Several days beforehand...
"Wake up, Tid." A soft voice woke the small Irken up. "We need to get to work."
Tid opened her eyes, and looked up at the source of the voice. In front of her was an incredibly tall Irken, one with long antenna that ended in a strange triangular spike. Toto was wearing his normal grey lab coat, stained by a few liquids that he had been splashed with in his short life. He also wore black trousers, as most Irkens did, and big black boots. Tid smiled, looking into her friend's red eyes, and got off the recharge chamber.
"Thank you, Toto." Tid smiled, giving a yawn.
She looked around the silver box, feeling a little disheartened by the lack of space, and jumped off the bed. She released her Irken spider legs, just so she could be the same height as the other Irken, and walked beside him. Toto smiled, looking at the purple eyed Irken. She was wearing casual clothes, contrasting the formal uniform he always wore. She was wearing a thick black jacket on top of a striped T-shirt, and blue jeans. Apparently, the Irken had imported the clothes from a place named earth; they always looked strange to Toto. The two walked out of their room, which was basically the recharge chamber, and into the main hub.
The two lived together in the Irken job hub, an apartment used by the workers of the Irken genetics lab. Neither of the two had a choice in the job they had received; like normal law abiding Irkens, they had their jobs chosen at birth. Toto was thrilled to have his job, but Tid was not so happy. Toto enjoyed messing with things to see how they worked, while Tid preferred making other Irkens happy in other ways, rather than taking them apart. This was one of the several differences they shared, and was often what kept them working as a team. Toto, while being as ordered and neat as possible, loved to argue and prove his point. He could never do this with Tid, as she would always shout at him until he listened to her. Another very strong reason why Toto never won was because Toto always found himself lost in Tid's eyes, and would often forget what the two were arguing about and would agree with her. Toto continued to ponder why he did so while the two walked down the pure white hall, pushing past smaller Irkens as they walked. The really small Irkens would often mutter to themselves, wishing that they were as tall as Toto, and the ones catching up to him in height would often shout Irken swear words as he walked on by. They knew he wouldn't do anything; Toto rarely resorted to violence unless it was completely necessary.
The two reached a steel door, one guarded by another Irken. This one was hidden under what seemed to be many scarfs, the only things visible were the two differently coloured eyes that the Irken had. One of the eyes was green, while the other was red. The contrast was the most interesting thing about the Irken, as the antenna and any other visible features were boringly average. The Irken retracted a tentacle from their PAK, connecting with Toto's and then Tid's PAK. After a few seconds of processing, the heavily clothed Irken gave a small nod, and let them through the door.
Inside the room was a table, and what seemed to be a dead Irken on the table. This was no normal dead Irken either; this one was a smeet. The smeet was just as big as Tid's hand; this caused the smaller Irken to run over in shock and check the baby Irken out. The smeet had red eyes that no longer shone, and antenna that were slightly curled but so short you could only just see them. Toto looked at the smeet in his normal emotionless way, and set out to work. Grabbing the limp body from Tid, he started poking it with probes from his PAK. Tid, on the other hand, looked around the room for something else to occupy herself with. She walked past what seemed to be millions of strange tanks, each with blobs or body parts growing in them. The tanks often had a purple liquid in them, and when they happened to be body parts, Tid could swear that they moved. She shivered, and moved onto another part of the room.
She looked on in awe; this room was filled with robots. The robots were all standard SIR units, she could tell by the cup shaped heads and the big (now grey) eyes that they had. Tid loved SIR units, and felt jealous that only Irken invaders and bounty hunters were allowed SIR units. She sighed, accidentally knocking one over. The SIR unit fell to the floor, eyes glowing red as the head of the robot hit the ground with a small clang. The robot looked around with a sigh, seeming quite depressed about the whole situation. It was at this point that Tid remembered that these were prototypes; this one seemed to have emotions unlike normal ones which had emotion controlling chips that could be removed if the Irken wished to.
"Now, what is going on?" The robot asked, "I am clearly in the prototype room, I am not complete!" The robot hissed the last few words, eyes glowing a brighter shade of red as it did so.
"Well," Tid grinned, "I'm sure I could fix you." The SIR unit looked at her with a strange tut. "What do you wish?"
"A female Irken, asking me that sort of question?" The SIR unit would have rolled its eyes if it could, "If you were an upstanding male Irken, I'd talk about having my emotion chip checked. I am not supposed to be a jerk like I am, after all."
"Yes," Tid rolled her own eyes, "Maybe if I get into your head..." The Irken reached for the lid of the SIR unit's head, causing the SIR to jump back in shock.
"Don't," The SIR growled, "touch, me!"
"But what about your..."
"I don't care!" The SIR unit frowned, "I refuse to be operated by a moron female like you!"
Tid growled a little at this point, "I'm not a moron!" Tid yelled, jabbing the SIR unit with an Irken spider leg. The SIR's eyes glowed blue for a second before switching off completely, now just a hunk of metal on the ground.
Tid sighed, now feeling quite guilty about what she had done. Despite SIR's having no real emotion, Tid always saw them as somewhat sentient. She saw them as obedient animals, the only kind of animals left on Irk, or any of the planets part of the Irken empire. Before Tid could get sidetracked, she decided to fix up the little SIR unit and keep it as her own. She had always wanted one, and when asked she could say she was simply testing it. After all, it was her job to fix up all of the SIR units in the room, or it was now, anyway. She grabbed the speared into SIR unit's head, looking at the huge hole she had made. Taking the lid off, she noticed with a sigh that both the obedience and the emotion chips had huge holes in them, with the emotion chip seeming to be hanging on by a screw. She looked around for another source of an emotion chip; she was only going to keep it as a friend so an obedience chip would not be needed. To her disappointment, she found nothing at all.
She looked around at all the SIR's, lined up neatly in a row and hanging on by strange hooks that would take them off into the meeting spot where the Tallests and the invader Irkens would meet and the invaders would get assigned their jobs. Tid sighed, thinking of all the fun it would be to run off and explore new worlds. She never thought of what the Irkens did on the lands, she just thought of the prospect of meeting new beings that would obviously form an alliance with the mighty Irken empire. Before she got lost in her own little world again, she decided to grab one of the other SIR units, almost snapping the head off in the process. She opened the lid, and looked inside. This was a new, experimental SIR, with a chip she did not recognise fitted into the head of the SIR. This one also had no mouth, which made Tid feel a little sorry for the robot that couldn't talk or show emotion. Maybe it didn't have emotion, Tid thought as she checked for an emotion chip. Nope, she sighed, putting the SIR down, no emotion chip at all.
It took her a few hours, but Tid eventually found a SIR unit with an easily removable emotion chip in it. It was strange that all the other SIR units had this strange, green chip inside them, but Tid pushed these thoughts aside as she started to carefully remove the emotion chip of the other SIR unit. She did this by taking out an Irken spider leg with a screw attached. As jobs were often stated at birth, Irkens were given PAKs that would help them do the jobs they would grow up to do. As an Irken scientist, Tid had screwdrivers, saws, open flames, strange tweezers and a pipet in her PAK. Toto probably had different objects in his PAK, but she never really asked. After she removed the small grey chip, she held it in her Irken spider leg carefully before removing the other, broken chip from the Sir unit she broke. She screwed the chip in carefully, and then took a few seconds to admire her work as the SIR unit activated. Blue eyes stared back at her, with a strange smile that formed around the SIR's otherwise smooth surface. Tid looked at the mouth, confused. SIR's didn't normally have a mouth. Her thoughts were interupted when the SIR unit suddenly jumped around, knocking all of the other SIR units on the floor.
"No, don't do that!" Tid ran over to the happy SIR unit, who was unwittingly pushing all the SIR's on the floor. Some of them glowed red; Tid knew this wasn't a good sign.
"Intruder alert! SIR units have been stolen!"The loud intercom barked. Tid paniced, grabbed the SIR unit (who was now holding what seemed to be a book) and ran of to where Toto was working.
Toto, on the other hand, was peacefully working on disecting the dead smeet. He hummed to himself as the knife he was using cut though the soft flesh, singing as he rose yet another organ from the Irken's dead body. He only had a few more organs to remove and check, when he noticed the intercom going off.
"Teenage jerks," He muttered, rolling his eyes, "they all want SIRs of their own, but they don't realise that they don't deserve them." He tutted to himself and cut out the rest of the squeedly spooch when Tid ran over, holding a gleeful SIR unit in her hands. Toto sighed, he should have known the clumsy Tid would have done something like this without supervision. He gave her a grim smile, and grabbed the SIR unit.
"I know, I know..." Tid looked at the SIR unit sadly, noting that the book it was holding was about the history of a strange species of plant and animal hybrid. "I've done bad, and I know I shouldn't have messed with the circuitry, but one of them was sexist and I got mad and..."
Toto's stern face fell after hearing Tid's stressed voice. He sat down, placed the Sir on the floor, and wrapped his arms around his friend. Tid sniffled for a few minutes, and then calmed down a little. Toto let go of the Irken, and looked towards a window that was beside his work station.
"You'll have to admit to it, you know." Toto said softly. "You might get two years in jail, or working as snack giver...I'll miss you."
"But I don't want to go to jail!" Tid sighed, "Why don't we just leave this place, before we are caught?"
"I don't think that is such a good...ah!" Toto began to speak, but was quickly grabbed up by Tid's Irken spider leg before he could finish his sentence. The intercom continued to scream, talking about how the "idiots who messed with the good SIR units" were located in the science depratment. Tid ran across the hall, back to where the SIRs lay on the floor, and looked around for something to escape in. Toto looked at her with disbelief, and half heartedly pointed over to what seemed to be an emergency exit, leading to an escape pod. Tid made a small squeak, and rushed over through the chrome hall with the fallen robots, and into the emergency exit, which seemed to be made of a wood like substance. The place creaked with every step Tid made, so she decided to let Toto go and tiptoe through the floorboards. She looked towards Toto, who now looked like a lost child at a fair rather than a proud Irken scientist.
"You can go back, if you want." Tid said softly, looking at Toto with sad eyes. "I won't hold it against you."
"Y-you know I can't." Toto sighed, grabing Tid from behind. "I promised to never...never leave your side."
Tid tried not to smirk. "There's no need to get all mushy, Toto." She sighed, hugging him tighter, "You love your job, go back to it. Go back to what you love, Toto."
"I made a promise." Toto said, looking at a small gathering of Sir units that where forming at the end of the exit hall, "And I am out of options anyway. Come on, let's move it!"
"Right ho!" The SIR said, skipping towards the other SIR's, "I'll hold them off while you get the escape pod sorted."
"You sure?" Tid asked, causing the SIR to nod.
"It is my duty." The SIR replied.
Tid looked back for a second, and then raced to the escape pod with Toto. The escape pod was a gold coloured circular ship, with two seats and one SIR holder on the inside. There was a wide window which also served as a door at the front, one which Toto had now half opened in his hands. Tid quickly got into the ship, looking back at the SIR she had just befriended. The SIR was firing back with guns that came out of his head, but even though the SIR was new and more advanced it was getting beaten into pieces. The SIR looked at Tid with a smile, its eye just hanging out, and quickly ran over to Tid's side in the ship. The escape pod quickly rose, and shot out of the room, leaving a large hole in the ceiling. The SIR's looked on with glowing red eyes before flying up after the escape pod.
"You know how to get yourself in trouble, Tid." Toto laughed nervously, looking down at the SIRs rising like swarming bees. Soon enough, they started to reach the planet's atmospheric layer. The ship started to shake and shudder, and Tid quickly grabbed onto Toto's side as she looked at the burning metal around her.
"We're not gonna survive much longer." Tid shivered, looking down at the red hot SIRs, "Either from them, or from this falling apart."
"We'll be fine." Toto said softly, "We'll be fine."
A few deadly minutes passed, and the SIRs started to turn white with heat. Soon enough, the SIR units were set aflame and fell down the sky like downed planes. The explosion of metal and overheated circuitry could be seen to look like fireworks, that is if Tid and Toto had the desire to see what was going on. The two had covered the other's eyes with their hands, too scared to see anything but black. The ship continued to rise, and soon raced across space. By this time, the rocking had stopped, but the ship had ran out of fuel trying to get out of the surface (and through the ceiling) as quick as possible.
For now, the two continued to drift into space. To save oxygen, the ship inserted wires into the Irkens and let them rest, their PAK's now giving them full life support. The ship continued to float aimlessly through space, until it reached the gravitational pull of a random planet, and pulled the ship in. The ship fell into the planet's strange sky like a comet, smashing into the hard surface of the planet. The inhabitants of the planet looked on in awe, not realising the strange beings that were going to enter their planet. This was fortunate for the two Irkens, as these beings were very teritorial, a lesson they would soon learn.