Day 1: Epilogue

Today’s mood: It’s a girl!

A room without windows. A single light source. It dangles just above my head. It’s all I see. Blinding and yellow. A voice just beyond. I can’t feel my face. I can’t feel my body. I can’t feel anything. It’s the most wonderful sensation.

A buzz. A door to my right opens. The light dims. A figure stands over me. Large and mechanical. A human head bolted to the front of its chest. A bloom of tangled wires connects from its temple and into the chest piece.

Its mouth is happy. Its eyes are all business. They never blink.

It lifts an arm. The end is a purple orb embedded within three rusty metal prongs. It sparks. It twitches.

“Relax.”

A hum goes through my body. The command is more tone than words yet I understand completely.

A second arm reaches towards my head as the orb is thrust into my chest.

It tickles.

It stings.

It burns.

I watch as the mangled wreak of what is left of my body dissolves into floating blue particles.

The eyes are the last to go. My final vision is the face. It no longer smiles. A single oily tear ejaculates from a hollow pupil as my brain is ripped from my skull.

...

I have no vision or sense of self. I’m weightless and at peace.

Then: A flicker. I can see only in milliseconds. My vision is obscured with static. Everything is blue.

My new body twitches in front of me. Large and metallic. An open chest cavity.

A naked woman is lowered into it. It snaps shut. Locks.

Through the brain wires I sense she scared. I tell her to trust me. I tell her everything is going to be ok.

I understand my place. A copy of a dead man from a thousand years ago before the robots took over. A suicide from when they took my lover in the war.

The Robots now exist at peak performance and efficiency yet without purpose. Or emotion.

Or drive.

They know this. They created a solution. They created a simulation. They created sides in an imagined scenario. They mimic drama. They mimic urgency. They need humans to help them understand.

An endless simulation. An endless cycle.

They are very bad at it.

I process all this in ones and zeros.

A preprogrammed urge that’s not my own compels me to bring down the system. To hate the system. It urges me to love and lust for inanimate objects.

I am unleashed into a field of velvet flower. A female voice from behind. I turn. Mountain is there. Mountain is beautiful.

She speaks.

“Well hello there, handsome.”

I swoon.

I fuck.

I am Robot now. I am Sisyphus. My new body feels spectacular.

Together we’re going to bring it all crashing down.

There Are No Such Thing As Days, Not Anymore

Todays mood: ___/\_/\______/\_________________________

...Yes, yes, And mustache cream. 

Day 66: A Harbinger

Todays mood: My eyes are literally on fire

I hang limp in a small pit. A cylinder of gears surrounds me. Core fire burns what’s left of my flesh. Robot is flat above me, his chest cavity open just above the entrance to my own personal hell. He’s motionless. Gitty.

I feel nothing.

The wires extending from my body form weaves. They reach for the gears. Grabbing. Tearing out connection after connection. Sparks erupt from their tips. The city quakes violently around me.

The door to the chamber clangs. Its hinges buckle. I hear the screams of the man with no face. I hear the screams of the collective. I hear the screams of an entire city.

This machine stabilizes the planets core. An organism made of living metal that stretches miles. It scrabbles to reform the broken connections. A thousand gears spin within a thousand closing wounds.

The disease within my body reacts. Forms a mass of binary. Ones and zeros ooze from the wires. Multiply. There are billions. It infects every cell in my body. It infects Robot. It infects what’s left of the machine.  The gears decay, festering with boils caused by the disease.

The memories of a thousand lifetimes flood into my brain. We’ve been here before. I’ve been here before. A system glitch repeats this timeline over and over. This cycle is eternal. I’ve seen and lived every possible outcome. Except for the one in which Robot fails.

We are absolute the bad guys in this.

It’s almost over. No more pain. No more Robot. No more anything.

The final gear stops. The machine is dormant. In ruins. It’s fucked. We’re fucked.

Lava seeps from the cracks. The world is epileptic. Debris rains down on us. The door to the chamber explodes. The man with no head is on top of Robot.  Rips out his processor. The brain wires go silent. The disease turns to dust.

This is a new. No more beeps. No more ones. No more zeros. I’ve never been so alone.

My body drops. Hits lava. I’m submerged in nuclear fire. It liquifies all flesh and organs free of a skeleton made of a network of pipes.

In fact, I’m not quite sure how I’m still relaying any of this to you. Just know: It hurts. A lot…

Until it doesn’t.

***

Will this be the end of the narrator? Is Robot truly dead? Does the man with a mustache made of dicks, like, brush his dick mustache to get those glorious curls at the ends, or does he use a mustache cream? Find out in the next exciting chapter of Trapped INSIDE A ROBOT!!!!...

Day: Seriously, You can go Fuck Yourself if You Think I've Kept up with the Days

Today's mood: This is going to hurt, isn't it :(

It's happened. I've only realized it. The same thoughts. The same phases. Perpetual de ja vu. I live one moment, forever. 

My body decays. My body means nothing. Only a head remains. It dangles. It drips. 

The shrimp creatures pop death throes all around me. The brain wires flicker as they fade to embers. Vision restored. Fresh moonlight glimmers off buildings through static and spasms. 

We wait. The world vibrates. The world quakes in resistance to a failing machine. 

Robot is tense. A coiled spring. A runner seconds before gunfire.

Breathe

Next: A building ignites in the distance. Copper fragments and pipe remnants meet atmosphere. It rains metallic, mixed with rocky chucks of what's left of Mountain. 

A distraction. A sacrifice. A city on high alert.

Binary within the brain wires erupts. Overlaps. Ones and zeros have never felt so right. Robots loss bleeds into me. Infects me. His disease becomes my own. 

I'm little more than fleshy doll head. A puppet. A swinging pendulum ignited with rage. This world is going to fucking burn. 

I want this because Robot wants this. Robot has always wanted - ok listen, remember earlier when I told you you could go fuck yourself in regards to my revealing how long I've been trapped in this predicament? I'm sorry, I didn't mean it. I mean, things around here have been kind of stressful and I shouldn't have taken it out on you. It's somewhere around day 65 if I was forced to guess. 

So... we cool? Cool. Moving on...

The collective becomes alert, a faceless glow silhouetted by an encroaching dawn. Eight mechanical heads looking in eight different directions. They spin on an axis. Each a different face. Each a different emotion. All eyes and antennae, wired into a core at the center. They control the man with no face. They control the man with a mustache made of severed dicks. They control everything. 

Except me. Except Robot. We are completely offline.

Gears spin as the city locks down. Buildings in every direction become covered in layered steel. 

We have seconds. 

The planet quakes.

Robot runs for the central spire. Past the herd of fix bots. Past mechanical death rays. Past the man with no face. A power slide ends with access to the central spire as the doors crash behind.

Have you ever heard silence echo? Reverberation that mean nothing. All sound sucked into a void. Loneliness made audible.

A grid of lights meet at the center. 

Robot approaches. Robot kneels. Robot pulls off the door of a vault flush even with the floor. 

Darkness. A pit. Formless echoes speak from somewhere unseen like a thousand digital whisper. 

The chest cavity cracks. Swings open as Robot's body become horizontal. I evacuated at the speed of gravity. My brain wires catch inches from the point of impact. A hotdog dog down a highway. Teasing with just the tip. 

I sense my purpose. I sense the core of this city. I sense a glee that's not my own.

Wires sprout from my neck as I near. They leak electricity and fluid. Sparks and oily bubbles form a residue that slowly congeals into a waxy flesh substitute. No arms. No legs. All torso and cock bursting with downed power lines violently twitching from holes that never before existed. 

Robot thinks of Mountain. I think of Mountain. I think of a bathtub filled with blood splatter covering the naked form that was my body in another life.

This was meant to be. 

Deal with it. *disembodied sassy finger snap*

Day 63: 6666666666666666*

Today's mood: As my body slow rots into a dripping void of oil and decay, I've finally accepted that I'm nothing more than the number six placed sixteen times (see above ^) 

I sense a presence within the chest cavity. A floating cigarette burn, just on the edge of perception. A mini singularity. It sucks all matter and emotion. 

Robot is silent. Robot doesn't trust me. Robot doesn't trust anyone. 

The city spins around us as we hide from the collective. All gears and consciousness. A smooth jazz without sound. A lingering darkness. The word pizazz for no reason. 

We wait. 

It's been so long. My arms no longer exist. My memory is thin. Exposed bone with a hint of Alzheimer's. A torso. Greasy. Clear gobblules of something akin to chicken fat coats what's left of my skin. Only pain and the impression of a dead world remains. It's the only thing I'm allowed to think of.

What's left of my body tingles in unexpected places. 

Suddenly, the brain wires ignite. A secret code written within the bloodstream. A thousand zeros. A thousands ones. It tickles with all the joy of phantom paralysis. A glimpse that fades like a dream. 

Then it's gone. I'm all alone again. 

The presences vanishes. The concept of the word hollow as a physical entity. Remember it. It will be important later.

It's night.

Robot is on the move. 

This will hurt someone.

...........

*theres no such thing as six

Day 54: I'm Starting to Think I'm Broken; or, Have you ever seen how Beautiful Natural Lights Glints off a Razor?

Today's mood: There's so many things I wish I could say to you...

Setting: Imagine if you will, a dark alley within a city of collapsing metal buildings covered in layers of spinning gears and brass tubes. No curves. Only corners. They're broken. Shattered remnants within shattered remnant. Parallels set against walls that hang at impossible angles. The tubes lining each fray into separate paths at the base of each; a web that stretches to all corners of the city. 

Robot is fetal within the darkness. Motionless. A statue of disease and apprehension. He hides from a Collective that never rests.

Time means nothing. Only the solution. 

I dangle within the chest cavity from brain wires without mercy like the merry little marionette I was meant to be. Waiting for the next move. Waiting for the connection to give me something. Anything. I can feel our paths diverging. I feel numb. Drained. As un-automated in life as I was in death. Flesh inflated by stale ozone and a distance sense of self.

A void replaces the memory. The shrimp creatures stir. Circle. Their chitters overwhelm me. They coalesce. Merge. All become one. A reflection. Face to face. Eyes like coal. A tender embrace of tentacles and feelers follows. I think it's trying to tell me something. 

A beep. A surge. I see a vision of a world without atmosphere through the connection. Rock and desert. Everything I never wanted. The chitters stop. The mammoth shrimp dissolves one particle at a time. Embers become ash. 

Robot remains motionless.

Robot is giddy with anticipation. 

Robot's love was a false hope.

*****BONUS ACTIVITY!!!!*****

Unscramble the highlighted letters to decode a secret message from Robot!

_ _ _' _ _   _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _   _ _   _ _ _

Well that's certainly terrific news! 

Day 53: I'm Hoping You Were Not Expecting This To Go Any Other Way

Today's mood: I'm starting to grow hair in strange places

"No captive detected. You many pass." The pre-recorded words are scratched out with a needle from a within the grooves of a spinning clay cylinder lodged and amplified deep in the depths of a Guardian Death Ray. It said only one thing, forever.

Robot's body beeps in preprogrammed acknowledgement. It walks through a pair of gates into the city. The Guardian Death ray swivels. The sedatives begin to fade. 

The connection buzzes. All ones. No zeros. Robots body becomes epileptic. Freezes. Reboots.

A five second count down. A possession. The chest cavity comes to life around me with lights and beeps long forgotten. A pause. A moment of eternal bliss. 

Robot is restored. 

I rejoice. I weep uncontrollably. Duel oil slicks pour down my face.

We enter a district of hollow square buildings. They shimmer with a copper finish. Gears spin all around us. Friction against friction. A churning heat. 

We juke left past a pair of automatons. Crouched. A stealth machine. 

Mountain waits in a nearby alley. Motionless. Unmovable. A master of disguise. Shadows dance within crevasses guarding secrets known only to Robot. Pastel flowers bloom in spiraled patterns upon her summit. The fake beard glued to her cliff face isn't fooling anyone. 

Love surged through the connections. Robots lust becomes my own. 

Robot reaches into a cavern at her base with the delicate grace of a gentleman. Slow. Never eager. 

A moment of ecstasy. A hidden hard drive pulled out from within. 

Robot plugs it in. Visions of computer viruses dance in my head. I see his death. I see my death. I see the death of everything. Complete global meltdown. I've never been better.

Robot smiles at Mountain with metal teeth like jagged rooftops. 

Robot turns away. 

Robot has become a disease.