Though his last job was a miserable failure, Rule Book the 'discount' mercenary may have found his ticket to a bright future; a mysterious robot with an insatiable curiosity and a penchant for working out the trouble Rule Book gets them in.
Rule Book should have seen the warning signs before taking the job: mysterious stranger, mysterious package, abandoned city, described as an easy trip there and back. Since when does that ever turn out right? But a thousand caps is hard to pass up. The pegasus' luck might just turn around when left with a relic of an age long past standing at his side, who though just as lost and confused as he is most of the time, might just be his ticket to a much brighter future. This is the story of a strange little robot with a far stranger purpose and a mercenary hired off of 'discount' boards and damned tired of it, fighting for survival against forces far better suited to surviving themselves, and with more important agendas on their minds.
It was a miracle that the lights in the room were still working after so long without use. Most of them, in any case. The cool glow of florescence was a welcome change from the glimmering of a single flashlight, and the pegasus who stood at the door remained there for a long moment to enjoy the change of atmosphere. Outside, the wind was still whistling against the broken remains of the building's main floor, but underneath the reinforced concrete there was not only refuge from the elements but a strange sort of peace brought about by the thick walls and soft hum of the lights.
Sadly it didn't seem to last for long. The lights had only been on for a few seconds before a sharp FSSST sounded from the opposite side of the room, and with a brief flicker the room again went dark. There was the faint sound of an electrical pop from across the room as something burned out after so many years of neglect, and that was that.
Rule Book took the time to push his black mane out of his eyes, and then a bit more time to shove the stubborn locks back and over an ear when they proved more difficult to get rid of. He'd dealt with worse places than this, but normally when he did it was under better circumstances and on his own terms, and normally he had prepared a bit more in the way of lighting than the strapped-on light that sat just above his brow, making it all the more difficult to straighten his mane. Still, it could have been much worse than a straightforwards basement-diving among the crumbled and soggy remains of an abandoned commercial district.
As Book looked about and got his bearings he began ticking off all of the extra hazards and inconveniences that he now had to contend with besides the failed lighting. The stairs he had clambered down from a closet in the lobby had led to a hallway and then a keycode-locked door that had long since stopped being secure, bolts rusted completely to bits and a firm yank away from opening. Now, just ahead and down a few extra steps of concrete, was a room that was filled with all manner of boxes and crates and unidentifiable things that were disfigured by time. It wasn't a very large room as far as rooms in general went, maybe even a bit low-ceilinged, but as far as basement storage rooms went it was a pretty fair size larger than average. Though much of everything he saw was physically intact, which was also a miracle in any city that had been touched by the War, it was also in poor condition; crates made of treated lumber were still starting to waste away with age and moisture, boxes made of metal were clearly starting to rust almost through, and at the far side of the room a section of wall had given way and the earth and stone behind were crushing sections of the storeroom.
It was strangely quiet. Rule Book was used to dank caves, and while this basement was as cold and wet as any cavern it had an eerie stillness and artificial quality that made him shudder on the steps. The grey pegasus drew his coat closer about him at more than just the chill, wincing as the long cloth brushed against the fresh bandages on his left flank, and started forwards down the steps... to stop abruptly, angling his head as his light reflected oddly off of something. A surface that was not concrete was in front of the steps, reflecting his lamp's glow like a mirror, black and out of place. Gingerly and with a frown, Book extended a hoof and touched the surface of the strange black sheet.
His frown deepened to a scowl as he watched ripples roll outwards from the spot, spreading outwards across the surface of the water that covered the floor of the basement. "Just my luck," he said, barely even a whisper. He drew back from the water and watched the ripples spread with his lamp, trying to gauge where it ended and a proper floor began. The ripples met the walls and crates and bounced without ever meeting a patch of dry concrete.
Flooded. Of course the basement was flooded. He'd run out of miracles tonight and now bad luck was catching up to him and starting to make this job even worse than it had to be. He swore inwardly and wished that he'd bought some sensor equipment. He'd like to know if the water was tainted and just how royally bucked he was at this point, but he'd get no such information from what little he had on him now. As far as he had been told the city above had been destroyed by means of conventional warfare rather than the brutal and instant erasure that was a megaspell, so he had doubts about if the water was tainted. Either way he had an unfinished job to do and he wouldn’t let water stop him.
He promised himself that he would find a doctor to check him over as soon as this was seen through. After all, he still had that nasty bullet-hole in his left flank’s thick muscle to contend with, and while he kept saying to himself that he could tough the pain out like a colt, he knew it would need more than some pressure from clean bandages and a hooful of pain pills. He definitely couldn’t waste time worrying about a tiny bit of tainted water. At least, he hoped it was a tiny bit. Would that he’d not exhausted his wing muscles in getting here in such a hurry...
Mustering up his courage he started to step forwards, his forehoof sliding into the surface of the black water without much sound… and shortly after making contact with the concrete of the next step down. The water was icy cold and impossible to see through; who knew what it could be full of? Rule Book made the decision there with only one foot in that he wouldn’t stay long enough to find out any more about it. He continued forwards, hoping that there wouldn’t be any more steps in front of him, but his other forehoof found another step just beyond the first. Almost a foot of depth and he had no idea if he could stand or have to swim! For all he know it could be a whole flight of steps to the actual floor below, and at that point he’d have to just give up entirely. There was no way he was swimming in stagnant water with a wound in his butt.
He took another step, limping a little forwards and extending his hoof along the next section of concrete below the water, and found that this time it didn’t end in another drop. His scowl threatened to curl up into a hopeful smile at this; at least it was only a foot deep. That would be fine. Encouraged, Rule Book started to ease his way forwards again and make his way into the water, feeling carefully in front of him to avoid tripping.
The sound of his breathing and the soft sound of water parting around his legs were the only two noises in the basement, no matter how he strained to hear anything else. At the very least his luck with having escaped the clutches of the city’s ‘inhabitants’ - if he could call the bandits that had attacked earlier such - was holding up. For all he knew they’d given up and were picking the corpse of his original charge clean right now; it was a small victory to know that they’d find nothing valuable, being as he’d been entrusted with The Case a short time before he fled.
The pegasus didn’t feel much sympathy for the ghoul who’d lost whatever passed for life in the city above. Sure, Rule Book thought, the unicorn colt had been his charge to escort to the very basement he now found himself in, but the mutterings and distant stares that were almost all he got in terms of conversation hadn’t instilled any feelings of affection for the guy in Book’s heart. He also didn’t feel much affection for ghouls in the first place, especially ones that dated back to the days before the War; they’d lived plenty of life tacked onto whatever original span they were meant to live, and not many of them stepped past the ‘angry old geezer’ attitude for him to take a liking. Even if they had far more knowledge and experience than he did, and usually had advice worth listening to.
Keystroke had been the name of the specimen who’d met a bullet-induced fate a half-hour earlier; an engineer of some skill who from all he could piece together had once worked in the building that was ruined above Book’s head. What little conversation had passed between them since leaving New Pegas and making their way into the San Palomino desert had been dominated by very long blurbs of near to meaningless information strangled out by Keystroke’s ravaged throat, among which were a few bits and pieces about what exactly his job was meant to accomplish.
The black-painted, metallic case that sat neatly in the pack on Rule Book’s back was the prized possession of the ghoul who’d hired him as an escort, but it had been passed over without almost any hesitation when things became rough and the ponies circling them in the streets began to call out taunts. Keystroke had apparently entertained no hopes of survival against so many, and maybe he had been regretting only hiring one pony to bring him to his destination, but in the short sentences that had passed between them while under fire he made it clear that the whole point was The Case, and The Basement.
Rule Book had failed to defend the old creature as he had promised he would, and he felt guilty about that. Maybe that guilt was why he took on the colt’s final task, or maybe is was a need for a sense of closure. Whatever The Case was, it was important, as was the storage room the pegasus waded through; his job wasn’t done until he found out how the two matched up.
At the far end of the room, with bare wall on his left and crumbling walls on his right, Rule Book found a set of shelves set against the wall that were somewhat intact, though unfortunately empty. Other than the wade through dark water and the boxes and canisters that filled the room, there seemed to be nothing useful or meaningful or even suspicious. What had been the point of coming here? Assuming it was the right building, which he was sure it was because the directions had been very specific, was this even the right area of the basement? Maybe the building had a floor even further down, now entirely filled with opaque, icy water?
Book shuddered at the thought.
Even so, he couldn’t simply give up without having done everything possible to see this job through to the end, and he had barely even begun his search. Met with the useless wall the pegasus started to look about for anything that would give a clue as to his final destination in this dank hole. To his right, towards the collapsed portions of the room, he could see a set of metal frames set into the wall and metal-shod cables that ran along the wall from them, to either side and both upwards and downwards; a switch-box or fuse-box. Rule Book didn’t want to toy with electrical equipment while up to his knees in conductive liquid, but it was a start. His headlamp followed the lines of cable that ran upwards, where the brackets that had held it to the concrete had been knocked free of their anchors, letting the cable hang down into the water a bit before going back upwards to the lights.
“Well, there’s the lighting question answered,” he muttered to himself. “Must’ve shorted and blown a fuse.” It was a reasonable assumption, especially with the faint smell of something burnt in the still air. He counted it as yet another miracle that the water hadn’t been electrified and killed him on contact, or something equally career-ending. When the fuse had been blown it had cut the connection to this particular cable, leaving the water relatively safe to enter. The other cables, assuming they hadn’t shorted, were likely fine, and the one extending upwards to the edge of the ceiling and then towards the damaged section of the basement was a possible lead. It was probably damaged as well, but it still went somewhere, and it could potentially answer the question of what he was doing in this hole.
Rule Book proceeded even more carefully than before, stretching each hoof out in front of him in the water and testing the flooring before taking the full step. The wall had been damaged somehow, likely weakened by time, and had given way to let dank earth shove through and spill broken concrete across the floor, providing a handy tripping hazard that Book wasn’t eager to exploit. Even with the damage to the wall, the cable remained out of the water and stretched to both the remains of the basement’s corner and then took another right along the wall and into somewhere that Book couldn’t see with the crates obstructing his view.
The concrete chunks that had fallen out of place had done some damage to some containers here and there in this section of the basement, and as he waded past Book couldn’t help but peek at what they’d spilled. Many of the things weren’t identifiable in the water, but where stored objects had spilled onto dry rubble it was a bit clearer that they were small boxes of cardboard, barely holding together. And yet more, where these boxes had been damaged it seemed that they contained mechanical parts of unknown purpose, many of them identical.
From what Rule Book pieced together listening to the ghoul who’d sent him here and from what he could see spilled out of containers he made the guess that this building had been the home of a company devoted to either the production or distribution of machine parts, and very complicated ones at that. As the structure had the makings of something more corporate than industrial, he had a feeling it wasn’t a manufacturing site; maybe a company office or a development and design center for a larger company. If so it made sense that scavengers wouldn’t have messed with anything here; machine parts weren’t useful to nomadic types, just settlements.
As Rule Book neared the corner and a point at which he could turn and continue following the cable, he slid himself further towards the right and hugged close to the containers just before the turn, trying to stay out of the way of the majority of the rubble. As he turned the corner his headlamp followed the cable along the wall to what looked to be a subsection of the basement divided by a partly-collapsed barrier, and then downwards to a wall outlet set rather high up in the wall, a grey box jutting out and with something plugged in still. Book followed the cord with his headlamp to where it ended at what looked to be an old electric screwdriver, next to which was--
The pegasus pulled himself back with a jolt, pressing himself against the cold metal of the container next to him, clenching down his jaw and making a determined effort to not cry out. A severed head. A bucking head on the table! The sight of it was fresh in his mind and he recalled the distinctive shape of a pony’s head, not merely a skull, laying sideways on the table next to the drill. He raced to come up with some explanation but could find nothing other than the assumption that somepony had been beheaded and their freshly-taken cranium set on the table. But who? And by whom? And for what?
Most importantly, where was the killer?
Rule Book steeled himself, taking a glance behind him where he had come, expecting all sorts of things… but seeing nothing. As far as he could tell he remained alone in the flooded basement. He turned and prepared himself mentally for carrying on, leaning out around the corner and letting his light shine across the table and the grisly display…
… he was quiet for several long seconds as he realized what he was seeing. His light clearly showed what looked to be a pony’s severed head save that there was no blood nor flesh. It was certainly a head, but it didn’t quite look right, and as Book rounded the corner and closed the several feet of distance to stand beside the table he saw why.
It was a robot. Or more accurately, a robot’s head. The metal where it would have connected to a body was jointed and bare but the rest of the head was covered in interlocking plates of white plastic. The eyes were wide open, showing intricate and minutely-sized parts behind the glass in imitation of a pony’s eye, complete with a pupil and an iris. It all looked very realistic, if a bit dirty and grimy; clearly it wasn’t anything made postwar. And it most definitely wasn’t a Robronco model he recognized.
Finally Rule Book had an answer as to what was in all of these crates and storage barrels, or at least a fair deal of them; robot parts. It was few fair trots ahead of where he had been before in this mystery, though it was by no means a complete picture. Somehow a storeroom of robot parts and machinery connected to The Case in some way.
The pegasus shrugged his pack off and gripped it with his teeth, tossing it up onto the table next to the head. All this time he hadn’t seen the inside of The Case, but now was a good a time as any to see what he was dealing with, and hopefully piece together some more of the puzzle. The plain metallic container had a set of hinged latches on the front which were easy enough to open, and eventually he prodded it apart and took stock of what was inside.
It wasn’t very interesting, but it was most definitely illuminating; he was no engineer but he’d seen enough machines dismantled by gunfire to recognize critical robot components when he saw them and here, set inside of aging foam inserts, was what was essentially a processing module. Not a Robronco model, but very similar in design. It had all the appearances of being either a knockoff part or other replica, but the ghoul who’d carried it had treated it as though it meant the world to him. It likely did.
Rule Book could make the connections fairly quickly: here he was in a storeroom full of robot parts, with a mission to carry a robot processing unit of special significance and…. do something with it. It was plain what it was he had to do; he had to find whatever robot this core would fit into and activate it, and hope that the program stored in the unit would shed further light on the entire matter. As for what robot it went to…
Rule Book turned and looked about at the crates and containers around him, wondering how many he’d have to look through before he found something he could use. He doubted he’d find a complete robot anywhere, but then again all he’d need to test his theory would be a torso or a he--... he turned around slowly and peered down at the robot head on the table. Could it really be that easy? The pegasus reached out with a hoof to nudge the robotic head and roll it a little, looking it over and after a while locating the panel on the back of the cranium that was easily popped open with the bit of the nearby driver, as the screws were already taken out and nowhere to be found. Sure enough, the panel revealed a bay for a processing component, inside of which was the silvery case of another core. Some deft prodding with the driver let Book slip the little box out of its socket.
“Guess it’s about as easy as that, huh?” he asked nopony at all, holding the two cores side by side. Maybe the old ghoul had been here before and was working on something before this entire ordeal; the new core was an exact duplicate in terms of shape, though significantly less grimy. It didn’t take long for the colt to fit the processor into the space where the old one had resided, snugging it into place and placing the panel back where it belonged, little plastic pins securing it with soft clicks. “Now I just need to find some way to power the damn thing…”
It was likely, to Rule Book, that somewhere in this room there might be at least the torso of the robot that this head was designed to fit on, and if he was very lucky he might even find some power cells to fit it with. Once that was accomplished maybe he could get some answers straight from the pony’s mouth, and in this case quite literally. He waded his way a bit back from where he had come, peeking about in the mess of crushed and half-crushed crates to try and get an idea of what was stored where. The majority of items that had been spilled appeared entirely made of metal, and from the shapes he made the guess that these were parts from another robot model entirely. A crate that had been tumped onto its side with the lid knocked off revealed what looked like the head of a robotic ant; definitely not a pony model.
The parts he thought he would be looking for would likely be stored in a special container of some kind, he reasoned, being as the piece that lay on the table behind him looked a great deal more expensive and complex than the average robot. Something not likely made of wood, and something not likely stored at the bottom of a stack. Something new, and secure, and possibly… dark grey and stored ten feet away from him at the top of a stack of crates near the corner of the basement. It was the best option; a rectangular container that looked somewhat out of place among all of the storage boxes, with a series of numbers on the side that he couldn’t make sense of with the peeling of the grey paint. Next to this was yet another, and then another, all identical… and all being crushed by the weight of the collapsed concrete above.
Rule Book slid his wings out from under his coat, fanning his feathers; he was a bit stiff, but he decided that the out-of-place containers would be worth a check. Flapping his wings, the pegasus pulled himself airborne with a slosh of water and made his way in the air towards the containers he had spotted. From the look of things it seemed as though they were intact, metal shells that were doing an admirable job of holding up the weight of a collapsed roof. Enough that he could reach out with his hooves and tug at the sideways-facing lid without it budging at all.
A good wiggling and a sharp yank later and the lid of the bent container popped off like that of a tin can. Peering in with his headlamp revealed the most promising result he could have hoped for, and at the same time the most disappointing. What was inside the container was crushed and mangled beyond all hope of usefulness, but the appearance alone was worth a grin; gleaming silver metal and bits of white plastic, much like that of the head that rested on the table below. It was likely parts for the same robot model, and if so that meant one of the three containers had to have something useful to him. At the very least something to help him understand what kind of robot he was dealing with in the first place; the containers looked rather military, but a replica of a pony hardly seemed a very military design choice. He’d find out soon enough.
The container at the far end of the stack was the least harmed by the weight of the roof, and was easily a foot in height and two wide. The same measure of tugging and wrenching brought the top of this one off as well, and inside was a delightful find; an assembled body. He dropped the lid and didn’t mind the splash it made in the water below, reaching in with both hooves to feel of the material inside; cool metal and smooth plastic, just as he had hoped. Miracles upon miracles. He grasped at it and started to pull it forwards… but it seemed the weight of the roof wasn’t giving him much room. He didn’t want to pull too hard and risk causing the ceiling to collapse on him, but at the same time he didn’t want to just give up. He gripped the robotic body a bit more firmly and tugged in short little yanks, trying to bring it loose and slide it out.
HRRRRRNNNNNN… went the ceiling. The concrete inches above Rule Book’s head suddenly shifted and he stopped flapping, desperately trying to duck out of the way as chunks of rock started to break loose. He dropped quickly and flared his wings out again to glide out from under the spot, feeling grit and bits of gravel raining down on him. At any moment he expected the entire roof to come rushing down and smash him into the water-covered floor, smooshing him like a fly between a window and a rolled magazine.
And then all at once it stopped.
Rule Book alighted on the edge of the sturdy table at the end of the little corridor of boxes, assessing the situation; the ceiling had shifted and given way a little further, taking more boxes with it but ultimately being stopped short of falling down. Had it gone any further it could have either blocked the way out entirely or worse, crushed him. But even better was the ultimate result of seeing, laying splayed across the new rubble that jutted from the water’s surface, the body of the robot he had been trying to get to.
The pegasus flapped over to the rubble and settled down in the water next to the machine, casting a cautious glance upwards before turning his attention to the robot. It was most definitely not something he’d seen before, a machine built in the shape of an earth-pony to great detail, though perhaps a bit smaller than even his own body. It was, sadly, more than a bit worse for wear with the way it had been crushed in the box, cracking some of the plastic plates that covered the entirety of the body save for the places where joints allowed for movement. Beneath the plates he could see complicated moving parts that he assumed would allow it a great range of motion, which he supposed for an anatomic replica of a pony was the entire point. While it had taken a beating and portions of it looked mangled, it was intact and most importantly… was missing a head.
Rule Book reached out and tucked his forehooves under the robot, the cold plastic smooth to the touch. It felt almost too light to be complete, and as he hefted it he wondered if it was just a husk of metal and hollowed out on the inside, because it weighed only about as much as a pony of equal size; though this was a fair deal of weight it was still a far cry from the weight of a robot. The metal was likely aluminum, and the plastic plates rather than metal probably shaved plenty of weight from the machine. In either case he could lift it up and onto his back, keeping it out of the water and hauling it towards the table.
Setting the body down across the sturdy metal surface, he looked over what he had to work with using his headlamp. From all appearances everything was where it should be, as though the robot had been stored away in assembled form, save for the head… which was likely the one laying here on the table. It looked expensive, and assuming he could get it out of here he briefly wondered what kind of haul in caps it could bring in at New Pegas, or even the Hub. It was worth a shot. But more important were the answers to several burning questions.
He slid down the plastic shutters that made up the ‘eyelids’ of the robot before he started; no sense in being creeped out by the dead stare while he had to concentrate. Putting the head on the robot’s neck segments was an easy enough task; the neck was made up of a series of motors that looked as though it could give a wide range of turning much like the vertebrae of a pony’s spine, and connecting the head to this was a simple matter of setting it properly and then securing the four bolts that held the end of the neck to the base of the robotic skull. Then the somewhat painstaking process of making the cabling connections to the skull. Then came the even more painstaking process of realizing that he had put it on backwards and having to undo everything he had just done and do it over the right way.
Sploosh!
Rule Book was getting towards the point where he was searching for some kind of control mechanism to see if what he had done had worked at all when he heard the very distinct sound of something splashing heavily into the water. He bolted upright and turned around, peering at the rubble with his headlamp… but the sound hadn’t come from there. It had sounded like something at the very far side of the dark, flooded basement. Something large.
The pegasus swallowed and held his breath, listening at the now unbroken silence for any sign of further movement in the room. Barely perceptible when he strained his ears and perked them towards where he thought he had heard the sound, he heard a tiny noise like ripples being formed in the water’s surface. Not the treading of hooves wading through liquid as he expected, but rather a sound much like that of a fish swimming just below the surface of a shallow pool. A big fish.
He couldn’t bring himself to move, could barely bring himself to breathe. His mind was frantic. There’s something in here with me! he thought, casting his lamp’s light across the water’s surface in front of him and searching for any sign of movement. But the surface was still. Even so, he heard the sound of movement on the far side of the room… and he could feel his heart pressing up into his throat as he swore he could hear it drawing closer.
It was then that I woke up and opened my eyes for the first time.
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.”
Imagine the face of the first person you have memory of.
A parent, almost certainly, or the equivalent thereof. A caretaker. Though their eyes may not be filled with love they are at least the eyes of someone knowing and certain; they see you and know why you’re there. While the future may not be known, they are sure that there is a future for you ahead. It is easy to take comfort in this certainty, this security. To trust that your caretaker is right.
The pegasus who stood at the doorway, looking out into the grey light of a cloudy day, was a stranger, not a caretaker. He knew nothing of my purpose nor did he know anything of my future. With him, I wasn’t certain I had a future in front of me at all. I had no one else I knew of but this stranger, and when he looked at me I could see his eyes moving almost imperceptibly, looking over my chassis in the light and remaining deep in thought. There was no certainty in his eyes… only a grim discontent.
He didn’t know my purpose.
Who was I to be? A worker that saw that all toils were toiled, and all tasks were done? A soldier that saw to the protection of that which my creator would wish protected? A tender to the wounded, emoting sympathy but operating with mechanical efficiency?
I was as much a mystery to myself as I was to my activator.
The building we were in had been the office for a place of business, but the identity of this business remained unknown to me. No markings were left to determine where I was, and though unable to ask I had the indication that the pegasus would not know either. All that was left were the remains of wooden or metal desks, smears that had once been ink and paper, and bleached fragments of concrete.
Beyond, through the gaps in the ceiling and the glassless windows, I could see that there were other buildings in just as terrible condition as the one in which we resided. Small offices and little shops, glimpsed briefly, that had long since lost any sign of what they had once been. My hypothesis was correct in some form: disaster was the cause of this damage, but an earthquake did not seem likely. Whatever had occurred was truly only able to be described as cataclysmic, and whatever it had been was something long past.
How long had I been in the storeroom below us? Since the disaster that caused such destruction? It was possible, though this hypothesis was one I did not like to think much into; it would mean less chance of determining my purpose.
If it had been a year since these buildings were crushed, then there would be less weathering. As it was now, it seemed as though water damage was starting to erode the walls and floor. Five years? Not even that span of time and a torrential hurricane would account for the same weathering.
A decade? Such a span of time would account for the weathering, but not the degradation of my power cells.
Twenty years?
….fifty?
I cut the analysis process short and quickly scrubbed the logs of that train of thought; I didn’t want to consider such a span of time as long as that… for if true, the chance of meeting my creator, of any pony who could give me purpose, was very small.
I would have to trust that my activator would know what to do, and would act in my best interests.
Load task-management program, I commanded my file system, intending to bring back up the section of my HUD that would give me objectives based on presented end goals. The file system gave an error back instead: the file wasn’t opening. Surprised by this, I examined the logs my system had brought me regarding the program’s previous run event and was disappointed to find that it had closed in such a way as that it had become corrupted. Much of the program was completely intact, but the executable process was no longer usable.
I brought up the files very carefully, pulling up the directory and all it contained from my chassis’ storage and examining it. It was overall a very small program, but one that relied heavily on processing power; not the best of background tasks, but a helpful one to one such as myself, who was being given no commands. It had closed in a fairly haphazard way, and this had caused some of the data in the executable to become scrambled, preventing it from running. I would simply have to find a solution myself.
Pulling the damaged executable file out and moving it into an archive, I created a new file in its place, a blank section of memory that I could begin to devise a fix inside of. The original executable had been small and for the purposes of loading up other sections of code, and so recreating it was a simple matter of loading the same files that the original had been loading when it had run, referencing the logs it had left behind.
Eighty-nine lines of code later, I saved this new file and turned it into an executable. For safety, I made it read-only so that if there was an issue later on, it wouldn’t pose a threat to itself and risk damage to the executable. I didn’t want to have to do this again.
Load task-management program, I commanded my file system again. This time, the process opened, and while it wasn’t as quick as I would have liked, the friendly dialog in the corner of my HUD was a welcome sight.
New objective? it queried.
Determine my purpose, I responded, adding the new goal. Then, remembering my initial objective: Secondary: Defend activator.
I could feel the program working away, churning through data to try to determine the best way to reach these assigned goals. Primary objective unable to be completed at this time. Gather data.
It was no surprise, but it was still a disappointment.
I turned where I stood, bringing myself about to face the grey pegasus; in the soft light I could see how dirty and disheveled his black mane was, still damp from the engagement with the reptile in the basement below us. The thick grime that covered him was streaked and partly washed away. He caught my motion and his head turned to look back at me, meeting my gaze for just a moment before again I saw his green eyes wander as before, looking me over.
He seemed wary. Cautious. Calculating. Though the mind of a living being worked differently from my own, I could almost see the thought process running in his head: he was trying to work out what I meant to him. Was I useful? Was I a threat to him? I didn’t know the answer myself, and I saw no realization enter his eyes. He was still uncertain; still a stranger.
With a quiet huff of breath, the pegasus broke his gaze from my chassis and started across the room at a trot, heading towards where the front desk of this building had once been, and in his motions I noticed something peculiar: he was limping. Why was he limping? He could have been injured by the creature he had killed.
“Alright, so here’s the deal,” he began. “I don’t know what we were supposed to find here other than you, but I’m not ready to stay here any longer than I have to.”
We?
The two letter word created vast possibilities that could be explored. Assuming that the pegasus was using correct grammar, this meant that there was at least one other individual he was referring to. But who? I had seen no one else but this pegasus and he didn’t seem to be looking for anyone. So where was the completed part of the ‘we’?
At the desk the pegasus began to shuffle his hooves among the bits of debris, looking around for something on the floor. I could hear his hooves scuffing against bare concrete where once there had been carpet. He was favoring his rear leg rather often, and when his jacket moved I could see that there were soaked bandages beneath, stained red with blood. In that case, he’d been hurt before the fight because I hadn’t seen him stop to put those bandages on. Either a recent wound or one that the fight had reopened.
He continued as I began to move myself to follow, my own hooves making hollow clicking noises on the floor as I walked. “I don’t have much time until the bandits track me down, unless they take their sweet time with my pack back there- SHIT!” he cut himself off with a sudden realization, swearing loudly and jerking his head in frustration. His expression had, in a moment, changed from one of grim thought to almost horror. “My pack!”
I turned my own attention to the words he’d said: Bandit. An outlaw or robber. But more importantly, plural.
Single words brought pieces of what the situation was into better focus, and I was able to speculate: The pegasus and at least one other were attacked by ‘bandits’. So why was this 'we' in his case now simply 'I'? The most likely scenario was that whatever companion or companions had been with the pony was no longer so. Considering the mention of bandits, injury or death was a likely possibility.
This environment seemed to be one I was ill-suited for with as much damage as I had taken.
The pegasus’ mood had taken an even darker turn upon realizing that he was without his pack. I saw him staring at the ground, but made the guess he wasn’t seeing anything in front of him and was instead quite firmly rooted in thought. “Damnit… I knew I forgot something,” he muttered before looking up at me. He seemed to guess my question and answered, though I hadn’t asked. “When we got hit I…” he gave a defeated sigh, looking away from me almost ashamedly. “..I left my freaking pack behind. I had to fly and I can’t carry it when flying, so…. damnit!”
I formed a quick hypothesis: not long before locating me in the basement below, the pegasus and whatever companion he had at the time were attacked by ‘bandits’. This pegasus fled, leaving what I could only guess were valuable objects of his behind. Likely, to be looted by said robbers.
It made sense that there would be looters after a disaster of any substantial size, but after as much time as I had estimated had passed would not law-enforcement have been reestablished? In fact, would not salvage on this portion of a town or city have been attempted?
I could not get rid of the notion that something was terribly ‘off’, but it would have to wait.
My activator started to pull open the drawers on the desk, searching among the barely-intact items within for something, though I couldn’t imagine what. Eventually he came across something that caught his eye, and he stopped his shuffling through the old office supplies and pulled something out, holding it up to the light. “Hm, how’s that for a search check?” he asked.
Held up to the light was a set of pens, some without their caps. They looked as though they were rather high quality, though long past the age where they would actually be able to write on paper. Emblazoned on them, however, was a symbol: an image of a gear framing a mountain peak. The symbol was engraved in the metal casings of the pens, and a short while later I saw the same symbol on a paperweight that the pegasus also held up from the same drawer.
“What d’ya think?”
I thought that there was a good chance that the symbol had some relation to the company that owned this building, or more accurately the remains of this building. Most likely their logo, and perhaps the logo of my creator or creators, but I found no matches at all in my database. Whatever the case, I couldn’t provide this answer to my activator without a working vocoder.
The pegasus noted my lack of response and tilted his head a bit, narrowing his eyes. Again, the uncertain examination of my shape. “Anyone home?”
I nodded in response to let him know I could hear him; he hadn’t noticed before that I had been silent, but he hadn’t done much that would have needed a response. “Can you talk, or are you the quiet type?”
It was hard to answer this question; were it a yes or no ordeal I could simply give the answer by shaking or nodding, but it wasn’t. Instead, I raised one battered leg and spun it about to point upwards at the region of my chassis’ ‘throat’ area, tapping the metal of my hoof against the joints of my neck.
My activator seemed to show some understanding. “Damnit… I always skimped on points in my repair skill.”
The statement didn’t quite make sense to me. Points? Interpreting it as a language variation left me with understanding that he had said, roughly, that he wasn’t knowledgeable enough to have gotten my vocoder working.
“So here’s the situation, robot,” he said then, and I saw the objects he had retrieved vanish into his pack alongside the case he had stowed earlier. “There’s bandits out there somewhere, and they know I got away. They might just come looking for me, and I can’t be holed up when they do. So we have three options: we can head further into the city, which seems like a shit idea but who’s keeping track anymore… we can leave the city behind and see what some friends of mine can do about this logo and about telling me about you and that processor in your skull…
“Or, we can go get my pack back, and see if Keystroke is still alive. Or, whatever it is he was before, if not alive, I don’t know.”
Keystroke? The way it was said, my auditory interpreter automatically placed a capital at the beginning; a proper noun, not a standard noun. I had a name for someone, for once. The name of the missing companion that finished the ‘we’ that had been mentioned earlier.
“Leaving the city means getting out into cross-country territory, and I don’t have much food left,” the pegasus continued. “That was in my pack. Same with water. And I can’t roll high enough survival to provide for myself half the time out there, so I’m not really happy leaving that pack behind, if you follow me.”
I only barely did, as the slang phrases he was using didn’t quite match up with what I had in my language files, but I managed to get the basic idea from context. I nodded affirmative.
“I can’t go far without food. Not sure if you get that, since you’re a robot and all, but it’s true. So right now, as stupid as it sounds… going after the bandits and getting my pack from them might be my only chance of survival.”
Based on the definition of the term ‘bandit’, I had great doubt that the individuals would be willing to peaceably hand over anything they had unlawfully taken. My diagnostic program chimed in with similar doubts about the situation: most likely, going after anything called ‘bandits’ rather than ‘looters’ or hopefully even ‘malcontents’ would end up doing more damage to me than needed.
But my only objective was clear: I had to protect my activator. How, I didn’t know, but I had to. It was the only purpose I had managed to work out from the limited data I had so far been presented, and I was bound to ensure it was done by any means. If pursuing a dangerous course of action was how it would be done, then it would be done.
My diagnostic program informed me, again, that I was loony.
“So, you’re going to come with me, right? And try to keep us both alive?” the pegasus asked, hopefully. I didn’t know why it was a question at all; he was my activator.
Still, I nodded in the affirmative once more; I would follow him so far as my purpose remained unknown and as long as my power cells allowed. This, of course, was just over five weeks time, as my diagnostic program was happy to remind me now that I was determined to carry out what it saw as a needlessly-dangerous task.
Five weeks. Assuming that I only followed, and didn’t take more damage, that was only five weeks of time to locate undamaged power cells or locate a generator. That, or determine what steps would need to be taken to repair my primary cells, if any even could be taken. My backup cells weren’t able to put out the voltage needed to power up most of my chassis’ modules, and without power I wouldn’t know what most of them even were.
The pegasus’ expression changed to one that was more positive, and I felt somewhat more positive about things myself; after all, we had an objective that was clearly laid out, and it was a relieving moment. I liked having a task.
I hurried myself after the pegasus as he hastily shut the drawers on the desk again, keeping the items he had pilfered moments ago with him and starting towards what I assumed to be the front door. He was significantly more adept at getting around fallen debris than I was, not hesitating with his choice of path like I had to in order to work my way around fallen chunks of the floor from above us.
Add new primary objective, I began a command to my newly-revived task program. Retrieve activator’s belongings from ‘bandits’.
A moment passed before the HUD blinked and updated my objectives, showing the new one now at the top and highlighted: Follow pegasus to ‘bandit’ location.
Prepare for additional damages to chassis, chimed in my diagnostic program. I informed it that it should be less verbose, which it dutifully obeyed, but not without a certain air of smugness that I didn’t very much appreciate. It seemed it didn’t appreciate the direction I was taking my new body, and had a certain amount of blame for some recent damages reserved for my choices.
Perhaps it wasn’t wrong.
At the open doorway, the doors themselves long since vanished, my activator stopped and peered out once more, looking from side to side and then once looking upwards towards the cloudy sky before proceeding; I had wondered what his investigative glances outside had been for some time now, and now I finally realized that he had been trying to watch for anyone approaching. Such as, perhaps, bandits.
As I followed down a short set of steps, the change from relatively dim conditions into bright daylight caused my optics to softly whirr, closing their apertures automatically to adjust to the increase in brightness. As they refocused, and as I followed the pegasus into the parking lot, I was able to take in more details about the city around us.
Within my database were descriptions, thousands at the very least, of various things that I could refer to for information. Among these were details of wildlife, details of plants, details of ponies, and even details of cities. What I saw around me was unable to be matched to anything. I could use the word ‘alien’ to describe it, though this was the first time I had ever been outdoors to witness the world myself. I had expectations from my database, but this…. defied all of those.
The world was bleached and devoid of color. For several seconds my eyes swept side to side, wondering if I had lost chromatic sensor input, but it was a bleak monochrome world I had entered and not because of an error. Here and there, yes, specks of red or brown or blue, but the vast majority was blank concrete and bare earth, interspersed with dark shadows and marks that looked like scorches across the ground. Every building I saw around us was caved upon itself like the one we had left, and none of them had intact windows. They were crumbling and eroded by weather.
There was no sound save for the soft whirring of my own motors, the breath of my activator, the crunch of our hooves on dusty pavement, and the sound of wind blowing between gaps in the buildings around us.
Whatever hope I had stored away that there would be someone near that could tell me my purpose was deleted, but not by choice; it was cleaned up as invalid and untrue garbage information, marked to be overwritten. There were no ponies, or any living creatures, that I could see as far as my eyes would allow me to see, and it was clear to me now that whatever disaster had claimed this area had done so very completely, or more time than I had been willing to estimate had passed.
Stopping in front of me, the pegasus looked back and saw me looking around, and as though sensing my curiosity he offered an answer. “Know where we are?” I shook my head. “Detrot,” he said. “Well, sorta. We’re actually a long ways from the real Detrot, in a town to the north-east of it. But Detrot was a big enough city that everything around it used to be called the same.”
Detrot. I began to scour my database for information, but I didn’t have much: the seat of the county in which it resided with a population of more than five-hundred thousand, not including populations within the overall ‘metroplex’ area that was called by the same name.
Half a million ponies or other sentients. Was. Past-tense.
Where? Where could that many living creatures have gone? What did they do when disaster struck the city? What could have happened to make this much damage be possible? Nothing in my databanks could come close to a hypothesis.
The pegasus met my gaze as I looked to him questioningly, and I opened my mouth to question him further…. but of course, I couldn’t speak.
My activator seemed to grasp that I was confused, and continued, though not by much and not along the same thread as my actual question. “Normally ponies from the desert don’t come nearly this far west, so I’m not even close to local. All I know is that this whole area is bad, bad mojo,” he trailed off. “...should have bucking thought of that when I took this bucking job.”
Curious, I lifted myself up, standing upright on my hind legs… but wasn’t able to fully manage the maneuver, because one hind leg once again jammed and hung, preventing me from gaining any height to see by. I settled for what I had already, panning around on the horizon.
As far as I could see into the cloudy distance was yet more of the same; buildings destroyed or at least greatly damaged, and no sign of movement. I continued to peer around, following the pegasus as we moved out of the parking lot of the building we had been in, and into the empty roadway. Still nothing.
Then, far in the distance, I saw something: a smudge. My eyes whirred quietly as they refocused, and the smudge resolved into a vague jagged shape. It was far in the distance, almost lost in the haze of atmosphere, but the shape was distinct enough for me to identify it as the skyline of a very large city’s ‘tower’ district.
That must be Detrot, I messaged to my own process. And therefore, that must be roughly south-west, judging by the navigational cues provided by this pegasus. We were somewhere to the north-east of that, in a smaller town in the country of Equestria. Which, based on information from my database, was a very large country. Millions of individuals, and with a strong government.
Where was everyone? The logical conclusion must be only that they weren’t here either because they were avoiding this area due to disaster, or because there was no reason to be here any longer. Because my estimation of a great deal of time having passed since this disaster was very likely, it seemed as though there must be something else that was preventing a population from forming near here.
I wondered just how much danger we were in for the residents of an entire country to be avoiding a metropolitan area.
My activator seemed to be nervous; with my gaze now returned to him I noticed that he was looking around us a great deal, as though expecting something to change. It seemed he was expecting the bandits he spoke of to appear at any moment. It also seemed likely that the sound of his firearm could have been audible even here, which if so would offer anyone nearby an idea of where we had been.
“This way,” the pegasus finally said, matching my gaze and then turning. He pointed us towards what I had determined to be east, and I was quick to follow in his steps, mounting the curb on the far side of the road to use the sidewalk rather than the cracked and broken street.
I made a very careful note of where we had come from, with the hope that we would return; it was likely that the location would offer more answers later on, and perhaps spare parts to replace what was broken on my own chassis.
For now, however, the only hope of answers would lay ahead.
The town was in shambles; every building we passed was a small store or office, thoroughly looted and with little in the way of furnishings. I saw no intact windows in the one-hundred and six window frames I had so far counted, and there was no sign of habitation. Whoever had lived and worked here had been gone for some time, and the belongings they owned were almost all either taken with them or looted afterwards. What objects I saw that were still here were usually damaged beyond use.
As we traveled, though, I noted that there were inconsistencies in the destruction of buildings; some buildings managed to remain rather intact if certain criteria were met; single-story structures, structures made entirely of concrete and steel, and structures with short wall-lengths were all kinds that seemed to have survived far better than their neighbors, and some of these did indeed have rooftops.
Even more curious was the fact that as we left what was likely the town’s business district behind, the destruction seemed to lessen in intensity overall to a degree. It seemed almost as though whatever disaster had occurred was focalized on the business district. As the buildings grew more residential, with the appearance of apartments interspersed with small store buildings, the integrity of their structure noticeably improved.
There were simply too many variables involved to narrow down exactly what could have happened, and so I simply continued to gather data.
In the meantime I turned towards the thought of what we would do once we actually did encounter the ‘bandits’ that my activator spoke of. By himself he had little chance of negotiating; it wasn’t logical to think that multiple aggressive individuals would be willing to negotiate with my activator. My presence made little difference; I had no knowledge of negotiation tactics other than whatever I would come up with on my own, no knowledge of combat, and I was not very threatening to begin with because of my chassis’ size.
Even more concerning was the fact that as we traveled, my activator’s limp became slowly more pronounced; he seemed to be in pain, but was going through the effort to not show it. With an injury, it was hard to tell what he could do if it came to violence, even with a firearm hidden beneath his clothes.
So what then would be the best course of action?
Subterfuge was a conclusion that seemed pleasing to me; avoid contact entirely, locate the objective, retrieve, and escape. This would prevent the need to negotiate or do combat, and so would far decrease the risk to either of us. But even so, I had limited knowledge of the scope of this art; I was unsure how to accomplish it without more relevant data.
It was in my slow sweeping of the buildings around us, looking into every window I saw in the hope of seeing something within that would give more clues to the fate of the town, that I saw something rather unexpected far before my activator did.
Some distance down the road we had been traveling alongside, on the side opposite of us to our right, was a building with a mostly-intact structure, and even a second story. The window on that second story contained something unexpected: a pony. Standing and looking out of the window frame, peering down the road towards his right and away from us, was a male pony with a black, wide-brimmed hat. My optics softly whirred to focus, and I noted that under the layer of grime covering this pony, his coat looked to be a dull brown. This coloration made him somewhat harder to spot against the background, which is likely why my activator hadn’t yet taken note of him, but my sensors had seen his movements and brought him to my attention.
The second person, and third living thing, I had ever seen was standing at the windowsill and peering towards his right, a black object laying on the sill in front of him that was long, but otherwise unidentifiable at this angle. He didn’t seem to have noticed us, instead being focused on something else. I followed his gaze, and guessed that his interest was in a store sign that was hanging by only a set of heavy wires, swaying in the wind down the road somewhat further.
Was this individual one of these bandits? Was he the companion? The answer wasn’t relevant so much as whether or not he was a threat to us. In my HUD were outlined my objectives, and clearly one of them was to protect my activator. I didn’t know if this pony I saw in the distance was a threat, but my activator might.
I reached forwards with one hoof, batting at the dirty black tail of the pegasus in front of me. He jolted somewhat in surprise at the touch and quickly turned to look back at me, confusion painted across his face; he didn’t know what I had seen. Now stopped, I raised the same forelimb and pointed upwards and forwards, towards the individual, and my activator’s eyes followed the motion to the window. My question as to if the pony in the distance was a threat was answered by the colt’s change of expression to one of grave concern.
If the pony in the distance was not the companion, Keystroke, that he had mentioned, there was a very good chance it was instead one of the ‘bandits’. Without a word my activator tensed and sprang into action, turning towards his right and bolting with wings outstretched as though he were about to take flight, but he never took to the air. Instead he was almost hopping and gliding, using his wings to take the weight off of his injured leg. I didn’t question his choice, immediately following suit and putting more power to my motors, bringing myself up to a quick gallop.
I was thankful that my chassis didn’t seem inclined to make more noise at a run than at a walk as we crossed the road to the far side. Ahead I could see where my activator was trying to bolt, and followed him into a building where the door was missing from its frame. It looked to be some form of small store, perhaps once a bakery or a deli judging by the arrangement of counters and displays.
My hooves skidded across dusty concrete as I brought myself to a halt, the pegasus stopping far faster than I did in front of me just inside the door. He looked around with quick intensity, making sure there were no other occupants, before finally he turned to address me in a volume barely above a whisper.
“Shit,” he started with much emphasis. “Good spot check. I didn’t even notice that. It was a pony, wasn’t it?”
I nodded in response. He didn’t seem to have gotten a very good look before bolting.
“Do you think they saw us?”
That I had seen, they had never once looked in our direction or otherwise indicated that they knew of our approach, but I didn’t know if our dash for this small building had drawn any attention. To reassure the pegasus, I shook my head, but his look of relief was short-lived as he grimaced, the adrenaline of flight giving way to the pain of his injured limb.
A stifled, if barely so, hiss of pain escaped through his teeth, and I took a step back as he suddenly slumped onto one side on the ground, and this hiss turned into a stifled whimper. He was in pain, immensely so, and I struggled to try to think of some way to help. He’d been holding back showing his discomfort at traveling on foot, or so I guessed, if his leg pained him this much.
Why hadn’t he flown instead? Pegasus ponies could hover for a great length of time without rest, but this individual seemed reluctant to. It was something I took note of for later investigation.
I didn’t know what to do. My activator curled in slightly on himself, the bandages that covered his flank in view and very red with what seemed to be fresh blood. He was in a great deal of pain and seemed to be struggling to keep himself quiet, or risk attracting attention. The bandages had become soaked in water from the basement that I had no doubt was contaminated, and this worried me about the possibility of some harm being done by that as well. In fact, it could well be the wet bandages that were causing the most pain.
I stood there wondering what to do for several long seconds, feeling helpless at my inability to cope with the situation. Soon, though, my activator quieted, and looked down to his flank with gritted teeth.
“S-sorry,” he muttered. I didn’t know what he was apologizing for.
The pony at the window outside was a threat; my activator’s rush to use a building for cover was proof of that. What kind of threat was unimportant to me; if the pegasus didn’t want to be seen, I saw no reason to argue the point.
I found myself wishing I had recorded a frame or two of the stranger in the window, for examination.
“Nnh!” The pegasus on the ground grimaced and clenched his jaw visibly, touching the top of the layered on bandages experimentally and finding it did nothing but make the pain worse. “O-okay,” he said eventually, though his tone betrayed his uncertainty. “.... okay. That was probably a lookout. If we were spotted he’d probably be yelling for backup or be shooting. Uh…”
He was trying to work out a course of action. I watched his eyes, as I had done often since my waking, and saw him looking around the room, cataloguing everything he saw in the hope that he could make use of it. Eventually he settled on something in particular, and my own eyes followed his line of sight towards the back of the shop building.
There was a doorway to the back rooms of the building, pushed open against the wall with a broken tension-hinge on the floor. Beyond was a kitchen, and what seemed to be other small rooms. Debris littered the ground from where parts of the ceiling had come apart, and it was gloomy without a source of light beyond the door we had entered through and the glassless window of the main room.
“There’s probably a back door,” the pegasus started in a whisper. “Maybe we can slip out that way and try to come up behind this guy. They attacked us a little further down the road… so maybe we can get to there without getting spotted?”
It sounded like a question. Almost a vague hope. He was unsure about where to go from here.
“Just give me a moment to… catch my breath. Okay? Go ahead and take a look in back, see if there’s a back door.”
I was reluctant to leave my activator alone, but being as he had given me an instruction… I hardly had a choice. My list of objectives updated to display the line ‘Locate rear exit of structure’. I looked over the pegasus, wondering if he would be alright, but noted that he was uncovering his weapon; mounted to a harness slung under his coat was a pistol with a long barrel, though I knew too little of firearms to make a guess as to the make and model. The diameter of the barrel said to me that it was likely very powerful, and having seen the damage a single round did to the thick bone of a skull, I estimated that it would do the same to any aggressor that dared enter the building.
With my activator behind me, I moved into the second room, stepping around debris and over the broken tension-hinge on the floor. The floor in this next room was covered, more or less, in small square tiles, dirty with dust and grit from the ceiling. The remains of a large refrigerator, a long commercial oven, and a floor drain that had long since stopped draining all indicated that this was a kitchen. An open metal door on the right wall let me see what had once been a walk-in freezer, though the shelves instead had been cleared of anything that had been on them.
I walked slowly around the room, curious about the state of the appliances; they appeared to have been partly dismantled. Screws were missing from the oven’s casing and panels were hanging loosely. The refrigerator was pulled forwards some and was missing panels as well. Upon inspection, the entirety of the compressor motor that normally took up a large portion of the underside of this appliance was also missing.
Moving on, I traveled down a short hallway where to my right was the open door to a small bathroom, likely for employee use, and a closed door to the left with a faded sign. In front, however, was what I had been instructed to find. Even in the gloom I could make out the dusty and broken sign on the floor that read ‘EXIT’, long since fallen from the ceiling. The metal door was closed and intact, which was the first exterior door I had thus far seen of the sort.
I cleared the objective from my HUD, marking it as completed before reaching my neck upwards to grip the handle of the door in my metal jaws, the only way I knew to grasp it, and gave a firm tug.
The door remained unmoved.
Curious as to why, my eyes whirred to focus on the surface directly in front of me; it seemed this door had a keyed deadbolt lock to hold it closed, one where a key would be required to lock it from either side. Unfortunately, the slot where a key would fit on this side was jammed by no less than three pieces of dark metal, and fragments of a fourth. The key, if found, likely wouldn’t unlock this door due to the obstruction, and I doubted that the key would be easy to find.
I reluctantly placed the objective of finding an exit back onto my HUD; I’d simply have to find some other way. I looked around, hoping for a window, but this hallway was devoid of anything of the sort, as had been the kitchen. The bathroom, as was proper for such a room, had no windows either. Perhaps in the closed room there could be a window?
I retreated the short distance back to the closed door, looking over the worn metal; unlike other interior doors, this one was built heavy and much like an exterior one. Perhaps a second exit door? Unfortunately in the gloom I was unable to read the faded sign. Unlike the rear door, however, this door had a level for a handle and no locking mechanism, and so for it I simply lifted a foreleg and pulled down on the handle, turning it as far as it would go and pushing open the door.
The hinges gave a low creak as they turned, and one vibrated ever so slightly; another tension hinge like the door to the kitchen. I applied more pressure, pressing the door open against the hinge’s countering force, and slowly peeked into the room beyond.
The inside was utterly dark, which was unfortunate as it proved that there was no window access, but I could not otherwise see anything that would give me an indication as to what the room was for. Perhaps a storage room? I pushed at the door and opened it wider to allow more light in, my eyes quietly dilating as wide as the apertures would allow so as to make it easier to see into the room with the minimal lighting.
On the floor in the far corner, curled in what looked to be a position close to that of sleeping, was what at first seemed to be a pony, but with a grim realization I found that instead it was a corpse. The third pony I had seen in my operation was most certainly dead, the body dessicated and shriveled from obvious mummification, hairless skin pulled taut over bones and a few strands of mane covering the face. They were wearing a shirt, and a hat sat toppled next to the body, a nametag on the shirt unreadable. An employee, most likely. I didn’t know if they were male or female.
I remained standing there, contemplating the discovery of the corpse. From all appearances it had been here since the pony had died, curled in a position where it seemed they had been sleeping when their life terminated. Had they been here during the disaster? I had no data relating to the dating of biological remains.
Dismal, I noted in my log file. It seemed that I was finding very little pleasant about the world I had found myself in upon activation. But there was yet more to see, and I simply had to hope that I would be able to find civilization, and answers, in the near future. But there was nothing I could do for the corpse on the floor, nor did I have a reasonable guess as to their cause of death.
I averted my optics from the remains, and returned to my exploration. The room had a number of boxes, most of which had been opened and emptied, some of which seemed to be cardboard that was decaying slowly. In one corner was a bucket on wheels, plastic with a mop handle sticking out and leaning against the wall, near to a shallow basin and faucet. Indeed, this was a storage room, and likely had housed dry goods and cleaning supplies for this place of business.
Near to the corpse, however, was something interesting: steel cylindrical shapes were outlined in the dim glow from the open door, and my optical interpreter resolved this into a ladder, reaching upwards. I followed the metal rails, noting the lack of ceiling tiles, and saw that the ladder extended into the blackness above me where even my sensors couldn’t see. What lay beyond?
My objective was incomplete, and I had yet one more place to search; up the ladder. Perhaps it led somewhere that would have an exit.
Looking back down, I looked about for something I could use to prop open the door with, and found that a nearby plastic sign was leaning against the wall. I leaned out and grasped it in my metal jaws, picking it up by the handle and dragging it out to jam into the space where the hinges met the frame of the door, keeping it held open. The ‘Wet Floor’ sign did an admirable job in its new role as a doorstop. That done I entered the room, pushing aside empty boxes to make my way to the ladder.
I reached up with my forelimbs, placing them on the rungs of the steel ladder and trying to determine the best way to approach this task of climbing. Eventually I settled on the approach of using my forelimbs to hold myself steady, grasping with my jaws and using my hind legs to push my way upwards; the five-point climbing method seemed inefficient, but perhaps it would be the safest method. I ascended slowly, counting the rungs as I went.
Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Each an equal distance apart so that even as the light grew less I was easily able to locate them by simply calculating the distances my limbs needed to travel. Above me I could only see blackness, and higher up the paint on the rungs vanished and was replaced instead with minor surface corrosion and rusting.
At fifteen meters from the ground, with only blackness ahead of me, I found my progress impeded when the end of my plastic muzzle touched a metallic surface that quietly rattled at my touch. I saw nothing, but remaining still I could hear a very faint sound, a low grumble of air moving rapidly over a surface. An exit? I reached out and swung my head slowly back and forth, searching for anything by which I could identify the obstacle, and eventually I struck something that with a few more taps I determined to be a lever, or handle.
It was a hatch of some kind.
I reached out and grasped the handle in my jaws, trying to twist but found it wouldn’t move in that direction. The other direction proved useless as well. Finally I pulled at it and was rewarded with a dull CLACK as a metal latch unbolted itself from a catch, the lever swinging downwards… and then suddenly tensing as springs mounted in the object began to pull.
All at once I was blinded by white, my optics unable to change from fully dilated fast enough as daylight bombarded my sensors. The hatch was yanked upwards by springs that rattled from the tension. Suddenly without something to hold onto, I found my rear hooves slipping from the rungs, and with a clang I found myself without anything at all to support me.
I was falling. My internal components shifted upwards in their moorings as gravity was thrown entirely in reverse, and the bright square of blinding light leapt outwards and away from me. I reached out my hind legs to try to catch myself on the rungs, but one of them missed the metal and instead I found myself being shoved in a sudden spiral.
Uncontrolled descent! flashed a bright warning in my HUD, a new alert for me. Activating gyroscope.
My diagnostics system interrupted the message with a new one that was troubling: Gyroscope not responding, module without power.
Without the rapidly-rotating wheels of a gyroscope within my chassis, I would be unable to control my tumbling. I was now too far from the ladder to reach out and hope to grasp onto it, sent backwards by the strike against the rung.
Activate reaction-control thrusters, I commanded hopefully to my chassis.
No such module detected, was the unfortunate reply.
Gravitational control systems, I queried.
No such module detected.
Emergency parachute?
Random guessing is unsatisfactory. No such module detected.
The ground was rapidly approaching and I was sure that an impact from such a height would cause damage to me, perhaps severely so. Though even with it approaching, I was curious: gyrocope? The module would imply, were it working, that there was a reason to be facing in a particular direction. So what direction was I meant to be facing?
Gyroscope module designed to right the chassis, chimed in my diagnostic software. Upon righting, deployment of pneumatic pistons is performed to absorb kinetic energy from a dangerous fall.
Pneumatics? A feeling I had never felt before swept through my circuits, an elation in the discovery of something new about myself. The emotion was unbidden, but appropriate. It was something new about this chassis I was wearing that could tell me more about my purpose, or enable me to perform more functions. What that would be was of course a mystery, but the elation of discovery remained.
If my gyroscope could not right my chassis, then I would right myself using improvised methods.
I calculated my angle based on internal readings, and then a second time to determine how fast and in what direction I was tumbling. It was a great deal, but I would have to compensate for this regardless. I put power to the motors along my spinal column, twisting my torso quickly so as to exert inertial force against part of my rotation, and with a hard kick of my forelimbs I put another force into play to try to control my tumbling.
Deploy pneumatics, I commanded my system, overriding the need for my chassis to be righted and hoping that my course-corrections would be enough to bring my limbs downwards as originally intended.
TSSST!came a loud sound from my chassis as my hind limbs extended from the lower half, increasing their length almost two-fold using metal pistons. The hind hooves split apart fractally, the casing deploying to show an array of motors and supports beneath in a complex fashion, expanding the surface area of the bottom of my hooves until they were far wider, a three-toed claw of a shock-absorber. With a loud CLACK of metal on stone, cracking the tiles beneath me, my hind legs impacted the ground and were pushed upwards against the newly-discovered pneumatic pistons, a soft hissing of air escaping as they slowed my deceleration from a sudden jolt to a much more comfortable… jolt.
I fell forwards on all fours as the pistons in my hind legs retracted, the rear hooves collapsing back together with a mechanical whirring of servos; a change from an impact of a predicted 30g, to a much lighter 12g.
Enumerate damage, I requested of my diagnostic software, checking over myself visually.
My diagnostics had already been gathering the data. Current report of no damage sustained in fall. A repeat event is thoroughly recommended against. If at all possible. Statistical probability of survival in a second instance is… unfortunate.
And yet, I’d made it out intact. And what’s more, it seemed that the chassis that I had found myself placed in had more to discover than had seemed apparent initially. I heard a hoarse call from the other room, asking if I was alright, but of course I was unable to answer audibly. Instead I turned to return to my activator, to make him aware that I’d found a rooftop exit for us to exploit…
...my left hind leg collapsed underneath me, suddenly unresponsive. I fell forwards, my torso taking the brunt of the fall as I dropped. What had happened? I went through a rapid self-check of my motor-functions, and everything seemed to be fine, save for a single motor in my left hind leg, the same leg that had caught and frozen multiple times so far.
Damage report updated. Locomotion module thirty-seven has sustained damage of unknown extent. Unresponsive. Logs suggest possible issue with power-distribution due to reduced voltage. There was a pause as my diagnostic software showed me the log in question. Investigating and attempting resolution.
“Hey!” came another hoarse, loud whisper from the other room. “You okay, robot?”
The door was still a meter away from me, and I would be unable to simply walk out. It seemed I would have to, for the time being, drag myself out to meet my activator.
A soft sound brought my attention elsewhere, however. My ears swiveled, trying to track the sound to a source, but as it stopped I became unable to determine where it had been coming from. I turned my head, looking behind me to the corpse, wondering if perhaps it had somehow been the source, but it remained precisely where it had been before. Uncertain, I raised my head to peer upwards at the hatch to the roof that I had opened.
In the square of light was silhouetted a face. A pony with brown coat and a wide-brimmed hat peered down at me.
The lookout.
mod_ attributes; set PERK,#0x0001; set PNEUMATIC_LEGS, [Woosh! You’ve got the wind under your hooves with air-powered pistons; you jump three times higher than a regular pony. In addition these babies double as shock-absorbers, reducing all fall-damage by two thirds if you land legs-first.] jnc ok_mod_attributes; save_file; FILE SAVED
