Fallout Equestria: Do Robot Ponies Dream of Electronic Bunnies

by ScottWolf

Ch 01: Startup

FoE: Do Robot Ponies Dream of Electronic Bunnies

Chapter I: Start-Up

Maybe next time you’ll take a second look/And not judge the cover of a book.” - Zecora

System Report: 0000000001
Unit Status: Active
Location: Canterlot, MoW Weapons Research Facility
(Exact Location Unknown: Satellite Signal Error, GPS Offline)
Begin data dump to external off-site memory back-up:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - Done.
Preparing visual report: Done.
Date: Unknown
Time: Unknown

Online.

The first thing my hard drives recorded was the boot-up sequence. Power, motor controls, Eyes Forward Sparkle, various system status indicators, all the basics. My logic processor was the last thing to be activated. Instantly I knew my designation, model number, serial, and manufacturer. I was, for all intents and purposes, a model 8300 Ministry of Wartime Technologies Advanced Infiltration Bot Prototype, serial number 0001.

My visual receptors came online within milliseconds of system green light. I stepped out of the maintenance pod and took my first look around. The room was empty. It wasn’t barren; the walls were lined with various processing banks and wires, some of which connected to my pod. In that first second of existence, I had several thousand thoughts and processes go through me. I auto-mapped the room, used my radar to scan my surroundings, located a weapons locker, located the building exit and plotted a course to get there. Other processes were automatic, and therefore, are omitted here to save time.

My focus fell on a desk with a terminal, situated to face the only set of double doors the room had. The terminal glowed a sickly green and lit the top of the desk well. There was a clipboard and an empty coffee mug next to it. I trotted over and plugged myself in, ignoring the rest of the desk for the moment. Access to the main system was surprisingly easy, given what I knew of this company, and how closely they guarded their secrets. Within two seconds of plugging in, I had access to every data file and working security camera in the building. I downloaded everything I felt relevant, and took a few moments to process it all.

It seemed I’d found a history of the company, dating back from foundation to the fall of the Balefire Bombs. It was all cataloged and stored on my memory in twenty seconds, processed in ten, and analyzed in twelve. The history lesson over, I moved on to files pertaining to my own manufacture. I had blueprints, circuit schematics, and various other technical notes about every step of my creation, conception to completion. It was during the nanoseconds I was reading this that a thought occurred to me. I was the single most advanced robot in existence. The first one ever built with an AI core processor, or at least the first with full autonomous thought and will. They had even given me an emotion chip. I was the pinnacle of pony technology. I had abilities from all three races of pony kind, the best that made them all.

So why had they not activated me?

My completion date was marked a full six years before this facility went offline. During that time, I had never been given a full start-up. I’d only been partially activated to do various tests and research. If I was conscious of any of it, they had wiped my memory banks clean before putting me in the pod again. What were they afraid of?

Further reading brought up something labeled “Classified” and did not elaborate further than that. The only thing I could find was it was an experimental weapon system built into my chassis. The files and specs on it had all been erased, copied over, or formatted. There was nothing left to tell me what I had inside me.

I spent a few more cycles searching for an explanation, but came up empty. With an electronic sigh, I unplugged and made my way to the armory. The history files had said this was a weapons development station during a time of war, so logically there should be weapons. The only risk was if a survivor of the attacks had found and looted the building, but it was only a small risk. The entire place had gone into lockdown the minute the bombs began falling.

As expected, the armory was sealed and didn’t look like it had been tampered with. Scratches on the door, however, indicated somepony had tried to get in. Dried blood stains and a skeleton told me he had been caught and killed. By who was unknown. I took a cycle and searched the history files for reports of a rebellion or any internal strife, but found nothing. That meant that whatever happened to this pony had never been recorded, which begged the question “why”. I set that to the back of my mind and focused on accessing the lock.

It was a remote link system, and was fortunately still under power. My infiltration program kicked in and began a rapid back and forth with the security system. None of my downloaded files held any security codes, so I resorted to hacking it. Seconds ticked by as I exchanged forged handshake protocols and faked pass codes, most of which were rejected. Finally, I found the correct code and disengaged the lock. With a smug satisfaction that surprised me, I stepped thru the now open doors.

The scene was something out of a horror film. Skeletons and decayed bodies littered the floor. A unicorn skull was stuck to the ceiling, its horn embedded in the duracrete that encased the room. A Pegasus lying minus a wing, the appendage lying a few feet away. Piles of pink and green ash were scattered about, indicating energy weapon usage. In the back, I found the decomposed body of a young pony, its sex indistinguishable from the decay. It was wrapped around an energy pistol, apparently clutching it for all it was worth.

A new feeling surged through me from my emotion chip. Sadness. No, not sadness. This was an even greater emotion. Despair maybe? I don’t know. I had so little experience with emotions. Robots did not have emotions. Nothing in my files gave even a hint on why I felt this way, but I knew. My leg servos seemed to give out and I dropped to my knees. I heard a sound as I landed with a clanking, and interpreted it to be that somepony was crying. A nanosecond of a scan told me the room was empty save for myself. The only logical explanation was that I was crying, or rather, sobbing. I had no tear ducts to cry from, but still I was sad for the child. It must have been so scared and alone. It had watched whatever had happened in here, and had survived when the rest hadn’t, only to die of starvation sometime later.

I briefly wondered why it was in here and where its mother had fallen. With no way to find out, I rose to my hooves and turned away, leaving the pistol with the body. Rest in peace, child, I thought as I returned to my task, my sobs continuing to echo in the duracrete room.

I spent some time searching the room, my internal systems telling me which weapons I was compatible with and which ones I could not use. Most of that time I used to calm myself down. There was a great wealth of arsenal here, but it seemed most was conventional. I found shotguns, rifles, automatic pistols, a few energy weapons of various sizes, but nothing out of the ordinary. I decided to take only a few things from this room and hit the large safe my map indicated was downstairs. Perhaps I could find something better down there.

I had no idea what I would be encountering in the aftermath of a balefire attack, so I selected a combat shotgun, a 10mm pistol, something labeled a Zebra Assault Rifle, and a mini chain gun. Attaching and integrating these weapons into my chassis was simple enough; I had seven ports for small to medium weapons, and two for large weapons. The chain gun fit snugly into one of those, and the other weapons found a home elsewhere. I grabbed what ammunition I could find and walked out of the room.

As I made my way down to the basement, I began to think a few “random” thoughts about who and what I was. The first was that I was much larger than the average pony, even larger than a draft pony, but not quite the size of an alicorn. My system indicated my hooves doubled as exhaust ports for mini turbojet engines, and I had a stowed wing pack on my back. The specs said I had a flight range of 200 miles.

My power source was apparently a converted balefire egg. I was shocked for a moment when I scanned this tidbit of information, but relieved when I discovered that, if damaged or destroyed, it would not detonate. There were magical safeties and failsafe countermeasures that ensured it would go dormant should I cease to function. Relief washed over me (yet another new emotion, but I guess since I’d just been activated that all emotions were new to me) and I smiled to myself. At least I wouldn’t kill anyone by exploding.

My body was covered in a soft gray coat with streaks of blue in a camouflage pattern. I had a mane and tail made up of ultra-thin wires and microfibers, all colored orange with blue ends. They disguised quite a few electronic interface ports. Firewire, Ethernet, basic telephone input, and my wireless transmitter were embedded behind my mane at the back of my head. I wasn’t sure if I would use any of that, but was glad to know I could if I needed to.

Walking down the last corridor to the safe brought another question. What year was it? All records from the files stopped the day of the attack. The state of the armory told me I was years after that event, but I didn’t know how long after the bombing that was. I could be quite a few hundred years into the future. The building itself seemed run-down, giving further proof of the hypothesis. I guessed I would find out sooner or later.

The safe, I discovered, was actually a Stable-Tec stable. It seemed to be sealed and had power. I trotted over to the control for the door and nosed the switch to “open.” With a shriek, the doors were pulled back and inward. I activated my headlight and peered into the darkness inside. My E.F.S. didn’t indicate anything dangerous ahead, but neither did it indicate anything living either. Its range was limited to a radius of 45.72 meters, or 50 yards.

I stepped into the dark portal, scanning for anything that could be a light switch on the wall. I found it up a half flight of stairs that led to a platform. Nosing it on, I found yet another grisly sight. More bodies. These were not as decayed as the ones before, seeming to have expired within the last few decades. A closer inspection revealed bite marks and missing chunks of flesh. What the hell?

I didn’t puzzle over this long. I still had a mission to retrieve any weapons inside the stable. I’m not sure what was driving me to seek out the technology that may or may not be buried down there, but I followed it willingly. I was glad to have a purpose, even if it was temporary. So far, I hadn’t found anything that told me what I was supposed to do with my new-found consciousness. What I did know was I needed to do something.

Stepping through a door at the back of the room led me down another flight of stairs into what seemed to be a common room. My files indicated that Stable-Tec stables were meant to keep ponies alive for hundreds of generations, sustaining them for up to a thousand years. The records of this one were that it was fully functional, classified a “control” stable. So I was not expecting what I saw next.

Four ponies stood over a fifth, occasionally reaching down to touch it. I couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing, so I magnified my vision and activated my audio boosters. My ears were treated to the sound of chewing and ripping of flesh, my eyes watched them tear meat off the body on the floor with ultra-high definition. I felt sickened. How could ponies do this? I focused on one of the feasting ponies and saw that it no longer looked like a pony.

The creature was missing flesh in various places. I could see its ribs and what was left of its internal organs through one of these holes. Its eyes were the same green glow as the monitor upstairs, but they were blank and pupil-less. A cold realization came over me that these were irradiated ponies. Zombies.

An automatic subroutine kicked in and I activated my Stable-Tec Arcane Targeting Spell, or S.A.T.S. I locked onto the closest zombie, selected the zebra rifle, and fired a three-round burst into the back of its head. In the slow-motion euphoria of the spell, I watched all three rounds impact, pulping the head and setting the body on fire. A quick check on the weapon’s statistics told me the ammunition was not magically enhanced itself, but by the weapon. The assault rifle turned the bullets into incendiary rounds. Cool.

I left S.A.T.S. as the other three ponies turned and spotted me. As one, the let out a howl and charged. For being undead, they were surprisingly quick, crossing the expanse of the common room in seconds. My rifle set two of them on fire but didn’t slow them much, so I toggled the chain gun mounting. In half a second my rifle was stowed and hidden in my body, while simultaneously the chain gun was revealed from my right flank. I unleashed a thirty second burst into the galloping monsters, catching them all in the hail of bullets and shredding their bodies. Two fell to the floor dead. The third lost two of his legs and his lower jaw, but still he kept coming, dragging himself across the floor. He could no longer roar or growl at me, but an enraged moaning sound still came from his throat. I triggered my pistol and put the final round of the fight directly between his eyes, silencing him at last.

Stowing my weapons, I stepped over the mutilated bodies, scanning them briefly for anything of use. Finding nothing, I trotted over to the one they were eating. It was another zombie, and it was still alive. I discovered this when it suddenly lunged at me from the floor, its jaws clamping down on one of my forelegs. My systems registered the strike, and I felt the teeth break the artificial skin.

I discovered in that moment yet another innovation from the good ponies at MoWT: a Pain Reception Center. I cried out at the new sensation from my foreleg and yanked back reflexively. The sudden jerk broke the teeth in the zombie’s muzzle, but still it came at me, unable to get up yet lunging at me nonetheless. I pulled my pistol yet again and ended its suffering.
An inner program began to run in my body. A mixture of proteins and nutrients was created somewhere inside me and pumped down to the breaks in my skin. In seconds the damage was repaired and the pain nullified. I watched in amazement. The more I learned about myself, the more I figured that they were building less a weapons platform and more an artificial life form. Very interesting.

Getting myself back on mission, I made my way through the stable to the lower areas. I discovered what was labeled the Overmare’s office. A terminal on the desk gave me access to the lock on what was labeled “S.W.R.C.” A waypoint marker appeared on my E.F.S., and I followed it down to the bottom floor. I found more zombies on the way, and dispatched them with little difficulty. One had been carrying a strange key. It was round and hollow on one end with a small square peg sticking out, and had green plastic on the other end. I stored this away for later.

The room I was led to was, predictably, locked. I could detect no signal from a security device, and couldn’t see an access panel anywhere near it. The only thing I found was a small, raised surface with a cut-out ring. The ring had a small square hold on the bottom of it. I compared the size and shape to the key I’d found and sure enough, they were the same size. A strip of green across the top of the key port confirmed I had a match, and the door was opened shortly after.

I had hit the jackpot. There were weapons of all shapes, sizes and makes inside. My initial scan of the room revealed everything from more zebra rifles to a mini-balefire egg launcher. That I took and attached to my other heavy port, stored away in my left flank safely. I also found what was labeled as a Plasma Rifle. It looked like a laser rifle, but had glowing green coils around the muzzle of the gun. It was also larger and thicker. I attached it to a medium port and stowed it, then looked around for anything else interesting.

A very long barreled rifle rested in the corner, almost as if it was casually placed there by somepony who would return for it soon. It identified as a .50 Anti-Vehicle Sniper rifle. Rated at a two mile range, the ammunition was imbued with a magical force strong enough to break through two-inch thick steel armor and a 100X scope to guarantee accuracy. The author of the stat file had probably gushed about it as he wrote it. He had gone on to promise that the weapon would greatly lower the casualty rate of infantry versus all but the heaviest Zebra assault craft.

My initial worry was that it wouldn’t fit in my last medium port, but to my surprise, as soon as it was attached, the barrel folded itself up next to the main assembly and tucked itself away with no difficulty. Those MoW scientists had thought of everything.

Taking one last look around after securing plenty of ammunition for all of my new weapons (I found a crate of mini-balefire eggs and stuffed as many as I could into my inventory), I closed and locked the room, securing the key in one of the deepest compartments I had. I could use this stable as a base of operations, if need be.

I backtracked to the stable entrance and closed the doors, sealing them with a twenty-eight bit encryption. Only somepony extremely insane would try to crack it. I rigged the controls to lock up after three wrong attempts and entered a personal code that would send out a signal the next time it was used by anypony other than myself. By Luna, I loved my spyware.
I found myself shortly after staring at the main entrance to the building. I knew I had to go out through these doors, but something held me back. Yet another feeling from my emotion chip stayed my hooves. Apprehension. Nervousness. Fear of what I would find on the outside. I knew I could be hurt, however artificial the pain was. I knew it was foolish to be afraid of pain, but I was nonetheless. And there could be all sorts of harm just beyond those doors.

I shook my head violently, trying to get rid of these feelings. Apparently, my emotion chip didn’t have an off-switch. Lovely. I steeled my nerves and strode to the door. A hoof on the handle, I took a deep breath (I could breathe?), and pushed, stepping out into the world at large.

Footnote: Level up!

New Perk: “Awareness – It Was Under E!” Rank 1 – Your scanners have catalogued quite a few things and can find what you’re looking for very quickly. You gain an additional 10% to Perception. Additionally, you locate items in your inventory in half the time.

Comments

[Tonto the Trotter]

I have just discovered your story good sir/madam. I am sad I did not read it sooner. I love the title of this fic, the title having a reference to Blade Runner one of my all-time favourite Sci-fi Ridley Scott movies. I know it's only chapter 1 and I should reserve judgement until later chapters, but this story has gripped me.

The protagonist being an artificial lifeform is a nice change of pace to the fleshy, organic protagonists we all know and love. I am looking forward to the next chapters, which I am going to start reading, one minor gripe is a small spelling error I noticed. You spelt Through as thru. That aside, I Looooooove this first chapter.