Chapter Text
After a long day of working tirelessly as a cashier for a little cafe, the result of an entrepreneur starting a new business, I stood in front of the door to my apartment. Sighing, I pulled out my keys, unlocked the door, and entered my little abode. I didn't really own that much, a comfy chair and a small table, the microwave being a gift from my mother after having it replaced with a new one, and the bed with the barest essentials to get me through a cold night. Everything else, like the stove and the fridge, came with the apartment. Approaching the latter appliance, I pulled out the leftover meal of last night: Macaroni and Cheese, the only thing I had left going for me until payday.
As it would appear, I was not living a great life, having dropped out of college with all my hopes and dreams down the drain. This made me regret doing so as it left me, a 25-year-old man, with only a few lame job opportunities that paid squat, barely enough to afford a week's worth of food and the rest for rent. 'Oh, how I love living a shit life. Not.' I thought as I put the Macaroni in the microwave to warm it up. As I waited for my dinner to finish, I pulled out the one thing from my pocket that was a saving grace for my troubled existence... my phone. It was the only thing I had on me that kept me in touch with current events around the world and the internet while also being my direct access to my coping mechanism: memes. I don't believe there's a need to explain why that's a coping mechanism. Checking the few social media apps I had, finding nothing that intrigued me, I sighed, put away the device, and opened the microwave to receive my cheesy meal.
After eating my meal, I took a shower and lay comfortably on my bed, my mind stuck on what I would buy if I had enough spare money. If I could, I would've purchased merchandise of some of my favorite web series I watch. But, with my lackluster job, I could not and had nothing else as a suitable payment method, leaving me in the dust. 'Oh well, guess I'll wait until I get a better job.' I thought, drifting into unconsciousness. The last thing I saw before falling asleep was the ceiling fan overhead.
And when I woke up, what met my sight was not that of my bedroom. Staring up into a thundering sky pelting me with rain, I took notice of my surroundings. First, my eyesight was accompanied by a distorted hud as my eyes appeared to now suck bad. Second, I was stuck in a pile of scrapped robots( I think, can't really visually tell if they were ), barely able to move, and finally, from the looks of it, this seemed to be a sizeable collection of discarded machines( again, can't really tell if that's a correct statement ). And I was stuck in it, my upper half uncovered to the outside world, with only one arm free.
I'll give you three guesses on how exactly I reacted? If you guessed that my natural instincts screamed at me to get the fuck out of the pile of robotic corpses, all the while looking like an idiot, then you guessed correctly. For any of you who assumed that I calmly and rationally handled the situation, be my guest and put a hand to your face as I panic and flail wildly out of the sticky situation I found myself in. I gave zero thought to how eerily familiar the arms apart of me or the countless shapes of broken machines surrounding me were as I had other things to worry about. Like freeing myself from the trap I had found myself in.
After several moments, I finally broke free from the nightmare that had trapped me, falling down the hill of discarded robots, with my face landing into the mud ground separating the pile I had been stuck in from other heaps of discarded machines. This... only came at the cost of an arm being torn off and left in the pile behind me. Surprisingly, I didn't feel the pain one would experience from losing an arm, only a slight sting. Using one limb, I pushed myself up, feeling mud clouding my vision as I turned my head to look all around me, scared and confused as to how I ended up here in the first place. Had I died in my sleep and got reincarnated? Was I in a plane of torment? The last thing I remember was falling asleep and waking up here.
Attempting to blink the mud away hadn't worked as I tried to clear my vision, leaving me to use my one good arm to mechanically regain my sight. Sitting down on the muddy ground, refusing to sit on a broken-off head, I hovered my hand over my face, my head feeling heavy for some reason. I would discover the cause as my hand made contact with a hole where my eyes were supposed to be if the other discarded robots were a telltale sign. The mud had gotten stuck inside my head... where it shouldn't be, and then I put everything together at that moment.
I was definitely not human... I was a robot. I was a discarded, broken machine with nothing covering me. 'No duh, Sherlock? You lost an arm and didn't feel excruciating pain from losing a limb. What next? Will we set out to discover that water is wet?' I mentally criticized myself. But what kind of robot? I had no clue. My new concern right now was removing the wet dirt from my head. Grasping at clumps of mud trapped within the shell of my head, I got several handfuls out that was enough for me to finally gaze, granting me clear vision. With my vision clear, I discovered that the blindness was only slightly lifted, observing the shapes of what I had assumed earlier were robotic remains. They probably were. As the sight of green blobs just shouted, I was facing what I could guess was a forest. Deciding to leave this scrapyard, I limped into the woodland.
Now, if I had to be honest, walking in this mud with the weight I now had proved to be a struggle as each step would sink my metal feet into the wet dirt. Where I would go, I had no clue. As long as it wasn't that nightmarish and stressful place that was that robot graveyard, the better. Even as I left with my new, artificial nature, I - somehow - felt chills building up my robotic spine, knowing well enough that I would have nightmares of that place for some time.
As I moved through the forest, I looked over where my arm had once been. It... didn't look like I was losing blood... or was it oil now? But it didn't look as if I was losing anything. Perhaps I ran on nuclear power? But if I wasn't losing anything important, then it didn't matter.
'Where do I go? Where am I going?' I thought about what I was going to do now. I found myself in a situation that could be considered worse than the one I had been living in before this morning.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
The rain's starting to get on my nerves... or electronics? I hope I can find shelter soon.
Returning to the present moment, it would turn out that I would come across a mansion of some sort. Would it be rude to break into this manor so I could have shelter? Yes, but I didn't care by this point. Walking into the clearing, the first thing I saw beside the mansion was a tree with... a dead robot chained to a tree. On one hand, this could be a warning sign to stay away from this place if that was how people here treated their property. On the other, -nonexistent- hand, I didn't have anywhere else to go, and this was, seemingly, the best I could find for now.
Going from bush to bush near the mansion, making sure I was not visible, I eventually came across a backdoor into what appeared to be a library from what I could see from the window peering indoors. Who'd have a backdoor into a library... I wouldn't know. But I was gonna try and see if it was either locked or unlocked cause I was just at the tipping point of going insane with the constant drip from the rain. Walking out from a bush, I tried my best to carefully approach the door, not knowing if I was to cross paths with a maid or butler. Placing my one and only hand on the door handle, I turned it, and the door, surprisingly, opened for me. Why it wasn't locked, I wouldn't know.
Quietly stepping inside, I closed the door and carefully began sneaking around the library. Entering a secluded aisle of bookshelves, no other signs of life, be it artificial or human, could be seen, giving me one sigh of relief, even if I didn't even need to breathe in the first place. With shelter achieved, I decided that I could pull out a book from the shelf to pass the time or something, so once again, I used my one arm to pull out a random book, letting the gods decide what I would read for now.
It would turn out that the gods would want me to read Green Eggs and Ham. How the gods thought it'd be ironic to force me into selecting a children's book will be a mystery for all eternity. Turning around with a children's book, I would come face-to-face with a small robot in a maid outfit, eyes yellow and looking up at me with curiosity.
It was at this moment that I realized many things. This robot looked awfully familiar to a worker drone, thanks to her being close enough to not look like blobs of varying color palettes of green and brown. Which meant I was also a worker drone, a broken one.
Another thing was that she had a white wig of hair on her head. Whoever gave a robot hair probably held the robot close to their heart, however weird it may feel.
And she looked awfully like a certain Cyn from the same show I recognized her design. Which would mean I was in the fictional universe I called my new favorite. This could only mean bad things.
"Wide Smile, Green Eggs, and Ham is my favorite book." the robot said, giving me that soulless stare. "Puppy dog eyes, wide smile, please read it for me, unidentified individual?" she asked, what with her face plate showing a puppy instead of eyes. As she stared at me, my thought process was divided into three voices, one quieter than the rest.
'Run away!' the quiet voice said, perhaps the reasonable one out of the rest. Maybe if the other two weren't as loud, I would have run for my free will.
'Punt the child. Do it; punt the abomination into the stratosphere. Punt them. Dew it. Punt them!' shouted the loudest, starting to chant the most stupid idea I ever had right next to dropping out of college. Attempting to punt Cyn in my current state would be seemingly possible, plus that's without account of her absolute solver nature. She probably knows how to hide a body anyway, so it's best not to make an attempt on her life this early on.
'Let's just entertain the child. Perhaps it will leave us be afterward.' said the one voice fighting back against the stupid, irrational, intrusive voice. After listening to all these voices, I decided to entertain the Cyn. Maybe if I read her the book, she could tell me where I could best hide while staying out of the rain.
Before, I inevitably ran away to escape a specific public event that she would go Skynet/Glados all over the place. Not fucking risking becoming a puppet afterward. 'Perhaps hijack a starship and crash on an uninhabited world. That way, no one can bother me.' I thought, crafting a plan to get out of dodge.
Returning to reality, I looked Cyn in the eyes with my broken ones, "Sure, why not," I said, almost showing fear.
Sitting down with an eldritch abomination joining me on the floor, I flipped open the book to one page, starting to read to the little Cthulu disguised as a cute little robot. As I tried to read the words from page to page, Cyn would occasionally make a statement regarding her physical actions or what happened in the book. It was... almost cute, if I had to be honest. Almost, Cyn would be murdering people, and no matter how rich these folks were, I wouldn't stop judging her actions.
She could've resorted to reporting to child protective services or blaming the Elliots for white-collar crime, gaining the attention of future IRS. Killing a bunch of rich folks doesn't precisely serve her case.
As we were about to finish reading, footsteps caught me off guard as a new voice entered the scene. "Cyn, time to go into the... basement..." a young girl said. Turning to face her, the sight of a (even more than the current moment for me, I guess) distorted girl, the appearance of a human changed out for a dark black coating, standing in the middle of the aisle. "Oh... and who are you?" the girl asked, her white eyes looking into my soul. She began to approach Cyn and me, though her attention was on me more than Cyn.
"I..." I paused, thinking about it; is it -to be honest- a bright idea to share my human name? Probably not. I better lie and say I can't remember what with the current broken status I was in. "I don't know my name," I said, tilting my head. My best guess was that this was a young Tessa if the strange blob that could be a bowtie was enough evidence. Someone who wouldn't callously harm her robotic friends.
The girl looked over to Cyn, who stared back with the same soulless stare she had done with me. "Cyn, where did he come from?" Tessa asked, suspicious of Cyn. I don't know if she was wary of Cyn for letting me in or reactivating a dead worker drone, which I wouldn't blame her for assuming.
"The unlocked back door," I said, using the book to point at the mud trail I had left. In hindsight, I probably should've ensured I made zero tracks before coming indoors. "Cyn here had nothing to do with me coming inside," I said before looking back to my current state of disrepair once more. "... Any chance I could receive repairs?" I asked, putting the book down and placing my hand on the place my other had once been. "In return, I could work as a servant... or something? As long as it's not customer service, I'm fine with anything." I said, placing my foot down on what I was unwilling to do.
The girl made a humming sound before once more looking back at Cyn. "I could work something out... but Cyn, basement for the night, got it," Tessa said, giving an order to the other broken worker drone. "As for you, I need to deactivate you for a short while to fix you... are you fine with that?" She asked, showing signs of sympathy.
"That's fine by me. Don't really care if you do in the first place anyway." I said, and like that, I found a new place to work and stay.