause commands to loop back around. Unfortunately this was a hardware problem, and not as easily fixed as a simple glitch. The only one who could help me at this point would be my activator.
Slowly, carefully, I began to test my ability to move. I seemed to have legs, and though it struck me as odd I did not know why; what was I to expect other than legs? Apparently, something different. But legs I had, and legs I moved in order to bring myself upright. Tilting my head down to peer at myself I found that not only did I have legs, I rather much resembled my activator in that I was somewhat pony-shaped. A quick glance judged me to be about 15 percent smaller than the colt, though other than this I seemed to be a rough analogue. I had hoped my physical appearance would grant an idea of my purpose, but it seemed that it would not be that easy to get answers.
The slow tilting of the colt’s ears drew my attention, and I watched him intently. His ears swiveled without his head moving, and my guess was that he was tracking a sound. I located my own ear-controls, swiveling the mounted audio pickups on my head to follow the direction of my activators’... and they picked up a curious sound I had not noticed before.
Swiiisshhh… swiiiishhh…
It was a sound that I had no comparison for to identify, but I distinctly heard it growing in volume. The room that we were in had a number of obstacles that made the exact location hard to pinpoint, but it was most certainly drawing closer, whatever it was.
My activator was tense. His breathing was slowed so he could hear better, but was irregular and labored. The sound he was intently focused upon was one that did not please him and as the sound drew closer he seemed to become less intent on trailing its motion. He looked about in front of him, tilting his head to look around a box near him before finally starting to move backwards towards me.
The colt finally turned around and I saw his forehooves lift, soaked with dirty water. He put them on the edge of the table and seemed to be about to climb up onto it with me when he finally noticed that I was no longer lying down. His headlamp flashed across my face and blinded me for a moment, and when my vision adjusted I could see his green eyes widen even more. His expression changed from one of nervous tension to one of surprise and then nearly to a panic.
I moved myself backwards, wondering what would happen; for some reason something about me surprised him, and this worried me. The colt made a small sound, a little gasp of breath, and after considering me for a moment and glancing back at the way he had been looking before he seemed to decide that whatever concern I was was less than the concern the sound in the room brought him.
“Move over,” hissed the colt quietly, through gritted teeth. He looked back at me and narrowed his eyes, that nervous tension taking over his expression again.
I quickly moved to fulfill his task, disappointed that my first order ever was something so mundane and trivial. But, as I began to shift myself towards my left, I found this was not as trivial as I had expected. My legs seemed to work well enough for most of what I had done with them so far, but as my left hind leg attempted to slide sideways in one joint… it hung. Something caught that was not meant to catch and the swivel jammed, and before I could lean myself back I found that I was toppling sideways to the left.
BANG!
My chassis smacked down hard on the metal tabletop and the surface gave a squeak in protest. The sound it made was not very loud, but compared to all sounds previous it was a deafening boom in the dark room. I quickly tried to recover and get back to my feet, but had to move a bit more to the left to accommodate the colt that was now much more hurriedly clambering up onto the table alongside me.
“Shhh! Quiet!” the pony next to me insisted. I had not yet managed to get back to my feet, but still I stopped and waited as he had said, daring not to make a sound.
Whatever the sound in the room was, it was something my activator seemed to be unwilling to encounter. Was it dangerous? I couldn’t begin to guess at the time. The pony next to me was facing towards the room and still listening, no longer as worried by me. I wanted to apologize for the noise I had made in trying to follow his directions, but of course… I still could not vocalize.
“Hey, tincan. Can you fight?”
The question, harshly whispered by the colt, caught me completely off guard. Could I fight? The question perplexed me, and I hesitated in trying to find an answer to consider what him asking it meant. It seemed likely, then, that there was some kind of danger and that he wanted to know if I was prepared to face it.
I had no idea of the answer. To find one I put forward a query to my diagnostic program: combat-capable?
My diagnostic program advised me that I was in no condition for hazardous environments and then further queried as to how I could possibly think I was, with all of the red and orange indicators it brought to my attention again. It then pointed out that, by all means, I should delete its response and if I felt up to the challenge should go ahead and put myself in danger and see what happened.
I took this as a definitive no.
My activator didn't look very happy when I shook my head in answer to his question. "All this freaking trouble for a motorized mannequin? My luck." I heard him mutter, though not at me. “And still no damn answers.”
I myself had no answers to any of my questions, though I began to piece parts of what I had so far observed together. Judging by the structural damage to the room we were in and the spread of liquid across the floor, I made the guess that some disaster had occurred here. A quake perhaps? I didn’t have enough data on geology to make an accurate guess there, but it was a possibility based on the cracking of the concrete walls. I could make the guess, then, that whatever disaster had occurred was what had damaged my chassis. The diagnostic program echoed this conclusion.
So far, other than the hardware for vocalizing, it seemed as though a number of modules and peripheral devices were either reporting damage or not reporting at all; the diagnostic program had called up a side process to analyze the damage reports and came to the conclusion that my chassis had suffered a great deal of blunt force and pressure damage, sustained most likely from a substantial impact. There also seemed to be a great deal of decay in my power cells, which meant--
Before I even knew what was happening, my body was already sliding forwards. I didn’t even have a reflex process running; I couldn’t react as the back end of the table I was laying on began to suddenly and violently push upwards with a heave, tossing me upright and then pitching forwards with the pegasus alongside me, his wings bolting out in reflex. He shouted something, but I couldn’t determine what was being said over the sound of objects splashing into the water… including myself.
Liquid exposure, chimed a notice in my systems. This notice very quickly became an outright emergency alert: Liquid penetration! Chassis seal compromised!
Oh dear. My chassis had no intact barriers to prevent the intrusion of the dark water as I splashed into it, barely getting my limbs underneath me to start getting myself upright. If I could keep my torso above the water I would likely be alright, or so I could assume based on the fact that my legs held no vital components.
The table, now flipped, came down suddenly on top of my back, hitting my head with a dull TANG of noise. My vision flickered at the impact and one eye desynchronized, showing a tilted image that was out of focus, and then all went cloudy and silent as I was shoved under the surface of the water by the heavy furnishing piece I had previously been laying on.
Beneath the surface was only silence; my audio pickups were dead in liquid, and my eyes had nothing at all to focus on. Liquid penetration! came the notice yet again, insistently blinking in the field of useless vision I had in front of me. Chassis seal compromised! I could tell that water was streaming into the gaps in my plating, starting to intrude in the shell of my torso in who knew how many places.
My diagnostic process informed me, somewhat calmly, that I should probably do something. I was inclined to agree.
I put full power to my leg motors, straightening them out and shoving roughly upwards. Through the connections of my chassis I could ‘hear’ the motors struggling and whining, but the table above me was not heavy enough for the combined power of my servos and I managed to drag myself out from underneath it, breaching the surface again.
My activator was not immediately visible, though I could clearly see his headlamp a few feet away from me. His status was unknown, but he was in the water as well, struggling against something I could only barely glimpse in the beam of his headlamp as my eyes regained their focus.
We had been attacked by something, and I didn’t know if my activator could handle himself in such an engagement, nor what he was even engaged with. Worse, there was still liquid inside of my casing, and I had no idea at all what damage it might cause were it to remain there... my diagnostic program told me it might be ‘a lot’.
It didn't seem to me, that feeling of uselessness coming back, that I had anything at all at my disposal to aid my activator. No processes save for the minimal few needed to operate were running, and I didn't have time to sort through my memory banks to find anything even resembling combat advice. Even if I had anything of the sort, my chassis was heavily damaged.
I needed an objective, a task to complete, and it was clear that my activator was too busy splashing and struggling with an unknown assailant to offer me one.
Objective process? I queried my own filesystem.
Running Tasky Pro version 1.3, responded the filesystem. So I did indeed have a task-management subroutine, how wonderful. A licensed copy as well. A moment later the program was up and running; in my field of view a small dialog box appeared and then moved itself to the upper left of my view.
No objectives. Add New Task? it queried me.
Add task: defend pegasus, was my simple response. I hoped that this task-listing program would be able to comprehend such terse verbiage. It seemed that it understood my request, as it then began pinging my already-running diagnostics for information relevant to such a task.
The diagnostic program was not very agreeable now that I had sicced this new program on it for requests, but it complied even so.
Objectives updated, claimed the task program, shortly before the little dialog in my field of vision listed out a single task for me to complete...
Extreme urgency: Engage unknown hostile with blunt force.
My diagnostic program was even more displeased about this conclusion, and advised that pursuing this task would likely end ‘very badly’. I discarded this advice. The program added a new line to my list of damaged modules in response: Pending updates.
By the time I was done with giving myself a task to complete, a full three seconds had passed… valuable time that I did not intend to let go completely to waste. In front of me I saw my activator go down, splashing into the water with whatever was attacking him on top; it seemed that this assailant was quite strong. I began to approach, slowly the first two steps to ensure that my legs would move freely without locking up, and then starting to dash.
At a foot away I still had no ability to identify my target, but this mattered very little; it was about my size and darkly-colored, and perched now on top of my activator. The colt shouted something through sputters of dark water.
“Just hit it!” was what it sounded like.
That was already my intention, I said to myself. I reared back on my hind legs and then slung myself forwards, forelegs pointing towards the hostile. It was likely not at all a tactical maneuver, but blunt force was blunt force.
As my legs impacted the side of the target, its unseen surface yielded and flexed; flesh, then. A creature. My weight carried me forwards, shoving the creature off balance and throwing it sideways off of my activator, the beast splashing into the water on its side. I heard it let out a startled hissing noise, followed by submerged gurgles as it twisted in the water.
The colt struggled upright, drenched in dirty water and throwing himself away from the creature and to my side before turning around to face it again. With the headlamp centered on it properly I could get a better look at what we had been engaged by.
It was a reptile of some kind, of that I was sure. The mottled grey hide was scaly and slick with water, and it was smaller than a pony if only by a bit. Its long sinuous body seemed rather serpent-like, but it also had limbs that showed it to be a quadruped of sorts. As it righted itself from my attack and turned, I saw it had bright, even luminescent, green eyes… and a long snout filled with gleaming, razored teeth.
I had no idea at all what it was. For a full second I scoured my memory for anything resembling this, but the closest that I could find were references to ‘dragons’, which this entity did not fully fit the description of. Again, my inability to speak left me unable to question my activator for answers about what this was, or what we were going to do.
The reptilian beast had no such trouble with deciding on a course of action. It lunged forwards, forelimbs outstretched to try to pounce on the pegasus beside me yet again. This was something I couldn’t allow; I reacted by gathering my legs and giving a leap of my own, attempting to intercept its motion with my own. I caught the beast at an angle, tackling it in mid-air before it could strike my activator again.
My chassis creaked and rattled at the impact of the creature, and a few short beeps of warning were all I had before I was in the water again. Even so, my attempt at intercepting was successful; the beast and I had collided and splashed down sideways in the water, off-target from the colt. My vision was obscured by water and the now more familiar alert of water penetration came up yet again. Risk accepted; the creature could not be allowed to attack my activator.
The reptile was apparently made very angry by this. I felt a sharp impact against my chest as it struggled to right itself, and a new alert popped up in my HUD: Chassis penetration! It seemed that the creature had claws, long, very hard ones that were easily jabbing straight through my chassis’ plating. I tried to bring myself upright, but the claws buried into my chest plating held firm, and instead I felt myself being hoisted up.
Tasky Pro has stopped responding, came a new alert. The section of my HUD that showed my objective blacked out. Diagnostic system malfunction, came another alert; the sarcastically-inclined program shut itself off. My sensors could detect the claws of the reptile digging quite deep into my torso as it hefted me up with absurd strength, standing bipedally and raising me out of the water. I saw the headlamp behind me illuminate it as it gave a shrill and angry snarl.
Around me the world lit up for a brief instant, everything flashing white. My eyes had no time to adjust to the flash before it was gone, accompanied by a sharp and tremendous BANG of sound, a tiny explosion in the small room that echoed harshly on the stone walls. The creature’s head distorted as something very small and incredibly fast struck it, and I could see the skull fracture and break. Blood sprayed out in a small explosion of red that obscured my vision, and then suddenly I was dropping.
I collapsed into the water next to the reptile, struggling to free myself from the claws buried in my chest; it began to convulse, which helped me wrench free and regain my footing. The exposure to the water helped clear my vision, and I began to back away from the flailing beast.
My activator had drawn something from under his coat; a firearm that was strapped to the harness he wore beneath. The long lever that triggered it was swung out to his mouth, where he had bumped it to fire. He had shot the creature in the head, and still it struggled and shrilly squealed. The colt yanked the lever a second time, and the loud bang echoed again in the small room, a second round spraying water everywhere in a gush, but still the creature wouldn’t stop.
With a third shot, it let out a tremendously labored gurgle… and was still.
I found that I couldn’t react for some time to what had transpired. I still stood on all four legs, water draining out of the holes that had been left in the plates of my torso, but I had no idea of how much damage I had taken. The beast’s struggles had turned the previously only dirty water into a dark maroon soup of water and blood, with bits of what I could assume was brain near where its skull lay beneath the surface.
“Can’t fight, huh?” the colt said, bringing my attention away from the deceased threat. I turned to face him, still unable to respond. “Nice bluff roll, but that’s a bunch of crap, tincan.”
I hadn’t known that throwing my weight in a direction could be called fighting. And based on my performance I was still hesitant to call it a fight so much as a ‘haphazard struggle’.
Reboot diagnostic process, I commanded my filesystem.
Loading diagnostic processor.
As the chassis’ diagnostics system came back online, it made sure to inform me that I was a complete idiot. I disliked this conclusion, and deleted it, before asking what damage I had taken.
Power supply unit damaged, it informed me. Power output can be sustained for approximately thirty-eight more days on backup cell. Chassis punctures detected; watertight seal compromised and requires repair. Multiple subsystems unresponsive, water damage likely. Insufficient power to boot numerous modules. I-told-you-so protocol engaged.
Yes, it had told me so. But that didn’t matter in the end; my activator was safe.
“Shit… that was a close one.” The pegasus colt flipped the lever of his firearm back underneath his coat and pulled it back over what looked to be a very large pistol strapped to his harness. “Alright you, follow me… I don’t want anything else to do with this basement, I’m getting the hell out before something worse jumps me.”
Worse? My activator expected worse things than pony-sized reptiles with metal-crushing strength?
I couldn’t question him without a vocabulator, and it was the first reasonable command I had thus far been given. The pegasus gave a glance at the downed creature and then moved back to where the table had been, splashing about a bit in the water before retrieving what looked to be an empty case, which he closed and stuffed into his bag.
As he made his way out of the area, I followed him and took note of the damage to the structure. The walls were cracked and portions were even crumbled, parts of the ceiling had caved in, and boxes were thrown hither and thither. Even as the steps upwards to a doorway came into view it seemed little of the storage room was undamaged in some form or fashion, which gave more credence to the guess that some disaster had occurred.
What confused me, however, was the age of many of the things around me. Wood was clearly beginning to rot where not submerged, metal was rusting into nothing, and the amount of dust and grime that coated every object was substantial. How long had these things been here? How long had I myself been here? Had I been brought here by my activator or is this where I was built?
None of my questions had answers, only more questions added on to the growing list of mysteries.
I followed the pegasus up the steps and out of the dark water, slowing to let it drain out of the small holes in my leg plating before following him through the doorway. A short hall was just beyond, and from a bit further and up a flight of steps I could see a pale glow; natural light was just beyond, not artificial lamps.
The colt looked back multiple times to ensure that I was still following him, and then behind me to ensure that nothing had followed me, and before long he was heading up the steps towards a higher floor, where I assumed I may find more answers.
No answers came as I reached the top of the stairs and passed through an open doorway into what looked to me to be the ground floor or a building. The room I had been activated in was, assumedly, a basement. Now I followed the nameless colt into an open area where I had expected windows… but instead found that the light streamed into the area from a lack of ceiling or roof.
All around me was shattered concrete and gypsum panels from interior walls, grey light shining down from above through massive breaks in the structure of the building. My eyes adjusted to the change in light, and as my activator turned off and stashed his headlamp I saw that the sky was cloudy beyond. I heard wind through the gaps in the ceiling, and studying the debris confirmed that it had been this way for some time; whatever had caused so much damage had been a great deal of time ago, based on the aging of the sheetrock panels broken and dissolved by rain around me. Perhaps a year, perhaps more. I had little in the way of comparison, but what I did have was enough to tell me that structural damage from disaster didn’t include weathering.
Radio signal detected, chimed a module inside of my chassis’ head section. 133.7 ‘The Woof’. Error: frequency designation mismatches detected frequency. So I had a radio module as well. Which, strangely enough, seemed to be working very well; it was one of the few modules listed as fully functional by my diagnostics.
“Can’t enjoy the scenery yet, robot,” called out the pegasus nearby, getting my attention away from examining my surroundings. “...I’m no local, so who knows what the hell is going to jump me next. We need a spot to hole up so I can figure you out.”
No answers. Only more questions.