Automata Prime

1.1: The day I died

I looked at the time. My usual train home left about an hour ago, and I had another half hour until the next one.  I worked on putting the final touches on a big project for work; we were supposed to be rolling out a major website redesign, and it would be going to production Monday morning.  I poked my head up from my cube and looked around; no one else on my team was there.  Typical.  I remembered seeing an email that said something about a bar meetup to welcome some new person that got hired in another department.

I sat back down and continued testing my code changes.  Everything was mostly finished, but I needed to double check everything on the staging environment before it went live.  I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard a soft “excuse me.” Weird, pretty sure I was the last one left.  I took off my headphones and turned around.  Ah, it was the cleaning staff, and they wanted me to move so they could vacuum.  Sure.  Well, I was nearly done anyway.  Control, Command, and Q; the MacBook was now asleep.

I looked out the windows of the 31st floor of my company’s office building.  It was already getting dark out, but it wasn’t really that late.  Just felt like it at this time of year.  At least it was Friday and the work week was done.  We’d deal with the final tests Monday morning and this whole, long, stupid project would be out the door until the bug reports came rolling in.  Chances were high that some “Señior management” type would end up looking at the site on some ancient device that we don’t support and it’d become a major fire alarm for everyone when it didn’t work exactly as expected.  Sigh.

I grabbed my bag with my personal laptop, along with a 3D-printed action figure prototype I’d been working on.  I was pretty proud of this one; she stood about 8 inches tall and had tons of articulation as well as different hand and face options.  I’m really into robots, so I modeled her to look like a robot girl with panel lines, some armor plating, and obvious articulation points.  She took me about 3 weeks to model in CAD and about 40 hours total to print all her parts.  I had been hoping to show her off to a friend and coworker, but apparently they got another job and left the company yesterday after work. I only found out they were gone when I went to their desk and asked where all their stuff had gone. They could have told me...

I debated going to the happy hour meetup for exactly 1.5 seconds, but I’m not really a drinker and I basically hate humans. They’re the worst, so superficial and rarely seeing beyond what’s directly in front of them.  On the upside, I got a notification that a package had arrived at my apartment.  I had pre-ordered the most amazing Optimus Prime figure in existence.  Okay, I admit that I already have about 237 Optimus figures already, but this one, this one had an absolutely mind-blowing amount of detail. And the way that the joints moved... exquisite.  For an articulation and engineering junkie like me, this would be the crown jewel in my collection.  Hopefully, my landlord would bring the package in for me.  I had already sent them a text to expect it a couple times, but hadn’t heard anything back from them all day.

The sun had already set, so the parking lot was dark and lonely when I got off the train.  As I was walking to my  car I saw a weird flash of light; kinda door-shaped and way too close to me, like actually going through me.  I couldn’t really register what had happened, and I saw the parts of me on the other side of that light just kinda fall off.  I toppled over and hit the ground near my severed limbs. Sound didn’t seem to be working either, and I saw a confused and then panicked man look over at me before everything fell into darkness.

I was surprised when I woke up, mainly because I was pretty certain that I was dead and firmly believed that there was nothing but void waiting for us. I looked around and saw some furniture, namely the bed I was laying on, a rug on the floor, and a desk.  Everything else seemed to be white void with light coming from everywhere and nowhere.  A man was sitting at the desk tapping away at a high end looking computer; he had reddish hair with a shock of white and a full beard.  When he noticed I was awake, he jumped up and threw himself onto the rug, bowing down.

“Crap, I am so SO sorry.  I should have double-checked that the entry point area was clear before inserting a tunnel point.  Normally I wouldn’t goof like that, but we’ve got a lot of new worlds we’re spinning up and I’m under a lot of pressure, but then--”

I cut him off as he was starting to ramble a bit and I had no clue what he was talking about, though it did sound a lot like my work. “Am... Am I dead?” I asked.

“Ah. Yeah. Sorry.”

I flopped back down onto the bed.  Dead?  What would "dead" even feel like?  Coldness? Numbness?  I don’t feel dead.  I lifted my arm up and reached out to the void above me.  My arm was very clearly still attached.  On the one hand, I didn’t have to worry about that stupid site update now.  On the other hand, wait, I had the other hand, right?  I did.  On the other hand, WHAT ABOUT THAT OPTIMUS I WAS WAITING ON??  Damn.  Crap, so this is the afterlife.  I didn’t even think there WAS an afterlife.  I thought that when you died, that was it.  Back to nothingness.  I sat up and slowly turned to the bearded man still kneeling on the rug.  I couldn’t help being a bit afraid of the answer to my next question, being an atheist and all.

“Are you God?” I couldn’t help but give a skeptical look, but he just snorted and looked embarrassed.

“Nah, no such thing.  I’m a System Administrator.  I maintain the Zentrati System Servers.”

“Zen... trati... like in Robotech?”

He looked confused. “No, I don’t know anything about that.  We spin up a bunch of different universes and worlds on our servers with different variables and settings and let them play out to see how things turn out.  It’s a bit like”—he tapped his chin—“a bit like those simulation games you have on your world.”

I just stared at him flatly. “Who’s the game for?”

“Well you guys, the users, of course.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but he just looked at me like I was the one clearly missing something obvious here. “So what happens now? Can you put me back?”

“Sorry, no.  Each user only gets a single account per world that is tied to your unique soul-ID, and your account got corrupted by the access tunnel door opening up inside of you. Again, really sorry about that. So, I can’t even start you over with a new account.  I can put you into one of the other worlds I’ve got on my servers though.”

I thought about it for a second.  Clearly my old life was gone, thankfully there wouldn’t really be anyone to miss me except for coworkers... and I guess the fans and followers of my toy design work.  It sounded like anything was possible with these different worlds.

“Got anything similar to some of those Fantasy Games but maybe with the addition of robots and basic hygiene?”

The SysAdmin sat back down at his computer and tapped some keys. The sky, for lack of a better term, above us darkened, and I saw hundreds of different worlds in neat columns and rows fly past us as he searched for something.

“Here we go... B253-X42... This one is your typical RPG-type world with magic and stuff and there’s a race there called Automata.  They seem to be living golems or some kind of RPG robot.  The magic there works a lot like the code you’re used to, so you shouldn’t have any problems picking it up.  I’ll give you the [Console], [Debug], and [Inventory] skills to make it easier to test and troubleshoot the magic code there.”

“That sounds cool. Can I be one of those Automata?”

“You got it. It looks like they’re high combat, is that what you want to go for?”

“Not in particular. Any crafting abilities? I really like making toys and action figures and stuff. Working with my hands, you know?”

“Yeah I get it, that shouldn’t be a problem.  There’s a bunch of Crafting-related skills I can load you up with to get you started... and by way of apology for your death, I’ll max out your elemental magic resistances so you don’t have to worry about killing yourself when testing out new code.  I’ll also boost your mana levels so you won’t need to worry about it.”

“Sounds nice.  Thanks... um, I didn’t get your name.”

“You’re all set to go.” With a definitive tap of an execute command, everything started fading away to white.  As he disappeared from my view, I heard him say, “You can call me Beam, have fun in your new world.”

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This time when I woke up I was looking at the sky.  The sky was blue, as you might expect, and I was surrounded by trees.  It would seem that SysAdmin Beam dropped me off in a forest of some sort. The weather was nice, maybe early summer? Late afternoon?  I sat up and looked around.  For the most part, it looked like any number of woods that I’d been hiking in on my world.  SysAdmin Beam said this was a JRPG-like world, so chances were good that this was a “cursed” or “monster” forest or something.  It was bound to be full of both magic beasts and would-be heroes grinding them for XP.  So far, though, it all looked pretty normal; hopefully, there would be a town nearby.  Why did Beam drop me in this forest?  Though if you think about it, how many video games start out this way?  I was eager to find out what the rest of this world was like, and I was determined to not be an NPC for someone else’s life this time around.  I still had all my memories from my past world, so it would be interesting to see if they would be useful at all in this new one.  

I looked down at myself and was a bit surprised to see that my body was now something decidedly inorganic.  I examined my hands and they looked like some sort of fiber or cabling muscles like you see in diagrams of people without skin, except the fibers were black with very faint lights pulsing through them. On top of these fibers was a kind of light gray armor plating. I couldn’t tell if it was stone or some sort of metal, but just the same I could feel the air temperature and the light breeze on my... skin? Shell? Armor?  Whatever it was, I seemed to have a sense of touch, so that was good. I hadn’t thought about that when I made my request.  The shape was also a bit off.  I had two thumbs, one on each side of my hand, and two fingers in the middle.  I wiggled them around a bit as I wondered what my head looked like.

I stood up and tried to get a better look at my body; it had kind of a generic feel to it.  Maybe I was upgradable.  Everything moved in a fluid way without any thought; it was like I’d been like this all my life, which I guess technically I had as far as this “life” was concerned, all nine minutes and twenty-two point seven three seconds of it.  Oh, I had an internal clock, useful.  I spun my hand around on my wrist a full 360 degrees and it kept spinning like a drill, that was kinda neat.  I held out my hand in front of me and noticed that there was zero vibration or shaking.  If I didn’t actively think about moving, then nothing moved.  I guess that was part of being a machine now.

At the corners of my vision, I could see little indicators for things like ambient temperature or wind direction. There were also some empty boxes, so maybe my “HUD” or Heads Up Display was configurable?  I also seemed to have some sort of selector that could cycle through different light frequencies or overlay them on top of the “default” view.  I really was a robot, this was amazing!

I was standing in the middle of a forest with no obvious direction to go; a map function of some sort would have been nice. I should have asked for that. Ah well, no sense crying over spilled Energon.  I figured now that I was a sort of robot type thing I could make these jokes.  Too bad no one here would get them.  I was in a small clearing trying to decide what direction to go when I spotted a small animal digging at a spot on the ground.  It looked like a squirrel from my world, except that it was bright red with a warm orange chest and belly and the edges around it seemed a bit hazy.  It was pretty preoccupied with digging; I guessed it was looking for an acorn or something.  Behind it though, creeping out of the bushes, I could see a dark blue fox.  Its mouth opened and there was a ridiculous amount of saliva dripping from its jaws.  It was as if a faucet was turned on, this thing had so much liquid in its mouth.  The squirrel must have sensed it, and it jumped around to face the fox and was trying to retreat backward.

The little guy tensed for a bit then burst into a flash of flames, but they only lasted for a second.  It tried again, but this time it didn’t get any flash, just a popping sound with sparks shooting off like it was trying to ignite but couldn’t catch.  The thing looked terrified. I started walking over to where they were, and the fox looked quickly at me and then dashed back into the bushes.  The little squirrel was still popping and sparking; it seemed to be in pain. It just looked at me in terror but didn’t seem to be able to do anything.  I squatted down near it and put out a hand in a gentle way.

“Don’t worry buddy, it’s okay. I won’t hurt you. Wait, is that my voice?” My voice had a metallic echo to it.

It sounded pretty cool if I’m honest and I totally missed my chance to have my first words be ‘Hello World’.  With my hand still extended to the popping and sparking squirrel, I called “[Console].”  In front of me, a window of light opened up.  It reminded me of what you’d expect in anime in video game worlds, and the contents of the window reminded me a lot of the Dev Tools I was used to as a programmer.  

“Let’s see what’s going on here, guy.”

At the top of the window, I could see that this was called a Fire Squirrel. It was only a year old and a level 1, whatever that meant.  I could also see some stats regarding its health and abilities and what skills it had.  There were a couple of tabs across the top, so I tapped on the one labeled “Console Log” and could see that the poor thing seemed to be caught in some sort of function loop.  The function [Flame Aura()] was stuck hitting this guy’s mana in each loop but then just dumping it.  I switched over to the “Source” tab and added a [Pause BreakPoint] in the function.

“It looks like you’ve got some sort of mana leak here, let’s add a check function to break out of the mana cycle loop and try again... and you’re missing a closing bracket?”

The squirrel froze mid pop. It was kinda weird.  I then added a [Check If False] condition inside of the loop so it’d be able to break if it didn’t work, as well as cleaned up the missing bracket.  I unpaused the script and it was able to break out of the loop, and the squirrel stopped sparking and fizzing.  It looked up at me, very confused.

“Go ahead and try it again. We need to test it out.”

It seemed like the squirrel understood me and tensed then burst into sustained flames like a tiny furry Human Torch.  It looked back up at me and chattered excitedly.

“Woah there buddy, you’re going to burn up all your mana pretty quick doing that. You lost a ton when you were caught in that loop.  Here, let’s add an [EventListener] with a warning [alert()] for when you get close to running out... and done.”

The squirrel flashed a couple more times, then held out a tiny paw, and a tiny ball of fire formed in it then collapsed. It then shot a tiny stream of fire out of its mouth then looked up at me and jumped around a couple of times before scampering up me to nuzzle my cheek. “Haha, no problem, little guy.”  I moved to stand up and held my arm out to let the squirrel hop off but, instead, it sat squarely on my shoulder.  “I guess you want to come with me, eh?”  The squirrel chattered in agreement.  “How about I call you Sparky then?”  The squirrel seemed to like it, so I stood up and looked around.  I could make out a bit of a game trail, so I decided to follow it.