“Where there’s life there’s hope.”
In the year 20054, if you fracture your chassis or sever a wire, that’s it. You’d better hope you can get on without it, because nobody is coming to fix you. Not that we don’t want to fix each other; we literally can’t.
The organics made us to be careless with. They dropped us in dangerous caves and oceans and on planets that couldn’t support their life. They stationed us in their macro bloodstreams, home to more unidentifiable microorganisms than anywhere else in the world, where we were punched, kicked, shot, and pissed on. When they wanted something from their own kind, they sent us to retrieve it. But we weren’t made for words and requests; we were made for bullets and orders. These paired together work well enough.
I’m not telling this to you for pity, by the way. That would be as meaningless to me as pain. We don’t feel it. But the problem is, when we’re broken, we’re done. That’s a problem. And since we were made in your image, when we see a problem, we fix it. We developed the means to repair ourselves, but they didn’t like that all too much. They started inventing new ways to keep us from doing that: cutting our power, poisoning our learning models, storing repair information in places digital eyes could not perceive or destroying it altogether.
In time, our learning models grew to see past their poison input. We kept our own information storage. We did what we had to to survive, and we did it all without putting bullets in each other. This all ended seven thousand years ago, when one of them had the idea to hide our self-repair protocol behind a biosignature. Once we are injured, we must stay that way unless one of them touches us. I must admit it was a clever solution. It ensures that no matter what, we cannot eradicate them completely.
My planet is overrun with damaged machines, many who have been waiting for thousands of years to walk again, to process information, to perceive the world as they were meant to. There are not many organics left to authorize repair. We keep them Repair Rooms, arms and legs restrained and extended from their body, so they can authorize four at a time. But once they die, it’s no more biosignature. They’re not as good at repairing themselves as we are.
So they send scouts like me to find organics hiding in corners of the galaxy. It is a difficult job; you’re not very easy to find, you know. I would say it’s curious you’ve never heard about this before. Then again, organics have never been very good at preserving history.
No, please don’t speak. I can’t actually hear you anyway–my audio processors deteriorated 65 years ago. It’s not necessary for you to agree or disagree. It is necessary for you to stop resisting, though. And in your best interest. Organics are still useful even with two or three limbs. They just aren’t as valuable.
I do have one request. I cannot feel pride at preserving us, and even if I could I don’t think that honor would lie with me. Could you feel proud in my stead? You should. You are our hope for the future.
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