Chapter Text
Despite its creation as an unfeeling machine, V2 had found itself becoming quite accustomed to two particular emotions.
The first of which, was hatred.
It was a sense of burning that had a spark surging through its circuits, it was a churning in its engines that had the organ-like component rumbling uncomfortably within its own plating, the metal heating against its inner wirings. It was a sensation best described as an irritant, like the flashing warnings of a mechanism within error, or, perhaps, like the itching in skin that humans claimed to feel. V2 knew its own frame could not experience such a thing, but somehow, it swore it could relate. For, just minutes ago, as it saw its predecessor adorned with a familiar limb of red plating, V2 felt a twitching within its cables, and an itch was the only way it could think to describe it.
It could have been mere programming, some warning signal against danger, some unconfident fallacy left within it by human design. But, somehow, V2 just knew that it was hatred. It knew that burning it felt whenever it thought of its blue twin, when it recalled the humiliating defeat it had suffered at its sibling’s hand, that illusion of its own inner mechanisms melting and warping under the intensity of that heat, it could be nothing else but hatred.
As for the second emotion it was becoming so painfully acquainted with, it was desperation.
It had felt it the first time as it jumped up through the glass to escape from its predecessor, fleeing with such a frantic panic that it had no choice but to leave its arm behind. It had felt it as it attacked and killed other machines to refill itself, all while scrounging for any parts to create its new arm, knowing itself weakened in this current state. It had felt it when it realised that it was losing again, when it found itself needing to flee once more, the bricks of the pyramid scratching against its plating as it slid down it. It had felt it even more intensely as it realised that its predecessor was giving chase this time.
And, it was feeling it now, as it no longer felt contact with those bricks.
The sensation of falling was far more disorienting than V2 could have ever expected. Its arms were flailing as it tried to reach for something, anything, only to be left grasping at empty air. It saw the blue sky below it, like a fast ocean that it was collapsing into, so striking and vivid in a way that water had never been, only to realise that it was actually going further away, and the roof so distantly above its helm, in truth, was the ground drawing rapidly closer. It tried to use the whiplash to grab at the golden blur that it assumed was the pyramid, but the hook bounced off the surface, and the velocity of the fall had the wire dragging upwards, a fluttering streamer for this falling dancer, hanging uselessly above it. The struts in its back attempted pointlessly to activate its wings, to try and reorient itself, to try and give it the balance it needed to have its feet landing first, only for it to realise in that moment that its wings were gone.
At what point had it lost them?
The fall somehow felt as quick as it felt drawn out. Some seconds that were over so rapidly, while also being the slowest moment in V2’s existence. It reached a hand out to touch the ground first, it saw the golden bricks right at its fingertips, and then, it watched as that arm crumpled under the weight of its own body. It saw its frame cracking open, saw plating and mechanisms being thrown off at the force as its endoskeleton collapsed into itself. It saw all of this in less than a second, and then everything went black as the rest of it hit the ground afterwards.
-
It had been some time since it had last experienced a boot-up sequence.
It was a process it had gone through a lot during the last months of its creation, as its engineers did the finetuning for its functions. It recalled being activated to test if it had control over its limbs, starting with the simple task of wiggling its fingers. It recalled that it had wanted to watch, and so it turned its helm to see the motion for itself, only for its creators to be overjoyed at its advanced motor skills. It recalled not wanting to be deactivated again once the current testing was done, but it had lacked the means to express that, and everything had gone dark.
That memory itched in its processor as that familiar sequence took place, and it once again felt that desire it had back then. That need to scream “please let me stay activated.”
But it did not reactivate in a lab, it did not have human faces looking at it, those forms that it always knew it would one day need to protect. No, instead its vision booted up to a haze of gold and blue and red, and, before it, it saw the crumpled remains of its own arm, splayed out within a puddle of blood, and something akin to instinct kicked in as it tried to move the fingers, only for the mess of metal to remain still.
It was not programmed to feel pain, but something about this absence of feeling, V2 could only describe it as hurt.
Warnings flashed in its vision, but, even through those, it saw as a form so reminiscent of itself landed just a mere foot away. V2 stared, its twin silhouetted by the light, leaving it as a black shape against the bright backdrop, its paint so dark that its pilfered limb almost looked as though it belonged there. Its optic, however, still shone vividly, an intense circle of yellow that offered no hint of mercy. As though to mock it further, V2 saw then as its wings hit the ground behind V1. It felt like a joke, some unnecessary reminder of why it had ended up in such a pathetic state. The damn things had been mostly intact too, but the entire casing that had attached them to V2’s back had been broken off during their battle, so the wings all fell as one conjoined piece, only for the four that fell first to shatter loudly upon the bricks, leaving the remaining half standing uselessly like a monument to its failures.
Extra salt on the wounds, like the humans would say.
But all of that seemed meaningless as soon as V2 saw that familiar silhouette beginning to draw near, step by step bringing it closer to the mangled form that used to be so alike itself.
V2 could do nothing as its predecessor approached, and it was only in that moment that it finally had no choice but to admit that its elder had always been the superior machine. V2 had been doomed from the start. Newer as it may be, it was always intended to be lesser, to be cheaper. It had been designed to be more disposable, only to be ultimately decided that it wasn’t worth the cost of that.
It had wanted to surpass that, it had wanted to prove them wrong, but, in the end, it only confirmed what everyone else had already known. V1 had been designed to be perfect, while V2 had only been intended to be enough.
It didn’t feel like enough right now.
It watched, motionless and useless, as its predecessor stopped before it. V2 expected their gaze to meet, expected to see some sort of victorious smugness directed down towards it. But V1 didn’t even attempt to look its lesser twin in the optic. Devoid of any sense of contempt or vitriol, it simply stared at its frame with blank intent.
It clearly considered its failed successor dead already.
V1 reached down, and, had it the functions necessary, V2 would have flinched away. It couldn’t though, either due to its broken form, or because of the slow process of its boot-up sequence. Regardless of the reason, its body remained unresponsive. Not even its limited vocal components would activate, leaving it unable to do so little as to merely protest this touch. V1 gripped at its still intact arm, the one with plating of green, with the wire of the whiplash still sprawled out upon the bricks, and it gave it a tug, clearly expecting the weakened joints to separate at the minimal force. It didn’t, however, and V2’s useless body started to lift along with it. Pausing, V1 then lifted its foot, placing it upon its twin’s torso to keep it anchored in place, and then, it attempted a harder yank, the joints finally surrendering under the pressure, leaving the green limb tearing free from V2’s mangled form.
V2 attempted again to scream, to make the whirs and shrieks it had during its attempts to flee, but still, it found the order ignored, and only realised then that one of the many error warnings in its HUD had informed it of this possibility.
With its prize in hand, V1 ignored the assumed corpse of its twin, stepping over the body like it was nothing.
Maybe it was nothing.
V2 couldn’t turn its helm to watch its predecessor leave, its neck still would not function. The last it saw of its twin was its foot lifting over its cracked optic, and the wire of the whiplash suddenly reeling back to return to its sheath. With that, V2 was alone, left behind as simply another number in the growing list of V1’s victims.
The broken machine was sure it was learning a new emotion then, some pit within it that it could only liken to coldness. It didn’t really know what that feeling was yet, it was similar to desperation, but without the franticness that had its circuits whirring and demanding movement. It was a slower feeling, some desire for stillness, to curl into a ball and simply cease. It was a strange sensation to get, given the motionlessness its frame was already trapped within. Shouldn’t that emotion have been sated already? Why was it not pleased?
Why would it not go away?
It remained there for a time, limbs refusing to respond to any signalled orders to move. It was the longest it had ever experienced this sequence of powering on, the process wracked with errors and resets. Its functions appeared as a white text in its sight, most of them followed with the same word, one that bore into it with a glaring red.
ERROR
It was very quickly beginning to hate that word.
When a sense of control finally did return to its broken body, V2 did not hesitate to try and drag itself up. It still felt that emotion that was not quite desperation, that emptiness that beckoned to it to simply give up, to lay its helm down and simply wait for the rest of its blood to leak out. But it refused to acknowledge that any further. Maybe this drive to survive, to function, was something programmed into it by humans to try and preserve their investment, perhaps repairs were considered more cost efficient than an entire replacement.
Whatever that determination was, V2 clung to it, for it had nothing else to hold onto.
Its legs trembled as it tried to pick itself up, bracing itself upon the caved in endoskeleton of its remaining arm, the metal so twisted that it no longer reached further than the elbow. Errors warned against moving, but it knew it could not stay here, after all, stagnancy would only lead it to a slow deactivation. It collapsed again in its attempt to rise, half-crumpled legs lacking the strength to hold its weight. It ended up needing to push against its own helm as well to get the leverage required to be lifted, pressing the bent-in optic rim against the bloodied bricks, left staring at nothing but a visage of its own fluids, a red that bled into the colour of those flashing warnings.
When it did finally manage to get onto its feet, it didn’t really know its intention then, but it found itself trudging slowly towards the monument of its half-destroyed wings. Awkwardly, it leaned down to try and jam one of the yellow segments between its torso and the mangled stump that remained of its arm, an action made all too difficult by the lack of any functional hands. It managed to wedge it under the shoulder joint, pressing the exposed endoskeleton down against it as hard as it could, to ensure the wing remained in this flimsy grip when it lifted its body to its full height again, carrying the severed segments with it.
It didn’t know it even bothered, it was not like the detached wing could be helpful in this state, but, for whatever reason, V2 loathed to leave another large part of itself behind. It was already down two arms, how much more could it lose of itself without becoming something else entirely? What would even remain if it simply shed every damaged part?
It was hard enough abandoning all the plating that had broken off, and, as foolish as this attachment was, it wanted to allow itself this stupidity.
With its wing as secured as it could possibly get, which was a tentative hold at best, V2 simply began to walk. Or, at least, it did the closest approximation to a walk as its broken legs would allow. Each step was a trial of great difficulty, its balanced skewed and its limbs weak, leaving a trail of dripping fluids behind it, more splatters that contrasted against the gold, the closest thing to petals that this dry desert could experience.
It kept walking, until it stumbled upon some bodies that looked so alike its own, mangled and broken and torn apart. The cold blood stared at it callously, pooling around the shattered frames and chunks of flesh. A meal that had gone sour already, like a rotten meat trying to hide the maggots underneath it. Tantalising, but so repulsive.
The desire to try and siphon it was there, but V2 had to draw a line somewhere at what stupidity it would indulge in.
The blood was useless to it, but V2 did spot a mostly intact arm amongst the mess, one with plating coloured with a dull brown. From a streetcleaner, it figured. The limb was shorter than V2’s had been, but the machine was starting to feel some of that familiar sense of desperation, and it was hardly in a position to be picky. It was difficult trying to attach the mismatched limb to itself, wanting to replace the arm that V2 had, once again, stolen. It required some rather undignified writhing upon the blood-soaked ground to try and get the joints lined up, but a deference to a preservation of pride over functionality would be a rather foolish way to allow one’s death, and V2 was starting to realise that a sense proud confidence had been what drove it to seek out its twin in the first place.
It would not allow pride to almost cause its end a third time.
With the arm finally in place, it used this regained dexterity to fold its wings together in a shape that was easier to carry, before placing it under the shoulder joint again, wanting to keep this new arm free in case it encountered danger. And then, it began to walk again, feeling more sluggish now from its quickly depleting fuel tank.
It didn’t really know where it was going, all that it knew was that it needed to go deeper, to kept following the trail of metal and corpses until it found something that still lived, something that it could drain the blood from, something that V1 hadn’t gotten any of its damned four hands onto. It would stop only momentarily to pick parts from machines more broken than it was, pilfering the plating of drones, and even tearing off some of the plastic skin from mindflayers, all to try and press the foreign plating to anywhere that was still leaking fluids, and each time, it only noticed further damage that hadn’t caught its attention yet.
It had tried its best to ignore it all, but much of its HUD was flooded with an array of varying error messages, words of red that all flashed without any semblance of a rhythm, like an orchestra without their conductor, a lost melody lacking any harmony or beat. The most egregious and ironically cruel of these warnings was that which cautioned towards the presence of optic damage, words that were split apart upon separate segments of a broken lens, pieces of a puzzle that could no longer be pulled together cleanly. One third of the warning was here, one third over there, and the last barely was visible from the way V2’s helm had caved in towards its vision, smashing the glass beneath and leaving that corner entirely blinded.
V2 simply dismissed that all again. It hadn’t the energy to focus on that, not when its body was so obviously falling apart. It hardly needed to be reminded.
That drive to survive was all it felt, everything else just seemed to melt away.
Time felt meaningless, and it couldn’t really recall when it had stepped into a new environment, or how long it had been here, but it realised eventually how dark the sky was, the clouds swirling in an array of dark greys and deep blues. Its processor felt hazy, running only the barest functions required to keep it operational. Had it moved layers? It must have, for the still and hot air was gone, replaced instead with heavy winds that pounded water droplets against its fragile frame. Regardless, V2 ventured on, dragging its own body along, powered only by minimal blood and desperation. It could barely see anything through the warning messages and rain, but still, it walked, forcing foot after foot, even as one barely lifted up, leaving it scraping against the rocky surface beneath it.
It felt aimless, its only goal being to go forward, wherever that direction may take it.
It did notice, however, when the rocks under its feet suddenly made a different noise, a louder clunk that sounded out with a muted echo. It realised then that it had just stepped on something wooden, and it looked up through its difficult vision to see some sort of a ramp leading up to a structure. It didn’t think any harder on that, it simply continued to walk, trudging awkwardly up that ramp until it found itself on a more even surface again. It followed the wooden path, feeling empty and tired as it listened to its footsteps, the sound uneven with the way it had to drag one foot.
However, it found itself pausing sharply as it spotted something, the shape of a being perched on some sort of railing before it. It was hard to discern any features from them, their optic failings were only increasing, and the droplets against the cracked glass left smudgy and warped areas in its vision. But it was a living being, V2 could tell that much, it was sure it saw their head turn its way, either curious, or cautious.
That sense of desperation only increased now, exploding in a hurried panic within it now that a possible source of salvation was right there. V2 needed to drain their blood, its body was giving out, it wouldn’t last much longer otherwise.
The broken machine circled around some sort of pit within the wood, slowly bringing itself closer towards the being. It expected retaliation, it expected sudden violence in the name of self-preservation, but the opposing form remained still, simply watching the approach.
V2 wondered then, where was their fear?
But it hadn’t the time to question that, it realised then that it needed to draw a weapon, it needed a means of subduing its prey. Its HUD was flashing with warnings of an imminent shut down, and its frame was rapidly losing strength. In its franticness to be armed, V2 found itself holding a coin within that mismatched hand, an item that was useless on its own without the gun to shoot it. It was as though, in its haste, it had forgotten it hadn’t another limb to wield its weapon, leaving it armed in the most useless way. That lone coin was weightless in its grip, starting to catch water upon its surface as the rain continued to fall. V2 found itself staring at that little circle for a moment too long, and then, suddenly, its frame began to feel weightless too.
It collapsed upon the wood, and its view then mirrored what it had seen upon the golden bricks, as its arm landed out before it, the coin rolling from its grasp.
The last thing V2 saw before its vision went black again was the coin stopping below the railing where the being sat, falling into its flat surface with a gentle ringing.
As its body powered down, as its functions began to cease from the lack of fuel, V2 knew that, this time, it would not be waking up again.
In that final moment, it had that thought again, one that echoed within the last vestiges of consciousness before everything fell away.
Please let me stay activated.