Chachamaru paused and looked up from feeding the cats as she detected a brief flicker of a transmission on a channel that, up until a week ago, hadn't seen any use in six years. "Transmission detected. Triangulating location…failed. Signal lost." It had been garbled, as if the sender's transmitter wasn't quite adequate to send the signal far enough. Had it been an emergency signal, or just an attempt to find someone else monitoring that particular frequency? Whatever it was, it had been broadcasted every three hours for the past eight days. Most peculiar. She gave one final pat to a calico cat that sat purring on her lap, then gently set it aside and stood up. This would require some looking into.


Inoue Ai walked down the sidewalk an hour or so after school, flipping a coin in the air as she went. "Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads." Other people crossed to the other side of the street or just gave her weird looks, but she didn't seem to notice.

"Heads. Heads." She paused in her coin flipping for a moment. "Consider, one, probability is a natural factor which operates within natural forces. Two, probability is not operating as a factor. Three: We are now held within, ah, supernatural forces. Discuss!" she said, all in voice that was surprisingly deep for someone of her build.

"You know, Ai-chan, if people see you acting out plays on the sidewalk, someone will think you're crazy," Haruna said plainly as she strolled up to the girl, who grinned sheepishly.

"Hello, Saotome-san."

"Call me Haruna-sama!"

"Haruna…sama?"

"Just kidding. Haruna-san," she said, a wooden smile on her face.

"O-okay…" Ai said warily. Something about Haruna-san seemed off today…

"While I admire your choice of plays, I must say your choice of venue leaves much to be desired. Now, where's the robot?" she asked, her odd, joking tone unchanged.

"What?" Ai asked. Had she heard that right?

Haruna slipped an arm around Inoue's shoulders and guided her irresistibly into an alley. "I need to know about the robot, Ai-chan."

Inoue Ai crossed her arms and looked away, a perfect picture of arrogant teenage indifference. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"I need to know about the robot, Ai-chan."

"Haruna-san…?" Ai asked as she let herself slip out of character, her worry growing.

"Where is he?"

Inoue took a step back, but Haruna was faster, blocking the student's escape with her arm.

"You're not Haruna-san, are you?" Inoue asked. "Get...g-get away from me…!"

"Where is the robot, Ai-chan?"

She turned and ran, but Haruna had caught up and was running beside her in an instant. "Where is the robot, Ai-chan? Tell me. We're friends, aren't we?" Haruna gave her a hard shove and she bounced off the side of the building and rolled on the ground.

"You are hiding him, aren't you? Where?" Haruna demanded, standing over her.

Ai scrambled backward away from the crazy woman, trying to open up some space. This couldn't be Haruna-san…surely not! Her hand closed on a section of pipe in a pile of trash in the alley, and she thought frantically. If this really wasn't Haruna-san…could she take that chance? 'I think in this case there really isn't a choice,' Ai thought. Haruna-san was reaching for her, and her eyes were shallow and so, so cold, as if she were looking at an insect. So…Ai took up the piece of pipe and swung it in a vicious arc, striking Haruna-san in the temple, a blow that should have broken skin and shattered the bone underneath.

The pipe bounced off with a metallic clank, painfully vibrating Ai's hand, and Haruna's only reaction to the blow was to jerk her head an inch or so to the side.

'Haruna-san', with the fake skin ripped and hanging over her left eye, looked down at the girl with no expression showing on her face. "Requesting permission to enter combat mode," she said aloud, a touch of anger in her voice. Ai scrambled to her feet and backed toward the alley's exit, pipe still in hand.

"Enemy A.I. detected," someone else said from behind her.

Ai let out a startled scream and swung her pipe wildly at the person that had snuck up behind her.

Luckily, Chachamaru ducked just enough for the wild blow to completely miss her, then tripped Ai and smoothly pushed her to the ground just in time to avoid a blow from the fake Haruna-san.

"Karakuri-san?" Ai said.

"Stay down, Inoue-san," Chachamaru said as she hit the fake Haruna just below the ribcage with an open-palm strike. Haruna went flying and Chachamaru stood up, looking down at Ai.

Ai's eyes widened. "What are you?"

"Be care-" Chachamaru was cut off as the fake Haruna flew into her. Ai had a brief glimpse of a somewhat surprised look on Chachamaru's face as Haruna's fist hit her lower back and something exploded with a shower of sparks, and then Ai was alone; Chachamaru lay smoking and unmoving amongst a heap of garbage at the far end of the alley, with the fake Haruna standing over her.

"K-Karakuri…san…" Ai said in horror as she got to her feet. The fake Haruna turned to look at her, and Ai froze. "Get…get away from her!" Ai shouted, terrified. "L-leave her alone!"

The fake Haruna started toward her, her rubbery face hanging away from her head grotesquely, when what sounded like a jet suddenly streaked overhead, someone screamed in rage, and the alley exploded.


Hakase had just taken a sip of last night's coffee in her personal A.I maintenance lab when one of the emergency alarms started beeping. She whirled and ran to a bank of monitors installed on the wall. Of the two active unique A.I.s she currently performed maintenance for, the emergency beacon was lit for one of them.

"Chachamaru…"


Ai was thrown back by the force of the blast. She clenched her eyes shut in the swirling dust and debris, thrown a good five yards before she came to a stop. She sat up painfully and wiped some blood from her face in a daze as she tried to figure out what had just happened.

"You hurt my onee-san…!"

The familiar voice dragged Ai back to reality. It was a voice she knew of course, she heard it in class every day. But it was strange; the sheer emotion in that voice was a huge surprise, Ai thought as she climbed back to her feet. She looked around in a daze for a moment before focusing on a figure standing in the middle of the alley between her and the fake Haruna, the shy, pink haired girl who sat in front of her in class; Rally Wheeler.

The fake Haruna struggled to her feet among the rubble, listing heavily to the side.

"Ending combat mode. Escape mode initi-"

In much the same way she had interrupted Chachamaru, the fake Haruna's words were interrupted by Rally's fist. The fake Haruna wheeled back into the side of a building, and Rally hit her again, driving her head back into the bricks behind her. She staggered a step or two away from the wall and collapsed in a heap on the ground.

Ai just watched in horrified fascination as the quietest, shyest girl in her class mounted her fallen opponent and proceeded to beat the living daylights out her. But…what was the fake Haruna? Some kind of robot like Tanaka-san? She had to be! And yet Rally was hitting her with her fists, and…

*click*click*slide*click*snap*click*click*click*

Ai gaped as hidden panels in Rally's body opened and a dozen gun barrels popped out, pointing down at the fake Haruna, who began struggling wildly upon seeing this new development. Emergency sirens began to wail in the distance as the authorities were notified of what, to the local residents, must have seemed like some sort of bombing.

"You hurt my onee-san…" Rally repeated in the brief moment of silence that followed.

Gunfire erupted and Ai clapped her hands over her ears and screamed as her gentle, sweet classmate Rally unloaded five thousand rounds of ammunition into the fake Haruna from a distance of two feet.

When the gunfire finally died down, Ai watched as Rally stood up shakily and left the unrecognizable, smoking remains of her opponent and stumbled over to where Chachamaru lay unmoving atop the pile of trash by the wall at the far end of the alley.

"R-Rally-chan?" Ai asked, her voice cracking. Rally glanced back at her, and Ai saw that she was crying. Rally knelt down over Chachamaru and pulled what looked like a USB cable from somewhere under her shirt and plugged it into Chachamaru's ear.

"…R-Rally-chan? Rally? A-are you all right?" Ai asked again as she stepped wide around the remains of the fake Haruna. She looked down at it in awe; the torso was a shattered mass of twisted and blackened metal and rubber and plastic, the head utterly obliterated. Its arm twitched and sparks exploded, and Ai jumped away. When she turned her attention back to Rally, the girl had already unplugged the cord and pulled Chachamaru into her lap and simply sat there like that, hugging the unresponsive Chachamaru and crying. Ai could see a large area of skin on Chachamaru's side just above the hip that had been burned and blackened; her uniform shirt was still smoldering. Her skin was ripped open in places, exposing metal, tubes, and wires. Ai rubbed her eyes, but there was no question as to what she was seeing.

A car screeched to a halt at the open end of the alley as the sirens grew closer and Ai looked up as the door opened and someone stepped out.

"Let's see…you're Ai-chan, right?" the woman said. Ai just blinked at her. The short, thin woman seemed vaguely familiar, as if they might have passed on the street recently. She was very short, and her thick glasses were quite distinctive.

"D-do I know you…?" Ai asked dully as the sheer insanity that had filled the last two minutes finally started to catch up with her.

The woman smiled and shook her head, then rushed forward to catch Ai as she fainted.


Author's Note: Well, here's the long-awaited/utterly forgotten fourth chapter of A Robot's Life. There is very little Tanaka in this chapter (pretty much nothing at all other than a brief mention, in fact), but that will change in upcoming chapters. Oh, and zero humor too...sorry about that. Future chapters will have more of everything, especially Tanaka, action, plot, explosions, crazy robots, stuttering school girls, and words. Anyway, I'm afraid this story won't be updated as regularly as the main story, but it is more likely to have several chapters posted fairly quickly. Also, sorry for the short length of this chapter. Next one's about twice the size, and we'll just have to see where it goes from there.