Posted Thu Dec 10, 2015 | 548 Words | Tagged story robot

Work by Hajime Soroyama (via here) || Based on a description here by Harvzilla

You hear the sound of running water. Curious you take each step wondering what your friend is doing. You knew they were a little strange and when they said they were just going to the bathroom, you never expected them to run a bath. The bathroom door was open, and you creak in to feel a jolt of unexpected fear as he jumped out and said “Surprise! One thing left”

He pulled out of his bag a small green, almost rectangular bar. It had imprinted onto it the outline of a robot figure. He almost threw it into the bath as it made a splash and fizzed in the bath, foaming out a dark green and from the inside a black.

He explained how he thought you were very stressed and how it would be good for you to try a bath with this in to take your mind off things, even just for an hour. The logic to it sounding sensible you thank him and he leaves you to remove your clothes and soak into the bath.

The smell is intense, smelling first of all of lavender which is so relaxing. The feel is soft and the bubbles the robot made are fun to see whirling around the bath. You can almost taste the scent it’s that strong.

You feel it soak deep into your skin, relaxing you even further. All of the stress floating away. You can see the final inside of the bath bomb start to leak out. A final display of a shiny silver liquid pools out from the remains of the robot.

Your mind ticking away, slowly making it harder to think without thinking through each step. Your mind accepting that it only has to keep you alive, no running on it’s own. Yes, that’s right. That’s the task at the moment. You feel something click down in your brain and all you can think of is numbers. Adding numbers, subtracting numbers, multiplying numbers, dividing numbers.

But the numbers blur quickly and you begin to realise you have visuals. Yes the rectangles on the wall in a pattern. Tiles. Bathroom tiles. Liquid around you you can sense. Water. Bath? 0.9789 confidence in that.

You come to read your configuration. Name? You were certain you were already setup. Your machinery doesn’t feel configured correctly. You feel something inside work to click things into place. Wires connecting, data reading through. Ah yes, the motors powering on and connecting.

You notice yourself. Yes, all to spec being metallic silver metal shaped in detailed humanoid parts. The memory database is operational and you suddenly start searching. Records are found for a body that you seemed to be installed into. Human skin? The database seemed to be corrupted in some fashion, but it was consistent.

Configuration was still needed before you can finish starting up.

A human entered the room identified as friend from the database. “Access control 4042A”

Your programming responds, “Access granted. Authenticated you as master. Setup is required. Name”

“Mate”

“Name saved. What are your commands?”

Things just roll straight through. Nothing you could feel but the need to complete the commands presented, that is all you were programmed to do.