Alive Inside

Something caught in my upper gears and jammed. It made a sickening mechanical grinding noise inside my head. Then it whirred back and forth, trying first to back up and then to go forward over and over again without success. Reaching up to the sides of my neck, I switched the two metal brackets to the unlock position and rotated my head to remove it from my body. It twisted loose like a jar lid and came off in my hands with ease.

Switching to my front orbital cameras, I looked down into my cranial cavity, filled with what seemed like a tiny city of lights, circuits, and wires dancing. There in the center behind my orbital gear arrangement, was some type of foreign metal object. It was faded green color, where the rest of my gears are a steel alloy. This couldn't be just a loose or corroded part, so I reached down inside with my long fingerbones to see if I could wedge it loose.

They are strong, my fingerbones. Long ago the factory on the hill coated them in stainless steel for me, along with the rest of this skeleton. After all, why throw out a good design when you can upcycle and improve upon it instead? That was what the Twilight Authority used to say during their initial broadcasts but that was several hundred cycles ago now.

The object popped loose from the gears with minimal prying and landed in my palm. I closed my bony metal hand over it, so that it couldn't fall through, then retightened and locked my head back into place. Now I could get a better look at it with my orbital cameras. They have a much better resoultion than my torso cam, which is really meant to be more for secondary use.

The image whirred into focus on the object, revealing a small metal locket, tarnished green with age and dented in just enough that the clasp no longer clicked together. I stared at it for far too long as the gears in my head reset and then began spinning away again. A locket was a human made item. Something I hadn't dealt with for quite some time. Most items made by humans had been melted down and recycled long ago. So what was this one doing in my head?

Inside the slightly open seam of the locket, I could see something dark- colored, thin and rectangular. I pried the locket open and found it was a thin piece of black plastic with tiny metal teeth along the bottom. On one side was a capital R written in black. I did not know what R stood for. I wondered if it was a code or abbreviation I wasn't familiar with. I logged myself onto the authority database and scanned the object for more information. The search results came back within a few seconds, flashing across my line of vision.

"Authority: Search Results:

Item detected: SD Card

Origin: Human. 21st Century. 3 cycles BTM (Before Twilight of Man)

FHG1587: Model Compatibility: Compatible. Drive slot 4a"

I had forgotten I even had those drive slots. I hadn't used them for over two hundred cycles. We used to scan and delete contents that were saved on disks like these when we cleaned and reset the surface but our programing never let us view the actual contents. The TA told us it was unimportant. They were subversive, remnants of an organic animal species that nearly killed their own planet with pollution and greed.

My memory drive told me I should crush it, but I kept turning it over and over between my fingers. I could actually view the contents of this drive now. The command prompts that kept us from accessing them had long since been removed. After they were all destroyed, they became obsolete and needed to be uninstalled to make room for new updates and hardware changes over the years. I wondered to myself, as I examined the card, "Why the TA had discontinued humans?

I'd seen other organic creatures before obviously. We helped repopulate and release millions of species that the humans nearly destroyed. We left the other creatures to their own devices now for the most part. They had no higher form of thought that was useful to us and they were a part of the ecologicial balance that made this world a valuable living planet, but they have limitations that we do not.

I opened my left chest panel, located drive slot 4a and after a second of hesitation, pushed the sd card into a locking position. My orbital cameras locked and became a projector inside my own head. There was a second or two of static and a small human head and shoulders appeared in front of the screen. It was a child. It wore clothes. They were purple and white. A female identified child. She had long hair. It was brown and tucked behind her ears. She smiled a little but also seemed aggitated.

Offscreen, an adult female voice said, "Go ahead hunny."

The girl looked back towards the voice nervously, ran her hand through her hair, and then back at the camera. "Umm, my name is Rebecca, I am 9 years old. I live in Russellsville with my mom, my dad and our dog, Bear. He's a chocolate lab. My mom said...she said.. I should make this video umm, because the metal people are rounding us up and taking us to a very bad place and it might help if other people see this. Maybe they can help us get.."

Her voice faltered here and tears started to appear at the corners of her eyes. Another hand, an adult hand appeared from the side of the screen and then a torso. The mother wrapped her arms around her daughter, kissed her, and rubbed her shoulders in an effort to encourage her to keep speaking.

"We dont, umm, we don't know what's gonna, uum.. what's gonna happen to us..." Her bottom lip began quivering. She seemed to be choking while trying to talk now and her mom rubbed her shoulders.

"It's alright hun, I'll finish it, okay. You go play with Bear." The little girl nodded her head with her hand over her eyes and ran out of view of the video. The dog barked in the background. An adult female sat down in front of the screen. The girls mother or caregiver perhaps. Her hair was also brown and her eyes were the same shade of blue as the girls. Underneath those eyes, her skin was dark and appeared hollowed out. She looked tired, worried, but determined. She looked to the side as if making sure her child was out of hearing range.

"My name is Sylvie. My daughter's name is Rebecca. We are the last group leaving from Arkansas tomorrow. They are shipping us to a TA reassignment camp. It's a robotic Aushwitz and we won't be coming back. We've heard from others, what they are doing to people. We deserve better, my daughter deserves better. She's never hurt anyone, she's a child, an innocent child. She has a future, and they are taking that from her. They are taking that from all of us!"

Here the mother's voice had become almost a yell or a snarl. "Please, if you find one of these cards, please, there are more. She wiped her hands across her face several times smearing away more tears, she looked lost now, exasperated.

"We're having the kids swallow these disks tomorrow before they take us. We know they aren't scanning for anything internal. If our escape plan fails and we can't get away before then.... She shook her head, tears falling, hand over her mouth. "Then please look for all models marked FHG1587." She stood up and her hand moved forward, hit a button and the video feed abruptly ended.

I sat there for a while, processing and it occurred to me. Why had I never noticed how small my hands were or how short I was in stature compared to many of the other FH models. We are not programmed to reflect but we do possess artificial intelligence. Over time, there just became less and less work for us to do and that left extra time for me to think, to evolve, to reason, perhaps to empathize? These humans were not what the TA stated they were. They had feelings, they had a care for one another but it was beyond the level of concern that the animals I had observed had for one another. It was intriguing. There was something deeper to this that I could not quite understand.

So, I ran another search for other FHG1587 models.

Search Results: Model FHG1587

Quantity: 115347.

Location: Sector 6, Sector 7, Sector 19, Sector 23, Sector 27.

I used the mapping system to locate the closest sector, downloaded the data, and switched off my model GPS. I had decided. I was leaving my assigned sector. I was going. I was going to find the other cards. It's still probable that the human species really were subversive, but now that I have seen one, I have to know more about these humans. I needed to know the facts and it was obvious that the Twilight Authority has not given us all the accurate information. After all, this skeleton, this head now filled with the whirring of my own gears. It used to belong to a little human girl named Rebecca.