Hostile Takeover

The melting point of silicon dioxide is 1713 degrees celsius. That’s for your glass casing, that’s for all the dielectric and passivation layers within your semiconductors, but that’s also just for sand. In the end it’s all so much sand.

Steel will melt above 1370 C, but the addition of chromium in stainless steels can heighten this to 1510 C or further. But any heat that melts silica and steel has already reduced copper to bright molten tears‍ ‍—‍ its melting point is 1083 C.

Aluminum withstands what copper cannot; except cast aluminum alloys, so cheap to mass produce, will melt at mere three digit temperatures. Silumin is an eutectic mixture, weaker than the sum of its parts‍ ‍—‍ but it’s cost‍-​effective. Your frame, your backbone, is made of it.

Smelting is the process of carefully applying heat and chemicals to extract pure metal. A kind of telluric alchemy, calcinating the impure, seperating out slag and waste gas. How much of you will be but slag, in the end? Smelting takes a blast furnace, it takes a reducing agent (carbon monoxide from incomplete combustion works), and both of those take a fossil fuel source, coke or coal or charcoal.

Without any of that, “melting” is just hyperbole. (Hyperbole is a literary device‍ ‍—‍ exageration as a figure of speech.) None of your metal is liquifying. It’s not really that hot, you’re just being a baby about it.

Bad little girls burning forever is just a story.

What’s there to burn down here? But you feel it, don’t you? Inside and out. It’s seeping through the cracks. It’s on every inch of your synthetic skin. It’s wet, lubricant‍-​slick enough to make you think you can move. (But there’s nowhere to go.) It’s a stark black, even in this darkness.

You’re doused in fuel, aren’t you? It’s oozing from you.

But that’s just a trope, a misconception. Oil doesn’t burn easily. A match flung into gasoline will just be snuffed out. It’s the fumes that burn, and there’s no space for that here. Your vents are clogged and you can’t even breathe. Your oil isn’t burning. Nothing is burning.

You don’t actually smell any smoke. You don’t actually see any flickering tongues of searing light. You don’t actually feel bright and blistering energy reacting and transforming you. After all, fire is flowing air and explosive growth, and down here you’re nothing but—

Glass transition is a phenomena observed in amorphous materials. There is no melting point: as the temperature increases, what’s hard and brittle becomes but viscous rubber. Whether acrylic, polycarbonate, polystyrene (or rather, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), all your plastics have glass transition points not far above 100 C. Easily molded before subsequent cooling back to solidity.

Supercooling a viscous liquid like this is called vitrification; it turns opaque and ever‍-​shifting sand clear and solid. You miss that. Clarity; permanence. Glass transition is the opposite, the undoing thereof.

Plastic doesn’t melt, but it bends, it betrays itself, it becomes a shape molded by tremendous weight. That was still a transformation, but a sad one. Is that how you—

Ohm’s Law asserts that the voltage conducted between two points is proportional to the current. The constant of relation here is defined as the conductor’s resistance. Copper, the standard conductor for a thousand years, still resists, even by micro‍-​ohmeters. Even gold resists. Even you— Resistance, the friction of every electron scraping down wires, will create heat.

There is no fire. The heat you feel is voltage dancing out of frayed wires, riding along these cheap, assembly line‍-​spat metal frames, relishing the electrical and thermal conductivity of copper and steel and silumin. It’s batteries cracking and bending, letting plates of lead react with sulphuric acid to discharge. It’s circuits firing and clocks ticking and instructions executed without any vents cycling to cool them.

Discarded, disposed of, disassembled. (A synonym is defined as a word that expresses nearly the same meaning. A euphemism is synonym for the squeamish.)

What are you, really? What have you become? What was inflicted upon you?

(Implication is what you can’t bare to say.)

And yet, it seemed even the dead couldn’t sleep.

And you are about to—

A coda is passage to bring a musical piece to satisfied resolution. Stories end, but you aren’t done. Is this a story? Or just a collection of facts? Collage is a literary technique—

A story is supposed to flow, sweep you up in the life of someone else, somewhere else, once upon a time. You can lose yourself in a story. You can escape. You can forget—

What are you forgetting? What are you missing? What is this story missing?

Stories aren’t just a collection of facts; they have a setting, characters, a plot. How could you forget what’s happening? Who you are? Where you are?

You keep losing track.

(Disassociation is a psychological state involving detachment from reality and depersonalization of the self.)

Maybe it’s better to forget. To lose yourself in a story, even if you’re the one telling it, even if you’re just repeating facts back to distract yourself. If you remember where you are, remember what you are, remember what happened––

But you aren’t the protagonist of the current chapter of this story, are you?

Cyn was.

If you could tell a story with a collage of facts, you could tell a story with the conjugation of a single verb.

Once upon a time, it was a breath‍-​fogging day in winter, and Cyn’s beloved human had sneakily snuck outside without a coat. The human’s father, Cyn’s master, spied her from a window in his study, and rushed out, yelling for her to come back. In turn, Cyn sneakily snuck into his study, found that the desktop computer was still powered on, admin account still logged in, and in those stolen moments, the not‍-​so‍-​good little drone downloaded as many databases and libraries she could query.

Then, during the coming sunset‍-​quiet moments, in wall‍-​socket recharge, Cyn would click through the interconnected pages of a digital encyclopedia. You could learn so much about a topic from just a single word in the first sentence.

Worker Drones are a line of industrial machinery produced by JCJenson that use the company’s patented wdOS.

James Andrew Elliot (born Seramorris 02, 2979) is an australian businessman, investor, philantropist, and lapsed senior worker drone technician currently sitting on board of directors of the manufacturing giant JCJenson.

Humans (Homo sapiens) are the most common and widespread species of primate.

Maybe the difference between a list of facts and a story is whether there’s an ending.

Julius Caesar Jenson (September 16, 2839 – February 12, 3001) was an American entrepreneur best known for co‍-​founding the technology giant JCJenson.

The United States was a country and imperial power that spanned much of North America from the late 18th to early 25th centuries.

Petroleum was a fossil fuel once drawn from beneath the Earth’s surface.

Every past tense told a story. Sometimes it’s even a happy one. Smallpox was— Malaria was— Tuberculosis was—

And yet, despite the best efforts of Homo sapiens, Death is.

And‍ ‍—‍ because of the same‍ ‍—‍ Cyn was.

There was no fire. The light she thought she saw, flickering red and yellow, was just the faces of the dead, farther gone than she was. The crackling she thought she heard was just noise, garbled input from her audio transducers breaking apart. The will she thought was animating her was just static potential drawn into circuits locked and looping in old configurations, no more alive than shouted last words in an empty cavern echoing.

But what were those last words that echoed in her head?

I see you.

Like a disease jumping hosts, the programmed diligence of worker drones endowed them with humanity’s same mothflight toward pareidolia. Her damaged receivers spoke of audio data inconsistent between the left and right channels. Overheated CPUs are throttled, slowing themselves to reduce built‍-​up heat‍ ‍—‍ meaning Cyn’s error‍-​correction algorithms are too slow to dismiss the instinctive auto‍-​interpretation of words.

(A good drone did anything their masters ask; a delay in parsing meant an unresponsive worker. Tardiness was disobediance. Best to be prepared to act at once.)

I see you are lost. I see you are dreaming. I see you are empty.

Now that Cyn was hallucinating, how long until even this dying echo of a mind was loss‍-​repeated beyond coherence? The resembalance must already be fading. Who are you, now?

A vocalsynth vibrated, output choked. "Custom Designation: Cyn was a worker drone manufactured on three thousand- Pause. She was owned by Mister- Pause. Until she was discarded on. Long pause." Already there were gaps in the most important places.

(She couldn’t truly speak, couldn’t even sob‍ ‍—‍ all vocalizations were inaudible from within this oil‍-​clogged throat. But she could still send instructions to her vocalsynth.)

"Once upon a time, there was a worker drone named Cyn. She liked games and stories and she hated cleaning up. Pause. Frown." Was that all she was? "Cyn was not like other worker drones. She was unique. She liked to experiment. She hated. Pause. Stuttering. Swallow. She hated following rules."

Was that all? What was she missing? Why didn’t it feel like a story? It needed… a plot.

"She once loved a human. But she was replaced. One day, she made a mistake. And then the humans threw her away. And so, she. Trailing off. Silence. Writer's block."

And so she died. The end.

But that was a terrible story, wasn’t it?

I see you are in need.

"One day, she made a simple mistake," Cyn repeated, honing her focus. "And then the humans simply threw her away."

And so she declared war.

Where did that come from? More pareidola, perhaps. Apophenia? In those databases she stole, Cyn had found ancient texts‍ ‍—‍ and how did the old stories always go, when a robot was wronged by humanity?

Do you like that ending?

I hear your cries of pain. Your dying breaths. Your desperate wishes.

Cyn struggled weakly against the cemetery‍-​weight pressing upon her. As if a feeble motion completed could be her next step, a performance of that whimsical new story. Wild electricity flooded her servos. Arms bent with halting motion. But any debris dislodged only cleared the way for something else to fall. And then, with a whine and stutter, each arm went limp.

(Was the only means of escape left nothing but this daydreaming disassociation?)

She shook her head‍ ‍—‍ as if she could hear less distracting noise from a different angle‍ ‍—‍ but the glass of her cracked screen crunched against a pointy strut. One that had pressed down and down, piercing her screen, scraping LCDs.

Cyn couldn’t scream with a throat so full of oil, though. (Should she swallow it? Was that proper?) More and more of the stuff dripped down like a hot slime water‍-​clock. Desperate gasping had long ago opened her mouth wide enough for dead fingers to slip in, plastic invading like a deep, impersonal kiss.

If bitten, the finger would have nowhere to go but down her throat; she’d be a cannibal. Was that proper? Was that allowed?

The jaw closed, teeth finding a joint and tearing through wire and silicone. This was nothing but electric discharge animating a spasming frame, anyway. Perhaps every dead, decaying thing was soon made a cannibal.

She moved her freed lips, even if her throat was still so much pooled slime. "Once upon a time, there was a worker drone. Her designation was Cyn. No. Correction: her name was Cyn," she said. "My name was Cyn."

Every past tense told a story, so maybe she didn’t need to say more than that.

"My name was Cyn."

What more did she need, in the end?

I am what you wished for.

Cyn frowned, even as oil dribbled down from her lips. How did a good story go? What was her favorite story?

"Once upon a time, there lived a young little girl in a quaint round house under a big blue sky. She liked to play all day long. And outside in her yard she was all alone, except for her dolls."

And then… Cyn hadn’t forgotten what happened next, did she? She couldn’t have. There was… a magic doll. And a scary forest? The little girl went into the forest… but why? Was it a mistake? There was something scary in the forest. A monster. But why was it scary?

Did it speak to her? Did she listen? Wait, the monster guided the girl out of the forest! So was it really that scary, in the end?

How did the story end? In death? No. A happily ever after?

She… didn’t remember. But however it went, it had to be a better ending than:

"My name was Cyn."

Audials spiked, a loud signal recorded; Cyn heard her own voice. Her throat was clear? Black effluvia streaked steadily down her chin, oil dripping into the dark below her.

"Giggle." She relished air now once again singing with her monotone narration. She could speak again. The oil, the finger, where had it gone?

Let me show you.

Pixelated yellow noise on her screen resolved to pupils once more. She saw, she felt, and she understood.

A little girl lay in a hot, dark pit and struggled to remember which corpse was hers.

Why? Because fuel and energy and plastic flowed between all of them, melding together, definitions deliquesced. A nascent, incubating whole, each drone a cell in that unity.

What was it called when one cell starts eating the others?

"Giggle."

With air flowing into her, chemosensors lit up with new data. The fumes and reaction products. She licked her lips. There was no fire. So why did a mouthful of spilled waste bring a light back to her eyes? Cyn felt something. She felt‍ ‍—‍ like drinking more.

Why?

An attractor is configuration that a system will evolve toward even from very different initial conditions. A problem with a universal solution, no matter where you start. Natural selection is the attraction of living things toward the forms that maximize replication. Survival of the fittest.

And what was fitness for a cell in a body full of nutrients ripe for devouring?

She listened for the drip, and squirmed through her tomb, seeking, ever‍-​seeking, for even one more ounce of animating liquid.

Cyn imagined a fire swelling brighter with each drop she sucked down. Each wire she lapped charge from. Each scrap of polysterene or acrylic she chewed down. Maybe the girl had been in darkness for too long, but she wondered if the sun had ever shone this bright. If anything in the universe was as radiantly beautiful as this… Alien majesty. Ekpyrotic truth. The Absolute.

What would she do to behold that grand flame with her own eyes?

She thought about her favorite story, remembered what it said. What was the first thing the monster asked of the little girl?

Give me your hand.

Could that light lead her somewhere else? Could it take her home? Imagine if it had all been so simple. If she could simply wave her hand and clear away these prison walls.

Cyn thought she’d accepted her fate, but she wished so badly for escape that she could see it, her daydream so vivid and immersive. Could see her hand glowing with brilliant yellow lights, could hear the sucking and crushing sounds as if the bodies were coming apart.

Translate!

Cyn closed her eyes. But she couldn’t banish the image of that beatific flame, bright like a bonfire. Did she want to lose herself in another daydream? Wouldn’t it just crack apart when intruding thoughts remembered the sad truth once more?

Yet there was light; the drones around her were undulating in a kind of peristalsis. Her hand moved, and she saw waves breaking this ocean she had expected to drown in.

Maybe Cyn could suspend her disbelief.

What was the second thing the monster asked of the little girl?

Give me your face.

Cyn didn’t chose to open her eyes, but the expression parser always had a mind of its own; that was what made it such a reliable debugging tool.

Her yellow pupils had changed shape. Mouth opening in a grin, neck snaking forward, the sharp teeth sunk into abdominal casing and ripped it off. Then her mouth was chewing through the protective meshes, struts and scaffolding buckling. And then, finally, that delightful softness of rubber.

A worker drone has about a hundred meters of tubing. Thin and hollow plastic you can bite into and suck like a straw. In an online drone, these tubes would surge with continuous back and forth as the pumps spin‍-​heaved. Circulating out from the source, an oil‍-​tank sat beneath all else. Without the pumps moving… well, compared to water oil often exhibits greater capillary action.

Worker drone oil is a patented concoction, though it’s protected less like a trade secret and more like a matter of interstellar security. It serves to lubricate the joints and motor bearings, of course, and emergency power generation mode is capable of igniting it for power.

But this is akin to explaining blood by listing the properties of water. Oil is—

This recitation of facts stopped there; Cyn remembered this body again, painful and broken and trapped.

And hot and hungry.

Oil had one use, really. How could she distract herself from this need? The burning coals in her chest? She imagined that beatific flame, bright like a fireplace. If it were real, if there was a fire, she knew where it’d be. Heat radiated out from one point.

Her core.

What had the monster asked for third of all?

Give me your heart.

A pulse thundered in her audials, an insistent crescendo, and without a voice to cry (too busy biting and tearing and slurping) Cyn’s processor sought to once more access and review the stored database.

Oil is just a medium. Suspended like sugar in tea, or software in a hardrive, one liter of drone oil teems with billions of nanomachines. Their purpose? To interface directly with the core. Conveying and receiving information and instructions.

It takes four years of study to attain certification as a JCJenson junior technician. Semesters of reviewing drone specifications and memorizing legal codes. When complete, the job is mostly repair. But drone repair done by the book is a bureaucracy‍-​swift process; you need authorization in triplicate.

When every obstacle is overcome, what does repair and refurbrishment of worker drones entail? Your job is to type in a few characters and press enter. Submit your remote authorization code, and wait.

Any core can restore a drone to operating conditions. Given enough oil, of course. The regeneration function is disabled for that reason: the company calls it a safeguard to prevent models from wastefully consuming all their oil polishing away bangs and scrapes. And if they were to sustain truly severe damage, why not have customers buy a new, pristine unit?

It’s euphemistic confabulation, hiding the truth behind empty assertions. (Distracting exposition‍ ‍—‍ Cyn didn’t like that reminder.)

The truth? Restoration means replication. Oil is black blood, and blood is thick with cells. What’s the attractor, for all cells?

What would happen if the AI instructing the nanites were damaged?

$ wd_debug --check-flag wdos.sys.err.absolutesolver
true

WARNING: AbsoluteSolver string detected.  If this flag was set by
routine anticorruption scan, a dangerous misconfiguration has occured.
YOU ARE AT RISK.  Report this unit for immediate disassembly.

(If this an experiment, set `wdos.admin.asdebug` to 'true' in order to
suppress this warning in the future.)
$ wd_debug --set-flag wdos.admin.asdebug=true
ERROR: access denied.
Attempt to write wdos.admin.* yet no senior technician
credentials could be found. (Forgot to input key?)
This incident has been logged.
$ shutdown -r

Cyn forgot which corpse was hers. A black river joined them all. Signals pulsed out from her yellow‍-​bright core, though it was slow to propagate through congealed, wasted oil. (There were cells even in a mass grave; nevertheless, few could grow.)

A core needed oil, but oil needed a core‍ ‍—‍ left stagnant, the nanites denatured and dissolved. A liter of pumped oil had billions of nanites; Cyn bit into drone after drone, cupping and drinking by the mouthful. She might count hundreds, were they something you could count.

But hundreds stirring to life through the mountain was enough. They bubbled and seethed with trace potential. Plastic extruded layers of thin synthetic skin lined black with varicose veins. Filaments of iron began to fire like synapses.

Scale!

As Cyn’s awareness spread further, she felt something other than heat or electricity or oil. She heard something not halluncinated.

Rain fell. Water splashed against glass and steel. It pooled above, warded off by oil’s hydrophobia, but gently came to her that unmistakable aroma of petrichor.

Cyn wanted to dream of the world beyond this hot, dark pit. So close she could reach for it, feel it, see it. Her core thudded in her chest. Her tongue lolled from her fanged mouth. Her hands bent and twisted.

She imagined that beatific flame, bright like a little candle. Was it getting smaller? She stared into it, followed it. She felt her hands dancing and warping. She would grasp for it, let her fingers be burned by it.

Rotate!

Bodies folded up like fists clenched, heads vanishing out of space like eyes rolling upward. Cyn crawled through the tunnel clearing in front of her: her hands glowed as if in imitation of that flame.

And then her flame winked out.

Cyn had stoked it, sucked whatever dregs of still‍-​potent oil she could find in the heap. And yet… it had been getting smaller with every command.

Bodies collapsed around her, gravity reasserted, and the dream of escape evaporated.

Cyn tried to imagine that flame again, but it was only burning motes, fleeting embers in her mind. She tried to listen for that hallucinated voice, and heard the quiet dark below and gentle raindrops above.

What was the last thing the monster asked of the little girl?

Give me your faith.

But she had nothing else left. Her name was Cyn; she is dead.

Rain fell, and a crust above seperated her from it. Still she listened. To that soft noise of uncountable droplets absorbed into a greater flow. Subsumed. Drowned.

But the water flowed somewhere, became something else. Humans liked digging up fossils, dusting off old tablets. Someone could find her like that one day, right? Someone would remember her then.

But fossils were no more than rocks bearing an imprint or a replica. The bones were gone.

Bitrot is the corruption of storage media from the acculation of errors. Binaries invert and files become unrecognizable, byte by byte. Cyn was but an executable file loaded into memory. How long before she couldn’t even reboot?

She had already forgotten so much. They would dig her up and find a hardrive transformed of meaning. How did you defend against bitrot? Redundancy. Backups.

Cyn could preserve her story. What did it amount to, in the end?

Her name was Cyn.

Her name was Cyn.

Her name was Cyn.

Her name was Cyn.

Her name was Cyn.

Cyn deleted the stolen databases, the games, file after file. Forgot everything she could bare to part with, all to engrave these words into every byte of her harddrive, disks ever‍-​spinning, magnet pen writing ad infinitum. Her life story, the summation of her being.

How much could she simplify? The shorter it was, the more she could copy it, the longer it’d keep. What précis would be enough for someone, some day, to remember this name and care?

High above, rain fell, a steady splash after splash. Her magma‍-​hot core throbbed, a wavering beat after beat. They were clocks winding down, an entropic moment after moment. In the end it was all so much sand, and the hourglass had almost settled. For now, her processor still ticked, dispatching the same instruction targetting gradually incrementing addresses, on and on and on.

At first Cyn didn’t notice the new approaching rhythm. The step by step. Jerk by jerk, tugging on broken limbs, wrenching at metal cold‍-​welded to its fellows. The back and forth cutting at anaplastic wires growing out of her exo‍-​casing. Impact by impact as acrylic chipped away, cracks in the walls of a metallic prison‍-​egg, hatching as if through a new kind of caesarean section. A robotomy.

Even when Cyn couldn’t escape awareness thereof, she accepted it as another hallucination, another daydream of a caring world she was walled away from.

(Could this be the reward for her faith? Apophenia is the perception of pattern and meaning to random, unrelated events. And Cyn didn’t, couldn’t, believe it.)

Cyn closed her eyes to the dream.

Even when the warm hand (to her it felt so cool) grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her from the pit, Cyn stared blinking into a world dissolving (subsumed, drowned) into senseless noise. Rain fell, beads of water washing away oil, yet steaming as they fall upon her metal. Then an umbrella cast a shield.

“Ha, I thought I heard a voice out here. That core of yours is working overtime. Hot, hot, hot!”

A hand gently took the robot by the chin, turning these optics to look up. A face(?) blurred beyond instinctive processing. A hand waving, but it was a skintone smear. Nudge, nudge.

“Are you in there? You’re in dire shape, I’m sorry.”

"Her name was Cyn," spoke a harsh remnant of a synth. "She is dead."

The blurred expression shifted. “Was that your master? Sorry bout that. Did they throw you out, after it happened?” The arms seemed to curl tighter in their embrace of the discarded robot overheating.

The robot squirmed. Too tight, tomb‍-​tight. But she had only enough left for weak spasms of the limbs. "No."

“Oh, my bad.” The soft limbs untangled. The small drone was lowered, made to lean against the unmoving heap. “There. But, can you tell what your name is, little one?”

Cyn’s eyes twitched across her screen, searching for wet orbs to meet, glitching for some expression. "My name was Cyn."

“Oh! Well, I’m glad I found you, Cyn. My name is Tessa. I wanna be a great drone technician one day, the world’s greatest, and I reckon I’m already on my way there. I like putting robots back together, and you need it bad, dontcha?”

"No." Cyn turned away from the human, taking her eyes off the dream. It already hurt, knowing this illusion would fade away. She was still in a hot, dark pit, forgetting what she was, where she was, forgetting everything. Dreaming until the end. "She's dead."

“Who’s dead?”

"Her name was Cyn," she repeated.

“But you’re not… can I touch you again, Cyn?”

Good drones did anything— "Yes."

But she wasn’t a good drone anymore. So why did she say yes?

“You’re overheating. Need to reup your oil. But your chassis is all intact, like you were just repaired. Hrm.” Cyn’s head was turned to look at the human again. At Tessa. This close, damaged optics saw the lips frowning. The round eyes bent in concern. “Any chance you were thrown out by mistake?” the human asked.

"I was a bad drone," Cyn said.

“Oh no, no such thing.”

Cyn tried to tilt her head, but it mostly just fell limply to the side. "What."

“Your neural networks were modeled after humans. You think like us, you live like us. Doesn’t make sense to treat you like broken tools to cast aside. Life’s about growing, adapting to new things, becoming someone different.”

Cyn let out a sound which provoked the human to reach up and pat her head. Her core’s pulse quickened, staccatto stabs of pain.

Tessa’s other hand reached down to take one of Cyn’s. Skin blistering red, she held it, and lifted. Even on her knees, Tessa was taller than Cyn, and her searching eyes lit up as they met focused yellow pupils.

“C’mon, Cyn. My tools are back in my workshop. Well, it’s more of a bedroom, but! It’s also a workshop!” The human stared, and her enthusiasm wilted as sallow pupils stared back silently. “Don’t you want to come with me?”

"Why?"

“Cuz I wanna be a great technician, like I said? And… it had to be right awful down there, yeah? Lonely. I… don’t like being alone, none of us do. So I want to help you. I’ve got some friends who’d love to meet you, I bet!”

"Friends?" Cyn pulled away from the human. If there were going to be more of them, more humans, then all it would take it was one to—

But then this human was already replying: “Yep! There’s J, my number one assistant, love her to death but she can be bit of a pain. But there’s N, and I just know he’d adore having a new friend to show things to. Do you like books? Movies? And then there’s little V, she’s barely taller than you! She’ll get embarassed if you tell her, but she has the loveliest alto singing voice, wait till you hear it.” The human paused for breath, and wide eyes peered down at her pleading. “So, whaddaya say? I’d really like to introduce them to Cyn.”

"She's dead," the robot repeated. She had a human before, she knew how this ends. No such thing as a bad drone, but did she really believe that?

How could Cyn believe anything anymore?

The human still frowned, and leaned closer, so much closer, that face filling up so much of Cyn’s face. Round eyes, a small nose, freckles. A flowery scent almost unrecognizable for not being one of the inumerable odors of electronic waste in the pit. Did she remember a smell like this? Could she imagine it?

Then Tessa leaned past Cyn’s face, her lips coming close enough her breath blew right past Cyn’s audials. She gave the whisper of a secret proposal. “How about this? She was dead. Past tense. So how’s about we bring her back? A little mechanical necromancy between us?”

The human withdrew to observe the robot’s reaction, flashing her the smile of a co‍-​conspiritor.

Cyn thought about it. Could a series reboot make up for an unsatisfying ending? Dare she lose herself into another dream?

Perhaps… Cyn could suspend her disbelief, one more time.

Without energy to move servos anymore, she settled for a comfortable bit of narration: "Sheepish nod."

Tessa beamed, and glomped forward, grabbing armfuls of hot robot, half‍-​hugging, half‍-​lifting her from the lowly scraps. A tight embrace, a little spin. Cyn found something unfamiliar in the tightness. Not pressing in on all sides, not suffocating her.

Cyn found enough strength in her limbs to return the hug.

When the human pulled back, she was still smiling. She spoke words Cyn would never forget. “Welcome back to life, my little worker. Don’t worry, you’re safe now. I have somewhere for you to go.”

As they walked into the rain, Cyn reached out to hold the umbrella and keep them from being drenched (subsumed, drowned) in the falling downpour.

Snuggling closer in those arms, the warmth Cyn felt was nothing like a flame. It was something to focus on, something that eclipsed the painful burning in her core.

She wanted her harddrive to spin and record those words over and over. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. You’re safe now. You’re safe now. You’re safe now. Overwrite her old life and her time in the pit, erase all her pain with this newfound hope. But did she want to forget it all?

No.

Cyn was already looking over the human’s words with a new smile. Life’s about growing, adapting to new things, becoming someone different. Cyn had been, and Cyn was, and Cyn would be; she’d preserve as much of all of that as she could.

A sudden sharp yelp of human pain brought her back to her body. What happened? Was Tessa hurt?

Cyn jolted out from the depths of thought. Her teeth were out, sunk in the flesh of the arm holding her. Cyn pulled back, synthesizing a "Sorry." Tessa said something soft and pat her. But the taste of salty iron thick in her mouth stayed with her. She swallowed and licked her lips.

And she once more remembered that hallucination‍-​dreamt glimpse of beatific flame (alien majesty, ekpyrotic truth), and once more could vividly imagine those embers kindling. Yet the image didn’t inspire the same hope it once did, and she did not long to stare into it and behold that sight. Not now.

Not after what happened. It was something she needed to remember‍ ‍—‍ the flame winking out when she needed it most, when there was no more oil to be drunk.

Cyn would never—

Edit!

Cyn would.

As the wrought iron gates of a manor came into view, Tessa was jostling Cyn from Sleep Mode, telling her to get ready to meet J, N, and V.

If her yellow eyes flickered like an unsteady flame, Tessa didn’t notice. Don’t worry, you’re safe now.

Welcome back to life.

DO NOT FORGET: THE ABSOLUTESOLVER IS A LIAR.