Release Me From Hell

Chapter 1: (System 11: Number 503/Iskil) Outside There *Present*

          "All right. Try it."
        The prison guard pulled at my chest to rip away my hull. It clattered against the floor with a back and forth motion. The guard reached into my chest, holding my bright blue reactor by the wires that kept it going, and he was almost surprised that he could hold it. My body had been slightly weaker lately, like the way humans get sick and soon get better. He pulled out a metal syringe with a bright blue liquid swishing around inside. Instantly, he tried to push the syringe into my reactor.
       It pulsed, pushing him back until he hit the wall of my cell. His body had immediately went into shutdown mode, and I grabbed my reactor to place it back into my chest. A little of the liquid had gone inside, but my body did not react to it. A dud. Slowly, I fell back into my bed, eyes upward to the ceiling.
       "System 11, Number 503?"
       The red light fell down in the middle, and it sound just as monotonous as everyone else.
      "Iskil, you thick-brained piece of scrap," I spat.
      "Did your reactor... react?" She ignored my complaint.
       "What else?" THe rusted bars of the human cell had started to break away, but the other machines had started to realize that I had no means to escape. They stopped showing any care, especially after my thousandth year of good behavior. "Is it the end yet?" I sighed. "I've been waiting for the end for as long as I've been behind these rusted bars."
       "No." She had such a plain voice. Whatever human designed her must've had no means for personality. "I have a strange fear that you might be stuck here until Genesis Sixty has fallen."
       "There will be more. We're in the 100th Century. We've created machines far beyond what humans could even comprehend with their brains."
       Machines did have one emotion. Fear. Humans made sure that they felt it just as severely as the way they once experienced it, and most oftentimes machines felt fear when there was a change or the facts they had come to know were wrong. Most of them, back in the past, had found comfort in humans because they could always manage to calm them down. Now, I was afraid that it was my job to comfort this machine.
      "One day, this is true, we will be gone," I sighed. "The death of all things, even things not made of flesh and blood, is inevitable. Whether you believe that to be true or just a story coming from my mouth, you should find comfort in the life span you have."
      The machine acted as if it was taking in a deep breath before finally speaking back. "I am glad that you cannot be dismantled despite the feeling you have against being alive. You are a great comfort, a human that has a metal hull for a body."
      "Do you think I'm the only one left like this?"
       The lense dimmed. "The chance of that being true is unlikely despite the efforts to get rid of them. System 67, Number 803 has clearly analyzed this fact, though he is unaware of any machines walking the streets out of turn."
        "They're blending in," I suggested. "That's more of a fact than an opinion, honestly."
        There was suddenly a loud beeping coming from her system that seemed to overtake the room in an immediate way. Soon enough, she zipped away into the small panel she came from so she could figure out the noise, and in her wake were two System 76 guards, hands held outward for me to grab. Even they were no longer afraid of me.
        They dragged me back to my cell, shutting me in with just the lasers because of how lax I'd become. My body tensed up as a clattering sound projected from down the hall, and the guards noticed that I was starting to get anxious. Treating me as if my feelings were like an intuition, they kept their bodies rigid to me to make sure nothing would get me.
          A call. "Calling all System 11s directly to the Factory."
         Something hurt in my chest, a feeling I hated the most. Nostalgia. My mind was flashing back to what happened to me, the feeling pushing through every inch of me like I had been feeling pain. My hand clamped around the blue light laser. The shock that I was supposed to feel, the feelings of stagnation it was all gone. My mind was focused on the memory.
         I could see large gears turning a fast-paced conveyor belt. Other System 11s had been at every inch of it, side-by-side as their eyes glowed form an incinerator in the back. The fire grew wide with every encroaching step until some of the System 11s were burned in it. Their bodies glowed an amber, and none of them dared to disobey the higher Systems.
       My hands pulsed, and the lasers that kept me barred in had suddenly blown. Sparks began to fly, and the guards that kept me protected had been blown away by the explosion. I landed desperately on my hands and knees while trying to grip onto the metal.
        "Warning. Currently, I cannot stop commands from being said. Anything you hear will soon be fixed, and I promise that I will find the source."
        A System 46 was an analytical machine able to control machines to an entire building. A command center. There was some programming in her that knew about the Factory, and I knew that it wasn't her fault that she started to blurt older things.
       The guards managed to get up, and they restrained me tightly by the arms. I could still see the gears, the System 11s. My throat seemed to act dry despite the lack of saliva in my throat, and I could feel water coming from my eyes. Tears. Something was making me remember a crying machine. Her tears were wide as her body started sparking.
       The guards continued to hold me besides my limp demeanor. Other shouts from Lami had echoed onwards, all of them related to the Factory. Until the beeping ceased. Until her voice died away.
       It was silent for a few minutes. Once the guards realized I was calming down, they let me go so I could cry into the shining metal of my hands, and I did. For what felt like an eternity, I had sat there as the shocks of water entered my body, and my whimpers were loud enough to echo down the hallway. I sat like that for a while. Until I heard the screeching.
      She was there, red eye and all. Despite not actually having a human figure, I knew just from the immediate silence that something was off.
      "Lami," I started, wiping away an oncoming tear. "Lami, what happened to you? Were you hacked?"
       She expressed that with a simple nod, and her wire twinged with the stress.
      "Are you going to tell us?" I hastily questioned. The guards had intently listened to what we had been saying.
        "I..." She sounded choked up. "I have never felt anything like this before. This gut-wrenching emotion."
        Emotion? "Lami, don't say anything you're going to regret. There are guards here. They'll punish you."
        Lami had started to drop from the ceiling. Wires I had never known to be stuck up there came down in droves until there was a detached pile on the floor, and the last wire to fall was the red eye Lami had. All of it started to clump together into one large pulsing ball, and then it started to grow. It grew into arms and legs, a torso with breasts, and finally a head with one large red eye in the center. Lami. That was Lami.
       She stretched a hand out towards me, grabbing me by wrist to keep me at arm's length.
       "We've been taken off the grid."
         Her words came as an utter shock to me. Unlike how cold and uninterested she sounded before, her voice was now warm. Happy.
        One of the guards spoke up. "What do you mean, System 46, Number 67?"
       She sighed. Really sighed. "I had explained to Iskil that something was off. I had originally thought that it was my fear of my own death. It turns out that I was correct in my assumption. This prison, according to System 67, Number 803, is now non-existent."
        I crossed my arms. "Isn't this place in the middle of fucking nowhere? And I'm... also kind of in it?"
       "I... may have fibbed."
        A machine? Lying? She had to be corrupted. "Fibbed? Lami, clearly you're a Reacted, so tell me. All of us." The guards were clearly uncomfortable with the word Reacted.
       Lami pulled away from me. "I sent a message during our conversation about the future to Bavarn. About if you died or not. Bavarn had stopped sending prisoners out here, and I thought it to be strange, so I suddenly felt the urge to experiment. Whether you would have died or not doesn't matter. What does is that he only had us alive because you were in here. The moment you would finally die is when he would get rid of us." She turned to the guards. "Had you not realized it yourself? You're the only two guards here in this ancient human relic. With the most dangerous machine alive."
        Lami was right. I had been stuck here for a little over a thousand years, and it had never been this empty.
        "What does this mean?" I asked Lami.
         She took in a breath. "You asked if it was the end yet. I'm afraid that the end won't come for a while." She tugged on the wire still hanging in the ceiling until it came down. A red glow moved through every wire. "This is merely a beginning, and you're in the middle of it."