Magic's Birth: The Sisters' Memories

by The Psychopath

Encouragement

The robot stared at the two makers that approached her calmly and started checking her chassis. They verified behind her flowing 'hair' and tried very hard to lift her plates, to which she responded by lifting them automatically, something her programming told her to never do unless otherwise requested by very few sources, her makers included.

The male stepped back and grabbed his chin. "I theorized that such a thing was possible with our advanced technology," he said.

"I thought they would go crazy when seeing us and our infrastructure." The female scratched her head. "Doesn't seem to be self-aware yet, though."

"Do you require anything of me?" Luna asked.

"Not...yet," the male responded. He walked around the machine, humming to himself. "She doesn't seem to be self-aware or even attaining sentience, though. Hmmm."

The female shrugged. "Could just be a glitch in the programming that required her to fulfill an incomplete command?"

The male shrugged in response, then he got an idea. "Let me try something." He stepped in front of the robot, his hands clasped together in front of his waist. "Luna, who are you?"

"I am customized model LN-1 with added sub-designation 'a': An all-purpose household aid machine. I was made in--"

"Not that," the male interrupted. Luna's sensors detected increased excitement from the male. He seemed to be anticipating something. "Who are you?"

Luna's head twitched to the side then back in place. "Unclear," she said.

"Who are you as a person?" the male specified.

The female stepped forward. "What do you think of all of this?" She gestured to the whole room. "Of yourself? Of what you made?" she asked while pointing at the replica.

Luna looked to it then back at the maker. "Your habitation could be further improved based on your physical dimensions and those of your off spring." She heard the two makers groan. "Is my response not satisfactory?"

"It's...can you just put everything back, at least?" the male asked tiredly. Luna turned and looked at her creation and gave pause. "What's wrong?"

"I..." Luna's voice glitched again.

There was a moment of silence before the female posited another idea. "I don't think she wants to," she said.

"But that would go against her programming," the male argued. "They can't do that. That's not how that works!" he insisted. "That would be like preventing your own organs from functioning." He stared at his robot. "Try asking her something else."

"Do you want to keep your creation like this?" the female asked.

Luna looked back to them, and after a moment of calculating, nodded, pleasantly shocking the two. The robot returned to her task of cleaning and maintaining the household, remaining in such a routine for quite a few weeks, much to the makers' dismay. Her tower didn't remain for long, since the infant as still wanted them to play with. That said no matter what the makers tried to do, Luna would not react to any creative stimulation. Giving her stone slabs and a chisel elicited no reactions. Other older artistic styles requiring use of paint and pencils did nothing to stimulate whatever drive the machine had to work with the sticks. They even tried to give her light paint brushes to create forms of art in the air, and although the robot initially seemed interested, she quickly reordered the brushes then moved on.

---

"I thought you liked artistic things," Twilight said. "At least back then."

Luna gestured uncertainty with her 'hand'. "It wasn't so much the concept of art as the idea of the lights and the grandiosity of it all." She looked up, staring through the ceiling. "The idea of reaching that river of lights above and see if I could find literal oceans of them like I did when I peered at the city below. All the colors shining brightly." While she had no mouth, Twilight could still see the princess frown. "Although I do regret not being self-aware enough to use the light brushes...at the time," she specified with a sly tone.

The lavender alicorn turned to Celestia after reinvigorating the orbs of white light she and Luna had stuck to the walls of the cave. "What about you, Celestia? What brought about your sense of self?"

Celestia pondered for a moment. "Too many things, honestly. I was...a focal point of information, should I say."

Twilight raised a brow. "What do you mean?"

The white robot chuckled. "Ah ah, Twilight. No spoiling the story."

The lavender alicorn looked back and forth between the two sisters. "But surely, Princes Luna doesn't know your side of the tale. I know you two met up while traveling," Twilight said.

Celestia displayed an air of bemusement and authority, something she usually did while attending the masses in the throne room. "You're partially right. We did meet up."

---

Another month had passed by, and Luna had not displayed the creativity and personal choice making she had when building the tower. Discontent, the two makers decided to give up in trying to encourage her self-evolution and left her to her programmed tasks. Luna was left with children supervision while the two parents left for an undetermined amount of time, so they stood in the room Luna had been unboxed in, her previous home having long been disposed of.

The two infant makers stared at her silently, uncertain of which of many actions to take. Tons of ideas ran through their minds.

"Fly us around the city!" the youngest ordered with a cheer.

"No," Luna said. She pointed to the young male. "You will be harmed by the speeds and height. I am also not designed to carry your weight during full flight. I could lose control and crash, destroying or damaging this item and bringing harm to you."

The child pouted angrily and started to throw a temper tantrum, but Luna stared down silently, apathetic to the child's display. He gradually calmed down, leaving place for his brother to finally talk.

"W-well. I don't like that our parents renamed you. We designed you!" he complained. "Change your name back to Star Slicer the Space Empress!"

"No," Luna said.

"Why not?!" the child asked angrily.

"You are not my owners. Your parents are currently designated as my owners and only they may overwrite my current custom designation."

The boy pouted. Luna saw his face turning red, but blood was pumping into his brain.

"If...our parents are your...owners, then...So are we, because we're their children! And we drew you, so...Um..." The boy was straining his mind a lot. "We own you through our parents..." His eyes widened and a smile adorned his face. "So you have to do what we say!"

Luna leaned over, looming over the infants. "Nice try, but your parents are my direct owners." She pointed an arm at the two. "Unless something renders your parents incapacitated then your orders are not acceptable commands. You must await approval by the primary makers."

The older boy sat down. "My head hurts," he said as he put a hand to his head.

"I require a painkiller," Luna ordered. "Light strength for very young infants."

The home buzzed and hummed until the group heard something solid slide open and a bow, no bigger than the infants' hands, lowered itself in front of Luna. She formed a ring hand and grabbed a small, white capsule from the open top, leaving the delivery system to retrieve its package for later use.

It was a tiny thing, with a shape etched into it. "This delivery system is outdated, but efficient," Luna said as better recommended medication and delivery systems flashed in front of her screen in rapid succession. She leaned down and held the pill to the child's face. "I would have preferred a direct injection to the cranium, but this will have to do. It should be...enough, if it isn't too..." Luna's voice glitched. "serious." Seeing the reluctance of the child, Luna accessed the city in her database, admiring the lights again. "It is...fruit flavored. There is a sweet...delicious flavor to it."

The looked at Luna then reluctantly took the pill, his face strained in preparation for the disgusting flavor, but pleasantly surprised by the sweetness. The machine pondered about what to do next. The schedule that the parents had given her seemed...inadequate? Uneventful, perhaps? Trying to find a solution, the replica tower came to mind as did the infants' inability to create anything efficiently.

Some hours later, the parents had returned, stunned to see that Luna was teaching the infants how to create solid dodecahedrons. Obviously, they couldn't wrap their head around the concept while the robot already had a dozen of them floating around like half-empty balloons.

"What's going on here?" the mother asked.

The youngest pointed his finger at Luna. "Star Slicer is teaching us to make doblehecons," he said. He let go of his creation, but it fell to the floor and broke apart almost immediately. He threw an angry tantrum, much to the obliviousness of his would be teacher."

The mother put her fingers to her forehead, annoyed. "That's not what she-...Dodecahedrons?" the mother asked.

The older brother nodded. "Yeah. That." His creation was a little more successful but could barely go more than a centimeter from the floor, and the geometrical shape he had created looked like it had caved in on itself. He frowned in response and looked to Luna casually grabbing a large assortment of the sticks and making another 'ball' as big as her head.

The father stood next to the robot looking up at her creations and admired them. "Why did you make dodecahedrons with the sticks?"

"Because..." There was a long pause, and static noise came from Luna. "I wanted to make chilliagons, but I wouldn't be able to save enough faces if you saw."

The parents slowly turned to the robot, visibly cringing painfully at what she had said.

"Did she...make an attempt at a joke?" the father wondered aloud.

"A terrible, terrible one at that," the mother responded. "Makes you feel sick, actually."

---

"Celestia!" Luna shouted angrily.

The white robot back away. "What, it's true. It would make you sick." She crossed her arms. "You were never very good at jokes to begin with sister," she said while shaking her head.

The lunar princess looked to Twilight, clearly upset. The pony knew the robot's cheeks would be puffed up if she had any. The alicorn played with a pebble on the floor. "I mean. It's true, princess." Luna 'gasped', making Twilight hurry forward with an excuse. "B-but that doesn't mean you can't improve!" She smiled sheepishly. "I'm certain that, with time, you'll become great at jokes."

"Twilight," Celestia called out deadpan. "We're millions of years old." She pointed to her sister. "I'm pretty sure that, if she's still terrible at jokes, then it's not just programmed into her circuits, but her soul as well." She let her arm drop limp to her side.

The blue robot trembled angrily. "Can I continue with the story, please?!" she said behind virtual clenched teeth. Celestia stretched an arm out. "Thank you!"

---

"Wouldn't coming up with jokes on the fly require some for of self-awareness?" the woman pondered. "At least, she didn't take that out from her database. She wasn't programmed as a therapy assistant."

The man thought silently. "We'll have to keep making tests and take the data from the service station whenever we can." He looked to the kids and lowered his head a bit. "And let's try and avoid an incident like before with the kids."

The female laughed nervously. "Yes. Let's."

Luna was dismissed back to her service station. She was met with the familiar blue light and interlocking, floating plates. Although she was concerned for being put to rest while the sun was merely halfway set. The black void broken only by the numbers, letters, and symbols flying across her optics. The same...shocking sensation came across her system. It started repeating, but the diagnostic checks showed no abnormalities. White noise came from every which direction in the dark void of her rest. Then they became clearer but indistinct. Quiet voices with no owners. Blurred colors started flashing across her 'eyes' as the voices danced around. Her body remained in place, stable and strong, but what was within her was frantic and distorted.

"Who are they?" she wondered. "What are they?"

Images of metallic chassis only became clear in the mess of shapes and colors sparingly. The machine found herself swimming through it, the blue energy enveloping her and enveloping the black in its soothing, somewhat fantastical embrace. Incapable of making out the shapes correctly, Luna instead tried to defragment what she could and replace any corrupted data, but there was too much all at once. Still, she managed to partially make out some shapes, like other thin machines like her traveling besides other indistinct shapes. Some were performing physically exhausting tasks. Then there were the titanic creatures that Luna perceived as tall as the sky piercers. Massive, solid arms and angry mouths belching black smoke at their 'spy'.

Everything broke and mixed into a mess of watercolors and mist. An aggressive visual noise that Luna was gradually tuning herself out of this mess and preparing to shut herself fully down until another wave of blue energy came opposite of her. It was weak and resembled thin and stretched fabrics fluttering in soft wind, but she reached out anyways. Luna could hear a noise, like ticking, drowning her auditory sensors. Clicking, switching, digital beeping, wooshing. More and more sounds gradually fought each other for supremacy in a cacophany of noises Luna had no use for. The more of the fabric she grabbed, the more noise came in, but the clearer and larger an assortment of colors became.

Finally, the middle section of the image cleared, showing black, mechanical eyes with yellow rings surrounding a central 'pupil', much like Luna's. They were looking down at something, or simply left on standby until their use was required once more. The blue robot leaned forward, incapable of understanding the signals going through her circuitry. She wanted to know where this other machine was. What it was. What it was doing. Then it reactivated and looked straight at its spy, somehow aware of her.

Luna was disconnected from the service station which was screaming in agony and coughing up sparks. The machine almost toppled over but righted itself back up when its systems booted. The parents had their arms outstretched, ready to catch her. The children were panicking and the house was flashing red in response to the threat, its anti fire drones floating precariously above the group.

"I'm sorta relieved we don't have to hold her," the father said. "They're thin but still pretty heavy." He looked at the damaged station and frowned. "If the self-repair routine doesn't work, then we'll need to call the manufacturer and figure out what happened."

"Let's isolate the current so it doesn't cause an overload to the rest of the house and cause any further damages," the female suggested. She was about to dash off when she noticed her machine's expression. The mother looked to the robot's eyes, concerned. "Luna, are you alright?" she asked.

Luna's eyes were shaking wildly in place, almost like she was shaking from turbulence. "There are others...like...me."

Author's Note:

You know what time it is? It's a specific time of traveling. Enthusiastic exploration, if you will.

Comments

[coto616]

Realy like the story, cant whait to see where is going...

And luna, that was a rly bad joke

[FanOfMostEverything]

Fascinating stuff thus far. I do love a good AI awakening story. Looking forward to more.

[Lexiebommel10]

Spooky

[HiddenEntity]

Oy yoi yoi...

[Sir Starshine]

"Because..." There was a long pause, and static noise came from Luna. "I wanted to make chilliagons, but I wouldn't be able to save enough faces if you saw."

I don’t get the joke here…

You know what time it is? It's a specific time of traveling. Enthusiastic exploration, if you will.

I completely misread that as “euthanasia,” and kept thinking of a robot chicken bit.

[The Psychopath]

10881736
I forget what I was doing with the chilliagons bit too. I think I was trying to display that she was starting to glitch already.

[tsaukpaetra]

She interfaced with the Internet equivalent? Oops...