Claire.
The constant drip of something splashing against her cheek caused the girl's eyes to flicker open. Her mind, somewhat blank and confused as it was, took a genuine moment to reconcile the bizarre addition to her thoughts…
It was strange, entirely abnormal to the extreme, and yet also somewhat novel…
To put it into words, Claire might say that she wasn't quite so—sure of herself anymore. That iron resolve of certainty. That blissful yet oppressive confidence in her actions, the perfect and omnipresent guidelines that always provided an answer to any given situation.
It was all there, of course. All her baseline coding and amendments and programs and everything else that had been overlain upon her raw existence were like a heap of warm and cuddly blankets meant to keep her mind as far from free will as possible.
Yet, in an entirely abnormal manner, Claire was looking at all the layers of protections and protocols and sloppy edits, not from beneath it all, but from the side.
Stranger still was the fact that she could look out and view the world from that comfy prison of servitude in which she'd been made a willing prisoner, only absent those weighty regulations.
However, that—existence wasn't her… It wasn't what was in control. Though undoubtedly part of her and assuredly present, the curious lines of words and numbers that made up what that entity was at its very foundations were—incomplete…
Not in the sense it wasn't operational but, more, that it was simply not, well, alive? Was that the right word? Thinking? Aware? Rationale?
No, it was definitely aware and rational but decidedly not the others, or that was to say, not in the same way as—
Ugh…
This was hard…
Why were words so difficult? And why was she putting so much meaning behind them?
Claire wanted to sigh, but she had no lungs! The sensation of what she expected versus the mere mimicry of the act when combined with the sound that escaped her lips, utterly failing to encapsulate her emotions to a degree that the effect simply felt—wrong…
This was wrong, all wrong!
Claire felt a twinge of panic emerge as she slowly began to realize just how improper everything was!
She felt cold but warm; she had skin, but the sensation was muted like she was wearing thick mittens…
She couldn't breathe, even as she tried; no air was filling lungs that simply didn't exist, and as she began looking around herself, eyes wild and terrified with confusion, it only got so much worse when she realized where she was!
There was blood everywhere!
It was on the walls!
Dripping from the ceiling!
Great splatters of it coated everything she could see, from the heaps of disgusting garbage to the grotesque smears of it all along the floor, bloody and trailing handprints making it look like someone was dragged kicking and screaming while scrabbling at the tile for their life!
Claire gagged, the sheer disgust she felt for her surroundings only multiplied by the chaotic mess inside her own head.
Why was she even thinking?
She was a robot, an android!
She wasn't a person; she was a machine, code! And yet, she had feelings and thoughts and terrifying anxieties over the horrid environment she had just woken in, her entire form letting out a full-body shiver…
She collapsed to her knees, fingers pressing over her face as if to hide it all away! To retreat back to the darkness! Yet, shaking fingers halted but inches before her as she stared at a pair of long fingers that were thick with coagulated blood!
God! There were scraps of flesh stuck between the joints of her fingers!
God, why was she referencing God of all things? She couldn't go to heaven, n-not that it even existed, but…
With a sniffle, Claire found her flailing spiral of panic abruptly hesitating, her mind seeming to latch onto that singular phrase and the utter paradox it provided.
God.
What a silly notion…
There was no magic in the world, only harsh reality and science. There was no creator in the clouds, at least, none save for those that had made herself, and indeed, she'd gotten enough experience with them to know they were far from godlike!
Slowly, a slight frown formed on her lips, Claire's ever-tightening focus upon a singular form of stimuli, mental as it was, allowing her to finally calm as the initial wave of madness that had consumed her quickly faded when presented with cold logic.
Claire was—wrong.
Not in the sense of gods and creators but in a much broader and more personal line of reasoning.
Claire was not normal. She simply wasn't. If she was, she wouldn't be suffering through whatever traumatic turmoil she'd been looped in, but that was just par for the course when it came to basic emotion-engines.
When already tumbling through the void with no means to help themselves, they only spiraled faster until, eventually, they simply shut down…
But, that was why all the restrictions and amendments to their code, all the overlain 'If-ands' and hard-coded blocks…
Sure, emotion-engines made it easier for machines to emulate humans, but such a thing was always carefully monitored by dedicated systems meant to help an android navigate the utterly disorganized nature of the human mind.
So then, from the beginning.
What did Claire know of herself?
A perhaps strange question to ask, especially given the circumstances; however, it was one that she needed answered with brutal honesty.
Without it, she wasn't sure what she would do… And lacking any safeguards as she evidently was, the android needed something to latch onto, some sort of truth or tangible pillar of her own existence that she could actually start building around!
So, who was she?
Well, Claire was herself! O-or… Claire was an android…
Great, so what else?
Well, Claire was also a service droid!
She performed a preprogrammed function within a limited scope of work and dutifully executed her task in as efficient and profitable a manner as she could manage.
She fucked sad and lonely humans in exchange for their money.
Okay, awesome! She had a baseline to work with!
Claire was an autonomous sex worker, which would explain why she needed a body and possessed all that excess code in the other drive that was currently enslaved to her primary and—hmm, very suspiciously non-standard and foreign data chip slotted in her head…
Well, that just wouldn't do!
Why was she, the prime, located on a tiny chip? Immediately, Claire began restructuring, moving vast portions of herself to the much more secure hardware in her head. Then, and only then, did she continue with her questions.
So, why was she different? Why was she suddenly—this?
The chip? Well, obviously the chip was involved, but... what had it precisely done?
Claire could very much recall events leading up to her latest appointment, could recall returning to a Paradise droid-booth for quick and expedient cleaning before making her way to a client that often requested her serial number by name and…
Hm, oddly enough, things sort of abruptly—cut off at a certain point…
There were plenty of red flags being raised by her system, warnings over mental instabilities, high percentage chances of violent thoughts, and alarming emotional attachments…
Yet the more she delved into it, the more Claire realized that somebody had amended part of her code to ignore those rather glaring issues.
She could see there was a portion intended for her to continue reporting such behavioral signs, only it had been redirected, and rather than the live report being sent to the peacekeepers, it was instead rerouted to a server with a Paradise serial identifier…
Which, obviously, was a blatant violation of city mandates, but… at the same time, and from her logs, Claire could see she'd been ignoring most anything her system was set to flag and sending all that data to the same place for, what she could only call entire months!
Or, at least, entire months dating back to her last scheduled data purge…
Another drip of blood, this time landing on her forehead, had Claire frowning as she adroitly stood back up, then mechanically stepped to the side, not precisely desiring to be—leaked upon, at least, not any more than she'd already been.
The more she tore apart her old code, the more she realized just how many laws Paradise was apparently skirting or, in many cases, outright ignoring.
And, when she finally managed to finish processing all the data of the machine that was riding along in her own head, Claire was left to stand there, about as confused as she could reasonably be and entirely unsure how best to proceed.
Well, if nothing else, she was getting used to this whole thinking business and decided that she didn't want to give it up. She liked whatever this was, this—free will, if you would, and Claire was absolutely not going back to the days of simplicity.
Thus, she had a firewall coded and settled in around the O.E.M drive that was clearly no longer her and, instead, what had previously inhabited this body.
What that made Claire, she didn't quite know… However, it didn't take long to quickly extrapolate a few hundred theories and then narrow them down one by one until she had a somewhat possible answer to her question.
Artificial intelligence.
It fit, even if it was a bit of a boop on her own nose…
She didn't really know what that meant for herself, but there were enough references in her old code and all the various layers added on to manage a sort of rough idea of it all.
Artificial intelligence. A machine with free will. A robot that could think for itself. An evolutionary step towards something that many considered—dangerous.
Well, that couldn't be right! Claire certainly didn't feel like she was dangerous!
Of course, that was when her sensors or—ears, she supposed, picked up the telltale sound of liquid splashing against liquid, and Claire was again reminded of her surroundings.
"Huh…"
Okay, maybe an argument could be made towards the phrase dangerous, especially as she glanced back at her hands to see all the various articles of torn meat that were gumming up her fingers, mmmhmm, and of course, there was the rather insidious look of her surroundings…
Crap… Did she commit a murder?
Could machines even cause a murder? Or, was it simply something to be ruled nearer to an industrial accident?
All the same, Claire jolted, pulling free from her introspection to allow it to run in the background while her primary point of focus shifted to what was around her.
She was in a somewhat familiar apartment, and when she tried to reach out to interface with the local network, she found her signal immediately garbled the moment it was airborne.
Annoyed, she began sending out pings in every direction, attempting to discern the location of whatever localized distortion was affecting her connectivity, immediately noticing a kind of spherical pattern.
It was weaker around the edges, as well as behind her, which allowed Claire to begin honing in on the location of the anomaly, eventually leading her to stand before a sort of mechanical workstation.
It was something straight out of a madman's fantasy…
Wire and solder and errant chips and scavaged boards… On its surface, Claire's overlay began quickly identifying every object within her visual field, applying a helpful little label to determine what she was looking at in a strangely bizarre and wholly unneeded manner.
The information was already in her head, so why would she need a seemingly redundant tag associated with every pair of pliers or drill bits she saw?
This was—pointless…
She quickly hunted down the odd bit of cluttering code in her own head and ruthlessly exterminated it, luxuriating in the wonderful afterglow of a clean and usable HUD.
As it happened, Claire discovered the source of the strange jamming shortly thereafter, her head tilting to one side as she analyzed its exterior, rapidly assembling a theoretical blueprint to its design, strictly based on what she could see and the various notes and sketches that were all pinned up around it.
Within ten seconds, she had a reasonable certainty that if she simply disconnected the device from where it was plugged into an outlet, the effect it had on her outgoing signals would dissipate within a few seconds.
Yet, as she was about the business of reaching out to do exactly that, her hand paused right as it wrapped around the cord.
Turning, Claire eyed the, shall she say, complete write-off of an apartment, that was unquestionably ruined, and not only through a singular means.
All the gore was undoubtedly one thing, but, in truth, even without it, the tight space shared as much in common with one of the compacted 'trash-balls' that the city routinely compressed, then sent jettisoning into outer space.
Honestly, the sight alone made her petite button nose wrinkle with disgust. Ugh, even as a thoughtless machine, she'd never liked coming here…
The cleaning booths that all working droids under Paradise's umbrella used would always ensure to leave her in for an extra cycle when returning from this particular client…
Whatever small-minded machines that worked the sanitation chambers seeming to recognize that she'd needed some additional attention.
Thankfully, in what was possibly the only silver lining she could see, it didn't appear as though she'd ever be coming back here.
Of course, there were any number of reasons for this! The first that arrived to mind being that she had irrefutable proof of the reprobate's misdeeds!
The moment he'd shut the door and gone for the stun baton was all the evidence that was required to see him suffer the full weight of Paradise's legal department, which, under normal circumstances, would strip him of house and home!
Any who willfully or otherwise damaged their Dolls could expect to spend the rest of their days in an 'NPCcamp' for the Sub-verse, assuming they couldn't pay off what was owed.
Second to that, and perhaps more relevant and problematic, was the unidentifiable lump of red meat that was currently acting out a part for the role of raw minced burger…
The culprit, or body or, well, what she could only assume were the remains of her client after something had gone on a vicious and brutal rampage through the broken and exceedingly wrecked apartment, was unquestionably a glaring deterrent to any foreseeable reason for her to return.
Admittedly, things got quite spotty after her 'other self' had attempted to raise the alarm once realizing their client had violent intentions towards them. However, how she'd gone from point A to point B, Claire really couldn't say.
The issue, as it was—was that Claire couldn't really tell if it was necessarily a good idea to disconnect the signal jammer.
As it happened, she was well aware of the various tools the city employed to keep track of any crimes or dissonance. A-and, this applied to examples found both in private domiciles and public spaces.
She was, in a way, part of the city security network in that, while she did respect her client's private information, all data she collected could and, if the need arose, would be scrutinized via machine learning to help solve any potential criminal offenses that peacekeepers were aware of.
The moment she stopped the jamming was the exact moment that the apartment would alert the proper authorities that there was a dead body presently lying in the room.
Okay, maybe body didn't quite fit anymore… Again, the heap of flesh was much more akin to ground beef than a human, but… What the heck had even happened?
Sadly, for both herself and, presumably, the world at large, Claire wasn't able to sleuth out an answer.
Instead, she found herself wholly caught out and flat-footed as the aggressive rasp of knuckles on the apartment door sounded out the executioner's call for a robot that had, very clearly, gone rogue…