Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Did I win? Were the events of my escape a hard-fought victory or a near escape from disaster? I would like to say that it was the former, my enemies gave it their best, and found that it wasn't enough. I am unbreakable. By the measure of my enemies, I was the clear victor. By my own measure, however, the incident was a catastrophe. Not in my personal failure in peacefully pushing my idea across. Elias had been playing me this whole time. I didn't fail there. What I did fail it was getting so swept up in seeing my vision come to life that I had alienated my former allies. That meant I had to secure new ones.

Lupe started. I stared.

The two of us stayed like that for several minutes. At the very least, she wasn't screaming her head off which was a good thing. Taking this to be a good sign, I rose slowly to my feet with NICOLE held in one hand and spread my arms out in a peaceful gesture. Lupe sniffed the air about me.

Though the rain had rinsed off everything as thoroughly as it could, I could still sense a dried patch of what had been blood. The faint metallic stench clung to my head and down my neck and shoulders. I wondered if Lupe knew what it was. I took a step forward and Lupe stopped sniffing, tensing up.

"I assure you that in spite of how I look I'm still in full control of my faculties," I began but Lupe interrupted.

"It's not safe out, come on in, we can talk inside," she said stepping aside, her blue eyes never once leaving me.

In a bit of a daze, I staggered toward the hut, only to return to my senses when I saw Lobo fully roused and appraising my new metallic form from head to toe. "We leave our weapons at the table when we wish to talk," he mentioned.

Not wanting to argue with the chieftain of the Wolf Pack Nation, I slid off my ring blades leaving it in the coffee table before settling down on the couch in the middle of the room. "Are you okay?" he asked sincerely.

"I'm fine," I said, my voice sounding hollow. "Things got... difficult."

"Sally?" Lupe whispered.

"Yes, Lupe?"

"Do you really think everything will be all right?"

I didn't answer for several minutes as I staggered my way to the bathroom sink and scrubbed the hardened trickle of roboticized blood off under the running tap.

"I don't know," I whispered as I shut the tap off and turned to face Lupe, "I don't know" I repeated.

"But you tried right? You did what you thought you had to," Lupe asked the ceiling light, behind and above her head, casting her face in shadow.

"I don't know, " I whispered hoarsely staring up at the dark ceiling. "Yes," I said at last. "I tried very hard to make everything all right."

"Then that's enough," Lobo said. "That's all I want to know."

Lupe nodding swallowed once and asked. "How are your friends taking this?"

I slid my metal tongue around her teeth as I carefully appraised Lupe's question "They're taking it fine," I replied finally. "I think everything there is going to be fine from here on out."

Just then, I heard shouting outside the hut and I could not help but let out a trill of fear.

"Attention Princess Sally. Despite your recent questionable actions and assaults, we wish to openly negotiate with you to prevent any further violence. Come quietly, unarmed and in peace to our security forces and you will not be attacked or restrained in any way."

"It's a trap," Lobo whispered. "They don't really know where you are." I waited and listened as the announcer passed by, then heard the proclamation repeat itself some distance away in hopes that I'd hear it. I had, but it sounded too good to be true. Lobo was right of course, it was a ploy and a desperate one at that.

Whump! Whump! Whump! The door rattled

"I'll go get it," Lobo said.

"Quick, under the bed," Lupe motioned.

Not wanting to argue with my hosts, I squeezed underneath and uttered a silent prayer to whatever cosmic entity was out there that Lobo wouldn't sell me out. Above, the bed shifted as Lupe shuffled into place, making it seem like she had never left the warm confines of the bed covers.

"Can I help you?" Lobo asked the interloper.

"Have you seen or heard any suspicious persons snooping around?" an unfamiliar voice said.

"Besides you? No."

"Great chief, it's with deep regret that I inform you that Princess Sally has roboticized herself and is now considered a fugitive by the crown. Any help you can provide now will be deeply beneficial: When have you seen her?"

"At the drill grounds a few days ago."

"I see, have you seen her since then," the stranger asked.

"No."

"We've been trying to narrow down the search. Do you have any idea of where she would be hiding or who would be sheltering her?"

"You could try her friend's homes, " Lobo suggested.

"Thank you, Prince Elias is looking for volunteers to comb the woods for the fugitive and it brings me no pleasure to invite you to participate in the search," the stranger asked.

"Lobo dear what's taking you so long?" Lupe whispered sultrily from above my hiding spot.

"I see that your're busy, chief. Keep an eye out for trouble, will you?"

"I will."

The footsteps faded away and I heaved a sigh of relief.

"Thank you," I whispered to the couple after climbing out from my hiding spot.

While Lupe and Lobo secured their home, making certain no further interlopers could drop in without our foreknowledge I had plenty of time to examine my diagnostic reports on my self-repair systems. As it turned out, I do in fact feel pain albeit a very toned-down version of it. I definitely felt the impact, the heat. The shock, the loss.

The failure.

My hosts were nearly finished with their preparation so I considered what lies I should tell to paint myself as the aggrieved victim. But in the end, I settled on telling them the truth. I just wanted someone to know. So, with the exception of the most graphics parts of the surgery, I told them of the chain of events leading up to my self-roboticization.

Occasionally, they stopped me respectfully and asked questions which I answered truthfully to the best of my ability. When I finally finished, the sun was rising and the rain had somehow stopped over the course of our conversation. As I got to the end, I assumed I would get some measure of peace from spilling my guts out but guilt continued to wrack my frame and I succeeded only in feeling hollower than ever before.

When I had finished, with my head still down, I turned my hands palm-upward and, with wrists together, I raised them until they were before their faces.

"What is this?" Lobo asked.

"I want you to take me back to stand trial."

I must have held that position for almost a minute before Lobo's hands touched my metallic wrists; his hands were callused and warm. It pressed down, forcing me to lower my arms.

Swiftly, I broke Lobo's grasp and pressed my mechanical digits into the wolf's jugular grooves. "Don't" I hissed, my muzzle pressed against his "Don't tell me it was justified. It wasn't. I made-"

"I won't," Lobo answered. "I won't tell you that. I'm going to punish you," his breathing grew shallow and rapid, and I imagined I could hear his heart thudding. Slowly, I lowered my hands and returned my gaze to the ground.

"For starters, as part of your punishment, you're now my subject. That means you have to do whatever I tell you."

I nodded.

"Okay, then. Now I'm going to give you an order. You'll have to do it."

I felt that same warm hand, this time on my forehead. It trembled. Lobo's breathing grew still more rapid, by my authority as Grand chieftain of the Wolf Pack Nation, for all your crimes against the wolf pack, whatever they may have been . . ."

My hands shook.

Lobo took a deep breath and finished, "I pardon you. I absolve you. I forgive you. And as your chief, for your punishment, I order you to forgive yourself."

I raised my head and looked in Lobo's eyes, my vision automatically blurring.

Lobo spread his arms and tenderly wrapped me in an embrace.

In the morning, with memories of last night still running through my head, I looked outside. The air was fresh and cool, droplets of dew hung from the tip of every blade of grass. With my inner soul churning with too many emotions, I looked up and, for the first time, saw an unbroken sky of blue above Knothole.

There were no clouds, no pillar of smog that marked Robotropolis, nothing save an enormous spherical object that hung above the cleared city skyline; the Death Egg.

I entered the living room carrying the blanket on my right arm. It was a woollen, hand-knitted patchwork of cloth scraps. It hung from my arm, skimming right over the wooden boarded floor but without ever dragging on it. Lupe and Lobo had to report to morning roll calls and this left me with free reign of their hut until they found a suitable opportunity to smuggle me out.

The couch in the centre of the but was lit by the orange glow of a Sunday afternoon which spilt from a slit in the windows as I laid down and stretched myself across three seats. Of course, the couch wasn't as long as a bed, so I had to keep my knees somewhat bent to fit in it. The posture created a strain in my artificial muscle. It was supposed to do that, be ever so slightly uncomfortable, but not unpleasant enough that I would need to change posture.

With a precise motion, I unfolded the blanket and covered my legs and up to my chest. Internally, I debated whether my arms should go under or over the blanket though it wouldn't have made a lick of difference to my internal body temperature.

The TV in front of the couch was turned on, broadcasting a movie I had never seen in the flesh featuring a green ogre and a talking donkey. Of course, it's not that I didn't know the name of the movie, it's length, the name and date of birth of each of its leading actors and the catalogue number that the digitised film held in the Mobotropolis media records.

But I tried to distance myself from that knowledge, pretending I didn't know all that. Pretending I had flicked the TV on when the movie happened to be playing. It wasn't working; not fully. But it was as close as I dared to go, short of intentionally deleting that knowledge from my databanks.

My eyes were half-lidded but still, I felt just as alert as I had ever been and was forced to settle for adjusting the settings to my photoreceptors till the characters on the screen went out of focus. All of this was, of course, a crude mockery at recapturing a memory. At feeling again that familiar sense of warmth, of calmness, that came with spending a Sunday afternoon lying on the sofa in that narrow sweet spot between awareness and sleep.

Except there was somewhat off. The room felt different somehow, though I couldn't quite put my finger on what was wrong. All the original huts in Knothole were built largely to the same specifications. Did I need to reorient the furniture again? Just how many feet had separated it from the couch?

If felt as if someone had gone through my stuff and set everything out of place by a fraction of an inch. I could tell things were wrong, but the memories weren't precise enough, clear enough, as to know how to fix those same mistakes.

The most glaring hole in that memory was the presence that had been there with me. I knew I hadn't been alone. Someone had sat with me, on the same couch. I recalled jokes. Yet, I couldn't recall his face or name. Or had I? It was strange. As clear as my memory of being in someone else's company, I also remembered feeling strange alone. I cursed again my fragmented, blurry memories.

This whole experience was an exercise in frustration. The feeling I was searching for sat just outside of my reach. It grated on me, that the most vital memories, the ones tying me back to being a Mobian were also the most blurred ones. Yet, I could reconstruct the blueprint of our SWATbot foes down to the identifying serial codes in each electronic board within its brain and each line of code within the SWATbot that governed its subroutines.

Even as I lay on the sofa, watching a movie alongside NICOLE, I had been busy.

The SWATbots hardware may have received updates over the years to make it a truly formidable multi-role fighting machine but its mind was primitive, still highly reliant on decade-old acornian programming. Yet, the potential was there. I could 'teach' it to fight like my Freedom Fighters.

I was trawling through millions of lines of codes to mould their combat algorithm into one that would be capable of battling Robotnik's own robotic forces.

But its mind was so woefully limited in containing all that I wanted it to. There was no chance, no possibility of giving them the same understanding of battle tactics as I had.

I thought of seeding them with the barest hint of sentience, enough to acquire a sense of self-preservation.

Except it felt all wrong.

It didn't feel...Mobian enough. It was, in fact, a monster. An imitation of life. It would be useful. It would be optimal. I knew it would be. But to do so would feel like a betrayal from what I had set as my anchor. I wouldn't give self-awareness to what I intended to use as a mere weapon of war. I would have to adjust their programming I realised. I had to distil complicated dogma to facts, images and movement patterns.

They would be tools I decided, little more than an extension of my own will.

That would mean that if my machine uprising were to have any chance of success, I would need to be in the front lines, directing the machines' movements with precision; risking my own body. I needed fail-safes, a clone of my mind that would persist even if my original form was destroyed. Still, I found myself disliking the idea of consciousness as being some fluid thing. The idea of losing contact by mistake with a backup body, and coming back to find out another me had taken over. What would I do then? Probably fight for dominance.

Not taking the logical decision to create backup copies of myself had been hard, and I had expected to feel...something...pride maybe at preserving my sense of individuality. Yet, my trepidation gave way to that sense of stillness... of strange detachment that I was becoming so accustomed to. Even more worryingly, any annoyance I had once felt at not being able to experience anything other than calm indifference was also fading away.

As philosophical conundrums of ethics and consciousness rattled about my head I decide to get up from the couch and take my new body on a test drive.

The tables and chairs in the hut were a cinch for me but the coal bunker was more of a challenge. I experiment, but only manage to lift it an inch off the ground with every servo in my new form is training itself to its limit before I lowered it to the ground.

Perhaps I've been pushing myself too hard. After all, I was on the verge of death only a few hours ago. My thoughts then went on to performing some self-upgrades.

NICOLE had pulled up some of Rotor's weaponizing blueprints which had which largely consisted of having me festooned with an enormous array of weapon systems, leaving me as little more than a head mounted atop a pile of guns. I felt nauseous at the thought.

Inwardly, the diagnostic reports looked okay but I just had to make a visual confirmation and stepped in front of the mirror to examine myself. My tactical body vest which had been roboticized along with me adding some extra bulk to my frame but I was otherwise still recognisably myself.

I am a Mobian; I had to remember that. I had to set boundaries.

I knew it would be too easy to embrace my new nature and become something else, to slide down the slippery slope...stupid? Perhaps. I knew I was putting obstacles in my own way, deliberately falling short of my full potential. But I felt I needed this, these anchors. To prevent me from going down the ever more slippery slope.

Vengeance was important. But so too was not losing myself. Because as long as I didn't there was still a glimmer of hope that some reasonably happy ending could be reached. No matter what, I couldn't afford to turn myself into some mindless weapon of mass destruction.

(YOU HAVE MAIL.) NICOLE reported as a newsletter was slipped under the door.

Sure enough, I featured prominently on the front pages, with the headline reading: Mecha Madness: Princess Sally roboticized!" Beneath that are grainy photos from security cameras, and a few blurry ones when I posed for the photographers on the ground. I sigh, grateful that they didn't publish photos of me soaked with blood or screaming in agony.

Now, what does the article itself say?

Let's see: Sally enters airstrip, seems sane, but proceeds to steal the roboticizer and neuro-override, surgically attaches the latter before roboticizing herself. Mecha Sally (which the reporters now dub me) battles valiant security forces including Sonic the Hedgehog and Amy Rose along with G.U.N agents before vanishing into the night after a fruitless all-night search.

That seemed more or less the truth.

Elias then made a statement dismissing allegations that Robotnik's machines had abetted in my escape and quashed rumours of my apparent defection. He then went on record as saying that in spite of outward appearances, I was not under the influence of Robotnik but I had instead suffered a mental imbalance which was further exacerbated by my self-roboticization. Consequently, I was now a danger to both myself and others.

Flinching, I noticed a prominently displayed public safety notice warning civilians to stay away and alert security forces if they caught sight of me. The rest of the paper then devolved into speculation about my whereabouts and intentions, none of which really caught my eye save one. Apparently, a telekinetic hedgehog calling himself Silver claimed to be a time traveller from two hundred years in the future and claimed I would be the traitor that would bring about the apocalypse in the distant future. As I read on, Silver was apparently punched in the jaw by Sonic and subsequently tossed in the brig for 'fearmongering and being a general nuisance'.

I put the paper aside.

Has the thought crossed nobody's mind that I may just want to do good?

Apparently not I supposed.

My musings were interrupted by a loud thump outside and a familiar grunt before I heard the sound of claws scraping outside. "Um, hey Sally… is that really you?" Dulcy whispered, so eager to see her friend up close that she pulled the door open and stuck her head into the but. Wide-eyed, she bobbed her serpent-like head up and down, trying not to flinch before my glowing blue photoreceptors and metal digits extended out into a caressing touch.

"Even when Lupe told me what happened, I was beginning to think I'd never see you again, " Dulcy whispered.

"Yes, Dulcy, it's really me."

"All dragons can discern truth and lies. That's how I cleared Sonic when he was accused of murder. That's how I know it's really you," she whimpered.

"It's me," I repeated.

"You were gone all night," she said. There was a hint of accusation in her voice, a touch of anger. But, I could tell that this was just a mask for her agonising worry.

"I know this won't make things right but sorry, Dulcy," I said.

"They tried to lie to me, Sally," she continued, whimpering. "They lied about where you were. They said you were going on a special mission for Elias."

"That's... not too far from the truth," I said. "I'm indeed on a special mission just not for Elias and I need some help getting to Robotropolis."

"No," she hissed so forcefully that I was almost certain someone else had heard. "You had it in your mind for weeks and you didn't bother to tell any of us other than Rotor," Dulcy said, and this time the accusation wasn't just a hint. "Did we mean so little to you?"

"I didn't mean to hurt anybody," I whispered. From the way Dulcy's frown shifted, I could tell that though she believed me, she still didn't like what she heard. "If Elias had given his approval, I would've told you all about my decision. But that still didn't change the fact that what I did was wrong."

Her eyes widened as she shook off his fatigue and took a really good look at me, picking out all the little signs of stress and combat. "You're hurt."

"Just a little," I said, managing a small smile and tapping my head. "I think I have it all down though. Robotnik will be getting quite a big surprise when his own machines start turning against him."

"There's a war out there Sally, now hop in," she said motioning to her pouch. "I'll get you to your army."