Seto idly adjusted his long metal cuffs like handless gauntlets that went halfway up his arm. There was an itch somewhere past his wrist where he couldn't reach, and it was beginning to frustrate him with its persistence. He glanced up and down the hall for any of the lab technicians, but they'd left all together to service the gaming robot Seto was supposed to be testing firsthand today. The coast couldn't be clearer.
Seto removed a narrow pen from the inside pocket of his coat where he kept his checkbook on him at all times in case he was called upon to overcome whatever obstacle with money. When you were one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet, it often turned out that most of your problems boiled down to how much money you were willing to throw down at a moment's notice to resolve at them. Right now, though, Seto's biggest problem was his itching arm. Instead of applying money to this, for money would not serve him here, he used his small check-writing pen to slip under his close-fitting cuffs and scratch.
By the time the technicians returned, Seto was sitting cool and itch-free with his legs crossed, waiting.
"Mr. Kaiba, the DuelMaster2000 is ready. We're ready to begin the run."
"We're calling it the DuelMaster? Please. It's a dueling minion, if anything."
"Sorry, sir. It's just so much more advanced than the previous models that that we deemed it necessary to name it with a higher status to reflect the progression fro—"
"Just stick with DuelBot715. It's a DuelBot, and it's the seven hundred and fifteenth iteration of its line. No point giving it delusions of grandeur. I'm the only dueling master here. Or anywhere."
The technician in charge nodded to one of his subordinates, who immediately ran off, presumably to fix the error of the machine's name at that very moment. By the time Seto arrived to the training room, the name "DuelMaster2000" had been taped over with masking tap with the words "DuelBot715" scrawled over it in a shaky hand.
Seto adjusted his stance as he lifted his duel disk up to chest height. There was a whispered, metallic whirl of gears as the duelbot lowered itself from where it was suspended above in the scaffolding. It positioned itself within Seto's line of sight, tiny lights flashing as it powered up and prepared to face off. A technician stepped forward to flip a coin, determining that Seto would go first, and then stepped back into the observation room.
Seto lay his first monster in defense mode, set a trap, and ended his turn. The duelbot, human-shaped from the torso up, moved as though it were looking down at its hand with eyes that didn't actually see. If these advanced animatronics were going to be facing off against people at KaibaLands the world over, they needed to have something of a human aspect. Players liked to look an opponent in the eye, to feel an emotional connection that couldn't be attained when opposing a faceless machine. Machine or not, when the opponent lost, the winner needed the illusion that the loss had hurt. Victory wasn't nearly so sweet without the contrasting bitterness of defeat.
Regrettably, machines weren't capable of giving a fuck. Winning and losing were both the same: nothing but inevitable outcomes to disparate sequences of events. Thus, Seto needed to artificially make his machines appear more human by making them bemoan defeat and exalt victory. Seto did this for the benefit of the people these machines competed with in his KaibaLand amusement parks, as Seto, much like the machines in some ways, personally didn't give a fuck. He was completely incapable of suspending his disbelief and treating a machine as though the machine were alive or that winning against a machine meant something.
Indeed, defeating a machine hurt Seto more than it thrilled him, though he very nearly beat the machines every time. A machine was a creation, and thus only as clever and capable as its creator could make it. If the machine couldn't defeat Seto or at least come close, then Seto had failed that machine. In conjunction, Seto had then also failed himself and every part of him reflected back pathetically in the shadows of his genius mind that were all of his creations.
Seto frowned at the duelbot as it took far too long to consider its move in absolute silence. It was supposed to have said something at least, some lame remark about taking him down or showing him who was the real duelist. Seto looked over to the anxious faces of the technicians and scientists in the observation room, all of them wringing their hands and none of them looking back.
"I thought you said it was fully on-line," said Seto into his headset microphone. "Is it still booting up? It's not supposed to wait this long, and it hasn't told me anything about its intention to kick my ass."
"Perhaps it's still thinking?" offered a technician with optimism so forced it sounded like nothing but fear.
"It doesn't think," said Seto. "It calculates, and it doesn't take this long. We have to program it to pause for various intervals between moves to give the impression it's thinking, but don't ever confuse the illusion with how long it actually takes the machine to decide its moves. Perhaps it selected a pause of ten minutes instead of ten seconds because of a faulty coding. Check the times on the deliberation intervals for errors."
There was a flutter of activity in the observation room as six people at once hurried to address a single problem. Seto groaned and crossed his arms, waiting without patience. Far across the room, the duelbot ran its hand and twiddled its fingers uselessly back and forth over its cards, as though unable to decide which ones to select. Seto watched the stupid thing and chuckled, morbidly amused by its utter inability to function because somewhere in its control center its code had been fucked over by a simple typographical error.
Seto heard the smooth sound of slipping cards falling against each other like too many pages flipped at once in a book. They fluttered to the floor from ten feet above, dead, twirling leaves descending from the released grip of the duelbot. Some slid. Others clattered. Seto grumbled in disapproval and shot a disgruntled look over to glass panel of the observation room.
When Seto looked back to the duelbot, he was faintly alarmed to see its face directed to him, as though it were watching him. The card selecting hand still danced over empty space, giving the machine an eerie, uncoordinated aspect.
"You're going down," said a mechanical voice from the speakers in the wall. Seto sneered. Well, at least the empty taunts had been fixed.
"I'm going to take you down," said the voice.
Seto continued to scoff at the machine. He wondered if it was going to sit here and taunt him for ten minutes before attempting to make a move with cards it no longer held. The practice run was for all intents over at this point. Seto had only scheduled an hour and half for this, and time was almost up. They'd have to schedule another run for later in the week.
"Down with the king."
Seto was already turning to go, but paused. He looked back at the duelbot, which was now perfectly still and silent.
"Excuse me?" asked Seto, not even sure if asking questions would elicit a response, but unable to control his urge to face this strange new development with the utmost incredulity.
"Down with the king."
"Where the hell did you learn that?" asked Seto. He was asking himself the question, not the machine. The machine had no comprehension of questions directed at itself. The machine had no sense of self. It didn't know that it learned, and had no idea where that learning ever came from. Each updated created something new that had never been. The machine didn't accumulate knowledge and experience like a person. It hadn't been designed to be the sort of machine that could teach itself.
"Down with the—"
"King! Yes, I know," recited Seto along with the mechanical voice. He was growing irritated. He took a step towards the observation room instead of the exit in order to give his subordinates a piece of his mind now that the duelbot was stuck on some kind of bizarre loop.
After three steps, Seto froze. He'd heard the soft sound, the whirl of the gears indicating movement. He looked back to the duelbot. The duelbot stared blindly at him, having turned its head to follow Seto as he'd crossed the room.
"Well that's fucking weird," said Seto. He wanted to step forward, to approach the duelbot, but a sudden doubt left him rooted in place. He hated that he didn't move. He despised the fact that a glitch in a fucking machine had him filled with such trepidation. Angrily, he strode forward. To his surprise, the duelbot also shot forward, as though to meet him.
The duelbot wasn't a strong machine. It'd been designed to fight with cards, not with strength. There was no power in its grip that superseded what was necessary to hold slips of laminated card stock. Therefore, then it reached for Seto's arm and throat, its fingers were easily broken. A shout of alarm came much too late from the observation room as the boss of every person in that room fought off the human torso of the duelbot that had so suddenly and unexpectedly lashed out against him.
"The hell are you idiots even doing?" demanded Seto angrily into microphone of his headset as he easily dispatched the duelbot. He didn't go for the machine's head like an amateur who didn't even know his own damn product, but flipped open the control panel where the torso met the base so that he could remove the real brain of the machine. The duelbot went limp and lifeless in an instant; the only damage sustained being that to the fingers and half an arm Seto had needed to remove to get behind the flailing idiot more easily. Seto didn't leave needless messes when he took someone—or something—down. Clean and efficient was the only way Seto knew how to operate.
"Mr. Kaiba!" exclaimed another technician in stunned terror. Seto said nothing and handed over the components he'd deftly removed from the control panel, as well as each finger and the segment of arm. These were accepted by the first three technicians hurrying out from the observation room as Seto stormed past. With a fourth he left his duel disk, and a fifth his headset. Everyone else cringed back and got the fuck out of his way.
Seto all but threw himself into the chair before the computers. He snapped for the staff to take the duelbot to the workshop for repairs. Beyond that, they could leave him the fuck alone, as they were all good for nothing, and he was going to have to do all this shit himself if he wanted it done right. He'd see them all later in the workshop after he finished checking the code. Maybe they could at least show him they could put a fucking duelbot back together without Seto holding their fucking hands through that, too.
The team of technicians and scientists hurried to detach the duelbot from the long mechanical arm it was fixed to. Swiftly and sheepishly, they rolled the main body of the machine out of the practice room on a cart. Seto remained behind, alone, fuming over the lines of code as he searched for the offending mistake that had lead to such bizarre, erratic behavior from his creation.