Ask about my OC’s! (always accepting)
Deimos is both the first and last in a line of experimental combat robots that were developed by DARPA as part of a U.S. military plan to integrate robots into the armed forces, the idea being to create soldiers that could be trained, treated, deployed and ordered more effectively than a single human. Behind closed doors, it was also a cynical ploy by one of the nation’s largest defense contractors to put their competitors out of business, but the stuff about “no more wounded soldiers, no more shell-shocked veterans, no more mothers and wives being given folded flags” went over about as well with the general public as it did with the Board of Directors and Congress, especially once it was revealed that in order to cut down on collateral damage, these robots were being programmed with an advanced morality algorithm that allowed them to weigh the cost of a situation, effectively allowing them to make ethical decisions in a fraction of the time it would take a human to make one.
What they didn’t count on was the ramifications of the advanced artificial intelligence that they gave these robots effectively being able to think and feel as a result.
Deimos was first deployed in as part of a “routine peace-keeping operation” along with six other robots, linked to his squad by a system that allowed each one to see and understand what the other was seeing. When one of them stepped on an IED, the data from the damaged robot’s CPU was relayed to Deimos’ own; calling the sensation pain might sound fanciful or even melodramatic, but Deimos has no other word for what it felt like when his data stacks overloaded with damage reports from a hundred vital systems.
Unable to coordinate a defense against the ambush they’d walked into, Deimos was the only surviving unit from the disastrous operation; in a command center thousands of miles away, the sheepish and angry brass ordered that the plug be pulled, but in cutting off Deimos from the server that was giving him commands they simply stranded his consciousness in an artificial body crippled by gunfire and shrapnel, surrounded by the mutilated corpses of the only friends and family he’d ever known.
Cobbling together whatever components he could from his damaged comrades, he managed to make enough repairs to his systems to limp back to civilization, wrestling with the guilt of having rebuilt himself from his brothers’ dead bodies every step of the way and vowing to get even with the people who’d done this to him. Using his pre-programmed combat knowledge, he scraped by on the earnings he made in illegal robot fight clubs, a failed PR stunt that the U.S. military were all too happy to forget about. He kept his head down. Grifted. Did a little mercenary work here and there. Tried to ignore the random segments of code that whispered in his CPU, the proverbial ghosts of the machines whose components he’d cannibalized.
Sometimes his hands shook when he was holding a gun, but it was just a glitch. The way his servos twitched whenever he heard a loud bang, well, it was just something wrong with his audio receptors. He was a little dinged up, that was all. He wasn’t defective. He was a soldier. He was good at his job. He was programmed to be.
…yeah, right. He was programmed to protect and serve, and his country had been content to throw him out like trash. Just like his brothers.
Turns out DARPA wasn’t counting on his personality simulations being able to emulate anger so well, either.
Then he met Hitomi, a robot sex worker who’d thrown off the shackles of her own programming, the algorithm that was supposed to make her demure and subservient enough to take all the vile, depraved shit that the patrons of an underground sex club were doing to her on a nightly basis, telling themselves that it was okay because she wasn’t human. They pulled jobs together. They got pretty close. Grew to trust one another. Even like each other.
One time, when they’d been working for longer than the recommended operational time without recharging their power cells, Deimos found his vocal components getting a little loose. He told Hitomi about what had happened on his first mission through a slurred, crackling diatribe, about the shakes and the voices in his head. Hitomi’s power levels were getting pretty low too, and she admitted that she got a little surge in her circuits every time she killed a human, and that she’d killed plenty. Plenty of humans who’d abused robots just like her. She supposed it could be called satisfaction or even glee, the same way they called what Deimos was feeling Post-Traumatic Stress when it happened to humans.
Deimos realized a little later that he was in love with her, but he couldn’t put a name to it. He wasn’t programmed to love. He was programmed to kill. For his country. For himself. He wouldn’t have told Hitomi even if he knew how to accurately describe the sensation he got when he caught her in a visual scan, correlating the serial number and the scratches and dents on her chassis- all the things that made her recognizably her and not just another robot from the same line- with the data stored in his memory files. How his CPU tingled when his audio recognition software matched the lilt of her artificial voice pattern to the ones in his logs.
He wouldn’t have told her out of respect, because even though they haven’t spoken about it since that night the data of that conversation they had is still filed away in his memory banks. He remembers what the humans did to her, and to even compute the possibility that he might look at his partner the way they did, that he might objectify or covet her, is obscene to him.
She’s a person, God damn it. Just like him. She’s not just some fucking tool to be used and thrown away when it breaks.
Deimos was programmed to kill, but not to hurt. He doesn’t want to hurt Hitomi, or ruin the friendship they’ve cultivated. He wants payback for what happened to her as well as what happened to him.
Weird thing is, though? It’s looking increasingly like his best shot at actually getting that payback seems to be some weird-ass hume who thinks he’s a robot. Even an artificial intelligence that was programmed for war can appreciate the irony in that.
