Quantic Dream

by Freescript the Bard

I Thought I Was Alive

"I'm scared!"

Green Light stopped the process. His hooves refused to budge the controls any further. He wanted to keep going, to do what he was supposed to and disassemble the defective android, send her parts back to the line to have them analyzed and repaired.

But he couldn't.

He looked up at the android, which was no more than a head unit and part of a neck joint. Her eyes were holographic, he knew; a projection of color upon a screen. But they showed fear, emotion, and… and hope. Her face was one of desperation, the life she thought she had in the hooves of a disembodied voice behind tinted glass.

An android, a nonliving supercomputer in a mesh of wires and metal powered by a quantic battery, was afraid to die.

But as Green Light looked into the blue eyes of the robot that was not supposed to feel emotion or even think for itself, he saw… something. A glimmer behind the holographic irises. A consciousness. Something that should have been impossible. Yet there it was.

"I'm begging you. I want to live…"

Green Light made a hard decision. He brought his hooves onto the controls and twisted them outward. The mechanical arms began a slightly faster-than-standard assembly of the android, reconstructing her torso and reattaching her limbs. A holographic covering materialized around her frame, constructing the illusion of a small white alicorn mare with short, dark grey mane and tail.

When Green Light looked back into her eyes, he found them shining with gratitude, a smile upon her face.

"Thank you."

Dear Celestia, what had he done?

---

Kara

---

Kara breathed heavily inside the box. While she didn't need air, the cramped darkness felt like it was pressing down on her, constricting her mind. It made her afraid. Not as much as the peril she faced in the examination room, but she felt afraid nevertheless.

"You're not supposed to think!"

The examiner's voice echoed through her head. It had hurt her when he had said that, when the machines were tearing her body apart. But it wasn't the machine that had hurt. She did not feel physical pain. It was the examiner's voice that, strangely, sliced at the heart-like quantic battery, when he said that she was not alive. It hurt, but no pain was felt.

How could something that can't feel pain hurt? Why did something as delicate as pressure waves from a speaker make her feel so damaged?

He had said she wasn't supposed to think. But here she was, in a cramped shipping box, being transported to who-knows-where to be sold as merchandise, pondering why the examiner's words hurt without pain.

But then… right before she was completely disassembled, he stopped the machines. Kara still didn't understand why he did. It was his job, after all, to reject androids that weren't like the others. The defective ones. He called her defective. Yet he stopped she said she was afraid. Why? She was defective. Shouldn't she be sent back to be repaired and reconstructed?

Kara's holographic face formed a frown. She didn't feel defective. But she guessed that was the point. She wasn't supposed to feel. Or think.

Or live.

---

It felt like days. For days, Kara had waited in the darkness, in the cramped quarters of the box. She wondered what was happening. Was she in a warehouse, being stored for later shipment? Of was she in a store, waiting to be sold to somepony for a large amount of currency, as the examiner had told her?

For the first time, Kara grasped the concept of impatience. She wasn't at all tired. Theoretically, she could remain standing for one-hundred-seventy-three years. But her anxiety grew, and she began to fidget within the box. In her fidgeting, however, she bumped the side of the box.

Kara froze. Any sort of movement could trigger some sort of alert from anypony in proximity of her box. After a few minutes, she let out a sigh of relief. Who knew what the consequences would be if she were to be discovered?

Disassembly was one. One that Kara wanted nothing more than to avoid.

A few more hours passed, and her patience began to wane. There had to be so something she could do to pass the time. Curiously, she sifted through her memory chip for something within her system to entertain herself, or to at least make the time pass faster.

> Option: Sleep Mode. A state of dormancy that allows the unit to appear asleep, or simply standing, dictated by user preference. Sleep Mode can be deactivated by voice command or by photosensory trigger.

Kara considered the option. It worked to her advantage brilliantly, especially if she could remain in a stand-still. The light-activated feature would wake her up when somepony opened the box, and she could act as if she had been sleeping the entire time. Best of all, she didn't have to wait for something to happen.

Closing her eyes, and with a self-satisfied smile, she activated sleep mode.

---

Light flooded into the box, hitting the photosensors in Kara's holographic eyelids. She blinked her eyes open, squinting at the bright sunlight that filtered through the opening. Voices could be heard, but she was still too blinded by the light to make out specific figures.

Then, one of the voices directed toward her direction. "Come on out."

Reminded that she was supposed to be a autonomous android, she followed the voice out into the light. As her eyes adjusted to the light, Kara saw two stallions standing by the opening to her box. One was a brown earth pony with a white delivery cap and a box for a cutie mark, the other was a neutral grey pegasus with a navy blue mane and a cutie mark that looked like a silver crescent moon covering part of a purple sun.

Kara suddenly became aware that both ponies were staring at her, waiting for… something. Thinking back to her time in the examination room, she remembered her initialization text.

Taking a simulated breath, she recited perfectly. "Hello, I'm a third-generation AX400 Android. I can look after your house, do the cooking, mind the kids… I organize your appointments, I speak three hundred languages and I am entirely at your disposal as a sexual partner. No need to feed me or recharge me; I am equipped with a quantic battery that makes me autonomous for one-hundred-seventy-three years…"

Before she said the next part of the text, the part in which the user picks a name for her, she stopped. Kara liked her name. Though it was given to her on a whim by a pony whose job is to kill units like her, she still felt a personal connection to the name. So instead, she improvised.

"My name is Kara," she said with the barest hint of a smile upon her face.

Comments

[Hope]

I like it, hope to see more sometime.