This started out as a complete comedy but my writing style is more set for writing dramas. So I guess it'll be a dramatic comedy. I'm not a big fan of the Matrix at all, but I really like the Animatrix, so if I'm screwing up any factual things (other than the facts I have to bend to make this story work) let me know.
It started out as many things to. A small part of a bigger project, a grander scheme of life, something one has no personal attachment to. And then it becomes personal, and it doesn't just become mildly personal. It becomes consuming, looming, the only thing you can concentrate on. The only thing that matters.
Outside of the circle of those allowed to be close to her, she was called the Chimera, a name taken from mythology. It was the name of the ever-changing creature created from the parts of other creatures. "Andi", as she was so called by close friends, had been one of the ones consumed by her project. Whether that was lucky or not, well, no one seemed to know.
With tweezers so small that she had to use a magnifying glass to see their sharp tips, she leaned over a large body draped in white sheets. She wore a surgical mask on her face, shredding remains of a lab coat over her body, and thick, cracking rubber gloves on her hand. But this was no human being she was performing surgery on.
For no human being has ever been made of a mass of metal, cold surfaces and hot wires flowing in and our of a mother board so tiny and fragile looking that it was impossible to believe her "patient," sprawled beneath a layer of dusty sheets, was a killing machine. A killing machine, and nothing more.
Still, she found herself growing attached to the monster. She'd been carefully teasing circuits and wires back in and out of it for close to a month, repairing damage that had been torn into the shell of a body by human projectiles. It was her project, her first project that she'd been allowed to work on by herself. Of course, there was no way in hell she'd admit that she felt that growing kinship. She'd rather have taken the blue than admit to that.
She'd left the false world because she wanted to feel special. To have a "secret" that the rest of the humans, the sleeping ones didn't share. She'd always felt that she should be elevated about the teeming masses. That she didn't belong with them. Sometimes, she even felt that they should just be left in the Matrix. They'd never appreciate their freedom even if they had it. Not like she did. They'd rather have their microwaves and Fox News than the truth.
Of course, those were just passing thoughts, and she never dared articulate them. It didn't fit with the "team spirit" and the "sense of community and faith in humanity" someone in her situation was supposed to have. Most of the time, she really did believe in the mission. Hell, if she didn't believe in the mission, she wouldn't be risking her life for it. It was her life, her world. Her new community was everything to her.
She sat back, brushing a drop of sweat from her face and tasting salt on her lips as she studied the silent robot waiting for her to be good and ready to return to bringing life to its dead circuits. Her friends, her fellow scientists, working on the same project had been slaughtered only a few days earlier. They'd left their guard down until, as the cameras rescued from what remained of their lab showed, sentinels had charged through the glass windows and proceeded to eliminate the last drop of human life at the outpost.
But a robot that had come to love human nature, to appreciate human life, had tried to come to their rescue. If only he hadn't been so late, maybe something could have been done…
Her current patient was not one of the ones that had raided the lab. She wouldn't have been able to objectively work on the creatures whose claws had taken her friend and mentor's life, even as she continued to work on resurrecting one of their "siblings."
The plus side was that the project worked. Robots shown a better world, a world where man was their companion and not their enemy or food source, would convert. They would even risk their own lives, go against their own kin, to protect man.
However, so far the experiment hadn't worked on sentinels. They were too violent, too single minded, to convert. They weren't built with high logic capabilities. They were expendable, brute enforcers. There were the LAPD of the robot world, essentially. Conventional logic said they couldn't be reasoned with.
Hence why she was spending her hours with aching fingers and a throbbing back, hunched over the metal corpse of a creature she couldn't have despised more if she tried. A small rewiring of the main control chips, and a disarming of the weapons were of course in order before they'd try to bring it back online. But with the new hardware came the possibility of adding new software.
She'd designed the software based off the standard algorithm for programming a dog. Just enough intelligence to be compassionate, loyal, and be willing to accept a human as its pack leader. Not enough intelligence to potentially realize that it was being essentially tricked into behaving the way they wanted it to.
The perfect spy, or so they planned. Loyal to them, but otherwise completely indistinguishable from the enemy. It would speak the same language, look the same, give off the same identification signals. Sometimes it helped to have an enemy army essentially composed of identityless clones.
A drip of an oily substance slid down the side of the machine's dulled and dented carapace, making a sound barely loud enough to have been heard by the sharpest-eared of humans. In the silence of the room, however, it caused Andi to jump. "Whoa, girl," she said to herself in the empty darkness, smearing grease across her face when she wiped the sweat off her brow.
"You talking to yourself again?" a harsh male voice asked, causing her to jump even further. "Or perhaps you're talking to that machine."
Andi glared at Jayson, his dark brown skin shining unnaturally in the low light from overhead. "What, did you come here to show off that you'd waxed yourself again?" she asked, turning around. "And if you must know, I'm planning to run away with this sentinel and form a lovely family of tentacle-covered multiple-eyed humanoid offspring. I'm thinking a June wedding would be nice."
"You always had a thing for June weddings," he smirked, walking over and lifting a dusty tentacle in the air. "But you're in for a problem… I think this one's a girl."
"Put that down, you sick ass. Machines don't have gender."
Jayson grinned and wiggled that tentacle in her direction. "Come on, now, what's life if you can't have a little… gack!" Somehow, his waving the tentacle activated a reflex, as the tentacle was now firmly wrapped around his neck. He flailed his arms wildly. Andi grabbed the tentacle and pulled, freeing a gasping Jayson.
"I thought this thing was deactivated!" he screamed, kneeling on the cold metal floor.
"It is, but the reflex mechanisms still work as long as its power source is intact."
"Damn things are killers even when they're dead," he snapped, kicking the limp tentacle angrily. "This is a stupid idea," he huffed, storming out of the lab.
Andi sighed and put the tentacle back on the table. "Don't listen to him," she said out loud to the darkness. "He's just an asshole. He says it's because the machines still have his sisters… but I think he's just afraid. Afraid of dying, afraid that there's nothing after this but darkness. I mean, we all are, but if we thought about it all the time like he does we'd all be that unhappy."
She closed the open box on the carapace. "That should be about good. I'll run a diagnostic in the morning, and then let's see if we can get you working."
***
Andi was awakened in the middle of the nice, ice blue eyes wide, dirty hair that had no real color flying about her overtly pale face. She'd had a dream that she'd opened her eyes to find a set of brilliant red circular eyes looking down on her, blood dripping out of cracks set in the eyes. Sharp clawed tentacles lunged at her chest, and she could almost feel it piercing into her ribs.
Needless to say, she felt more than a bit of trepidation the next morning when she peeled back the sheet, revealing the deadly length of her patient. An elder scientist who had been assisting her put a hand on her shoulder. "You're shaking," he said, his voice failing to betray any emotion.
"I'm worried that it won't work. That it'll refuse to change. That it may even kill us."
"It'll be chained down until we know it's converted. Don't worry." He took a hand off her and began to walk away.
"No," Andi said suddenly, her voice sharp and foreign to herself. "You can't. If it wakes up and finds that we've put it in chains, how can it trust us?"
"But if we don't…"
"It's a chance I'm willing to take." She looked over at the two gathered young assistant scientists. "Even if no one else will."
The head scientist, a man who was one of the few paler than Andi, sat down and rubbed his nearly bald head. "All right, connect it up."
"Her," Andi said sharply. "It's not an it. It's a her." She grinned over at a critical Jayson, leaning against the wall. "Jayson said so."
"Fine, if you two are going to continue acting like children, hook HER up. Let's begin this conversion."
As Andi slipped under, a shiver ran through her body. She could almost feel those claws piercing her chest in her dream all over again as a wave of black overwashed her to take her into the simulation.
But before any part of the simulation could begin, Andi found the lights coming on and her eyes opening to focus on the real world. "What's going on?" she asked. "Why did we abort?"
"There's a short circuit somewhere. The sentinel won't come online."
"I don't believe that," Andi said angrily, clawing across the floor and pulling open the body. "It must just be a loose wire some…" a shock ran through her body, throwing her off and backwards. A terrible whirring noise filled the room as tentacles whipped forward, shoving up and off the platform.
One of the younger scientists screamed like a girl. Jayson wrapped his arms around an emergency weapon. Andi shuttled backwards on her rear end, trying to get out of reach as the large robot swung around, tons of red eyes bearing down on her.
This is it for me, Andi thought as it lunged forward, eyes set straight on her and massive body bearing down.
==
When her breath finally returned to her lungs, Andi looked down. The rest of the lab was locking on in shocked surprise as well. The sentinel had indeed lunged at her, but had wrapped its arms around her without crushing her. Butting the large head area against her body and causing pain in her ribs, it did the best job such a clunky thing could do of giving her an affectionate rub.
"Nice… nice girl," Andi choked. "Down girl."
The robot blinked at her and flopped down on the ground forcefully enough to shake jars and objects hanging off the walls. She reached out and cautiously patted it, causing it to emit a high-pitched whine. Andi jumped a bit, but the robot made no movement.
"It's the dog programming," Andi whispered. "She's… behaving like a dog."
"Get away from it," Jayson ordered, lowering the pulse generator at the sitting sentinel. "It's unconverted."
Andi moved between the two, stretching out her arms. "What are you doing? She's not attacking us!"
"It's also not converted! Get away, it's dangerous! It could turn around and kill you at any second."
"No. I don't believe it will. If we want the robots to trust us, we have to trust them."
Jayson lowered his weapon. "When you die, it'll be no skin off my back," he hissed, showing his teeth in a feral grimace. Then with that, he turned around in a whirl of fabric and stormed out, still dragging the pulse generator with him.
The sentinel whined loudly. "What's wrong?" Andi asked, looking at it.
"It says it doesn't want to go to the blackness again," the head of a spindly robot with nothing more remaining than said head and torso said, his one remaining eye trying in vain to focus on her. He was a very old machine, left behind from the early days. He'd been found frozen in a block of glacial ice, and he had no memory of what had happened before that moment.
Andi froze. "Ask… ask her if she remembers what happened to her. Before the darkness."
More high-pitched whining and mechanical whirring occurred between the two. "No. She doesn't. She just remembers the darkness… and your voice. When you screamed, she remembered your voice. You always spoke so kindly to her in the darkness."
"I screamed?" Andi asked, looking surprised.
"Yes, and it was a rather cute and feminine scream if I may say so myself," the doctor said, stepping down from the platform. "Not like anything I'd expect out of you.
"You're mean," Andi sniffed, then turned her attention back to the still attentive robot. "She was alive when we operated on her."
"Don't worry about that now," the doctor said, moving forward. "What matters is the conversion was successful."
"We don't know if it'll work again. This seems to have been a fluke case," another of the young scientists added, causing both Andi and the doctor to shoot dagger-like looks in his direction.
Finally, Andi walked forward and rubbed the top of the monster's head. "She needs a name. How about… Fluffy?"
"Fluffy? That's the most ridiculous name for a sentinel I've ever heard. How about Killer or Fang?"
"Come on guys, you'll give her a complex," Andi argued as the robot snuggled against her leg. "And this is kind of creeping me out. Stop that," she said, gently pushing the sentinel away. It sat down and looked up at her, a crushed appearance reflecting in bright eyes.
"Oh, I'm sorry… I didn't mean to… I…" Andi sighed and brushed back her hair. "Okay, okay, you can be friendly if you want."
The sentinel brightened up… and immediately bowled Andi over and sat proudly on her chest. The doctor and his assistants snorted in amusement.
"Obedience school," Andi muttered. "What we definitely need here is some obedience training."
Jayson, hovering outside the door, listened to the laughter of the scientists filtering out of a crack. "We'll see what the people in charge have to say about keeping an untrained sentinel in Zion."
___