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's 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 robot's 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. It urges me to love and lust for inanimate objects.

I'm unleashed into a field of velvet flowers. A hear female voice from behind. I turn. Mountain is there. Mountain is beautiful.

She speaks.

I swoon.

I fuck.

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

I can feel the fear and confusion of the captive in my chest cavity.

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 65 (Still): 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. 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. It pulsates. It stretches miles. It scrambles 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.

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 few remaining shrimp creatures' spasm in their final 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 metal, 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. Robot's 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 regard 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. Above the city, 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.

The city locks down. Gears Spin. Buildings in every direction are 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 means nothing. All sound sucked into a void. Loneliness made audible.

A grid of lights meets at the center.

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

Formless echoes speak from somewhere within like a thousand digital whisper.

Robot lays over the opening. The chest cavity cracks. Swings open. I evacuated at the speed of gravity. My brain wires catch inches from impact. A hotdog dog down a highway.

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.

Day 63: It's no Longer Safe to Talk

Today's mood: As my body slow rots into a dripping void of oil and decay, I can’t help but feel that I'm approaching the end.

I sense a presence within the chest cavity. Like a floating cigarette burn. Distant. Devoid of light. A mini singularity that sucks all matter and emotion.

Robot is silent.

It doesn't trust me.

It doesn't trust anyone.

The collective’s always watching.

The city spins around us. All gears and consciousness. A lingering darkness. A hiding spot behind a temple made of copper.

We wait.

There are no more signals. No more beeps. Only pain and the impression of a dead world remains. It's the only thing I'm allowed to think of.

Suddenly, the presence vanishes.

The brain wires ignite. A secret code written within the bloodstream. A thousand zeros. A thousand ones.

So many things lost.

So many things unsaid.

It's night.

Robot is on the move. Panicked. Desperate.

This will hurt someone.

Day 57: I'm Starting to Think I'm Broken; or, Have you ever seen how Beautifully 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. It 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 56: 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.

Robot’s body reaches a forgotten city, turned engine at dawn. We stop at guardian death ray. It speaks. It’s scans Robot for captives.

It waves us through.

Robot beeps preprogrammed acknowledgement, as it passes through a pair of gates.

The sedatives begin to fade. The connection buzzes. All ones. No zeros. Robots body locks up as its memory core reboots.

A five second count down.

My brain wired light up. Robot greets me. Thanks me. Restores my every vital sign back to normal.

The shrimps don’t make a sound.

Robot sneaks into the city slums, crouching past a pair of automatons. Within, buildings shimmer. Gears spin. Pipes hiss.

Mountain waits in an alley nearby. Motionless. Unmovable. A master of disguise. Shadows dance within crevasses behind a fake beard, guarding secrets known only to Robot.

Love surged through the connections. Robot’s lust becomes my own.

Robot reaches into a cavern at its base. Slow. Delicate. Never eager.

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

Robot plugs it in.

Through the brain wires, I see a computer virus.

I see Robot’s death.

I see my own death.

I see the death of everything; a complete global meltdown.

Robot places a finger over Mountain lips.

Robot whispers a final goodbye.

Robot has become a disease.