@goddessnanna
Its senses followed her as she left the cockpit – it was always good to know where your handlers was at any given time – but only when a door down the hall had audibly closed behind her did its eyes wander to the folder she had left behind.
It’s okay to do something because you want to.
It was certainly not okay because weapons don't want anything and idle hands are the devil's plaything and while it didn’t remember who had said the last parts, it knew it had tinkered with a piece of equipment and whoever had found out had broken every bone in its flesh hand.
She must have been speaking about the food. And the water.
It could hear the shower activate with a deep, electronic hum. Carefully, the asset activated the autopilot and let it metal hand wander over to the folder, opening it carefully. The pages were disarray ever since she had dropped it in the hangar, but she had looked inside it and maybe she would notice if the order changed again. Did people notice such things? The asset didn't know. It did, because it was trained to. Better to make sure it didn't mess them up further.
It had caught a few glimpses at the contents while pretending to pick up the pages from the floor of the hangar, looking for the codes – but this time it was looking for something else. It stopped when it found a thin piece of paper – cut out from a newspaper. It was the obituary of James Buchanan Barnes, dated 1944, but it had no interest in that.
What it what it wanted was the photo above it. Two men standing next to each other. One blond and muscular in a strange, blue costume, the other – the asset didn't look at him. Didn't want to look at him. Looking at pictures of that man came with negative stimuli attached.
After returning the folder to its place, it folded the piece of paper as small as possible and hid it inside the palm of its flesh hand.
Out of a strange impulse to cover up what it had been doing, it took a few greedy gulps of water and re-positioned the bottle slightly to the left.
When Nanna returned, she dripped water on the carpeted floor which didn't matter, because it wasn't blood and wouldn't stain. She also smelt like the Secretary's soap which the asset didn't like, but she looked slightly happier which was good. She deserved it.
"I activated auto-pilot." It said, because it didn't feel like wrestling with its programming about whether to repeat her wording (good) but that would mean saying it wanted something (bad) and even if it was getting suspiciously easy, it was still uncomfortable. Also it was an excuse for what it had done during her absence. "I will take 7 minutes."
