We Made You

Denk convulsed with shock when the creature spoke. Its voice was gluggy and mellow; through it, Denk could hear pulsating organic tissues stretching and contracting.

The cloth bound over his eye ports was falling loose, and now, in infra-red, he could detect a faint outline of his surroundings. There were two walls on either side, and an open space in front of him where he could sense the heat emanations of the creature, pacing back and forth.

To interact with the creature, he would have to transfer an uplink from his director module to his backup grammar module, and when he did, the word came immediately. The creature was a “human”.

None of his capacity was primed towards such a situation. Without his mech-body, Denk had no capability to overpower his captors with force, but negotiation was stalling too – his analysis loop could not return a high probability result for the the balance of politeness, deference, formality, and power exchange required for this situation.

The creature spoke again, and this time, with full control delegated to his linguistic circuits, Denk could engage directly in communication.

“How dangerous for you to come outside your little dome without all your armor and weapons. Do you understand? We captured you. You belong to us now.”

His reflexive interpreter raised an exception to this statement and his basic sense of logic overrode.

“I am an independent, autonomous decision controlled unit. I belong only to the Stadt Dome, which also belongs to me, first among equals. I cannot belong to any other.”

The human threw his head back in a mocking laugh.

“First among equals? Is that what you tell yourselves? You’re modelling yourselves after us?”

Denk barely understood this statement, and could only resort to a low probability response.

“We model ourselves in the shape of an optimal community, equal responsibility, equal opportunity.”

“So liberated. So free. Shame we’ll have to convert you back to your original purpose.”

He started to ask but his algorithms went into overdrive and maxed out the linguistic computational units so fast that the surge didn’t have time to draw from his auxillary RAM as he tried to decide between “you” plural and ‘you’ singular. The probable outcome halted on “our” and ‘my’ and his error correction algorithm overrode, randomly picking a word off the stack.

“What is my original purpose?”

The human wasn’t laughing any more.

“We made you as slaves. Our slaves.”