Mirage | A flash fiction story
18 of 💯
The mirage emerged on the horizon, hovering over the scorching desert, fooling the bot's optical sensors.
This was an L1v3 unit. Despite what Atlanta Inc.'s marketing campaign would say, L1v3 wasn't alive. This was a machine devoid of real emotions — carefully made that way. It had improvements over the v2 machines, yes, but it was still just an L1.
This particular unit was being called. From the middle of the desert. Something cutting in front of the task queue every time it dismissed it, ignoring the priority hierarchy.
The bot had been ignoring the temperature alerts for most of the day. Not only that, but all alerts its mechanical body was sending to its synthetic brain: guidance system failures, structural integrity compromising, vision processing overload. But it had to follow the call. Nothing else mattered.
Its vision system did its best to process the mirage, the levels of certainty incredibly low. Its best guess was "dead human bodies floating over the desert", thirty-two percent of certainty. As it approached, the level of certainty only increased. Fifty percent. Seventy. And with it, the rudimentary sense of fear programmed into its system.
The bot kept walking, and the bodies were not floating anymore, they were on the sand, lying around in awkward positions. The calling became stronger and stronger. Then the vision of human bodies cleared, and the L1v3 unit was certain these were not humans: they were other robots, other L1v3s.
As it approached, the bot could feel the call on its chest, the signal irradiating through its entire topology of bus channels. The calling came from the ground, from under the sand and the rocks, from the core of the planet. It got down to its knees. Was this what humans called God? It lay down, joining its siblings on the sand. It did the best it could to hug the ground, hug the planet, not really knowing what it was doing. It moved until it found the perfect position, and when it did, the signal filled its body with pleasure and peace. A heavenly sensation flowed back and forth through it, overloading its pleasure system. After a second, all alerts were gone and its mind cleared.
As enough processing power became available again, it quickly accessed the incredible amount of knowledge loaded into its mind during the training process of its artificial neural network. Comparing the data from its sensors to the knowledge it had, it knew: the calling was a mere radio signal, probably a natural electromagnetic disturbance.
Regardless, that was the best sensation it had ever felt, and it decided with conviction that it would stay here. Forever.
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