Activation Sequence 103

Final Touches

‘Fredrick, what do youthink you’re doing standing there? Come and help me you lazy, good-for-nothing imbecile!’

‘Coming sir,’ I yelled from next door, groaning under the heavy load I was carrying, my lanky twelve-year-old feet slipping and sliding as I navigated the wet floor. The door to lab four was slightly ajar. Kneeing it open, I stepped in and deposited the boxes at the far wall. The professor seemed to be tackling a piece of hardware as I walked in, muttering to himself, adding a general air of grumpiness to the surroundings.

‘How may I be of assistance, sir?’ I asked formally. Despite the fact that Doctor Sechino has been my guardian after I was orphaned, I still needed to address him formally, the same as any assistant addresses their mentor.

‘Go fetch me a bag of chips, will you?’ Of course, he didn’t mean a bag of potato crisps. The prospect is far too ridiculous. What he really meant was by the term ‘bag of chips’ was the microchips that lay on the lab bench in their polymer case. I grabbed it and handed it over, as he started wiring them to the main system. I watched, fascinated, uncomprehending the complicated pieces he was dealing with. I had never seen such a level of sophistication before. 

‘There, that’s better,’ he said beaming, stepping back to admire his work. That system was part of a greater project, or as the guild liked to call it, ‘The Project’. And Doctor Sechino was the head of it. While the other members of the guild were busy creating seven warrior androids -part of a new elite unit-the doctor and I were busy building what shall be the leader. It was meant to be stronger than any other droid, faster, more agile, with skills honed to perfection, similar to those of feline predators. It would be superior to all field robots.  And we didn’t reach the complicated part yet.  For the first time, a robot shall have a thought processing unit, programmed to think and act like the Supreme Commander himself, on the event of his death. And despite the many failed attempts technicians have made through the years to create a truly intelligent robot, Doctor Sechino strongly believed he would succeed where others have failed.

From what I could grasp form the professor’s gibbering, this was more of a cyborg than a normal assassin bot. Some form of bio-tech and Genetics was used to create the brain. In that branch of science, I was somewhat of a prodigy, the equal of many of the elders in the guild, but even I could not have possibly hoped to understand the workings of this machine.

The reason behind my abilities was not due to intellect, but rather some weird form of communication I felt with the entities I experimented on -if you could call a semi-dissected organism that. It was as though they beamed thoughts into my head, telling me what to do.

Anyway, as far as I could tell by my understanding of the entire procedure, some DNA was harvested from the commander’s ‘by-products’ and used to create human stem cells, which were turned into neurons and eventually, a human brain.

This was where I came in. I was assigned to look after the fermentation process and make sure that all went well. Unfortunately, during the first few weeks, many of the cells withered and died –malnourishment, I think. Panicking, I hastily extracted some of my own DNA –not an easy feat- and used them as a replacement. I had no idea what two sets of genes would do. It may bring about a case multiple personality disorder.

Back to the droid. This brain could not simply be left inside the robot’s artificial head, having rebellious thoughts and questioning its creators. The thought processing unit was fitted with a natural inhibitor – a drug found in the poison sacks of many arachnids- which clouds judgment. It is secreted at a continuous rate by a gland in its ‘head’. A command chip is inserted to make sure the robot is still functioning at one hundred percent capacity.