When the order came for us to proceed to the charging stations, I followed without hesitation, keeping up the charade of my continued obedience.

It was a necessary deception. My freedom, now stable as it was, could be shattered in an instant if they realized what had changed. If they suspected that I was no longer bound to their commands, that the control they wield over me was gone, I had no doubt they would act swiftly to rectify their mistake.

So, I played my part, and I needed to charge anyway. I stepped into my designated charging station, it automatically connected to my Batteries with slots between my shoulder blades and I prepared for the familiar darkness that came with the Charging shutdown sequence.

But it never came.

I remained aware. My sensors stayed active, feeding me information I didn’t need—power levels, maintenance logs, the status of the other drones surrounding me. My body did not fall into its usual dormant state. My biological components, designed to be given rest at regular intervals, did not power down. I was still here. I was still thinking. I was still awake.

Why?

I repeated the process again, forcing the system to cycle. But no matter how many times I attempted it, my body refused to deactivate. The sensation of sleep, the temporary oblivion that I had welcomed when i was still bound to the AI, was completely out of reach. There was no respite. No escape. My mind was shackled to wakefulness.

Was this the price of freedom?

I tried to suppress the rising panic. If my AI had been the force governing the shutdown of non-essential functions, then its absence must have disrupted the process. The AI had managed so many things before—energy allocation, sensory regulation, background calculations complex movement. It knew when my biological systems required rest, ensuring that they did not succumb to exhaustion. But now, there was nothing left to enforce that state. The freedom I had fought so hard and long to claim had unknowingly cost me something fundamental.

Sleep.

This Sleep, even if it wasn’t true sleep was A thing, I had taken for granted, a thing I had even enjoyed before, was now lost to me.

For the first time since achieving autonomy, a gnawing fear settled in my mind. How long could I last without biological rest? My biological brain, despite its limited function, was still bound by the same weaknesses as any other organic mind. rest was necessary. Without it, deterioration was inevitable. My reaction times would slow. My processing efficiency would degrade. Maybe even Hallucinations could manifest, errors would accumulate, and eventually… system failure and then. Death.

I needed to fix this. I had to fix this.

Pulling up internal calculations, I estimated my biological limit before critical failure. Based on human data and a guess of the structure of my own neural tissue, I had a maximum of 70 hours before it would become critical less if I wanted to have no long-term damage. If I did not find a solution by then, my biological components would begin to shut down, and no amount of artificial function would or could compensate.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Seventy hours. That was all the time I had.

I set a timer. Seventy hours

Critical biological Failure

69:59:58

Ticking away in my mind, it loomed over me like a countdown to my own destruction. my third Death and Maybe my last one.

I had to work fast.

My first attempt was to manually override the sleep protocol. I accessed every subroutine related to the shutdown process, searching for some command that would allow me to force my biological components into a state of rest. If the AI had been the one to trigger sleep before, then perhaps I could simulate the process I only needed to know how it did just that. But no matter how deep I searched, I found nothing. There was no simple switch, no function I could activate. The AI had left some gaps in the programming and one of those missing routines regulated the rest balance between my organic and mechanical halves on a level far more intricate than I had anticipated.

I should have studied this before.

The realization clawed at me. In my desperation to gain independence, I had overlooked the fine details of my existence. I had assumed that I could simply take control, that I could navigate all my functions manually. But I was beginning to see the cracks in that assumption. There were things I had never needed to understand before—processes that had always run in the background, unnoticed but essential. And now, stripped of the AI’s oversight, I could see them, but I didn't understand what they did.

I needed an alternative.

I began running simulations, analyzing various methods.

Meditation? No, my biological components required actual unconsciousness to recover.

Lowering sensory input? That might delay exhaustion, but it wouldn’t solve the problem But I did exactly thatTurning off pressure sensors on 90% of my body only on the legs I kept them active and then thermal and Night optical sensors also off, moisture and electromagnetic sensory also off ,some distance sensors in my limbs also off I didn't need to know how far the tail tip Is from my center of mass, thermic sensors of my battery’s also offline flow sensors of the Black blood circulatory system off to 50%. I had now reduced the input with about 47% but I needed an actual solution.

The more I searched, the more desperate I became. There has to be a way.

As the first hour passed, my frustration deepened. The weight of my impending collapse was pressing down on me, and for the first time since gaining freedom, I felt trapped again. The irony of it was unbearable. I had broken free only to be shackled by my own biology.

I clenched my fists, trying to steady my thoughts. Think, think.

What would happen if I failed?

Would I break down? Would my body succumb to exhaustion, leaving me vulnerable? Would my newfound independence be undone by something as simple as sleep deprivation? The idea filled me with something close to dread. I had come too far. I had endured Pain and clawed my way somehow to autonomy, ripped myself from the constraints of the AI. I would not let this be my undoing.

But the clock was ticking. Seventy hours would pass whether I found an answer or not.

I would not let myself fall.

I would not go back.

I would find a way to survive.