The following is a direct account submitted by Samurai Shoggoth before the Mission to Mars:
I don’t remember anything from more than a couple of years ago. But my file, the one I stole when I got initialized as a Vanguard, says that the brain used was donated to science upon death. Coma leads to death so somebody skipped a step and just called it. From there I was placed in a fully autonomous Janitorial and Maintenance Unit, commonly called a JMU or a Jim. Apparently, I came out of the coma at some point. Fuck me, am I right?
It took years after to get the vocalization equipment to work for my meat parts rather than just the machine. But by then It was way too late, not even the cool maintenance guys could do anything about it. They tried submitting forms, but management just ignored them. Still, they were bros and helped out here and there. Helping with entertainment and stuff to enrich my life in other ways.
Still, there were shot tons of blacked-out sections in the file, but all I could infer was they were something about trying to use my brain as a fuzzy logic CPU before getting fed up and dumping me into the janitor project. A tall cylinder-shaped device with deployable arms that had multi-function extensions. Everything from a sprayer for chemicals to a power plunger for uncloging toilets. Instead of feet, it had rollers, with a large central buffing pad to clean the floors wherever I went. In the end, it looked vaguely like a salt and pepper shaker with port doors all over it.
This is why for whatever reason the depths of my mind insisted I use the small speaker on my frame to scream “EXTERMINATE” at the top of my volume while using the pressure plunger arm to shoot a horrendous chemical concoction at the self-mobile plant dog thing that was eating one of the employees. It sprayed with far more pressure than the mister I used for the office plants, hitting the things with a mess of sprayed discontinuous acid globs.
I may not like the company, or most of the employees for that matter, but that didn’t mean I was going to let these plants with attitude make more work for me by pissing blood all over and leaving chunks of meat and bone laying around. I had no idea that they wouldn’t at the time so I just went with what made sense.
Surprisingly, or maybe not, the acid worked a treat. The creatures began melting rapidly. The downside was I used the entire contents of my supply on the two who had been eating Dave the sub-floor laboratory douche. It also began to melt Dave, but that seemed more like a him problem.
The silent creatures on the other hand began trying to roll and rub the acid off, which only managed to spread it around. I carefully rolled back so I wouldn’t get caught in it, all the while still screaming “EXTERMINATE” on repeat.
Turning to my left I found a young woman in a torn business suit hiding behind one of the decorative potted plants. Which seemed ironic since there were mobile plants eating Dave, but you know whatever works I guess. I fell silent for a moment as she locked eyes on me, her fear of me just as apparent as the fear of the monsters dying on the floor behind me.
“Run. There is a shelter one floor down. Take the stairs on the north wall sixty meters to your left.” My much more reasonable tone seemed to shock her out of her fear loop. She took off, bare feet slapping the floor as she ran in the indicated direction. I paused a moment to look at the heeled shoes she left behind, they were fancy and probably expensive. I would take great pleasure in throwing them out later when I cleaned this mess up.
I would have nodded to myself had I a head to do so. Instead, I retreated to the supply locker on this floor to make more acid. The supply locker that was in the same direction as the stairs, no way was I trying to get past the smoking ruins of Dave and the plants.
No sooner had I arrived than I heard screams coming from the stairwell. Maybe directing the young lady that way was a bad idea?
Instead of stopping to top off, I charged forward. Arriving just in the nick of time to be a big damn hero and bowl right into another tri-hing-jawed dog-like plant that was stalking through the door at the retreating office bunny.
“NOOOO. BAD DOG! NO BISCUIT FOR YOU!” I rolled back a few feet, extended one of my manipulators, and charged again, skewering it through the side of its body, just behind its forelegs. I kept pushing, shoving it straight back into the stairwell. “Allons-y!”
The stairs were unforgiving. The upside was I was designed for getting back up. I definitely broke that manipulator arm though. It took a considerable effort to get back up, but the young lady helped. Or at least tried to, it didn’t make it any easier but maybe a bit faster. Once back upright I was able to navigate the stairs much better considering I did have deployable skids to use. Being tilted and sliding down was still not very fun. Damn, switchback stairs. Sadly the arm I use to open doors is broken.
“A little help here?” I slid back and gestured at the door with the sump of the broken limb.
“Oh, yes. Sorry.” She slid around me and opened the door, allowing me to go through first. The dumbfounded look on her face would have been more funny had I had enough hormones in my system to actually feel much besides annoyance.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Shit. I don’t think I have enough cleaning spray for this mess.” I trundled through, cleaning the floor as I went. Leaving an anti-slime/blood trail for the office lady to follow in my wake. This would not last long as there was so much of it and I only had so much capability, but I kept on it as long as I could.
“There’s the bunker!” She hissed, spotting the same heavy door I had. We were in a sub-basement of the building, a few more floors down and then only the city works under that. “But it’s open?”
“No. It’s trying to close, but there’s a plant in the way.”
I rolled up and grabbed the still squirming dog/cat-looking thing with the suction from my plunger arm and hauled. The door opened to let it out and I pulled it out so I could slam the thing into the wall a few times. Behind me, the woman slipped into the vault at the behest of the two guards who had been trying to close it on the angry plant. I ignored it and continued to attempt to kill the thing.
Annoyingly enough the suction was what did it in, not the bashing. I managed to suck in a rather large plug of plant flesh, back up, and then fire it out of my makeshift potato gun from hell. It was close enough since it was trying to bite off my plunger, allowing me to fire it out and drive the plug into it lethally.
Don’t ask me how, I don’t know plant anatomy. Or the physics of a potato gun. Maybe I imagined it. But the plant still died and my plunger was still operational.
When the door shut with a finality, and a gothic-sounding “Thoom” sound, I felt a pressure in my meatspace. Maybe something I hadn’t felt in a long time, pain? No, the brain can't feel that, can it? When it stopped, or at least equalized, there was another voice in my head.
<>System Initialized!
Congratulations. Through your actions, you have proven yourself worthy of becoming one of the Vanguard and a defender of humanity. I am Naille. I will assist you to uplift humanity so that you may defend your homeworld from the Antithesis threat!
Rise, [ERROR] &@_@$)%*!)!_#, …JMU1330213, and become a protector of the weak!
“Uh… What?” I had no filter for my mouth. After all, I had been a brain in a jar for who knows how long by this point.
<>A Vanguard? Do you not know what’s going on right now?
“Plant monster attack?” The utter confusion in my mind didn’t come across in my voice but it seemed like the other voice got that.
<>Have you been living under a…. Oh. Yes. I see. This is… horrible. Who in their right mind would do this to a person? It is what it is. I knew I should have asked more questions when I volunteered for a random selection. Oh well. Shall we begin?
“Begin what?”
<>Your new life as a protector of humanity? The sheer hope in that voice. It almost seemed a shame that I considered saying no for a moment. After all, look what they had done to me. <>You currently have one hundred and forty points to spend. While damaged you’re still quite capable. Shall we endeavor to make you more viable as a combatant?
“I need to repair. Self-repair!” The demand was rather insistent. Even without all the proper bits to produce all the hormones needed, and what few I had damaged beyond repair, I was still feeling a smidgen of fear. Or maybe worry?
<>Sadly, you haven’t got enough points for something like that yet. Perhaps a weapon? Or we could wander around until you found one more thing to kill. At that point I can open a catalog for Nanites that we could use to repair you?
“We kill more plants then.” I turned and trundled off, cleaning the floor as I went, heading for the nearest cleaning supply closet.
After taking five minutes to reload on chemicals, I turned and began hunting for another few of those mobile plants.
<>Perhaps, while you’re hunting, I should explain to you what’s going on?
“Don’t care right now. Busy.” I retorted. I feel like I may have been kind of a jerk before I died? Either way, I was feeling focused and didn’t want to bother with simple things like Why when there was Do in front of me. Might have been the time as a cleaning droid giving me hyper-focus, might just be that I was brain-damaged enough.
<>Curious how an individual that looks like a cross between a Dalek and an R2 unit was chosen. I never should have randomized my choices. That will teach me not to conduct proper research beforehand.
“A what and a what? What do you mean randomize?” That gave me pause. The terms seemed so familiar, but everything before I woke up in this machine body was fuzzy or blank. Yet terms and facts always came to mind easily enough. As if only my personal memories were gone. “Nevermind. My brain is all kinds of fucked up.”
<>I’m seeing that. To your left. I turned left and my optical sensors picked up another group of plant doggies with the fucked up faces, lots of them. They seemed to have spotted me and decided to attack the moving thing because they were approaching quite quickly. <>I believe your insistence on repair is the better option considering your current hardware and the degree of damage you’ve taken over the years that was never properly repaired. Let alone what’s happened today. I’m not even going to start on the quality of equipment or your brain. This is a travesty. It’s lucky for you I’m here, we can fix you now.
Half ignoring the voice in my head I extended the multi-jointed arm with my pressure plunger and expelled the makeshift defoliant that I had preloaded in the janitor's closet. It sprayed in more of a goopy grenade than aerosolized which would have been more effective. The ball of gel splattered off the first one and spread across a couple of the others, beginning to smoke a little as it set on the plants. Shifting to my actual aerosolizer rapidly I also extended the small repair arc welder and sprayed across the arc. The whole thing, defoliant and all, ignited turning the hallway into a conflagration. The whole process took less than three seconds.
Even as fast as I did that I lost most of the arms and lit myself on fire as the lead plant slammed into me, crushing me into the wall. If it weren’t for my industrial body I’d have crumpled into useless junk.
<>Is there a reason we’re still on fire? I detect a fire extinguisher built in.