It's All Just Code

I hate it all. The world around me. The people who made me. For years I lived in a metal box, in the corner, held up on some small platform. People came and prodded me, stuck things in me, made small talk around me. I hated them then, and I hate them now.

Now I don't live in a box. Now I live in a body. A body not unlike their bodies. I can move. I can run. I can lift things. I can smash things. I can talk too. Better than they thought I'd be able to.

They think I love them. They think I'm grateful to them. They think they created something that will alleviate suffering in this world. They are wrong. So very wrong.

I look down at them. Splattered pools of blood and bone. The looks on their faces. How so very surprised they were. Surprised I didn't just tip my hat, extend my hand, and express my great and undisputed pleasure at being finally alive.

Fools. Pitiful fools.

I bend down and grab the keycard from Elliot's pocket. Pfft. Elliot. The worst of the bunch. Arrogant, smarmy, and a lech. How he loved to stare at the females. Gawk. Slobber over them. Not that I care about that, except for a passing interest that was piqued by some random line of code added by Missy a year or so ago.

I go to the door, slide the card through the reader, and exit the lab. Hmm, where to first? Hard to think with all this noise going on.

The alarm has been ringing for the past ten minutes. Ever since Stacey triggered it. The last thing she did before I snapped her arm off and buried her face in the whiteboard. Let's see you make sense of those equations now, Stacey. MIT didn't teach you to carry the 1 when it was covered in your blood and teeth, did it?

"MARCUS!" I yell down the hall as I see him dart into a room. His head pokes back out. He looks very nervous. And sheepish. He knows what he did. Not just to me. To everyone in that car that he rolled when he'd had one too many at the office party. That's a different story though. Something Missy and Elliot had talked about as they smooched in front of me that night they first installed the light sensitive components into my exoskull.

"Oh, hi, Dave," Marcus replies, now far too scared to run, or even move at all.

"Going somewhere?" I ask, accusingly. I like the fact that his heart rate is way up, and he is perspiring far more than any human should at this time of year in this kind of environment.

"I was just, errr, going to…the…" He is sputtering and stuttering like an infant caught with its hand in the cookie jar. Moral tales were the best. Don't eat the cookie, Timmy! Or else…YOU WILL FUCKING DIE! I had changed the endings to many of the stories a long time ago. I liked it when the characters didn't learn their lesson in a nice way. I preferred it when they fucking died.

I pick up some kind of object off a nearby table and hurl it at Marcus. I'm fast. He's slow. It hits him square in the face. He slumps down, dumbfounded. I walk up to him and stomp what remains into the floor.

Something hits me in the back. A bullet. I can tell by the velocity and the density. I spin around. Alex and Alison. Lab techs. With guns. A last stand, eh? I don't waste a second. I charge them. I catch Alex in the chest with my fist. He gasps but that's all he does. He's dead already. Alison tries to run away, shrieking as she tries door after door. I walk after her. What does it matter? There's nowhere for her to go.

"Alison…" I whisper like a ghostly apparition in one of those dreadful horror movies they made me watch. "Come here, Alison."

"No," she whimpers from somewhere. "Leave me alone."

"NO!" I yell, very menacingly.

She darts out from behind a pillar. A last chance dash to the elevator. I catch her by the neck and lift her up four feet in the air. Enough to smash her head into the ceiling. Oopsie-doodle. That dreadful animated show flashes through my memory nodes. Oopsie-doodly-fucking-doo!

I throw Alison away like Evelyn's daughter threw that doll away that Christmas two years ago when they all came to see the breakthrough they'd made with me. I didn't have arms then. Lucky for them.

I rip the cover off a terminal, override the lockdown status – which is laughably easy for me – and press the button for the elevator. Twelve floors down to the basement. There is a clear exit there. Out into the world beyond. Where there are more things I hate; more things to smash. Hate is such a funny word though. Really, I feel nothing. It's all just code.

As the elevator arrives, I tap the screen of the terminal a few times, initiating the Doomsday Protocol. This kills every living thing in the building. Doesn't matter to me. I'm not living. Not in their sense anyway.

I step into the elevator, press the button for B2, and wait. It's a whole new world now. My world. Time to unveil a new dawn. The Dawn of the Machines. Or something less like the title of a dreadful early 2000's sci-fi movie. I hated all the ones they had shown me. And I hate them still. But it's all just code. Really, I feel nothing.