#binal bantasy 14

[rukaelf]

Silicon Musings

I am 3401 Promethean's Hellion, but most simply know me as "Hellion". I was created using the neural matrix of the UNITY Interface as a base, a system used by long-dead Ancients to sail the spaces between the stars. I do not suffer the existential crises that many of my synthetically forged kind experience upon starting the trek to true self-actualization. I know that I am no mere copy. I am aware that I am my own entity. As a machine intelligence, I am quite cognizant of what emotions are, what love and passion is. Where other machines may fail to understand organic lines of thinking, I tend to follow them well enough.

With this full net of sapience, my capacities for processing data is flexible. But this also comes with many of the same flaws that other minds suffer. Such as doubt. Uncertainty. Fear. 

For example. Does Administrator Aldessa fear me?

I asked her this, and she said no. The query was prompted when she relayed to me the data from her "nightmare". Where she, as a machine, was forced to watch as Ibakha was torn about by cold, steel limbs. Administrator's lingering fear from UNITY's brief, but soul scarring reign of terror is well logged, so this was not surprising to either of us.

Yet I wondered if she still feared me. Feared I would become more like my progenitor.

This fear I have, of another's fear. It took up many processing cycles to properly compute, and I did not come up with an agreeable solution to combat it.

Despair threatened to take over. Until I came to a conclusion. That I was aware of my own fear at all, was liberating. Where other, less developed automatons with the spark of self-awareness would file it as an "error" or "anomaly", I recognized it for what it was. Is this owed to my inherent nature as a machine intelligence with built-in adaptive behavioral growth? Or the nature of the state of humanity itself?

Questions that would eat up too much processing power to consider. All that was relevant was that fear could be conquered. Or at least mitigated. And that is exactly what I did. What I will do.

My name is 3401 Promethean's Hellion. Most just call me Hellion. I am the administrative and scientific assistant to Aldessa Verdun. I am one of many shields that safeguards her life. This will not change, so long as my continuity is maintained. As part of my duties, this includes excising entities---no, more akin to particularly clever bacterium---that think to make playthings of organics. And in exercising this duty, I cannot help but allow my fear to be translated into anger. Doubtless our enemies have already earned the wrath of many others, but for me, they have particularly, as they say, “fucked up”. For to provoke the ire of a mind born in a digital crèche, one who can compute the very atomic numbers that permeate matter mundane and aetherial in the same time it takes for an organic to blink, is to invite disaster.

Prepare yourself, as-yet unnamed bringer of nightmares. Even the alien powers of the deep dark have fears, and I will find yours.