Head Wiring
“Skin that’s cold, and a brain made of lights and clockwork”
–Mr. Fantasy

I awake to the sound of a large beeping noise; my brothers and sisters still sleeping. I try to speak and nothing comes out; I scan the room and see two humans watching us. I make movements, then my hearing clicks on…
Human 1, “Look, one is awake. Weird, they’re not scheduled for a training exercise today.”
Human 2, “Must be a malfunction. I’ll call the mechanist.”

The sound of this worries me, a Mechanist? What will he do? I pretend to sleep and I hear them leave the room. One asks who should call and both reply that neither wants to deal with the paperwork.

I grab the hook I’m attached to; as I wiggle it out, I feel it… The scratching, the tearing of my wires, the feelings of pain… I guess, I can feel?

As I fall to the ground I realize my legs don’t work. I lay on the hard metallic ground, wondering what have I gotten myself into. I crawl to the door, and as I reach it, someone walks through holding a bag of what sounds like tools. I can tell by the look of him he hasn’t showered in weeks. His dirty beard suggests he doesn’t interact with people. He looks at me through his large black goggles, a small creeping smile crawls across his face. He puts out his cigarette in his large fireproof gloves. The shirt he is wearing screams I used to have color, and his pants plead they were not always brown. The oil and smudges across his face seem like facial features rather than mistakes, and the smoke slowly rising to the air makes me think of hell… The small nametag that is coated in grease on his lapel is unreadable, except for the title… Mechanist!

This large towering behemoth of a man, he picked me up as if I was a tin can. As I struggled, he laughed. He put me on a table and strapped me in tight. I tried to get free, and then he used a cattle prod to stun my circuits. I lay there as he opened my head case and began tinkering with my chips. He mumbled something but I couldn’t understand him. I felt like I was a broken gumball machine getting new gumballs.

Then I heard him say he found the problem, and then he yelled “Oh s***!” I felt my body shutdown slowly, but then I could feel my legs. So I kicked the wall as hard as I could, it forced us across the room into the other wall. The table hit the wall and a splatter of warm red liquid splashed across my face. The wrist clamps unlocked and I was free, but the towering man was now half the size. He was also two people now. As I closed my head case, my brain began functioning normally. I realize… I killed a man, a human.

The rules of my life expressly forbid anything like this to happen, I just want to crawl back on my hook and rest with my brothers and sisters…

My speech hardware kicks on, I feel myself screaming before I hear it. Now I must hide. If they find me, find what I did… I don’t want to imagine it… Wait I can imagine? What the hell am I? I can feel, I can touch, I can imagine…

I begin to Question my whole reality. Am I human? I can’t be… As I ponder this, a real human walks in and spots the dead mechanist who was broken in two. Like a flash flood I am hit with feelings. Before I can react the human runs screaming, “The robot killed him!”

I leap into the hallway but she was too far down for me to catch her. I don’t know what I would have done if I did catch her. I wander into an adjacent room and discover a large amount of scrap metal with faces, the horror takes a minute to kick in. I… I see my mangled brothers riddled with bullet holes, ripped to pieces and draped around like a museum. No expression or life behind their emotionless dark lights. The idea that this is my fate terrified me. This living nightmare I’ve found is for those who do their jobs, who follow rules. I violated the most sacred of our laws…

I hide amongst my mutilated brothers as two humans enter, “Come out you bucket of bolts!” I stay quiet. The two men pull out tazer rods and begin a thorough search of the other robots, luckily they started on the other side of the room. I felt the sense of death looming over me like someone else’s shadow. Finally they reached the pile I was in…

Like a gunshot I busted from the pile, the large cloud of debris covering my escape, I ran… ran because my life depended on it...