Mukhtalif had never felt so purposeful. She knew now why the humans valued their lives so much, what could be better than love, after all? She spent the next few days in a haze of happiness, sneaking glances at Moshia at work, fumbling screws and forgetting to do her job properly. With each slip-up she felt even happier, every mistake meant she was more human, more able to feel the way she did. She even fancied, once or twice, that Moshia looked over at her too, stopped doing his work for a fraction of a second, once she could have sworn his eyes lit up again like the first time. Somehow, by some unfathomable means, Moshia was connected to her in a way. Mukhtalif noticed how when she felt a surge of emotion, that was when Moshia would seem the most conscious. When she felt most human, he seemed to awaken just a little.
Mukhtalif was - quite understandably - delighted with this, she felt now that there was a real possibility of bringing back human emotion and experience into the robot community, and that was truly unbelievable. She just needed to know how. Unfortunately, she never got the chance.
All those uncommon mistakes were like flare signals to the higher ranking robots that something was different about Mukhtalif. Robots were not programmed to make mistakes, it just wasn't supposed to happen. So when it did, others were bound to notice. Before long, the manager of her factory had noted her strange behaviour - with its limited ability to note anything - and reported it to the officials, in the usual robot fashion. Defecting robots were not common, but not so rare that robots were not programmed to know what to do in these circumstances. Ones that started to display human characteristics were to be expected, there was a chip in every robot's brain that contained all human emotions and behaviours after all, and it was just assumed that something had gone wrong with this chip. What to be done about it? Well, there were thousands of robots on the planet, you could afford to dispose of the odd one or two.
And so Mukhtalif was summoned to be sent to the officials, with the intention of her disposal.
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Mukhtalif
Science-FictionOn a robot planet held under iron control by their very identities, Mukhtalif is just another one of millions of robots, no emotions and no life outside of her job in the grand scheme of the planet's operation. Held in place by the meaning of their...
