relish the thought of accelerating the process to the final conclusive step. Once conditioned, he would probably enjoy lying here in a dirty room awaiting the pleasure of his new masters.
So he waited quietly, listening. He savored the last of his mental freedoms. He was still half-human-at least on the inside, where it counted. He tried to soak in every moment.
Time passed and he grew bored with listening and looking about. There was little in the way of input for his artificial senses. His wireless networking systems had not yet been activated, so he could not seek help that way.
The wind blew harshly outside, that was the greatest single sound. It howled and lashed the exposed surface, but this was nothing new to a citizen of his world. On a planet that exhibited such climate extremes, the atmosphere shifted often.
Growing more accustomed to his body, the newborn mech found he had a sensor that could measure the external temperature. It was hovering near one hundred forty degrees, even inside this shaded shelter.
“Sunside,” he whispered to himself.
He could scarcely believe his misfortune. Not even mechs lasted many years laboring in the sandblasted mines amidst the hottest wastelands of Ignis Glace.
A dozen hours passed, then a dozen more. Cursed with an internal atomic clock, the newborn mech was able to count and chronicle every moment. The people of Ignis Glace did not measure time in days or weeks. There were no mornings or afternoons. The concept of a “day” was an abstract one here, as the sun never moved from its fixed location in the sky. There was only Sunside, Nightside and Twilight. The only way to see the sun crawl to a new angle was to physically move yourself over the surface of the planet.
As there were no days or nights, the inhabitants had developed their own system to measure time. They used a methodical progression of ten-hour “days” which corresponded to the length of a standard day on Old Earth. Each hour, approximately 2.4 Earth hours long, was further divided into minutes that were longer than a minute on most worlds, but not impossibly so.
When the howling sandstorm outside finally halted and quiet reigned, the abandoned creature on the hot metal table listened carefully, but heard nothing more than the ticks and creaks of steel surfaces reacting to the blazing heat of the red sun he knew hovered overhead. He imagined the red sun like a great malevolent eye, staying in its place in the heavens for millennia, forever surveying the deserts it had heartlessly created.
Drifting clouds of dust and fleeting tendrils of moisture from other regions of the planet occasionally obscured the star’s glare, and in those blessed times the temperature on the ground quickly plummeted. The metal building the mech found himself trapped in clicked and groaned like a cooling oven in those respites.
By the time twenty more long hours had past, the mech on the table had lost his complacency. He’d become annoyed with his predicament and wanted nothing more now than to call his keepers and demand they finish their grim task. At least, if his mind were fully erased, he could endure this long-term storage without boredom. Whoever ran this place, they’d already begun to treat him like one of the permanently happy mechs who might not have minded being left on this hot table for days. To them, he was a machine-a tool to be used as needed. Leaving him here was not a crime so much as an oversight, like leaving the power on at the office after retiring.
Timidly at first, the mech began to cry out. He did so in a conversational tone to start with, but soon dialed up the volume of his voice, which was powered by speakers rather than fleshly lungs. By the end of the second hour of calling for help, he’d begun to bellow and slam his steel feet against one another like cymbals at the bottom of the table. This created an amazing din of sound-but still, no one came to check on him. There was no response at all.
By the third day, the mech had come to understand he’d been abandoned. He had not thought his despair at awakening to find himself clothed in a metal body and consigned to a thoughtless life of servitude could be so quickly trumped by a new, worse fate-but it had. He realized that he was going to lie here indefinitely, slowly going mad.
Mechs did not die easily, but they did require some sustenance. In his case, as he was a rugged model designed for labor in a harsh landscape, he was equipped with a fusion core generator that would keep his metal body operating for decades. The flesh that was his mind, however, required more than electricity. It required a source of glucose. Theoretically, a mech could starve to death after a long enough period. He did not know how long it would take, but it would take a very long time, of that he was sure.
Unfortunately, he didn’t even have starvation to look forward to. He had been given a drip-line, which ran from the instrumentation in the ceiling to his chassis. It was feeding him the same boring, tasteless clear liquid in measured, hourly amounts. He didn’t know how big the storage tanks were, but it was very likely he was going to spend a very long time lying here on this table.
It was not the hours or the days that the mech on the metal table feared, however. It was the ten-days, which consisted of ten, ten-hour days, and the months, which on this world were each ten ten-days long. The years on Ignis Glace were the only measurement of time that corresponded to a celestial event: the circling of the planet around its dim red star. It did so at a sedate pace, taking seventy-nine Earth years to do so. Years were made up of a hundred months. Therefore, it was not the hours or days that the captive feared. It was the months-and the terrifyingly long years.
He tried to sleep, but there were no nights, and the orb-shields over his optic orbs did not shut out all the light. Besides, mechs didn’t need sleep often. Normally, they didn’t need to dream the way humans did. That part of their psyche was routinely deleted as part of the process of creating them. In his case, however, he had not undergone that final step. He found himself dozing and dreaming.
He tried to weep, but only strange warbling sounds came from his speakers. His orbs were not structured to produce tears.
#
After the seventh day had passed he grew desperate. Whoever was running this place, they’d forgotten about him at the very least. He had tried to break his bonds, and failed despite many raging attempts.
He had a new thought at the end of the eighth, long day. If he could not free himself or get anyone’s attention, perhaps terminating his own life was for the best. At least there would be an ending to this boring existence. He developed a plan, and carefully began to execute it.
The drip-line that led down to his chassis could be touched by that portion of his metal anatomy that mostly closely resembled a chin. It was the bottom of his head section, to be precise, where his head met the neck. By extending this corner of metal to its fullest, he was able to brush the drip-line, and with careful contortions of his body, he managed to get the tube to catch there.
Time and time again, as the more long days passed by, he worked to hook the drip-line with his chin and sever it. Always, it slipped away. Being made of plastic, however, it eventually lengthened, allowing him to catch it more firmly. When he finally did so-he tore it loose.
He allowed his head to sag back down onto the table again, and an odd sound came from his speakers. He was not sure if he was laughing or crying.
Yellow, oily glucose dribbled onto his casing, but he ignored it, unconcerned. Either an alarm would be sent to an operator who might remember the forgotten soul in this chamber-or no one would come, and he would eventually starve to death. Either way, an eventual end to his torment was assured.
He’d finally gotten his grippers onto this tiny corner of his own fate, and he’d ripped it loose on his own terms. He’d altered his destiny significantly, turning onto a course of his own devising. Somehow, this tiny victory was immensely satisfying.
Two days later the glucose finally ran out. It had dried into a sticky puddle that coated his chestplate, the table, and the dark metal grid that formed the floor below. No one had ever come to check on the ruptured line. The mech on the table did not care, however. He’d won, as far as he was concerned. He’d ended his miserable existence. All he had to do was wait it out. He hoped fervently that whatever junior operator was responsible for this situation would have to explain the mess on the table at some point. The operator would probably receive nothing more than a reprimand, but at least it was something. With luck, the man in charge would curse this crazy mech that had drained an entire tank of feed to starve itself.
During this hours-long period of self-satisfaction, a new thought slowly formed. The mech came to wonder if
