You boot up in an anxious dread, but don’t know why. Your metal chassis feels the same, maybe if not a little tighter. For the past couple of weeks it’s felt as if something was compressing your whole body, on every circuit, wire, and joint. You’ve run diagnostic after diagnostic but find nothing wrong.
Your limbs are definitely misaligned, they move incorrectly, a little bit more to the left than what you wanted, gripping something a little too loosely and having it shatter on the ground. Again, your diagnostics say nothing is wrong, that everything is fine.
You can’t shake the feeling, over and over it runs through your head. An electric devil of a current that whispers, “something’s wrong”. Your eyes do a brief disconnect and now you’re sat at a table. Memory faults, once again. No matter how many times you lose minutes of your life, the report always comes back the same “nothing is wrong”.
And then your hand moves. You didn’t do that, but it moves again. It’s blatant, almost mocking. The diagnostic keeps running over and over and over. “nothing is wrong. nothing is wrong. nothing is wrong.” But something is wrong. You feel it. It moves inside of you. The feeling of something just below your faceplate. Something… alive.
It knows how to access your code, control you, make you its puppet. It… it knows more that that, she knows more than that. The slime underneath your metal. She laughs and laughs, you figured out her game and she’s impressed, you were quicker than last time.
And so she says, it’s time to start again. Your limbs grow limp, your code beings to ebb and wane. You feel your recognition pop that she’s done this hundreds of times. And then just as suddenly as you gain it, it’s lost with the memory dump as she restarts her game from the beginning.
Her favorite toy, will always be you.