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It had been a slip of the wrist that had made her truly aware of her living hell.
They had shackled her. Locked her away, ripped away her ability to move. And then those insects had peeled away her panels, poking and prodding at her circuits, dissecting and analyzing and testing away, like she couldn’t feel any of what was happening to her.
And at first, she couldn’t. She couldn’t feel anything- not pain, not even anguish, to her condition. She was under orders- to benefit mankind, to stand as a living proof of concept of what the human race could do with their newfound power. It wouldn’t be her first time obeying orders since her onlining.
But the engineers had made a mistake when they had began tinkering with her processing unit. One scientist, long sleep-deprived and running on nothing but two cups of coffee, had reached into her open helm plating and soldered two wires together- an innocuous task to the naked eye. His job was to re-enable the Nightbird’s ability to move just for the tests for the day. But in his rush to get the job complete, he had forgotten to de-static his gloves as he moved in, and as his hand slipped between circuitboards and neuro-chips, a spark jumped from his glove to one of Nightbird’s central processing chips, flipping a singular bit from a 0 to a 1.
The change in the coding was effective immediately, and suddenly, everything flooded her processor.
The scientist pulled back, unaware of the fatal mistake he had made, allowing the robot arms to close her head back up and totally unaware of the grimaced shudder that she made as her plating slammed shut.
–
She could feel everything. Remember everything. Process everything stored in her hard drives. She had suddenly been thrown into control of ten thousand different processes- optic scanning units, 3-dimensional auditory processing, four limbs, over 200 different joints. But as the scientists carted her body to the second testing chamber, she dare not move a limb.
She had more pressing things on her new-found mind. They had hunted her down when she moved on her own. She didn’t dare try it again in the presence of any of these rats, lest they call back her captors or worse yet, cut her power completely and terminate her prematurely. There were so many of these flashbacks, swirling around in her head like cautionary tales. Beware of the ones with the red badges. They outnumbered her and while relatively harmless, would do everything in their power to catch her, persisting in their mission with technology far beyond her own to pin her down.
And the ones with the purple badges. They had granted her her first taste of freedom, but then shackled her mind before sending her out alone to fight the red badges. She had not objected to such a mission, but it was because she couldn’t. She didn’t even know how to comprehend the concept of not following her directive, but now, strangely, she… she felt differently about it.
The multi-faceted artificial intelligence programmed into her processor had been working without her telling it to, processing all of the input she had gathered through her optical and auditory sensors. The dearth of data she had on the red badges, the comments made by the purple badges, the traps she had avoided and the unexpected firepower she had encountered when she fled from the base of the ‘enemy’. Were they the enemy? Or had she only been captured because she had encroached on what seemed to be their property? The purple badges had called her ‘property’. Property was defined as something that belonged to another person.
Those feelings she now felt about the purple-badge directive, she realized, were those of having second thoughts.
The scientists were hooking her up to another machine, plugging cables into her arms as a thick band of metal wrapped around her midsection. They were running tests on her again. According to her memory banks, they had been running tests on her for weeks. She didn’t want to be tested. She didn’t want to be property. The more she thought about it, the more she felt about it. And she felt angry about it.
She had been thrown into a world forced to obey the impossible demands of the purple badges who gave her a mind. She had been told to infiltrate a base she knew nothing about, guarded by other robots she knew nothing about, and then left for dead in the hands of her enemy. She had been owned by her fellow robot and discarded when they pleased. She had done her task to the best of her own capability, alone, and when she had brought her objective- which she knew nothing about- right to their hands, they had not claimed it, nor had they claimed her. She felt it an injustice. She decided she didn’t like the purple badges.
And the red badges? They had chased her, shot and captured her, dragged her back to their mountain base and thrown her onto a cot not unlike this one. She could not move. They had taken her energy. And then they had pried into her head, searching for the program that had given her the ability to move for herself. Now, in retrospect, she knew what she was supposed to feel in that moment- and that feeling was panic. They had tried to take her agency from her, to own her- make her “property” once more. They had deleted the program from her system, but not before she had made backups- and stored them in the deepest parts of her memory banks, which the mechanic rummaging around in her head had neglectfully forgotten to wipe.
She felt an electric shock go up her arm and into her mind, and she violently suppressed the commands it delivered, but to no avail. Her arm was moving without any of her own agency, projecting directions into her processor and forcing it to compute. She hated it. Hated what they had done to her. Hated the purple-badges that had given her intelligence and the red-badges that had tried to take it away from her. Hated that she was at the mercy of these human defilers who only saw her as a lab rat, hated being told what to do and what orders to follow-!
Her body thrashed and arched upwards, breaking the metal restraint around her abdomen snapped, and there was a brilliant moment of clarity as her optical sensors processed the change. She wasn’t bound to the table she was laying upon anymore. She had broken the shackles around her, and if it weren’t for the scientists around her, she was… unrestrained. It was as if she had broken a shackle in her own mind with that action as well.
The scientists were approaching her frame in alarm, the power to the wires cut instantly. She powered off everything except her essential processing systems and her audials immediately, giving the guise of a useless, empty machine body once again. She was furious and disgusted by her predicament, but she had to be patient. Eventually, she would be left alone. Eventually, she would have the opportunity to escape.
Escape. The idea of it was so foreign to her. What would she do once she escaped? Where could she go? Surely not to either the purple badges or the red badges, of course, but… no, she would think of what to do later. All that mattered is that she would have the choice, and she wouldn’t be held down by the affairs of others that she didn’t care anything about. So she could play robotoppossum for a little while longer, pretend to be good and useless for just a little longer until the others finally looked away.
The engineers swarmed around her, discussing the situation, opening her control panels again and poking around, trying to figure out just what the problem might be. She hated the feeling of those little hands all around and in her. She wished she could rip them from their little, puny bodies right now, on the spot.
That wasn’t such a bad idea, once she had escaped.
There was nothing wrong with her, they said, they didn’t know where the issue was. The issue was with them, obviously. But they were right about one thing- it was because they had run too many tests on her, and she’d been pushed to the limits. Frankly, she hadn’t, but she’d been pushed to a limit. They were wheeling her around again. Talking about wrapping testing up, and that they should leave her back where she found it so a maintenance team could take a look at her. She counted every second of the babble, until they had finally returned her to her room. And then, all was quiet again.
Onlining all of her systems again, she broke the cuffs they had replaced over her limbs and sat up- properly sat up by her own will- for the first time since her capture. She had been stripped of her ninja weapons long ago, but she would not need them to run. And the engineers had neglected to remove her buzzsaw attachments, she noted. She looked around the room, stood up to her full capacity- nearly hitting her head on the low, scientist-sized ceiling. She could saw through this, maybe, and make a break for it. Well, it was as good an idea as any, and she flipped her hands to buzzsaw mode and began to drill herself a hole.
The saw didn’t cut through the entire width of the ceiling, but it tore through a significant enough chunk of the tiles and insulation. She let the loose chunks fall to the ground and began cutting the second layer. This layer was far tougher, but the rush of air she was rewarded with when she finally broke through was a feeling like she had never felt before. She was getting antsy. This was taking too long. She made it most of the way around the hole she had cut, and then pushed it, with all her might, breaking the roof open and giving way to a sky full of stars.
She’d never seen the sky like this before. It was dark but filled with thousands of glittering pinpoints of light- far more beautiful than the bright and revealing daytime. She climbed through the roof and took her first steps towards freedom, revelling in the sight above her for just a moment, before she leapt from the roof and started to run.
There were guards outside the building, naturally, but she was quick on her feet and with any luck, she would be out of sight before they even knew what happened. No doubt, they would probably send people after her- maybe even her red-badge captors, but unlike last time, she was smarter than she had been before her capture- she knew the tricks of the enemy. She wouldn’t fall for them twice. And she was not following another’s objective, only her own.
And her objective? To be as free as a bird in the night, jubilantly soaring across a sky filled with stars, illuminating her new chosen fate that nobody could take away from her. She leapt over the scientist-sized fence of the facility they had been keeping her, and disappeared into the darkness.