The summary and a line in this fic are in fact, something of a steal on my part, gacked from a Voyager-oriented fanfiction in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds fan-written collective. I believe it was volume four… or possibly five. Ether way, this is intended as a homage as opposed to plagiarism (since we're writing fanfiction, the legal logic is difficult to deal with anyway).
This begins as a deathfic, but gets a lot more complicated as it goes on. Set in the Knight Rider 2000 universe, whichever universe that may be. Standard disclaimers apply and reviews and concrit are always appreciated.
Initial.
Prologue.
"I am the Knight Industries Four Thousand. K.I.T.T, for short. KITT if you prefer. I am programmed to prevent the loss of human life at any cost… A rather Ashimovian concept in all, but I feel obliged to mention that free will remains a factor."
It was at twelve fifteen a.m. on the Eighteenth of October 2003 when the Knight Industries Four Thousand (KITT, as he was known to his friends, despite the inaccuracy of that acronym) died.
He did it the same way he did everything: Extremely well. It took less than five seconds. He would have been able to analyse that time to the nearest millisecond had his internal chronometer not been damaged before his Time of Death. (Or, as Maddox might call it, his Time of Termination). As it happened, time for KITT moved in something of a blur during his last minutes (or hours, or maybe days. Impossible to be sure).
It was a personal sacrifice of sorts –a conclusion he had reached after following a careful series of deductions, dictated to him by his programming. KITT was designed, fashioned and programmed to prevent the loss of any human life, despite what the cost might be to himself.
Those who knew him might well remark that his programming had had nothing to do with it. That KITT had acted of his own free will to protect those he cared most about, regardless of what his program dictated. Whether this was true, or merely their own attempt at consoling themselves is something we will never be certain about. Either way, KITT's decision was made, and that decision killed him in less than half a minute.
The death of the Knight Industries Four Thousand's partner was not nearly so perfect. Humans were naturally messy about these kinds of things. They were far too organic to even think about dying neatly, and most of them hated the prospect anyway. They saw a strange kind of… glory in ending their days with as much fire as possible.
There was no glory, but there was certainly fire. The last thing KITT'S driver had had the chance to do was smile at him, bright and beautiful in the darkness of the driver's seat. Then she smashed from the inside out; their connection (a microchip-link interwoven between their minds if they were to be believed) severed and ripped apart along with his body.
If the actual shut down of the chip joining their brains didn't kill her, then shock and the twenty foot drop to the concrete sidewalk below them certainly did. His death was simple, clean, efficient, and astoundingly noble. Hers was complex, ugly, painful and unwarranted. She was destroyed by the aftershock of the thing which killed her car.
Her name was Shawn McCormick. She was a hero, and she will not be forgotten.
No one was entirely certain, of course, how or why either of them had died in the first place. That was why Michael Knight had been called. That was why he was here.
They would have to keep an eye on him…