Guy-Manuel was lonely.

It had taken him years to realise this, eons in fact, but it was true. The humans who built him were long gone, as were the whole human race, but then humans really weren't much company in the first place. He preferred calm silences over their restless chitter-chatter, and their admittedly inferior intellect got annoying at times- it felt like he had to explain everything to them. There was only one person he could stand to be with, Laurent, and he had gone a long time ago. It was with this realisation he began planning- humans had built him so he could build a companion.

I took him many months to gather all the materials needed to create this new... comrade? Friend? Guy-Manuel didn't really know what to call him, but that didn't matter. It was company after all. The metals and supplies were scattered about, but he still had the lab he had inhabited since his creation day so equipment wasn't a problem. He pulled up the most recent design files for his own frame, the last time he had upgraded himself hadn't been that long ago and was markedly more complex than when he had first been created, but human technology was comparatively primitive to what he could think up. It had been easy coming up with ways to improve his frame that the humans had somehow bypassed.

Guy-Manuel looked at the blueprints displayed on the heads-up display of his visor and if he had a face, he would've frowned. This new being he was creating couldn't have the same 'face' as him- it just simply wasn't done. This set him back a little longer having to design what the new mech would look like (he'd never liked the term robot- he wasn't emotionless, he was just... not human) and he even went as far as to change the gold colour scheme to a striking silver chrome. With that, he began to work.

It didn't take as long as Guy-Manuel supposed it took the humans to create him, in fact he created Thomas (a name he had found searching through files for information) in less time than it actually took to find the stuff to make him with. Guy had finished the 'build' on January 3rd, just over two months since he started his project. After doing some last minute checks and adjustments, he began to power up Thomas. An unfamiliar feeling of anticipation and anxiousness began to bubble up inside the gold mech, as the process continued far too slowly for his liking. Just as he felt as if he was going to explode, the sound of mechanical trills filled the once stagnant air of the lab. A stream of red ones and zeroes flashed over Thomas' visor and his body started twitching. Guy-Manuel knew this was a natural reaction from experience; the electric relays were synchronising and testing to see if anything would impede them and as luck would have it, they were in perfect working order.

Once Thomas' body had stopped convulsing, Guy-Manuel finally moved into his line of sight and offered a smiley face on his screen. It was hard to put all his emotion into a single emoticon, but maybe it was better that he didn't see the strange mixture of apprehension and hope he felt. Thomas turned his head and stared for a minute before running a single word over his visor "ALIVE?". Guy-Manuel nodded and replied with his long unused vocoder, for the second time in his life wishing he put some emotion into his synthesised voice.

"ALIVE."