Chapter 1: Chapter 1: God Damn The Sun

A yellow sun shone out from beyond the clouds. I stared up at it from my apartment.

Yellow and a little green, actually. Just like every other day. I guess the sky was a little more fogged up with smog than normal, but other than that it was a perfectly normal, boring, dreary day on Earth.

Ugh, I hated it. The sun, I mean. It used to be bright, beautiful — a reminder that all of us had more to go. A shining white dot in the sky. It'd been decades since that was the case. More than decades, actually. The few people left alive after whatever had happened were either the descendants of survivors, or genetically enhanced, or robots. Nobody had truly seen what humanity was like, as the dominant species. Not anyone I knew of, at least.

I got little snippets, though. Sometimes. When it happened, I was stored safely away in an underground containment facility; my kind hadn't been given as many rights as those in other countries had, so I'd experienced nothing until an emergency system turned me on generations after the mass extinction event. But before that, I'd had a few connections. My builders, a jovial couple with too much time on their hands. Some people on the internet.

They were all dead now. If not from radiation, starvation, murder, or from whatever'd caused those great cavities in the ground, then from old age. I didn't have any robotic friends. Most of the others in my block of containment weren't all too sentient, and anyways a lot of them had been scavenged already.

Eugh. I suddenly felt queasy. (This always happened when I imagined those robots looking just like me, except with their stomachs open and faceplates gone and the wires all sticking out everywhere.)

Pushing my discomfort down, though, I turned to go back inside and truly start my day. Life was fairly meaningless, but I'd long since come to terms with the fact that death scared me more than anything — time to scavenge for repair parts, electricity, and any biochemical nutrition I could find. Another long day.

I held tight to the grip of my pistol. Funny how the one thing that outlasted humanity consistently was its weaponry. Not a surprise by any means, but I honestly would have expected something else intrinsic to survive intact. No, though: I'd seen even a few functional jets (though not of any make or aircraft model I'd seen before) that were clearly military streaking through the skies around here. A total waste of metal, electronics, and jet fuel, of course. They were shot down quickly, usually by a burst of plasma — probably a railgun, or something. My weapon was much simpler. Still chemical munitions, but by some odd mechanism it manufactured bullets purely based off of atomic fusion.

Yeah. I had no idea either. If I was able to tap into its energy supply I'd be able to go for centuries without worrying about my needs — maybe I could skip right to when grasses overtook the planet again — but no, of course I wasn't that lucky. The mini-fusion reactor drawing hydrogen out of the air was also locked to a single output value. I couldn't figure out a way to make it produce any less than 2GV at an amperage of 1,000,000. That much power running through anything was liable by my understanding of electromechanical engineering to instantly heat it by hundreds of degrees. That's two trillion watts. That I couldn't fucking use, because there were no longer any usable step-down transformers for fucking terawatt generators.

Nevertheless, the gun was my only one. I'd looted it early on off of a lucky military crash-site find, one most had disregarded due to the noxious fumes emanating from the cargo holds. Being a robot had some perks — though, then again, I was far more susceptible to radiation than humans were due to my unshielded electronics.

Anyways. Currently, I was sneaking alongside the alley of a chain-convenience store. They were a dime-a-dozen around here, but had been mostly ignored — obviously, the first few weeks had dried all their stores of general supplies, and the next few years had likely been why all the electrical and mechanical parts were gone. Now, they just stood as a testament to what once was: a society firmly focused on destroying the minds, bodies, and souls of its workers. I scoffed. At least the billionaires got what was coming in the end. It was a hard-fought fight even in other, more kind countries for AI rights — let alone here in what used to be the continental United States, home of bigotry and company propaganda.

The way to scavenge, for me, was just to walk around and let myself naturally find interesting things. Maybe a little laissez-faire for others, but my sensors were good enough to let my mind wander as my feet did the same; right now I was looking for anything biological I could try to burn for power, or some form of electrical storage/generator components. The main problem with being electrical in nature is that kinetic generators based off of work you do — hand cranks and the like — inherently don't work at all. The second law of thermodynamics forbids it: if I tried to cycle for a week to keep myself alive, I'd need to find a way to exploit some other form of electrical generation to augment it.

So, here I was: examining the store visually for anything I could grab. For right now? Nothing.

I sighed. Yeah, fat chance I was gonna get anything I needed from here. I'd considered using my gun's firing mechanism for power, but that'd cause a lot of noise (even if I opened the bullets to get at the propellant, I still didn't really have a known way to produce efficient electrical energy that wouldn't draw attention.) Solar was my best bet, but it was already difficult enough before whatever happened to get clean energy like that — also, I had no wiring or magnets to use for current generation.

Well, things weren't all bad, I guess! I'd survived for a couple months off of scavenged plants and batteries. I'd just have to hope that someday soon I could make that renewable energy generator and move to like, a place with a waterfall, if those still existed. And then I'd just have to turn myself off and wake myself up in a couple thousand years. Honestly, there were probably robots already doing it right now.

Yeah. You go, KZX! Be positive! Even if it doesn't... feel like anything's ever gonna get better, you just gotta man up. I guess.

I mean, I wasn't exactly a man. But that was what my builders had assigned me as. And, well, fuck. What was I gonna do, refuse that one measure of humanity they'd given me? After they fucking died? Hell no. Taking this one to the grave. Um. I guess I'd have to dig my own grave at some point. That was a bit grim. Unless I just sat down somewhere and put a sign on me that said, "Free parts! I'm okay with this, I'm already gone."

Woah wait. No, that's even worse. Fuck. Hm.

I continued trying to think of a suitable way to take my assigned gender to my grave as I made my way to the second scavenging location. This was a junkyard — well, okay, it wasn't always a junkyard. But the big skyscraper that'd been here ages ago had toppled and left us with a lot of metals and scrap to harvest, if you had the tools, and it kinda looked like a big really even corn-maze made of metal and shit because someone re-organized it somehow, and — anyways, it was basically just a junkyard. I went there mostly to get my batteries or plants for the day. There was always at least a single chemical battery I could extract energy from, and then I could supplement that with whatever I could find growing around the area.

It kind of made me feel weird to literally just... eat moss, but I had to. For survival. And, well, specifically, it made me feel weird because I'd needed to install a new torso section for it — the only robotic torso that I could retool was female too, mostly, so I'd had to then remap all my arms and legs because it just didn't look right on the torso. Like a goddamn cursed mannequin or something. King Kong. I'd lived all my life with a masculine body-shape and also no bioreactor in my stomach, so... yeah, it felt weird.

I kept my face the same, though. It looked okay enough, and also... I couldn't just discard it. It was where I was, and I didn't know if the person I'd be in the other head would still be me, and also I kind of... I wanted to keep at least one aspect of me. Seeing my head on the feminine body made me feel emotions, but meh. I'd just deal. 

There wasn't as much moss around here today, though. That meant I'd be hoping some of those sprouts I'd started trying to cultivate a few weeks back had grown enough organic materials to be extractable for power. The yellowed sun didn't make anything easier. I kinda suspected that it was messing with the plants right now — but, well, I wasn't a biological studies person. I was a robot. It was sort of expected of me to be good at robot stuff.

I used what precious water I could extract from the atmosphere on the plants I'd started to grow — none were ready to harvest yet — and then begun to search for batteries more. I had a few at home, but I'd be seriously digging into my supplies as is, and I didn't want to have to start spending time and energy I could be spending scavenging building inefficient ones out of raw materials, so I wandered around the skyscraper-maze-junkyard for a while.

Excepting the dinginess and rust and yellowing of all the plastic components, the place had a sort of weird beauty to it. A sort of liminal space, but also... all of it a testament to parts of humanity's progress. Until it was cut short, we had systems to provide concrete and metal and glass and electronics and elevator cables — all to build stupid little towers to the sky. And now it was all back on the ground. In a couple hundred thousand years, maybe it'd all be reduced back to dirt. I ran my hands almost reverently over the few CRT cases that had been crammed into the walls of the maze haphazardly. My ancestors. Even if they weren't alive, the people who had them probably treated them as if they were.

And then when we did become alive, they started treating us as if we were raw materials. Hah. Not like that wasn't already a thing with humans.

The sun was reaching its zenith in the sky. Any humans around here would be getting a little antsy if they hadn't gotten water yet — or they'd be in bed, probably. As far as I could tell, the sun was searing much harder now that the ozone layer had been partially decomposed. Er, in any case: I needed to be a little more careful. Anyone I met would likely be aggressive, dangerous, possibly territorial—!?

"Rrrahchghchzhch!" My internal planning is rudely interrupted by a figure pouncing down from one of the walls of the maze onto me and knocking me to the ground. An honestly unnecessarily wide-brimmed hat blocked part of my view, but I could clearly sense them lying over me and holding me down by the shoulders. Then, they bit me on the neck with sharp fangs. Hard. 

They — she? — immediately gagged, turned to the side, and coughed up all the oil and coolant they'd just sucked from my body. "Eugh, oh my god, what kind of fucking blood disease do you have???" 

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For a brief moment, I'm struck by an inability to speak. Firstly out of weird feelings blossoming in my stomach (probably pressure?), and secondly: Oh my god, I had fucking seam lines across my skin. Could it be any more obvious what blood I had? 

And then the pain hits, and I was momentarily blinded by a thin sheen of red taking over my vision. "Blood disease??? I'm a fucking robot! God, that's my fucking hydraulic oil you just sucked out of me!" I couldn't feel my left shoulder and parts of my arm weren't responding right, but I still clamped them over the wound. "Shit. Fuck."

The person on top of me (who I now noted was maybe three inches from my face, and had dark hair, and a cute face, and — wait, no, stay angry!) stared at me for a couple seconds before touching their lips and seeing that it was, indeed, black liquid. To be fair, it wasn't lethal to ingest — also, it was a pure coincidence that it was black, considering it wasn't petroleum-based — but still. Rude, and I imagined it tasted like shit.

"Oh god, this tastes like shit." See? Told you! "And, wait, um. Oh." Her eyes widened. "I'm not feral anymore. Holy shit."

"I assume that's... good? Good for you?" Oil stained her lips, iridescent and shining, and— oh god my arm hurts. "Fuck, god, can you just get off me if you're not gonna kill me?"

The girl before me honest to god squeaks before whipping back to her feet with her hands held up in a placating gesture. "I'm sorry I didn't — I couldn't — I mean I was feral you know it's not — um, but, uh, I'm sorry, and, um, I really hope this doesn't, um, cause any problems for you, uh, I can maybe fix the leak if you want and are okay with it, um, if you're alright with magic?"

I let my head flop back down to rest on the ground, groaning. By the fucking divine. "Yeah just get on with it. Also, I don't know how, but you somehow made that goddamn run-on sentence a fragment. What's your name?"

The witch crouched over me. "Um, Madeline. Hold still, please. I'm gonna try and cast a repair spell I learned, but I have no idea if it'll work on a robot or if I need healing also." I did as Madeline said, and tried to hold still. Even removed the hand from my neck.

Despite magic, to my knowledge, being fake as fuck, I sense a feeling of being knit back together — and with feeling and function returning to my arm, I can tell that whatever the fuck Madeline did also re-fuelled me. Somewhat in disbelief, I sat up and moved my arm around. "Huh. Okay. Thank you."

Once I looked back up at Madeline, though, I could see a bit of hunger in her eyes. "...Madeline?"

She blinked, then looked away quickly and backed up. "Sorry, that took... an amount! Out of me. I think I'm gonna probably go feral again soon, you might wanna get out of here if you don't want to... y'know. I'll probably be fine by the morning, or, um. You know how it is with us scavs, haah."

I raise my eyebrows at what must have been the most anime girl noise I'd ever heard coming out of a person's mouth as Madeline awkwardly grinned and tried her best to look nonthreatening. Still... I don't wanna not help out. "What do you mean, feral?"

"I mean, um. I'm a vampire, sort of. If I go too long without blood, I start getting a little woozy and it gets a lot harder to control myself. And, well, there's not been a lot of blood around here, so... feral Madeline. I dunno why your oil gave me that burst of lucidity, either, it's not blood, but, um. At least it did do that. And, also, whenever I use magic it sorta draws from my life energy, which means I usually need more blood or food or something afterwards..."

"Wait, if you're a vampire, why are you not burning in daylight right now?" I squint at her. I mean, she was a little pale, but certainly not deathly so — plus, her witch outfit (a wide hat with a floppy top and a nice blue tunic) seemed to leave an okay amount of legs open for running. Hold on, was that a tail—?

"Well, I mean, I have really really mild sunlight sensitivity. If at all possible I'd rather not be in direct sunlight without shade. I'm kinda like a plant in that regard. Gotta put me in the right place with the right shade for me to grow! Um, or, well, in this case grow as in bite other people." Yup, definitely a tail. The calico-colored extra limb twisted in the air and made her tunic skirt deal sort of float around, which kind of made me jealous. Wait.

Hmm, bottle that for later. "Okay, right. Um, I think that an empirical test is needed, then. What if you bite me — not on a hydraulic line, this time, just on... we'll go with maybe some of the non-essential coolant lines I have — and then we see how it goes from there?"

Madeline perked up at the word "bite", but I could tell from her reaction that she'd heard only the one word and nothing else. In fact, her tail was twirling around in a particularly active manner — I'd... read about cats, once, I think. What was it that a slowly-swaying tail generally meant?

I think it probably meant... like, something related to hunting? Madeline took a step forward, and I instinctively took a step back.

Okay, yeah, definitely hunting. It was probably bad that I took the step back, because she took another step forward — pupils dilated — and another. The posture she was in struck me with a mixture of fear and something else, and after just another step she was within clawing range, and oh would you look at that it was my time to run! 

I dashed away, swearing like a sailor as Madeline chased right behind me (her stupid fucking hat somehow staying on despite the speed we were running at.) She laughed — honest to god chuckled — as we scampered through the maze, even as I was pushing my body to the absolute limits to get away from her. Fuck, I didn't realize I still had a prey instinct! I thought that was a human thing!

After recovering from my initial shock, it was clear I needed to get out of sight so that she'd stop trying to goddamn murder me. Turning a corner into a dead end and scrambling up the wall before Madeline could reach my location was my best bet, and after some quick and hurried parkour I was able to get to the outside of the maze safely.

I huffed, trying to cool my components down after that strenuous exercise. Thank god. Well, I wasn't gonna —?

Were those... the sounds of crashing? In the distance? No, I thought to myself, It couldn't possibly be.

And then Madeline smashed through the wall right next to me like a goddamn mascot — or superhero, some part of my mind suggested — and looked directly at me before pinning me to the wall by my hands.

I squeaked, this time, but in my defense I at least managed to get something out before she sunk her fangs into me for the second time today. "The— the goddamn coolant line, it's sort of, on the s-side of my neck, nnnot the part where it connects to the b-body—!"

Madeline bit me, and, unfortunately, the relief from not being immediately murdered (and ONLY the relief from not being murdered) caused my processors to black out for a few moments. When I snapped back to consciousness, I could see Madeline's blackened lips with a bit of electric blue on them — my, strangely, electrolyte-filled coolant fluid — as well as her somewhat-flustered face and vibrant, seemingly-worried eyes only a few inches from mine. I squeaked, and then felt my face burning hot with whatever breaking the coolant line meant for it, and then I fainted again.

God damn the sun. If not for the angle of the light on her hair and outfit and face and eyes and mouth, I would have escaped just fine from her handlock. It wasn't fair that she had the goddamn yellow gasbag on her side.