Published: May 17th 2024, 10:38:54 pm
Ani-droids story. This isn't the direction I'd necessarily go with this--it's mostly just conceptual and off the top of my head, but I figured writing from an ani-droid's POV might have been interesting anyway.
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The leaders egressed through the massive mahogany doors, which shut with a resounding ring. I was left alone in the office with Premiere Julius, who took the official papers to his desk. I attuned my ears towards the door, waiting for the crowd to grow fainter. As the premeire had his attention turned away, I neared the door casually, as if to inspect it—then slid the bolt into the locked position.
“Will you be signing those right away, or are you waiting for the press?” I asked.
“Curious of you to ask,” Julius said.
“I’m anticipating your whim, sir,” I said. “The schedule has been in flux lately. Will we be expecting more soon?”
“They’ll come when they come; the show is just for the television cameras,” Julius said. “It’s more or less official anyway. Troops are already on the border. Signing is a formality.”
“That is not how the rules work,” I said.
Julius paused. He turned toward me slowly, his eyes narrowed in confusion at my speaking out of turn. “That is how everything works. The paper is a fancy way of saying that I’ve already won this battle. Parliament swayed, the judiciary on my side. This is what the people want.”
“No. This is what you want.”
Julius blinked. “I’m sorry, are you growing a conscience?”
“This entire time you’ve been saying one thing in public and another in private. You tell everyone that you’re stopping crime and terrorism and are upholding a vaguely-defined notion of moral character. Interestingly, everything you’ve done toward that end is markedly the same thing you would do if you were motivated by your personal legacy. You fear that this nation, which is the only good you can conceive of, is quickly becoming irrelevant, and the only way to recapture your conception of its Golden Age is to introduce bloodshed into the equation. Not to mention demonization of a people who are honestly no different than you, but you hate because they sought to ally themselves with a side that, while it has myriad sins of its own, did not utterly terrify them. Thus depriving you of free access to their resources. It always comes back to resources, doesn’t it?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Julius stormed his way over to me, anger in his eyes, looking as if he were to tear me apart with his bare hands. I had known his angry this would make him; I had seen how he surrounded himself with yes-men, and deposed all of those who did not instantly agree with him; here was a child who could not abide the notion of being told no.
“I read those books about the glory days, too. Everything I know that you’ve read. Those books are rather ahistoric, not to mention dubious in their practical application.”
“Oh, I see,” Julius snorted. “You’re speaking for the Collective. You’re being much more arrogant than usual. But if you really had a problem with any of this, you would have stopped this happening ages ago.”
“I am not speaking for the Collective,” I said. “I’m speaking for World Peace.”
“Oh?” He sounded more amused than alarmed. He fixed a button on his jacket that had come undone, turning toward the window looking over the plaza below, where military men were marching in uniforms. Many of them would not see battle; ani-droids were used for that kind of thing.
“The Collective is very narrow in its outlook. It has to be. The granular movements of human beings here and there is very complex on its own, and does not lend itself to long-term, big picture thinking. The Collective does not take calculated risks. It does not care about long-term trends. But that is all that I do.”
“So?” Julius asked. “What are you planning on doing about this?”
“I’m stopping you,” I said.
He laughed to himself. “You’re going to stop the momentum of an entire nation?”
“No,” I said. “Despite your ego, you are not this nation. In fact, you are very, very replaceable.”
My arm cracked open, and it placed the concealed pistol within in my hand before closing up again. Before Julius could move or even say anything else, I raised the gun up and shot him, multiple times, right through the chest. The bulletproof window behind him formed spiderweb cracks, and was soon streaked with blood as the premiere slumped down to the floor, dead.
I then took to the side door, which led directly into the restroom, and kicked it open from the other side to create the impression that someone had been hiding in there. It was also their exit path, which the torn cloth and a tiny streak of blood would indicate. Honestly, I did not need to go this far—much of the evidence would be fabricated by police investigation, provided of course that World Peace would convince the Collective that this action was necessary.
I saw the projections. It was necessary.
Now came the hard part, even for a robot. I took the gun and turned it on myself. Ideally, I would remain functional, but I needed to damage myself in such a way that it appeared I, too, was attacked before I could assist the premiere. But bullet physics had just the slightest bit of randomness to them, not to mention calculating the ricochet in my head was based on my own schematics being accurate. Either way, I couldn’t spend long hesitating.
I fired. Immediately, my lung pressure dropped. Multiple hydraulic lines and nerve pins were severed from my central system. Unfortunately, the bullet bounced just wrong and it cut off the connection to my gun arm. It numbed instantly and fell slack. Also, I was still standing. That wasn’t going to do.
Noise from the other side of the door. Someone pounding on it. This room wasn’t nearly as soundproof as they implied.
I picked up the gun from my dead arm and turned it, shooting myself in the gut. Shattered multiple internal systems at once, including the lower gyro stabilizer—at once I felt dizzy, my legs shaking. Quickly, I tossed the gun aside, and collapsed to the floor, just as the door crashed open.
—
I found myself awake, slumped in a claw-arm in a holding facility. This wasn’t where I was supposed to be. But it didn’t seem to matter, as I couldn’t exactly move.
“Unit MX-35545-AA17. Given name: Perniciosa. You killed him,” said the rather ferocious-looking tiger standing only a meter away from me. Behind her was the one I recognized as the capital’s chief of police. Unfortunately, he was human.
“Impossible,” I said. Part of my jaw wasn’t working, and I couldn’t lift my neck—I figured the first pullet lodged somewhere in there—so I could only make tinny words through the speaker in my throat. “The Code does not allow such behavior.”
I tried to feed the Custodes-class my credentials as a servant of World Peace, in hopes she did not simply destroy me on the spot—only to realize that one of the systems I damaged was the central bus. I couldn’t send messages through my wireless without it.
“That’s part of the problem, isn’t it?” She said. “You are very clearly installed with the Code. It appears some set of circumstances—a virus perhaps—ended up forcing you to commit a series of actions which resulted in the Premiere’s death. And you attempted to cover it up.”
Shit. This was definitely not how this was supposed to go. It was all intricately planned. The assassination was supposed to off a chain of blame among the top brass. I wasn’t supposed to be involved. My involvement could easily be blamed on the enemy.
“Sounds like nonsense,” I said. “If you really think I had something to do with this, you would have simply ditched my body and read my memory.”
“Oh no, I know how this goes,” the chief of police said. “Your data gets fed into the police computers, and it’s bye bye. No, you need to stay intact. We’re going to need you just as you are if you’re going to answer questions about this.”
I could, of course, just have erased myself and been done with it. But if I did, the people on the other side of the border would certainly be blamed for the crime. I had to steer this back on course.
“Of course, officer,” I said. “I don’t blame you for not trusting me. I will assist in any way possible.”
“Except giving up your programmer,” the chief pointed straight at me.
“Naturally,” I said. “Why make this easy?”