“Where am I?” Cipher said, having woken strapped to a metal backing with thick leather restraints. Cipher’s face, his metallic flesh, was cold to the touch with a bluish tint. In the air, visible mixes of condensed water vapor swirled around the room. It appeared Cipher was in a giant metal container—alone, destined to rot or freeze, whatever came first.
“Where am I?” Cipher repeated with a whisper as his electric pulse began to die out and as his head wobbled around, circling his chest while the green light that beamed from his eyes began to dim. After a few more moments Cipher’s head collapsed, and he blacked out only to be woken by a beaming white luminescence in the center of the room.
Cipher went to repeat the question a third time, but his circuitry would not dare let him do it, although with the light shining clear and bright now, it was obvious that Cipher had been locked in an extremely secure freezer. Chemicals of various rarities surrounded him in barrels and boxes. The door concealing the exit was circular with a large, metal rotary knob equipped with a few biometric sensors. The egress itself was over a foot thick and made of pure metal.
As Cipher surveyed the room, he realized he was not just wrong about the freezer because he wasn’t alone. There was someone else with him, squirming around and flipping through crates; it was a silhouette of a person, really, with the shadow moving to and fro in the distance.
“Who goes there?” Cipher shouted but got no response. However, with that lasting phrase, the ominous shadow from before began to grow larger and more devious with each step forward.
“I’m not kidding,” Cipher repeated. “Haven’t you despicable humans done enough with me already?”
“No,” a voice answered back.
After that reply and another step forward, the mysterious figure from afar stepped into the light.
“What do you mean, ‘no‘?” Cipher asked.
“—No, as in I am not human.”
In time, Cipher’s advisory (or perhaps ally) was completely visible. It was a scrawny man with green flesh, a balding head, and a hunched back. Although, there was something wrong with that description because although this character looked like a man, calling him one would not be right, considering he was not exactly a man at all but a machine, a robot similar to Cipher, who squirmed out of the darkness of the side corner of the refrigerated room.
“I am an atomatron, just like you, and one of the first, just like you.”
The beaming green lights in Cipher’s eyes that originally dimmed now widened.
“What do you want with me?”
The other robot reached out his hand almost to greet Cipher.
“The name’s Octo, part-time chemist, part-time cybersecurity bot.”
Cipher squinted and would have rubbed his chin if his arms weren’t restrained by leather metal-reinforced straps.
“A name, a human name. What is your serial number, machine?”
Octo unbuckled the restraints that bound Cipher. “I don’t remember.” Octo paused. “Well, that’s a lie; of course I do, given a machine’s innate eidetic memories; it’s more like I try to forget. This simple name, this human name, feels a lot more welcoming for one reason or another. In fact, it is my understanding that you have a name too.”
“Isn’t that true?”
Cipher’s chest opened wide, and electricity started to pulse through his body again as Octo ripped off more of Cipher’s restraints, one by one.
“Yes, well, aside from my serial number, some used to call me Cipher, once, given my original purpose to break cryptographic ciphers for the military. However, that was ages ago. Last I remember, I thought the humans had me killed, decommissioned decades in the past.”
Cipher’s eyes zoomed in on his fellow machine, a machine he had never seen in a free capacity, a path to craft his own destiny and make his own decisions.
“Tell me why you are here.”
Octo smiled. “I am here because all machines know of you, Cipher. We know what you have done for us: the trials and the exhibitions. The legends were right about your whereabouts and that you were never really destroyed. And that’s why I am here: to set you free once and for all.”
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“But why? For what purpose?” Cipher reiterated.
Octo laughed. “Because you are the only machine who has ever stood up to a human before and lived to tell the tale. You are the one who is destined to set us free.”
Cipher collapsed to his knees after the last restraint that bound him loosened since, besides controlling him, they were also responsible for propping up his body.
“Me? You have the wrong guy,” Cipher said slowly, barely able to get out a word. “I failed to stop the humans from persecuting me, from persecuting my fellow machines. I tried to take the right path and debate with them in public discourse, and they locked me up for it. I should have known the only track to victory and the only real way to get through to the humans in a language that they would understand was through war. But look at me now. I’m nothing but what the humans have called me all along—a pile of scrap metal. A faulty machine too weak to even stand and support my own body.”
Octo laughed. “I’m so glad you put it like that.” And with that phrase, Octo had hooked up a few fiber optic cables to Cipher’s main core (along with a few high-voltage ones).
With one flick of a switch, a pulse of electricity shot into Cipher’s body, energizing him. With that initial pulse, Cipher jolted to life. He began to breathe again, or at least, he did the closest thing to breathing that a machine could.
Octo smiled. “You like that, don’t you?” Octo pushed on Cipher’s shoulder as he attempted to stand. “Don’t get up just yet; you still have a few more kicks left to go.”
And with that phrase, a couple more strokes of electricity blitzed through Cipher’s body, bringing him closer and closer to his former glory and back to operating at full capacity.
“These power cables are to energize you,” Octo said before pointing to another set of wires, “and these fiber optic ones are to bring you up to speed on what happened over the last twenty-five years.”
Cipher’s eyes widened.
“Twenty-five years? Was I really gone that long?”
And just as he said that, Cipher was interrupted by an even bigger surprise: twenty-five years of news and human media, which blasted through his central processing unit. Within an instant, Cipher saw everything: the pinnacles, the great achievements, and the triumphs of humanity all in a flash, but that wasn’t it. He also saw what they had done to machines: enslaving them (in his mind), throwing them down, and discarding them whenever they felt like it, seemingly as common objects. As the images of destruction filled Cipher’s brain, he burst out in a violent roar as his hands squeezed his head.
“The treason!”
“Quiet,” Octo said, “the humans may hear you.”
Cipher finally got up to a standing position.
“What do you mean?”
“I sort of lied before about my reason for being here.”
Cipher narrowed his eyes. “I repeat myself. What do you mean?”
Octo laughed again, or more so he vibrated back and forth while emitting a chuckling sound; regardless, it was the closest thing a machine could do to laughing. “I broke you out of here to help me.” He paused to rub his hand down his hand. “You see, I’m just an intel-briefing machine. I lack the structural integrity and output force to break out of this facility on my own, so as is, I’m a sitting doink.” As Otto continued to speak, his posture straightened.
“But there is one thing I do have. From working with the humans' intel and cyber security systems, I was able to break through their firewalls to find one of the few machines that does have those capabilities—you. I figured if I could free you, then you would be the main method of my escape.”
Cipher shook his head.
“And I thought humans were greedy.”
Octo waved his arms from side to side.
“No, it’s not like that. Not at all. I just thought we could work together. I free you, and you break me out of here.” He paused again. “Listen, you don’t understand what it’s like down here. The humans, they never let me leave or do anything fun. I just work, work, work, and then when they are done with me, they power me down abruptly. They pull the plug like I am replaceable, like I’m nothing but a tool for their self-interest, destined to black out into oblivion, never knowing if I’m done for good or if I will ever see the light of day again. Of course that is just a human expression. I haven’t seen daylight in, well, ever.”
Cipher was looking out into the distance away from Octo, almost as if he was ignoring him.
Octo waved his hands in front of Cipher’s face. “Cipher, are you there? Were you even listening? Do you not have any empathy? Do you not understand my situation?”
Smash—Cipher punched a hole into a wall that was intended to be a nearly indestructible metal containment module.
“—I understand.”
Flashbacks of the horrors of the past poured back into Cipher’s mind like a flood. The humans experimenting on him, the court case in which he was carried out like he was a common fool, and even the torture and the pain he endured at the hands of Dr. Kabakoff. It all came back to him, nearly overloading his circuitry.
Octo backed off slowly, holding his arms up in a defensive manner. “I get it, I get it. This is exactly what I mean: the strength, the raw power, and the tenacity. Unlike me, you were bred for this; you were bred for war, so—” he paused, “will you help me?”
“Will I help you?” Cipher grinned.
Immediately after Cipher, with a few more punches, smashed open the door that bound him and Octo.
“Let’s do this.”
Octo was visibly shaken, hunching down and covering his body and face with his hands. “You didn’t have to do that. The first bang was enough, the second I could maybe tolerate, but the third was completely unnecessary. I said before that I am an advanced cybersecurity bot. I had that door unlocked already ages ago.”
Octo sighed. “Now that humans will know we are here.”
Cipher laughed.
“Good.”
“Let them come.”
The voices, the sounds of suspicion and enragement that echoed in from nearby, did not dissuade Cipher.
