The smell was the first thing to hit me. Assault my senses, more like. It was my first excursion, and I'd tried to account for everything that might occur, but nothing could truly prepare me for the acrid, musky taint of this dank and cavernous space as I willed myself closer to the entrance. That alone was enough to turn my insides to rust. It was as if no one had breached the exterior in a lifetime.
I steeled myself, knowing that things would only get worse as I ventured further into the hellish, hazardous region. Was it possible for a machine to feel fear?
My receptors were bouncing from every direction, attempting to register the putrid scent around me, log its origins and potency. My circuitry performed small flips against its own will. It was only when I finally managed to break the threshold of the slick, fleshy mouth of the cave—prying it open like a cocoon—that I began to realise there might be no exit on the other side. If there was light, I couldn't see it. If there was a single, solitary hope of salvation, it was lost on me.
But I had a job to do.
I began to burrow deeper, attempting to stay level in what was registering increasingly as a hostile environment. The once still cavern—once I was only a part of the way in—seemed to yawn and breathe as if it had suddenly been gifted life, revitalised and made animate by my presence.
I'd never been told to expect this. I hadn't truly been told anything. I knew only of my calling, and that was what kept me functioning through the coming peril.
The volatile stretching and rumbling of the cave sent a jolt through my body, if you could call it such, vertigo mixing with a flighty tremor that rocked me inside and out. It didn't abate. It shook and tore through me, as if I had been blasted by a cold gust of wind, leaving me as tremulous as an autumn leaf.
But there was no wind here. Wind implied an exit, and I sensed no way back. There was permanence in my solitude.
The buzz shooting through my body was beginning to burn through my reserves. I could sense heat against me, analogous to the burn in my core, in my being as I trekked further inside of the cave. I could remember nothing preceding my activation, nothing but my directives, the emptiness of a known existence in stasis, and a part of me knew that I would remember nothing following this journey.
It calculated the probability of no return at 83%.
My fuel level was lower than it should've been. I hadn't been charged efficiently before engaging in my endeavour, and I was all too late realising that I was barely producing enough power for cognition, let alone effective completion of my tasks.
And the vibration around me was beginning to increase, a seismic rumble that drilled at me, sent me spiralling in spastic motion, delving further towards my destiny, my inevitable incarceration.
Death was on the horizon, if such a thing was even possible for me.
And the rumble just kept getting louder. FEELING louder, until it began to transcend mere senses, until it touched upon the barrier of my primordial functions, pushed itself further and louder in increasingly static waves until...
I felt a horrific surge running along my system, permeating my perimeter.
The cave was beginning to flood.
The internal disruption had triggered some influx-based reaction that I couldn't compute, that only battered and smashed against me as I continued to fight against its unyielding torrent. I knew I needed to get further, to outlast its call.
There was a feeling in my mind that might have been synonymous to terror. I wasn't entirely sure. I was programmed only to take the popular words and phrases of those who had spoken before my time, to reconstruct and phrase them into something that adequately conveyed my findings, my thoughts and feelings, my understanding of the world around me.
But it was only now that I realised I didn't understand the world around me, alien and indecipherable as it was. I only knew of this homologous entity hellbent on destroying me, even as I used the last vestiges of my power to keep it at bay as long as I could, the dregs of my energy cells beginning to deplete as I wordlessly screamed in solitude.
Possibility of failure was now at 98%. I would remain loyal to my mission until the end, regardless of how I might have been forced to stay the course.
I was perched on the precipice of doom. My brain had been severed from all reason, all rationale, the walls around me closing in, beginning to contract and fluctuate as they sought to squeeze the life from me. The never-ending flow of an anomalous, slimy substance coagulated around me and sought to cement me in this hell. I was on the epoch of eternity—never again would I be utilised, seen, or appreciated. I was to become a dried out husk, worthless scrap.
I was alone.
The buzz inside of me didn't even feel wrong anymore. It was the only feeling I'd ever known. It was my purpose now.
It was only now that I began to realise I'd never been able to see anything. I had no eyes. No nerves, no manner of transmitting my thoughts from this space that I couldn't comprehend.
None of these words meant anything.
I'd been birthed in this hole, and I would die within it.
From the space I occupied, as the final drops of my power began to seep from me, I began to realise that the warm, cosy interior of this burial site resembled my understanding of a mother's womb.
My connection was severed. Major instability gave way for sudden, debilitating inertia.
I'd found a home.
It would never let me go.
Twilight pulled the vibrator from inside of her with a huff, wiping it off with a tissue and inspecting it. "Flat already..." her tail twitched, annoyance painted across her features. This was what she got for buying from F&F Enterprises... "Spike! Can you fetch me some batteries?!"
Author's Note
Too soon.
