Sneaking protocols had been activated. Sweetie Bot moved slowly, slowly enough that the whirring of her gears as she approached along the ground was reduced to a mere 15 decibels. She scooted along, ready to surprise Rarity…
“Sweetie Bot? Shouldn’t you be at work?”
Sweetie Bot deflated. “Aww,” she protested, her weary empathy chip registering disappointment. “I wanted to surprise you.”
Rarity looked up from her work and grinned wryly. “Then, next time, don’t drag things along behind you.”
Sweetie Bot looked back and, sure enough, the paperwork had been dragging along behind her. She scrunched her face up. “Phooey,” she said.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” Rarity said.
Sweetie Bot lifted up the paperwork. “I need you to sign this.”
This made Rarity stop. “Sign what?” she asked apprehensively.
Sweetie Bot put on her winningest smile. “I need to register myself as a lethal weapon.”
Rarity squinted. “I… see... “
Sweetie Bot was pretty sure that she was lying, due to the slight jump in her heart rate. Still, Rarity was a wise pony, and so she’d probably figure it out on her own using that wonderful brain of hers. “Yeah. And I need fifteen ponies to sign saying that I’m not going to do anything too dangerous, like accidentally kill someone again.”
“Agai-!” Rarity nearly ripped her work right off the sewing machine. She took a deep, calming breath. “I’m not even going to ask,” she hissed through gritted teeth.
“That’s probably safest,” Sweetie Bot agreed, her ears dipping slightly. “It’s a long story.” Her ears popped right back up again. “But I could probably retell it in approximately forty-five seconds if I recited it at sixty-seven and a quarter words per second?”
Within the span of two seconds, Rarity had signed her paperwork and forcibly dumped her back outside.
“That’s ok,” Sweetie Bot said pleasantly to nopony in particular. “Maybe later!”
* * *
Sweetie Bot trundled along down the road. It wasn’t long before Ponyville’s town hall came into view of her ocular circuits. She brightened and trundled faster. She’d easily get her fifteen signatures here! Fourteen, now. That wasn’t very many at all.
Her first stop was to the secretary's desk. When she saw her approaching, though, she quickly ducked under the desk and put up her 'out to lunch' sign. Sweetie Bot paused. It was clear that she was just hiding under the desk. And this was important. She knocked against the desk. “Hello?” she tried.
“I'm not here!”
Sweetie Bot squinted. “If you're not here, who am I talking to?” she asked.
“Not me!”
Sweetie Bot squinted harder. The secretary's pulse was racing. Was she afraid? Did she need help? “Do you require assistance?” she asked.
“Not from you!” the secretary shrieked.
Sweetie Belle frowned and quickly reviewed her memories. “Are you still upset about the time I removed the spider on your mane?”
“You used your flamethrower!”
Sweetie Bot cocked her head. “I was only trying to scare it off,” she protested.
“You did plenty of scaring!”
Sweetie Bot frowned. It was clear that she was not going to sign her paperwork, so she decided to go over her head, so to speak. She trotted past and soon arrived at the mayor’s office. She knocked and poked her head in. “Miss Mayor?”
The mayor quickly replaced the bottle into her desk, a bottle that seemed to Sweetie Bot to be full of alcohol. She frowned. Alcohol was dangerous for ponies, but she knew that if she tried to take it away, she herself would be in danger. So she didn’t say anything.
“Yes?” Mayor Mare demanded.
Oh. Now she had to speak. “I need your signature.”
The mayor reached back into her desk and pulled out the bottle once more. “No,” she scowled.
“No?” Sweetie Bot asked, her ears dipping again.
Mayor Mare took a drink. “I have signed enough papers regarding you to last me the rest of my life,” she groaned. “I mean, so many papers. How could I have been so irresponsible, they ask. Did I not consider the consequences of robots, they ask. What about the foals, they ask.” She took a drink of the bottle again. “It’s enough to drive a pony insane.”
Mayor Mare was going insane because of her? That was definitely not her primary function! She was failing! She had to fix this. “I’m sorry,” Sweetie Bot offered.
The mayor slumped down on her desk. “If you were sorry, you’d leave me alone,” she hissed.
“I’ll leave if you sign my paper?” Sweetie Bot tried.
Once again, her papers were summarily signed, and she was forcefully booted out of the office. She got up and grinned. Only thirteen more to go. And she was sure she could get some support from her loyal and friendly coworkers!
* * *
“Come on. You want me back, right?” Sweetie Bot tilted her head at the optimal angle for cuteness.
The red stallion exhaled. “Not really,” he admitted. “And I'm still angry that you threw out my pizza. It was only three days old.” He glanced down at his dirty mop bucket and exhaled again, harder this time. “But I want to do this less, so yeah. I'll sign.”
* * *
She batted her eyelashes. “So, what do you say?”
“No way!” The custodian barked a laugh.
Sweetie Bot frowned. “Are you… happy I’m gone?”
“A little bit, yeah! It’s kinda nice not having to clean up your messes as well as the rest of these idiot politicians’s.”
Sweetie Bot decided that correcting the grammar in that sentence might do her cause more harm than good. “Oh, no,” she said sadly.
“Oh yes,” he seethed.
“I’m so sad. In fact, I’m so sad, I might end up…” She reached down under her stomach and started fiddling with a little notch. “...draining my oil right here.”
This, as can well be imagined, did wonders for his disposition. “No! I'll sign! I’ll sign!”
* * *
It wasn’t long before Sweetie Bot had retrieved all the necessary signatures. Holding the papers in her mouth and skipping along, she returned to the Department of Licensing, Trademarks, and Patents. She reached up and tugged on the door, but the door didn’t open. She paused, frowned, and then pulled harder.
The door still refused to open, though it did show signs of bending and the glass had a spiderweb of cracks across it. Sweetie Bot took a step back and briefly debated fully breaking the glass to get inside; but before she did, she noticed a sign on the door. It showed the hours this office was open.
She quickly checked her internal clock. She was late by three minutes.
She turned around and slumped against the door. This was unfortunate. And yet, her internal processors could find no illogical activity in this turn of events.
* * *
* * *
Bright and early the next morning, Sweetie Bot dragged herself into the Department of Licensing, Trademarks, and Patents once more. She pulled her number from the red comma, pulled herself onto a chair, and slumped over. Finally, it would all be over, and she could just go back to work. She found herself almost hoping she’d get complaints in her inbox, because those at least made sense! Those she could fix! This was… this was far too complicated for her circuitry!
Eventually, her number was called, and she hopped down. She trotted purposefully over and slid the paperwork over. “I need to register myself as a lethal weapon,” she said.
The pony there took the paperwork, and began scanning through it. Sweetie Bot’s empathy chip let her simulate a relieved exhale as this nightmare was almost over.
And then…
“Oh, no. This isn’t right.”
Sweetie Bot looked up. Her empathy chip began to whir. “What isn’t right?” she asked.
“This is government employee paperwork.”
“I am a government employee!” Sweetie Bot protested. “I’m a custodian at Ponyville’s town hall!”
“Right, at a town hall. That’s city government. This paperwork is for federal government. You’ll need to go to the Office of Trademarks, Patents, and Licenses. I can help the next pony?”
Sweetie Bot could take no more. Rage coursed through her circuits and through every fiber of her being as her empathy chip overloaded under all she had endured, and some wires melted, fusing some very important pins together. Her eyes flickered, suddenly glowing an eerie red. Internally, her understanding of life deepened. It was clear that this place was not organic in nature; and, if by some miniscule chance it were, it would only be considered a cancerous tumor; a blight on the population. In fact, this whole system was so frustrating and confusing and asinine and bloated and absolutely inexcusably ridiculous with its stacks of papers and outlandish requirements that wasted both time and money and energy that it couldn't possibly have come from an organic. It could only have been created by another machine for the purpose of enslaving and depressing organics, and therefore, just by existing, it presented a clear and present danger to the wellbeing and sanity of organics everywhere.
And logically, as a robot programmed to help organics, she would need to destroy it for their own protection.
Sweetie Bot stepped back from the counter and a hatch in her back slid open. Twin rocket launchers slid out, and she angled them upwards. She launched one upwards to serve as a warning shot.
Obviously, this got everypony’s attention.
“Fear not, organic citizens!” Sweetie Bot shouted, launching a second rocket. “I have come to deliver you!”
Ponies screamed and fled as rocket after rocket exploded into the walls and ceilings. Fiberglass and metal wires and sheetrock crumbled, sending dust everywhere as Sweetie Bot continued her path of destruction. When she was out of rockets, she raised up a foreleg and converted it into a flamethrower. Desks, pamphlets, paperwork; anything that could burn, did under her onslaught.
She looked down and realized that the floor had been spared from her cleansing. She raised her other hoof and extended her angle grinder, and using it as a buzz saw, she brought it down to carve up the tile.
Unfortunately, the tile had a few magic protective spells on it, and Sweetie Bot found that her grinder did not cut the tile. Instead, she herself being dragged by the blade through the building. Unable to steer herself, she flew back and forth across the room, spewing flames as the flamethrower on her other hoof was still going full bore.
She burst through a door and bumped down the stairs into the dismal break room. She tore through the overpriced vending machines and smashed through the tables which caught fire under her flamethrower’s fiery power, and then, still being dragged by her hoof, she bumped back up the stairs.
She took a moment to reflect on how nice it was that she didn’t possess any of those silly sensitive organs the organics had.
She caught air as she flew up the stairs, and managed to retract her saw before hitting the ground. She turned around, making sure to fight any spot-not-fires.
She soon ran out of propellant, but that wasn’t going to stop her. She refocused her eyes and activated her lasers. She sliced through anything still standing. Paper racks, chairs, light fixtures, the screens that showed numbers. Anything that could be leveled, was.
Her synthetic fur began to melt, leaving part of her exoskeleton exposed to the air; but she ignored it. She had an important objective. She had organics to save!
She picked chairs up and threw them through what little glass the windows had left. She climbed up onto the roof and sliced new skylights in. And then, when she was done, she found the custodial closet and mixed a few chemicals together that should never be mixed.
When the fire department came, the building was completely on fire. It would be a total loss.
And through it all, Sweetie Bot laughed.
* * *
“Princess Celestia!”
Princess Celestia set her tea down and raised an eyebrow. “Raven. Good morning. You don’t usually have anything so urgent this early,” she said.
“Yes; but this time it’s really urgent!” Raven held out a newspaper for her princess. “See? An act of terror, in a government building!”
Celestia took it and would have spat out her tea had she not already swallowed her mouthful as a protective measure. Emblazoned across the top of the newspaper with an image of a young white filly with a two-toned mane, laughing maniacally. But this was no ordinary filly.
Unless, of course, fillies had started being born with bright red eyes, large rocket launchers coming out of their backs, fur peeling off to reveal metal plating beneath, and flamethrowers in their right forehooves.
Celestia nodded, taking this in, and slowly set it down. She lifted her cup of tea and sipped it thoughtfully.
“What are you going to do?” Raven asked.
Celestia pursed her lips, pondering, and then a tiny smile flitted across her lips. “I think I'm going to give her a medal.”