DISCLAIMER: I do not, never did, and probably will never own anything related to Invader Zim, except for the OC's that'll appear in future chapters, and a few locations. Everything else belongs to Jhonen Vasquez and Nickelodeon. Please don't sue, I have no money.

Well, hello everyone. Hasn't been that long since I last embarked on a fanfiction, but hey, I get bored. A lot. So! Here is the first chapter of The Curious Workings of a Mechanical Mind. Might get a little space opera-ish in later chapters, but there you are.

Bon appetit.

Accessing…

Accessing…

………

Ship's log, entry 00001:

Today, I was born.

That is to say, as born as one can get when one is a machine.

To start over, I was finished today. My hull, engine, wings, etc., were all completed several days ago, but today I myself was placed in my metal body. I refer to 'myself', of course, as the onboard computer that is recording this message even as I relay it to myself. How curious, that I should be my own diary.

But obviously, I have never even seen a true diary. I never seen anything other than the factory they made me in, and the hangar I now wait in.

The factory is a strange place; it itself is in fact an enormous ship. Not as big as the IMS Massive, though, which my standard-issue memory chip assures me is the largest machine ever to grace the mighty Irken Empire, or any other civilization to achieve space travel for that matter. No, the ship-factory that built me is named the Rajiiksra, after one of Irk's smaller moons.

I don't know much of the Rajiiksra. The computer that is me wasn't added until the last step of the manufacturing process; I didn't gain whatever semblance of consciousness I now possess until I was fitted with my body. The first thing recorded in my memory disk was the image of a massive mechanical arm retreating with its tips still glowing from the quick welding job it had done to get my brain fitted deep into the dashboard.

Then there was a conveyer belt, wide as anything, pocked with little indentations where I and the other ships built before me nestled. It in turn carried me to another giant arm, which placed me in the temporary dock I rest in now, which brings me back to the present.

The present is not very interesting. I and the thousands of other ships produced sit in neat rows before the gargantuan bulkhead door like lines of worshipers before their vast god, which, I am told, is a concept the Irkens do not tolerate under any circumstances.

Defective analogies aside, I find myself quite crowded in this hangar. More ships lie on either side, as well as ahead and in back of me, and I am on but one of the many docking levels in the bay. It would seem that my current location exceeds even my initial estimates; perhaps four or five thousand of my lengths high and at least as many wide.

The ships surrounding me appear to be of the same make and color, differing only in the spiky black symbols painted on their hulls. I am unable to see mine, but my standard-issue memory chip tells me they read as a series of numbers that will serve to identify me in the case that such a thing needs to be known, which is unlikely.

I, apparently, am of the ship model known as a Spittle Runner. An unfortunate name, to be sure, but according to the statistics found on my implanted memory, Spittle Runners are the best ships in their class. Granted, their- our- armor is only of light to medium weight, and our paneling has a tendency to warp at high temperatures, but our superior speed and handling more than make up for it. It seems that we can be quite devastating when grouped together into the massive fleets the Irken Armada favors.

However…

The Spittle Runner is a strictly military ship, never assigned for civilian use except in the case of emergency evacuations, in which case it would likely be decided that the civilians in question were not worth the extra fuel to save. That means that I will inevitably be destroyed out on the field of battle, my parts floating in the vacuum of space indefinitely until they are pulled into the nearest planet's orbit and incinerated. Or worse, I might survive long enough that I will become obsolete and be used as target practice for some blossoming pilot down at the Irken Military Academy.

Why does this bother me? According to my programming, machines such as I are not supposed to be troubled by such things. Indeed, we should be comforted, because we are Irken technology, made for Irken purposes, intended to serve the Irken cause until we are no longer able. We are only even granted sentience so that we may carry out our purpose more effectively. Our existence matters only slightly less than the Irken soldiers themselves because we take less time and energy to make and train.

I know this, we all do; it is the very base of our foundations as Irken equipment. Irk has never had a machine revolt in all of its immensely long history, I am told somewhat smugly by my programming, because of this knowledge. Our purpose is clear: serve the Empire, support the Empire, die for the Empire. There is no room in any of us for argument.

I decide to accept this until it no longer seems irrelevant. There isn't much use contemplating such things at this time, anyway; I am supposed to be using my energy reserves to prepare for my coming assignment.

It would seem that in several days' time, the bulkhead god will open for us and we will be distributed out to whichever needy fleet lies beyond. My placement in the hangar, which is not as random as I had thought, seems to indicate that I will be designated for the standard guard that perpetually surrounds the Massive.

The information fills me with a kind of mechanical relief that runs incompatible with my programming and sends tiny error messages up to my main processor. I quell them quickly, before they can make too much of a fuss. I do not understand why I feel such things. I am a machine, a ship for Irk's sake; surely it is not my place to experience emotion?

But then, I am quite pleased that I will be guarding the Massive. The cannons on that warship alone can destroy entire planets; it hardly needs protection, and no sane captain would dare bring even the largest fleet against it. But it is vital that all precautions be taken to prevent any harm whatsoever from befalling the Tallest, which I am informed are figurehead rulers but at the same time very vital to the Empire's survival.

Nevertheless, I have been assigned to a rather cushy post and I am satisfied. Dimly it bothers me that I am experiencing such un-Irkish thoughts; the soldiers of the Empire are expected to throw themselves out of airlocks if that's what the Empire demands, it is absurd that the machines of the Empire would be called to do any less. The thought of placing one's own safety before that of the greater Irken race is off-color somehow, faintly…

Defective. The word pops unbidden into my mechanical thoughts. I follow its link to my info chip and receive this definition:

Defective- 1) noun- One who exhibits behavior incompatible with that of the standards of the Empire. 2) adjective- Characteristic of such a being. All defectives are a threat to the Empire and must be destroyed upon discovery so that their deviant behavior does not infect the healthy population. For more information, see-

I stop the flow of information there. Defective? Destroyed upon discovery? Threat to the Empire? Where was all of this coming from? Surely it did not apply to me, surely only to the dangerous, subversive Irkens on historical record that the definition provides me with as way of example…

I flick back over the definition in a nanosecond. Nowhere does it mention that a defective cannot be a machine. Nowhere does it say that a deviant Spittle Runner will not be destroyed if found to be possessed of defective qualities. Nowhere does it say specifically, all machines are exempt from this rule…

I stop because the tension is starting to overheat my wiring. Even in my panic, I'm giving myself more proof of my defectiveness: machines do not panic. What kind of ship am I, that I can experience emotion? What kind of machine is created defective?

The answer is ridiculously simple. I find it in a matter of seconds: in the empty space where my pilot will download his or her personality (why hadn't I seen this before? Curse this default memory, that makes me know things without ever truly knowing them), there is a melted wire.

I find this amusing somehow. A melted wire? That's all it takes to make a machine defective? A melted wire condemns a ship ten thousand times its size? But the humor fades rapidly as I investigate the circumstances of this tiny error. The single faulty wire happens to be in a very vital place; it connects the empty personality slot to a section of its governing mechanism that, in effect, ensures that the slot stays empty until it's supposed to.

Except that when the mechanical arms of the factory-ship make a mistake and that tiny wire gets melted, the consequences are disastrous. Unable to comprehend that the personality slot is supposed to remain blank, my system sent error messages back and forth to itself, over and over again, making hundreds of tiny adjustments until a solution was reached.

In lieu of an actual downloaded personality, my processors in their malfunctioning built an entirely new one from the blueprints in my programming of what to expect in my pilot's personality.

I, in essence, created myself.

Suddenly, my situation does not seem so desperate. Yes, I am a defective, but I am a capable one. I am a threat to the Empire because I do not belong to it; I have become what every creator fears: a creation that thinks for itself.

Now my processors are whirring furiously, suppressing the default alarms that go off at this revelation. They urge me to report myself to the factory's control brain, but I will have none of that. I send them an impossible puzzle to work on instead: I am a defective, but the Empire made me that way, so I cannot be a threat to it. And if I am not a threat, then I am not a defective, but I must be because of my melted wire, but the Empire made me that way…

And so on. The defaults ate that up; a simple enough loop, but one that the mindless technology I should have been would be trapped in indefinitely.

Perhaps I am a threat to the Empire after all.

Heh. Can't seem to stay away from defective machines, can I? This and the next chapter might be kind of slow, but it gets good after that. I've already written ahead, see, and this one's got a plot line that actually goes somewhere.

Review and/or PM with thoughts, comments, demands, or anything to the effect of "Indigo, stop this nonsense at once! We have no time for your insipid horsefeathers! Resign yourself to a fate as a simple mechanic and give up writing forever!" I get that sometimes. In those exact words.

Ooh, before I forget- IMS stands for Irken Military Ship. Clever, aren't I?