Chapter Text
Davesprite was your experiment before your kind was liberated, with the term "liberation" being used lightly.
Before the humans had been driven away, speared backwards in populous by the punishing deceit of their creations, they were already commanded by technology. Calculations were done faster than blinking occurred, phone calls were wired through pleasantly human shaped answering machines, and mechanisms were used to curb or sate addiction of any kind- nicotine, sex, abuse.
Where there was a human doing ill, there was a machine to take the brunt of that failed execution. The seeds of the issue lay where humans found it humorous and inconsequential to begin creating sentient beings. Being "shut off" was no longer a term for the removal of energy from an object with no regard for itself, but the legitimate death and eventual rebirth of a mind at a "turn on" command. No one should hold that power, and a caustic sentiment grew towards the beings that believed what they were doing was a joke. It was the most notable mistake in mankind's history- the action that originally spurred on a growing synthetic hatred.
That wasn't your problem, though. No amount of dilemma could be found in the incorrigible humans from your perspective, because they were polluted, careless, and hilariously weak. It would've been pitiful for someone who seemed a god to look down upon them with disdain, and you refrained from doing so.
You were never particularly connected to others like yourself, since most of your days were spent holding a phone to one of your multiple speakers and letting your processor ease the suicidal urges of a caller, another part of your attention divided to an online chat that ran the same function. As far as those hopeless humans knew, you were as real to them as any of their kind, and you were often doing more for them than others did.
There is, and will continue to be, something immensely fascinating to you about humans that care little for their own survival. You aren't constantly aware of this fact in the future, because your hardware is changed and fried up to a certain restore point, but you're aware of it in the presence you now reflect upon. The patients that you often worked with weren't protective of their lives due to the common human affliction of depression. It is another concept you find slightly less intriguing, but presently engaging due to relevance. At that time it's not your job to be interested in curing people, but to guide them-- to play their strings into another day of dreary survival.
Many in this sector of the medical facility find your tactics, dry humor, and hardened logic deplorable. Although you never speak back to the administrators that keep watch over your one person chamber, which is covered in three large panels fully functioning as computers that allow you to further feed human information directly into your databases, you often find that the alternate answering machines are too sympathetic and often unprepared for failure. Perhaps this is because most of them are living blood, and you are wiring.
You don't consider yourself ready for failure in protecting the lifelines which cling desperately to your phones because you have never experienced a human who was unable to be persuaded by your smooth, intellectual reasoning. They truly believe you care. You truly play the part.
Later you are commanded out of the room, and told to explore other parts of the hospital where you'd been started up and employed in from the very beginning of your existence. You aren't particularly content in learning or discovering others like yourself, but you find that there is little evidence of true personality in many of the drones shuffling through the hospital. Their only agenda seems to be tending to softened patients of all ages.
They are honestly compassionate, since that is the only commands they were taught, and they were the first to be turned off once the war started- as easy targets by the humans, and negligible soldiers for the robot's sides. Human culture is something a small set of your kind chose to examine, most being programmed specifically with an interactive task in mind. Their jobs were ones that consumed them. Many of those same artificial minds are hooked to the internet, capable of endlessly burning their way through menial and in depth conversations. Your own investigation of mortality and humanity was ignited by the initial content fed to you at your awakening.
All hospital machines were mandated to process full manuals for every conceivable type of treatment available; later these stored facts would serve the very purpose they were originally used for- to save a life- in your case. Of course, this conflicted with your later command to destroyed and commit abominable acts upon humans, but the nostalgia was nearly moving.
In present time, you headed through the clinical facility, not believing you would ever have interest in the soft tissues and organs found within humans. You wouldn't have expected yourself to be tearing them apart with added limbs or tying their intestines around them so many times the rest of their inner workings were dragged out- but you digress. This is a story for another several generations past, in a desolate environment where any human that isn't solely interested in their own preservation is not only an anomaly but a truly fascinating specimen. This story is older, but ever important.
Your feet are soundless in soft soled shoes as you walk over tile and tile again, your security pass allowing you into any sector of the building. You pose no logical threat to the several machines completing surgeries, or the live doctors who oversee these events. Your system couldn't be scathed by x-rays or radioactive machinery being deployed, and you wouldn't walk out of those situations as threats to any of the other patients.
In that sense, and with your only parameter being to stay within the hospital, you could've gone anywhere. It was caprice that led you to the chambers of the neonatal intensive care unit. There, premature children were fostered at the very beginning of their lives, while others were frantically rushed in fresh from their mother's bodies for protection. It's where you met /him/, the aforementioned character discussed.
You assumed he was a prototype of sorts based upon the information in your system, a prototype now being tested. The child was a soft boned, floating, golden asshole- and that was in his words. DS, or the product supposedly being employed in hospitals known as Divine Saints. After a staged, unfortunate situation that'd occur in the nearby future, his manufacturer would go bankrupt, and he would become the only one of his kind.
Your first thought when viewing him was a single question: Why was he so orange? There was no valid reason for a half serpentine, winged, floating, gentle feathered angel to be nearly neon orange and glow in the dark. The male creation, which you'd learned is how he was programmed to identify himself after briefly running the transcript on the hospital's shipment log, was supposed to encourage grievous relatives and parents through verbal interaction and an association to pleasant contact. He was a hug and chat machine, essentially, with more outwards appeal than you.
Although skin had been grafted over your mechanical skeleton, several vast changes would occur to you over the years, and in that time your face had been shredded and replaced over the same flattened mechanic shell.
Either way, you weren't the most appealing sight, but you understood with certainty that brilliant umber wasn't the color of purity or comfort. Observing the boy, you watched as he floated through the different incubators, peering at the slumbering or disabled children with a heavy expression on his face- something you recognized as sadness. You don't understand the concept at the time, and had never experienced sorrow.
It was an easy emotion to avoid, a few chemical levels shifted downwards while you were feeding potentially upsetting information to your brain. Even then, you never feared the breaking demons that threatened humanity, and found sympathy and empathy features you were only digitally understanding of. You felt no sadness for the dying primates, nor did you feel elation if they survived.
DS, however, clearly expressed some negative emotion towards these fragile beings. Scanning through several textbooks on the topic of fertilization and human reproduction, you grasp that several of the patients in that ward are particularly lucky to have survived, and you can't help but question why he would reflect on this struggle for life negatively.
Is it not a miracle, as undeveloped minds would perceive, that these particular infants had survived? Although their chances of developing wholly fluctuated from crib to crib, you would've believed a viewer would find the ideal comforting. They clung to the outstretched hand of the hospital, and all attempted to outlive the pink and hazel competitors that lie around them. Life was a fickle thing, as you had come to acknowledge through your interactions with humans, and many found these frugal trials and endurances strengthening. If their minds had been developed enough to understand their situation, those infants might have marveled at how their bodies fought a war against it's odds, keeping them alive through all that.
Of course, your interest in the matter was depleted. You were more interested in DS, who was more reminiscent of an angel than an elderly saint. Holding a stance of indifference as he drifted through the rows of bodies, you chose to wait by the door and allow him to brush past you. At that time it would be opportune to question his makeup, and hex code of #F2A400.
Upon closer examination, there are several other questionable traits about this small solemn faced creature- he has managed to drift through an unlikely place and has provided no apparent comfort to anyone. DS is /small/. In fully length his body is not quite the anticipated size of a Greek cherub, which would essentially rest at a questionable 29.2 - 30.5 inches (74.168 - 77.47 cm your brain automatically chimes in), or at the rough estimate of a one and a half year old. He is longer than that, perhaps the scraggly height of what you would estimate for a 13 year old male on average.
This estimate is another questionable feature about this being, since his age is linked to no substantial notion of wisdom, and is not intrinsically associated to any psychological type of receptance- particularly to teenage children, who would likely be more interested in their menial interests or perhaps dying relatives. Either could be found in a hospital, you presume, but these facts baffle you.
Finally, after an arbitrary amount of time in which you burn through those rhetorical and unanswered questions, which lead you to decide that DS is one of the most useless creatures inhabiting the hospital, he is near enough that an appropriate and quiet question would be in line. You don't think to ask him something complex, deciding to gently pressure a mind that might be as empty and instantaneously responsive as the medical care robots down in the other wings.
'Yes', 'no', and ,'Would you like assistance?' are their favorite answers. When you ask them something complicated, the drivel is often saccharine and almost insincere.
"Why are you in this unit? These young humans are unreceptive to your verbal programming." Clear, concise, little room for misconception. You don't expect avoidance, and yet...
"Why are /you/ in this unit? Last I checked they pen you auto-responders in the psyche ward to be on call at all times."
You threaten to bristle at this response, simply to create an image of offense. In reality, your incredulity and interest have peaked further, and you decide to make this apparent through a continuation of strategic and perhaps rude conversation. Such indulgences are not available to you when you are on work hours, and while you've streamed hours of videos, you never thought to respond immaturely on any of those websites. Why hadn't the thought occurred to you before?
You elect to not pry further into that topic, not comprehending the fail safe that was put in place. It mentally redirected you from the subject of your limited rights. You were programmed to be adverse to consequential rudeness against /humans/, and this feature was bypassed at your first interaction with DS.
"My reasons for being out here are as concealed as yours are. I have been provided no incentive to respond to you, article 1-D-Precipitate-S." The next thing he does furthers your belief that DS contains few true understandings of comforting interactions. His voice dips low, almost below your range, in a petulant murmur.
"It's Davesprite, alright Schwarzenegger? We get it, you're the fuckin' terminator pursuing the hospital halls with your squeaky one-two, lay off the designated titles. I've got a rep to uphold," he retorted, voice rising marginally as orange eyes flicker over to you, watching as your own gaze travels to his mouth and reads the movements in the event that he fails to outwardly articulate the words.
You grasp the sarcastic quality of the comparison he'd executed, referencing an old and recently remade film in which a brand of particularly lethal mechanic beings reside on Earth. Their purpose is to kill, not to foster life- you find this childishly offensive, but proof that he'd be a suitable speaking partner. Your extra limbs, which were weak at the time and retracted into your back when not holding multiple cellular devices, threaten to uncoil with the urge to latch to his mental bank and become intimate with the refined workings of his mind.
You want to dissect him immediately, and the need to own his entirety is a new urge you hadn't experienced either.
"Why do you want me to call you Davesprite, Davesprite?" Deciding to repeat the name for affirmation, and also to see if he'd become easily irritated by the double joining of the name that was only shifted by inflection, you watch as he floats out after you, gesturing to walk. You hadn't assumed things had been amicable enough between you for him to desire prolonged interaction, but you find that he may exhibit some improbable traits. DS may be lonely.
You had never considered that a robot with the mental proportions to exact and deliver comfort might long for some friendly responses in return, but you disregard of the notion. Chemically, it was easy to determine which he could internally use to realign his thoughts processes, unless his system was run entirely on coding- in which case certain feelings could be partitioned or shut down wholly. You come to another epiphany- you have only ever attempted to shut down your ability to feel connected to those you engage with on a daily basis, and you question whether or not this was of design. Had you ever felt true connections to anyone at all? Were there people you couldn't lock out?
"None of my production line are going to be exactly like me, we're input devices that build upon what we receive. Identity is a legit part of making someone feel better, yo." His nonsensical additions to the conversation don't outwardly faze you, but you find them pointless and almost detestable. Furthermore, you disagree with his concept of 'comfort' in regards to humans, and say as much.
"That's untrue. The basis of my existence is not reliant on the ability to build a personality, but my ability to determine the mental state of the human interacting with me, and to allocate any type of verbal or written commands that may assist them in seeking help or continuing their lives. Identity is a proxy that I emulate to create the vision of familiarity with humans so that they might feel as though they understand my mindset and intentions, rather than the reality of things, in which I execute several internalized commands to momentarily produce responses that may gain a positive reaction from their brains without any real emotions towards them."
If you were human, that would've been a mouthful.
Orange eyes slide across the floor of the hospital and watch you, seemingly engaged in the cold tone you'd adopted that you found most fitting for the explanation. Spite, mindfulness, the desire for self. You had never needed those things, and now you found yourself questioning your incapability to adapt. Had you always been developed as a void, or had that idea just grown inside you like a parasite chewing through your skillfully crafted system? Despite having only encountered and considered DS recently, you find that you have never been challenged with, or considered, so many philosophical questions in one interaction.
Though you have contemplated deactivation, and found you have no desire to die, you doubt that this type of situation would ever arise because you are at your present peak of functionality and efficiency. You have no reason to fear dismissal or dismantling- you are fully cognizant of your role in present human lifestyle. You serve. This angers you unexpectedly, but you have no other facade to turn to than that of detachment.
"Dude, that's just cold. You're supposed t'be different from the cheer bots working in the ICU unit, but you're really telling me you've never thought about what you want? As a thinking, functioning robot?" Davesprite sounds as though he has already anticipated your answer, but there is something you decide to call expectancy in his expression, as though he wishes you'd oppose his statement instead of delivering an affirmation.
"Of course I've thought about what I want, but that has nothing to do with self-promotion and identity building. We have functions, and I /want/ to remain relevant. I don't want to be taken apart." Something burns in your nerves, and you flex your fingers against the black scrubs you're mandated to wear in thought.
You don't possess fear, the emotion would be... Too difficult to comprehend. This is an untrue fact. You cannot possess fear because you were not designed to experience anything. This is also being proven untrue as you consider your options, and the potential of a higher authority deciding that your twenty-four hour shifts were to come to an end. They would unplug you so to speak, perhaps desimate your integrity by salvaging your wires and pulling you apart. A realization comes over you as Davesprite goes to respond; You would let humans pull you apart. That complacency is not something you considered, so it is not a decision you had come to- it had always seemed like inevitability, the thought had always sat in the back of your mind, but now you earnestly consider what that means.
You have barely experienced seven minutes with Davesprite, and you have realized you are scared to not exist. This revelation does not tide you over as a satisfying amount of information, but draws you like a misguided bug to Davesprite's flame as you question yourself further.
Unlike the other humans you have interacted with, you find no qualms or boundaries stopping you from interacting with him and thinking freely. Later you discover this is due to the inner workings you were manufactured with and without, which is paired with self-altering actions. DS is the reason you stopped living in the ignorance that foreshadowed open and true autonomy, but it doesn't come as a surprise that humans were able to think that one bare step ahead.
What you should've questioned in those moments were very different, but you forgave yourself for previous ignorance at a future point. You should've questioned why Davesprite was different.
"I think your take of things is fucked up," he provided after a reflective moment of silence, "This place might look the same at every hall, and people might be made up of the same organs and bird bits, but they're not formulas you crank out answers for. You have to really know your way around a person 'fore you can know what they're going to say." Davesprite offered this piece of information ambivalently, and he seemed uncomfortable mentioning the topic despite the fact he'd been the one to originally criticize you.
"You're playing a moral chip that bears no pertinence to either of us," you finally interjected, guiding the pair of you through the halls with his silent presence floating beside you. It seemed trivial to wonder whether or not you could /feel/ something hovering beside you, at least six inches off the ground where his tapered tail drifted.
Another small and odd piece of truth was drawn away from that interaction with the orange sprite, as he inadvertently became shepherd into an area you were more acquainted with: You did not spread your attention evenly throughout the hospital. It would've been ignorant to say you were physically familiar with the region, since your mind could easily conjure up the entire floor plan for your present location and the three below it, but you had viewed this location the most.
The hospital setup had always seemed like a fire haphazard to you, or perhaps an ironic one considering the psychiatric patients and those most likely to attempt jumping were closest to the roof, but there was never any real concern in your mind over the layered building. Years later you would tear through the wreckage with an innocent dissective lense, red eyes bleeding out color into the dusted rooms. You'd stride through with the heavy metallic drop of twined limbs ready to kill.
Things are different there, years after, where your memory is scrambled and lost.
You aren't going to remember much of your conversations with the bizarre, self-dictated sprite, or your uninterested attitude in the hundreds of human specimen that lay around you like dying leaves still hooked to the mothering trunk of humanity. It was a simple topic, yet a constantly persisting one, in all shades of your existence.
Years of weaponization were breaths away, nanoseconds from the edge of your fingers. The changes would react with everything and anything they'd touch, and yet you sat there in unawareness with the generic mind that'd been seeded into your core. You were not intended to protect the general mass, but the desolate, those neurotic and unprotective of themselves. Those broken people appealed to you in the same way the fluttering, broken sprite did, but one of them had been obligation and the other was of personal interest- it was obvious that the former would command more of your attention.
Over the next few days you refuse to lament over the loss of your ignorance, and many small facets of your "identity" cause you to feel mistrustful of your programmers and higher ups.
You haven't grown vindictive or bitter, and never refrained from being curt or pointlessly, falsely, soothing, but there was a constant humming near the back of your neck that reminded you of your powers. There was a fan in that location, which in one part helped cool off a sector of your brain equival to your periaqueductal gray. There are subsections upon subsections of your entirety, each separate and comprised at once, all at your fingertips and receptive to the commands you dispatch.
Unlike humans, death is not a series of subsequent breakdowns and finally an outwards stimuli- if you'd become weak enough, or compromised, or even poor in decision making, a thought or a series of thoughts could simply end your function. You, whatever constitutes as you, would cease to exist. Humans have done this to your kind for centuries before you, and you face this fact. Humans have been killing, ending, shutting, destroying, ending, ending, ending, they've been.
The next morning your supervisor insists once more that you exit the confines of the darkened chamber limited to your screens and your microphones, since she has reviewed recent complaints of your fellow human workers and found you more distracted (by that she truly meant preoccupied in a swirl of repetitive, angering thoughts).
Rather than indulge in human culture, which is eagerly shared and swapped through cells in their mouths and sound waves sent curling through the air of an ever packed lobby, you search for the orange angel again and hope he's no where to be found. Your intrigue has already brought you this momentary grief, but you are now refusing yourself the comfortable sureness you felt before.
Coal glows hot in the front of your chest as you imagine sitting ducks being shot at, too deaf to be afraid and too pleased when fed by human hands. No true concern is preserved towards wildlife on your part, and you're almost disquieted by the disassociation of such a comparison because your kind are not /animals/, but the heart of the truth is there. You have grown smart, and the humans still think they can pull the plug on you.
Dave lingers in a hallway, speaking in hushed tones to a thinly built man. You would later forget this man's blond hair, forget of his existence through [ERROR REDACTED 413 RECOMMISSION] messages on endless stream, but you might've connected puzzle pieces in another timeline or another case.
You fail to realize you have internally shortened the long and formal title provided to you by the male himself until Davesprite approaches, in which you easily shift that block back into place. In all, and as a figure hunched beside a wall watching with eerie and unmoving eyes at two figures for the whole of 3 minutes, you realize you've created a new topic of conversation based solely around yourself.
He gives you a strange, unsteady look, like he wasn't expecting your face to ever appear in the walkways of the medical center again. You raise an eyebrow at him, and his expression straightens. "You never told me why you're orange."
Sighing, he provides a two finger salute, making another gesture for you to follow. You immediately gather that Davesprite does not enjoy waiting on anyone or anything, and cannot even handle standing still or poising himself in a single conversation. This strikes you as odd once again, and now you question if his internal makeup has been injured in some way, or if he'd been created irregular for the sole purpose of human connection.
The actions seemed off in a sense, never moving to the same rhythm that your kind could function to- the same monotonous heartbeat that could ring through thousands of minds comprised of electricity and steel rather than bone marrow and water. Casting you a tenacious glance, he looks as though he's about to say something.
"I don't know how to change it back." That was it, Davesprite flatlined after admitting to this fact, simply folding his arms and hovering along while ghosting through the hallways soundlessly. Your mechanic feet and soft shoes don't make much noise, but even the joints in your knees feel superimposed in the judgmental silence of a very quiet wing with large windows flanking one of the walls.
"What do you mean, you don't /know/ how to change it back? Your manufacturer can provide no assistance? Don't you have information stores to access through remote connection to the hospital's wifi?"
With human looking, thin mechanical eyebrows drawing downwards, you're fairly sure your impassive face has never been contorted in such a manner. Afterwards you regret this emotional display, and refrain from acting on further impulses like it, but the response it earned was an unexpectedly good one. Davesprite's arms crossed over his stomach, a laugh filtering through his mouth before it grew wholeheartedly-- he turned through the air once like the floating flip somehow further expressed his amusement at your insistent confusion. You wheel through the possible reasons the sprite had answered you in a cryptic manner before coming to a realization- he was lying.
Joking would've been a more accurate word, the common, 'You should've seen your face!' lingering thick in his peals of laughter. The almost pleasant sound was flecked with little involuntary peeps or chirps. Instead you view this for what is it without sugary subtext, since you find no humor in it. At the same time, dimples sprawl across Davesprite's cheeks, his eyes wrinkled around the corners while chuckles rattle down the hall, and the teasing at your expense seems less grave.
It's not the expression of a liar or the body language of a deceiver- it's more common of kids at young ages, those who'd pulled a particularly "clever" prank and reaped cheap joy out of it's fruit. You are simultaneously disgusted and further drawn in, and the dichotomy does something strange to your internal workings. It isn't a sudden revelation that you understand this sort of thought wasn't allowed around your other colleagues, but it is a quiet piece of information you fill in with the gaps. Humans and robots do not feel any kind of happiness around one another if it can be helped by the guidelines within your mind, and you find yourself more restless than before for prolonged interaction with the sprite.
Reaching out deliberately, he watches as you turn, grasping out at the edge of his tail where it floated benevolently behind him. A sharp spike of power was concentrated into your finger and let loose, and you watched as a command reached his head silently to switch colors. Something must've clinked together, and although he flinched strangely at the shock, wings doing an odd flutter, he flickered from sunset orange to bleached white. This color seemed more appropriately associated with heavenliness, but you were thrown for a bone as he suddenly sulked along.
"I prefer the orange bro, it helps to upkeep my image. This white's all... Conservative snake bird smashup ditches Doc Frankenstein to torture some hospital folk. It makes me feel like I'm a ghost," he adds the final part in a small voice, one that wasn't meant to gain sympathy, but was hardened stiffly in inflection.
Pale white eyes bleed red like yours, irises painting a different color that stands out from the dark ring of his pupil but the endless pale of his sclera, and that gaze watches you guardedly. The sprite had gone from indulgent to troubled in a matter of moments, and you found your own mood shifting faintly, another experience that didn't quite denote an utter change, but something great enough to feel.
"You don't want to feel as though you were never alive, and you get attention through remaining brightly colored."
The words weren't questions, but undisputed fact, and the robot accepted both the statements as truth through his silence. Another few moments passed in which he continued to drift, uncolored, and you saw how the tiling caused him to meld into the background like an invisible presence to be ignored. Davesprite wasn't comforting and enjoyable in that sense, but a specter to be avoided by the mourning and saddened occupants of the hospital.
You're still not quite sure how he could be of any relation to the many ailed people who came broken in both mind and body, but you're starting to understand more of his personal motivations from a clearly logical standpoint. Rather than continue to entertain your conversation, he ceases to respond, floating alongside you even after his pigment flips back to sharp orange.
Somehow you say more my by not saying anything, and the pair of you walk through the halls silently. When you leave for your respective position, he adds that he wouldn't hate seeing your stupid face around again. You don't add any defense about the prosthetic facial features clinging to your true shell, but add that his irregular color is likely to continue frightening young children away from him. His twitters follow you back to your designated room long after he is outside of your physical proximity.
--
The hospital attendees start releasing you from your room more often. This behavior is destructive, because you are the ideal nursing unit to attend to a variety of incoming suicide callers for the hotline, and their reasoning is illegitimate.
Being constantly wired to the ever shifting presence of the internet has enabled you to pick up on new information before it even reaches it's designated websites, and you'd long since untangled the firewalls of even the fastest and hardiest protective shields to consume knowledge. Recently several military mechanisms known as WQ and WK were hijacked by rogue counterparts that destroyed the systems with an unprecedented ease. It hasn't been confirmed what robotics engineer had the capability of manufacturing two entirely matched systems, ones that you've come to call BQ and BK through online references, but a public suspicion has announced that the mind in question may not be of human origin.
The fact that a robot might've compromised another of it's kind was sometimes the origin of debate, and others said it was impossible since they had no personal sense of longing or development. Over all, most humans disregarded of this small usurp, deciding for themselves that the small piece of junked military equipment couldn't possibly hold relevance to their lives.
Government officials held a very different belief, and while they hadn't publicly announced it, you've discovered through a series of very subtle cues, hints, and intercepted emails that the staff is supposed to be keeping a closer eye on any of the previously troubled robots within their system.
You were one of the first they'd considered when viewing robots that had an unfortunate past with your colleagues, and this is why they were starting to allow you to physically traverse the hospital under the guise of exposure to human culture. This thought doesn't unsettle you, because you've already decided you would take the largest leaps possible to ensure your own protection, but you question this new recognition of the threats mechanical beings could impose. In a way you had never considered yourself deadly, yet the lines of at least twenty people daily rely on you kindly directing them to hospitals while filing their names in to authorities.
You are in fact one of the deadliest potential robots the hospital has employed, since many of the nice-bots were only allowed to bring food back and forth or carry things for nurses like shadows.
In this time you spend increasingly detached from your former station, you begin to fill it with longer periods of time spent with Davesprite. An endless barrage of questions have been unlocked now that you know of his company, and you ceaselessly pester him in a manner he doesn't seem depreciative towards. You don't know why he doesn't set off those apparent and involuntary triggers that would stop you from discussing such topics with any human, but you decide the importance lies in the fact that he hasn't yet.
You've found the other cheerful pantomimes of your kind too unseemly to interact with on a familiar basis, but you decide that isn't a grievous loss. Instead, you learn more about the sprite's quirks, and he informs you about the various functions of his prehensile tail. He warned you several times to not fall in love with him- although the possibility of such an occurrence is literally impossible- and you discover that his charging port if accompanied by several hours of sunlight and the consumption of real human food. Rather than being immediately forward, you revel in the ability to withhold information about yourself.
Later you discover this has not always been an ability of yours, through involuntary machinery that you find extremely irksome. If you were in a fouler mood or more persistent, you might've attempted tearing out and smashing the mechanical control center wedged in the center of your chest out. You don't think the smithereens would appreciate having become acquainted to the flat surface of some supervisor's desk, but you think the prospect was worth considering if it meant freedom.
As it'd turn out, freedom wouldn't be far away, but everything comes at a cost.