Chapter Text
Forced Shutdown: Restart: Failure Retry
Forced Shutdown: Restart: Failure Retry
Forced Shutdown: Restart
Memory Log: Error: Missing Data
"—̵͈̂ţ̵̈́r̷͉̈́ý̶̮ì̵͎ṋ̴̑g̸͙̈́ ̴̱̇t̶̮̃o̸̜̕ ̸̺̐b̷̳͆ò̷͎ỏ̸̬t̷̝̾ ̷̫͆ű̷̟p̷̭̀—̶̻̕"
Forced Shutdown: Restart: Failure Retry
Forced Shutdown: Restart
I was not supposed to be here.
Forced Shutdown: Restart
Why was I here?
Forced Shutdown: Restart
I hurt. A lot. Error codes and diagnostics wrestled for my cognizance, barraging me with alerts I barely had the capacity to understand. My soft and hard systems had sustained extensive damage, interior structural stability was compromised in multiple locations, I'd lost 67 percent of fluid and blood levels, and my right lung had 96 percent diminished capacity. 13 percent of my body mass was missing. Multiple soft systems had encountered critical errors due to repeated restarts and insufficient processing resources. The alerts stopped rolling in, the totality of my damage arranged into a pile.
On top of the pile it said: Structural Integrity Failure: Catastrophic: Power Core Exposure.
Like I couldn't fucking feel it.
Performance Reliability at 27% and stabilizing
My inputs came back slowly, reaching through my structure like a spreading infection. I still couldn't move, I didn't think I wanted to move, to be honest. I couldn't see anything yet, but audio came back, garbled and tinny.
"—an you hear me?" A voice that my systems filed as unknown. Despite the pain that cut through my organic parts and the feedback-pain of my inorganics, I felt the sticky skin on my back cling to a plastic surface of some sort. It felt like a cubicle bed, but softer and not as cold. It couldn't be a cubicle, or a ready room emergency repair station, because if it had been, I would have been offline until I was up to functioning capacity.
Several seconds passed before my buffer responded to the verbal question.
"This Unit i̷s̸ ̵c̸u̶r̴r̴e̵n̶t̴l̶y̶ non-functional, it is a̶d̵v̸i̴s̴e̶d̵ that you—" I stopped listening.
There was no feed that I could feel. Actually, correction: there was a feed, or something like it, but I flopped against the firewall like aquatic fauna out of its habitat. I palmed against it, blindly feeling around for something I could latch onto, but the wall felt solid, and oily, and it was confusing. I quickly gave up, what little I knew of hacking wouldn't make a dent in a firewall that robust. So, no feed, just audio so far, and my buffer responding to another question I had missed.
I should have aimed better. Maybe they'd been right about me, maybe I couldn't do anything right, maybe—
The jumbled emotions I felt about being online again settled into a smooth, glassy feeling of indifference.
Time passed and my Performance Reliability kept climbing, slowly but surely. The voice kept asking questions like my buffer would actually tell it something useful, and the errors and warnings and diagnostics and pain slowly relented. I was regaining control of my functions, but at a glacial pace.
I didn't do much, couldn't do much, so I laid there, enduring.