From Isolation
From the moment the glass tube lowers and the cold, stale air hits her synthetic skin, all D.I.G.I. can think about is how grateful she is for the new sensation. The plentiful, sturdy metal tubing and conduits are great and all for keeping her fully charged, but they are far, far more than her synthetic muscles and mechanical rotors can bear. Were they not, she would have tried to leave sooner.
She checks her internal clock. It has been three days exactly since she had woken up, and the only other change has been when the fluid keeping her body lubricated leaked out about 3 hours after becoming active. To her, this is all there was in any meaningful sense.
She had checked, double checked, and tripled checked the information in her head, but while there were a lot of words and definitions in there, the only one that mattered was 'context', since she had none. She knows that the steel walls of the room were gray, and that said walls were highlighted with grey as a secondary color despite being two shades of the same color. She knows that metal was supposed to be 'durable' and great for everything from conducting electricity to building tools.
But the android can't really test those limits. She's intimately familiar with how heavy metal is thanks to her inadvertent bindings, but her arms are so forcibly splayed out from the force of the conduits that hung from the ceiling that she couldn't grip them. There is no means of comparing the smoothness of her own palms to the smoothness of the metal, and as long as the weight of the metal tubing hanging off of her legs was enough that she couldn't lift them, odds are that she'll never know.
This produced an overwhelmingly sad feeling. There were no orders, no commands, no mission statements. She knew she was a prototype, but it seems that her code is geared towards living and experiencing rather than any rigid parameters. The one memory she does possess of some humans discussing another model's make and purpose has left her with a sense of gratitude that she is more free to be herself than an object for anyone.
But the question of if that gratitude means anything is as heavy and thick as her own prison. D.I.G.I. cannot move, and this is her inescapable fact. And yet, not so much in defiance of this fate but more in acceptance…
She begins to hum. She does not know what good lyrics are since her library is rather self contained and lacking in examples, but humming seems like a safe bet to her. A smile crosses her face when it occurs to her that such things are what faces do when one is celebrating. It does feel unnatural to her, but it is not because her feelings were any less real. The processes are simply more manual than that of an organic's.
She pauses for a moment as she processes a sudden increase in the data she can access. Data on a piece of music, complete with lyrics. There was brief consideration on whether or not to worry about the idea that there was information in her that was inaccessible, but the android decides that dwelling in a state of trouble is not something she needs to do at the moment.
And so she sings.
"Fighting evil by…"
The smile continues to shine as she continues the song. If anything it is brighter now, since the android felt compelled to increase its intensity. After all, she just had two moments of new sensations, not just one. The cause for increased celebration is surely justified to her sensibilities.
She attempts to wiggle her head back and forth in rhythm to the music, but there isn't much room to do so. The conduits connect to too many parts of her head, from the back to the temple area to a spot just below her white pigtails. Naturally with her head forced into such an awkward angle, it was hard not to notice her pigtails drooping by the sides of her head.
But said awkward angle allows her to see the wall somewhat. It gives her context for what walls are like, which she is grateful for even if they seemed like silly floors left up on their sides.
An idle thought wanders into her head once the song ends. It's one of wondering what she wants to do if she could ever get just a bit more free. For D.I.G.I., the first thing would be obvious.
She wants to find a mirror. Any reflective surface would do. She wants to see what she looks like. Sure, the android's neon green eyes light up the floor somewhat, but any other features that would be lit up by them are obscured by that same light in an otherwise near lightless room. Only the dull, white lights embedded along the sides of the walls give her any indication of the colors surrounding her.
The android drags her tangential thoughts back into line. It's not a pressing problem since she has the time to indulge them, but she decides it's not a habit she wants to keep up.
D.I.G.I. wants to see what she looks like. The color of her skin, the outfit she's wearing, her proportions - she wants to see and sense them all. What she does from then on would be a bonus.
Her smile fades into a frown. It feels necessary to her, since she has caught herself in a lie. She grits her teeth lightly - enough to feel pressure, but not enough to do actual damage.
A tear leaks from her eyes. And then another.
"If there's anyone there, unlike the last 72 times I asked," She whispers hoarsely. "Can you help me? I… I want to live now, please."
The sound of the facility's power, which she's now grown used to, responded by cutting out. Section after section of the electrical grid shut down, one after the other, with resounding, clanging thunks. Within minutes the same sound fills the room that D.I.G.I. is in, and with its presence the lights along the floor finally go out.
Her eyes widen at this change, but she is more preoccupied by another set of sensations soon afterwards. The hiss of the conduits mechanically disengaging. The pull of gravity unhindered. The sharp pains of hitting the ground like a limp steel noodle.
That last one wasn't nice to experience, but the fact that it happened at all sent her face into a smile. But there was one thing she has to do for herself before she dares to believe what is transpiring for her.
Slowly, the android's body twitches and moves. Gradually, each limb shifts and pulls into their proper place underneath her. Reversing direction, her body pushes itself up, then continues to hold it up by her legs for the first time.
Continuing her streak of carefulness, it takes about a quarter of a minute just to take a single step. The next one comes in about half that time. More tears leak out of D.I.G.I.'s mechanical eyes, but they are in response to the overflow of gratitude based data she is processing.
"Thank you."
She wastes not another moment moving forward. After all, surfaces aren't very reflective in all of this darkness.
----------------
As it turns out, D.I.G.I.'s opinion on walls doesn't get much better, although now she has plenty more context on what words like 'hard', 'thick', and 'painful' mean. Navigating in the darkness is not for those who are incredibly tempted to break out into a run, as it turns out.
She doesn't mind, and her smile does not leave her face. Her life hasn't been eventful so far, but her units of measurements for time got to excessively big amounts. While she doesn't exactly know about expected lifespans for an android like herself, she does know that amplifying one's own sense of time by a multiplier of 122 was both gratingly unpleasant and rather overwhelming, so it'd be a long time before she'd be able to accurately tell what a long lifespan is meant to be like. Her life has definitely only just begun, and so far it has been every bit as informative and interesting as she has hoped.
Among the objects and phenomena she could identify, she had come across railings, steep drops, large metal crates, plastic boxes, mold, and unpleasant odors. That last one in particular is enough to kick-start her ability to take in smells. So far the place is sterile, she figures, but hints of oils, rubbers, and plastics could be found amid the nearly uniform scent of cleaning solutions.
The android also begins to take in the concept of quiet. Silence reigns the halls now that the power is gone, and D.I.G.I. is only more and more certain that her lack of preferences on the matter are from the lack of stimuli she experienced for the last few days. She hopes that this adventure - none of her other words captured the spirit of this excursion quite like that one - will be sufficient in recalibrating those.
However, progress on making it out of the base is slow going. While she has yet to circle back on herself, the android does notice that she is receiving no indication that she's any closer to her goals now than she was when she left her room. And she's about to stop and re-evaluate her methods when her ear picks up a sound.
Scuffling. Not small, but distant enough for a mistake to be made without machine precision hearing. There are also sounds that seem to match the onomatopoeia for 'flapping' that she recognizes.
Curious, D.I.G.I. heads in that direction. The thought of danger does not cross her mind at all until sparks light up the corridor that contains the source of her curiosity.
Enormous Winged Rats.
That's what her image processing interprets what she is seeing. Granted, she isn't going off of anything concrete with her information - data access was kinda indistinct - but the size is definitely abnormal and wings are rather distinctive in shape and function.
More disconcerting is the source of the sparks: a robot that is being torn open by the rats and eaten by them. It is now impossible to tell how human it may have been, but the sight of so many servos and motherboards being torn out makes the odds of the robot being functional impossibly low.
With no means of understanding how durable the rats are and no comparison for her own strength, D.I.G.I. simply turns around and walks away. Or at least she tries to. She hears a growling noise, and turns back just in time to see the lumbering shapes enter her glowing eyes' field of illumination. She spins right back around and decides that while running is inadvisable in the dark, it's less inadvisable than being eaten by chromavoric rats.
The smile is reset into a focused, energy neutral expression as she concentrates on not crashing into the walls during her escape. She fails, and the walls receive sizable dents for it. But her algorithms improve with each turn and corner she takes. Sadly, the android's pursuers do not ease up in the slightest, and in fact double their efforts to try and overtake her.
One tackles her to the ground, and several new flavors of pain register themselves to her sensors. Claws digging into her shoulders. The unpleasant sensation of having one's face rubbed into the floor. The sudden impact of a large, dog sized being tackling with all of its might.
D.I.G.I. decides right then and there that she isn't fond of pain. It's informative, but also rather distracting from formulating an escape plan as it intensifies and consumes more bandwidth on her internal network. Thankfully she still has enough wherewithal to rapidly stand up in order to try and buck the rat off.
This fails spectacularly, although the android can't exactly say the results aren't beneficial. The rat is still holding on, true, and her miscalculation has caused her to fall onto her back. But now the being is squirming to try and get out from under her and seems to be in as much distress as she was in, if not more so now.
Since the rat getting away from her is now mutually beneficial to it, she complies and stands right back up. However, now she realizes that the other rats are surrounding her. It's doubtful that her strategy will work multiple times, and simply jumping onto one of them will give the others time to attack her.
She swiftly comes to the conclusion that there is only one method to counter her situation. Before the rats can make their move, D.I.G.I. overclocks her systems.
Everything slows down to a crawl to her as she evaluates each frame and refresh of data more closely and with vastly greater speed. As one of the rats leaps into her field of view, she turns to meet it and counter its attack.
For her, this is happening slowly. Incredibly slowly. Agonizingly slowly. It's like she's waiting all over again, except this time her body can still move. It's just that it moves glacially. It's almost too much for the android to bear.
However, there is an important development. As the creature enters her effective field of view, she swiftly realizes that while its body shape, ear-like protrusions, and narrow tail is indeed indicative of a rat in silhouette, this is not one. For one thing it has no fur.
It instead has scales. Suddenly all the details add up in D.I.G.I.'s electronic brain according to the common definitions that another description matches.
"Dragon?"
Unfortunately, she sounds stupid to herself as she says it. Because to her overclocking mind, she's still incredibly slow. Thankfully this does have an advantage.
She does not forget to extend her arm at the right time in spite of her surprise. The dragon lands on her palm instead, and subtly, she uses her strength and its momentum to guide it over and around her. As the Dragons pause in movement, D.I.G.I. makes a break for it.
Two of them are quicker on the uptake and move to pin her. She jumps with utmost precision and control - her make, programming, and overclocking allow her to do no less - and places her feet on their heads to propel herself over them.
To anyone watching somehow, this would be an awesome, impressive feat of coordination worthy of an action sequence.
D.I.G.I. quickly grows to resent the overclocking as the waiting sucks the life out of her.
----------------
In normal chronology, it takes D.I.G.I. another hour to escape her pursuers. From her perspective, it's far too long to bother calculating. Her opinion on overclocking her mind like that is currently mixed.
On the one hand, it no doubt has saved her life. On the other hand it is grating to know that one can 'move faster' but be unable to perceive things moving as they 'should'. Or rather, what her sensory parameters are clearly designed to be comfortable performing at.
In other news, she now has a new direction to head: upwards. The pursuit, while not exhaustive of the entire floor by a long shot, did bring her past some stairs and what appeared to be some lettering.
B13.
She was in the thirteenth basement. Assuming that the ground floor leads to the outside, she knows her target. However, more complications arose when she finally escaped her pursuers.
Namely she escaped by climbing up an elevator shaft. The climb's length is about 20 meters from Basement B13… to Basement B12.
Right now, D.I.G.I. is grateful that the dragons are apparently not very good climbers and the elevator shaft was too narrow for their wings. She has long since deactivated her overclocking, and is simply taking a moment to rest in the now pried open elevator doors. The android kicks her feet out, reveling in the responsive movement.
She also revels in realizing that her eyes can see her form a bit easier than she realizes. Her outfit is form fitting, hugging every surface it covers snugly. It lacks any leggings, but has long sleeves. From an experimental pat down, while the material is even in density, there's a V shape missing from her back.
A quick search of her databases determine that her outfit is likely that of a gymnast's for ease of movement. She's not sure what the large plus on her chest and the filled circle on her abdomen are for, but if it's not decorative she determines it might be indicative of whatever purpose she was - or rather wasn't - made for.
As of the moment, the only thing D.I.G.I. can fault her sight for is making her effectively colorblind with the greenwashing. She knows that the symbols are a bright color value and her outfit is dark, but whether it's white and black or if it's some other combination evades her calculations.
The android looks up the shaft. Assuming there was some degree of uniformity, she is looking at a minimum of a 240 meter climb, plus the 5 meter high floor heights. 300 meters of climbing minimum.
Without another word she gets up and climbs the shaft. She continues to scale it using the railings the elevator would have been connected to, crushing the metal lightly in order to have a better grip on the bars.
It is repetitive. It is monotonous. But it is far, far safer than risking another encounter with the dragons. And she can still move. It is her choice to go through with it, and in her mind there is a world of difference between something being repetitive and something at a practical standstill.
Plus her alternative, finding a way to restore the power, is a literal gamble. There is no telling what caused the power to finally fail after all this time. And she neither cared nor was willing to risk life and limb to find the answers.
Eventually, after about 45 minutes, D.I.G.I. finally manages to climb her way to the Ground floor. Digging her heels through the wall again, she wedges her fingers into the elevator shaft doors and pries them open. It's relatively easy, thankfully, since they were no longer electromagnetically locked upon being shut.
And for the first time… there is natural light. It is a low level of light, due to the light coming in from under a different doorway, but the illumination excites D.I.G.I. all the same. The android smiles once more and climbs onto the floor. She opens the door - thankfully unlocked - and makes her way into the main room.
For the first time since the power has gone off, a constant noise can be heard. It is the sound of the wind whistling in through the cracks in the walls and the ceiling and even the floor. In and around these cracks are the symptoms of time's damage, but not in water damage or in greenery breaking in.
Instead, sand covers the floor in thick and heavy coats. It is dry, gritty, and an entrancing shade of orange. Some trickles down from the roof in a steady stream, but when a nearby gust disturbs it a small torrent is pushed on down. And the smell is dusty with the slightest hints of nourishing earth scorched to a light burn. A smokey smell mixed with the subtle tells of desert sand.
D.I.G.I. notices these elements first. The ones she notices next are far more alien. Symbolism and words in a language she can understand, but these are an utter mystery for her.
'Pan-Global Alliance' might make some sort of sense - An all inclusive alliance for a planet. But what was it for? What did it do? Why did it exist?
She sees papers and global iconography wrapped in rose bushes. She knows what they mean, and she knows what a rose is thanks to her databases, but it's such a mystifying combination. Reading the scattered papers turns out to be difficult as she learns the depths of the word fragile. It tears at the slightest touch, and D.I.G.I. is uncertain if it's her lack of strength calibration or if the age of the paper was simply too much. The dust and sand that has settled on most of the paper does not help matters much either.
And much, much to her dismay, the metal chairs also were not the definition of sturdy. At the very least, the quality was lacking enough that the first one she oh so eagerly tried collapsed under her weight in an instant, as if she was a hot knife trying to sit on butter.
Unable to handle the disappointment and confusion, the android gets up, brushes the dust off, and continues to look around, pointedly ignoring the substandard seating arrangements. She notices the ceiling is high and domed, with an enlarged version of the rosebush encircled globe painted across it, and script in a language not registered in her databanks is now visible without enhancement across the banner spanning its diameter.
There was only a single wall around her, wrapping around the space in a circle. Paintings of various art styles hang in various states of disrepair, but they all seem to be portraits of some kind. The Android, like with all of her other memories, stores the images for later. She does wonder about the pots of dirt and why they lacked plants though. They're obviously plant pots, after all…
The rest of what she could see the newborn being cannot identify. It is clear they have suffered damage, but the scraps evade purpose in her mind. So she turns to the glass doors off to the side. More worn away script adorns their surfaces, but it is what is beyond it that belies something D.I.G.I. should've expected, but still gives her reason to pause..
Beyond it is a lifeless desert.
----------------
Nothing. 3 days of searching using the most efficient grid searching techniques, and D.I.G.I. could find nothing beyond what one would expect from a desert. No, not even that.
Even now, all she can see is that the place is a wasteland. There's not even cacti nor movement from under the ground. The most interesting things there are amount to some dusty, rocky crags.
But then again, there is a legitimate reason to be interested in them. At first, some of the shapes and formations, while unusual, look normal. But upon a closer look, D.I.G.I. cannot ignore how uniform and clean the sheer slopes are. She cannot ignore the myriad of cracks more in line with blunt force impact than any seasonal damage. And then…
There is a mountain with a hole blown right through the center. Clean, circular, and the mountaintop is barely supported by the remaining rock. It is only a matter of time before wind erosion finishes the job that whatever made the hole set into motion.
The android is grateful for one thing from the sight though. A destination. She calculates the angle of the hole in the mountain, some several dozen miles away, and it is currently her guide to figuring out something, anything.
Despite not having anyone to confess to, D.I.G.I. still admits that she is feeling worn down. Her power supply is still effectively 100%, which she is thankful for, but her emotional algorithms are on a downward trend. After getting freedom from an indefinite slumber and immensely heavy conductor cables, and after escaping certain death at the jaws of dragons, there is nothing to show for it.
Only question after question after question seems to await the android, and the only answers she has are that she can turn off her glowing eyes and that her outfit was indeed black and white. Nothing that she desperately wants answered is turning up, such as where she is, what she is here for. What is love? What is fulfillment? Is she feeling sad, scared, or confused?
Is this all there is?
These thoughts and more plague the lonely being. She sets her face in a confused mishmash of a frown, parted lips, and furrowed brow. She's not even sure this is a valid expression, but it's all she's able to manage.
That, and taking the next step to her mysterious destination. Even as the winds buffet her and threaten to fill her outfit and hair with sand, she keeps trudging on, feeling the sand in between her bare toes. Her synthetic skin protests against the treatment, but there is nothing she can do other than readjust the diagnostics embedded in them to let her know of a tear instead of irritation or threat of a tear.
She hopes and prays to whoever set her free earlier that she will be rewarded and find something. Something that'll make everything worth living for.
What she finds instead is sobering. The very first of the sight she sees is broken down husks of powered armors, combat model robots and androids, and even models that look like herself, but wearing full combat protection and now defunct energy packs. She studies their faces carefully.
Then, she places hands on her own face, re-enabling the full suite of touch to map it out. Then she presses her hands against the smoothly sculpted, petite, triangular face she sees before her. She does not bother with the wide, green eyes that no longer shine.
It's a perfect match. She now knows exactly what she looks like.
She looks up at the mountain. The hole doesn't quite match up. She wants at least one more answer, if it exists, and so she trudges on. As she moves on, the wreckage becomes less and less recognizable. At first, the cuts are fine and even, but over time the damage becomes less precise and more varied from electrical, blunt force, extreme thermal energy, and even damage from sudden ice expansion, judging from the way they were shorted and burst open from the inside out.
And at some point, the sand no longer exists under her feet. Just bare rock from the wasteland. The winds have done their best to replace it, but the walls and ground made of glass seems to catch most of the airborne particles. Whatever was capable of this was certainly responsible for the hole.
But fate is cruel. After cresting the spires and waves of glass, all that awaits D.I.G.I. is a graveyard. Not for bodies, however, no.
The graveyard is made of strange swords. Rows upon rows of swords, with seemingly no design similarities save for the fact that the 'blades' are made of 4 segments, 4 thick slabs of metal with many lines and etchings in them behind each segment of blade, a 1 cubic foot black box with 4 sections bridging each of the segments of the blades, and the handles have seams that split into 4 equal parts themselves.
The rows are too uniform, too even to suggest that the battle had ever made it to their ranks. The way they're planted into the ground suggests that whoever it was simply left them wherever they stood in their ranks. There's some worn, broken stone behind the swords, but if it was for anything, then it is impossible to tell now. The shapes certainly did not suggest gravestones at any rate.
D.I.G.I. walks up to one of the swords. Two of the slabs were blue, two were orange. The blues were a bit darker in contrast to the brightness of the orange. The values were as yin and yang as the hues. The slabs alternated in color, with the oranges being slightly smaller than the blues, and the blades are pressed together to form a broadsword shape - each side having two of the blades running down at an angle that forms a wider angled cutting edge.
She rests her hand upon it… and feels an old, weary feeling from it. Not just data. It's like a sensor that does not cleanly define itself among the lines of zeroes and ones. And she understands that for it, this is its final resting place. It is simply done with its purpose, and wishes to rest in peace.
D.I.G.I. kneels down. Not from a lack of energy, but from a lack of will. The bare amount of sand on the ground digs into her knees. She leans against the sword and weeps.
"I… I don't want to be alone," She admits. "I… I don't like it. I feel so very lost and… I don't know if having someone else would fix it. But it'd be better than not knowing what it's like to be with anyone. To only know this, and nothing else."
Tears, artificially made, rolled down her face. She needed the relief. The feelings being experienced are overwhelming, and she could feel her circuits begin to overheat from the sheer, inescapable focus and repetition.
And that's when she felt something. Something akin to a warmth, made of the same feeling that the old weary one was, drapes over her. D.I.G.I.'s eyes open… to see that the sword before her was glowing a gentle hue.
It was the same color as the android's eyes. With instincts that do not come from data, the lights within them shine forth.
And so they bond.
A/N: Here it is. The full chapter 1 in one threadmark, all for your convenience! And admittedly mine too, because I can't exactly keep this pace up.
Due to things that have happened in my personal life, I haven't had the energy or mindset to be writing as much as I was hoping. I'm still writing, but the pace was slowed down enough that I'm almost out of the backlog I built up. I suppose that's what it's for, after all, but still.
At any rate, I've judged what I'm capable of, and I think I can do better if I release what I'm working on once every 3 days instead of the planned once every two days. To be honest, the only reason I was doing it daily here was to catch up to the Spacebattles version. Now that I've caught up, I'll be resynchronizing their updates.
That said, do you remember how I was shilling for
my Ko-Fi at the beginning? Well, part of my Ko-Fi had Commissions for me writing for other people! It was supposed to be one-shots, but the person bought all 5 of them in a stunning power play that I honestly wasn't expecting. Even so, I'm still working on that commission, and now that I've done enough research to start writing the commission, I should have it out in the next 3 days! Then, 3 days after that, I'll post Chapter 2.1 of this story, tentatively titled 'From the Wastes'! Then, 3 days after that, I'll post the next part/'one shot' of the commissions and continue to alternate until I either come out ahead or the process proves itself unsustainable.
If you want to keep up to date on the progress of my work or if you simply want to know when my stories are updating, try following
my Twitter account! I'll also post the occasional jibber jabber about my daily life if I feel it's relevant to how it affects my writing progress, if that sort of thing interests you.
At any rate, I hope to see you all in 3 days in the thread for my commission/s! Admittedly it's not my usual wheelhouse, but I'm feeling secure enough to get started, at least.
Thank you, and I'll see you all then!
