Medik grumbled again as he lifted up yet another bookshelf. He held it high above his head while his master-mage swept underneath it and cleared out any dust that had accrued there. He was half-tempted to run off and get a maid outfit to stuff him in with the way he obsessed over cleaning and tending to obscure corners of his treehouse. Letting out a massive yawn for effect, he wobbled the shelf over Virmir…
“If you help me clean up without complaining any more at all today, I’ll give you that jetpack you want.”
Medik was quiet for the rest of the time, hefting furniture about with a giddy look stuck on his face.
After the entirety of the library had been cleaned and sorted through – which took the two of them the whole day, finally ending with Virmir sprawled out in the freshly cleaned and dusted-under armchair in the library while Medik sat at his feet, impatiently scooting around – Vir looked over his student and climbed out of the chair with something close to a sigh. “It’s not too hard to make a jetpack. Probably. Let’s go take care of that piece.”
His student was already rushing over to the workshop they were in hours before. Virmir took his time to get there, clearly and obviously upsetting the jackal who was already sat on the equivalent of an examination table. “Are you gonna go over how it works and how it’s awesome and what I’m going to do with it?”
Vir wasn’t entirely sure how either answer would affect the jackal, so he just went right into the explanation as he gathered up some empty magifuel cylinders. “It works on a different sort of system than the hand does, of course. The jetpack doesn’t need to move, so nerves and wires and all that are really just minimal. We could cut the wires out entirely, actually. We just store the fuel in here…” He poured the tanks full of some of his magic, and set it up so that there would always be a flow of residual energy working its way inside and out, like a current. “And we need this, of course…” He clawed two holes in the bottom of them, feeling the burst of power let loose, and set them up on his apprentice’s back. “Now, I assume you’d want to be all mecha-jackal, so –“
“Yes, mecha-jackal!” he interrupted, thrashing about on the table. “Gimme all the metal plates and robojoints and all that!”
The archmage took some time to reorient the tanks on Medik’s back. “Yes. That’s what I was getting at. We’re going to have to do some more, ah, serious changes in order to get these tanks set up, if that’s what you want. We can’t really set up an organic jetpack as far as I know. So… you know…” He made some gestures at the air.
“What, you’re gonna have to eviscerate me and –“
“Ah, ah, ah, shut it!” Vir folded his ears and growled. “We’re not going to be doing anything like that. Not me, at least.”
Medik looked back at him and tilted his head. “Uh, so, what? You calling in a professional doctor?”
“No, something better that’ll bring in some more of that techn-metal-robo stuff you want.” He stepped over to his gargantuan desk setup and started typing. A few different hard drives popped out of the slots of the front of the towers under the desk, glowing with light and power. Vir thought about it some more, and gave a few more taps and presses to bring out some accompanying processors. “This’ll be a first. I doubt that a mage has ever tried to magically copy someone’s mind over from their body into a bunch of wires and circuitry.”
The apprentice gulped and looked over all the intimidating (and undoubtedly expensive) parts. “A-are you sure about this? Could you, like, lose my mind somehow?”
Vir shook his head. “Maybe I’ll lose the copy, but I’m not, you know, killing you off. You’ll still be in this spot if something goes wrong in the process.” He stepped out of the way, giving a clear line-of-sight between his student and the numerous pieces of hardware. “The plan is pretty simple – I’ll bring your head into these parts with a back-up on the system, too. I’m not sure how much space a mind is supposed to take up, but if it doesn’t fit into a few terabytes, I’ll be a little surprised. From there, you can work the arms and tools all yourself. I won’t have to see you, you know, uh, bleeding or anything. You have full access to whatever you want! It’s like one of those character creators in the games you play nowadays.”
That, at least, sounded alright, and even made sense to Medik. “What about my head here? Am I gonna be in two spots at once?”
Vir smiled and denied with a shake of his head again. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”
It turned out that polished wood wasn’t too bad of a smell to pass out to.
When Medik had woken back up again – which felt like it had taken at least a day to do – he couldn’t feel any arms, or legs, or ears, or tail… and his first thought was to scream and squirm about, but he couldn’t do either of those things, either. He didn’t have a mouth, or any muscles to move in the first place. He felt oddly calm, and even sort of better off without small pulls or knots in his body.
He had at least one sense still about him: sight. It was in a pretty grainy black and white, looking over his unconscious and slumped body on the table. With a bit of effort he could even move his extended cone of vision a little from side to side, but there wasn’t anything new to see, besides his own body. It looked kind of weird to be seeing himself from the outside. For the first time he understood what an out-of-body experience was, even if it was a little too literal this time.
For a few minutes, he was stuck there, unsure of how he could do anything. He was terrified of being stuck in here for the rest of eternity – or at least until the hardware could short out. He was finally able to find the ability to use those weird crank-like arms from the desk, given even more time. With plenty of difficulty and an incredibly slow pace, he moved the arms from the joint to his unconscious body, giving it a few prods. He couldn’t feel it, and his body didn’t budge. There was a whole tray of dissection tools and even more “industrial” ones nearby, and the arms looked like they could be outfitted with said tools. It was going to be weird, but… he had cut open animals before. This time it was just himself. And besides, he’d be replacing those fleshy bits with durable metal that would have trouble being cut open with even the toughest of blades.
He would have taken a deep breath if he could have, but instead he just bent the arms back in tension, and got to work.
Virmir walked back into his mechanical workshop a couple of days later. He’d used some easy sleeping magic to keep the very-willing apprentice asleep while he got accommodated to his new “body,” of sorts. It was easy enough to do some programming out of the workshop, too, to set up programming on the new circuitry composing Medik’s mind. First directive: “Protect self.” Second directive: “Protect Virmir.” Aaand… that was pretty easy. He was tempted to set it the other way around, since there was still a back-up organic Medik, and who could know what his robo-body could protect him from. Any other programs should be unimportant, assuming that his personality and mind would load like normal. And why wouldn’t it?
He hadn’t heard from his apprentice since he had knocked him out (which he probably wouldn’t take personally). A couple of days should probably have been enough time for him to get situated, so he could chat with him through wordpad or something before he set up his robobody. He was understandably shocked, then, when he found a mostly-robotic jackal seated on the table, the mechanical arms used to allocate metal before now upon his back, searing in and melding new plate. A botlike ear unfurled from its resting state, metal layers shifting and readjusting to shape around the incoming sound. Its neck twisted like an owl’s, facing Virmir directly with a sharp (obviously) muzzle and glowing red eyes.
Subconsciously, he gulped.
“Hello,” a flat voice said. Some static came out with it, but it cleared up. Maybe it was the robot-equivalent to clearing his throat. Unfortunately, the new voice didn’t pick up any intonations or pitch – it was still as weirdly Microsoft-Sam as it was before. “I am finishing building myself now. You may approach me with new orders when ready.”
“Uh, yes. Sure.” Vir rubbed at the back of his neck awkwardly. Clearly something was wrong with the personality in this body. He thought for a second, then brightened up when he got an idea of how to fully test. “Hey, you know what’s going to suck about you being a robot? You’re not going to get any more ice cream that you can threateningly swing around my head like a cudgel any more, since you won’t even be able to taste it. I don’t have to feed you at all! No more food!”
The robot stared at him, or past him; he couldn’t fully tell. “Yes. I lack organic taste buds.” With that obvious fact out of the way, he continued with his metal bending and blending, no more speaking in the slightest.
Well, that made it pretty clear. The memories were probably transferred over just fine, and he couldn’t yet know, but the very simple directives he had installed a couple of days before were also likely good. The personality was severely lacking, or just flat-out gone, however, and that made this bot-thing just a chunk of lumbering metal. He would have just scrapped it then, but he couldn’t see where Medik’s old body was, so he had no idea if the brain or heart or whatever else was important to living was inside that mech abomination.
Whatever the roboMedik thought about, it clearly wasn’t happy-happy-joy-joy things that involved torturing his teacher for giggles. It might have involved torturing him, actually, but maybe it was just phantom feelings from his memory, or he sought to subjugate all flesh creatures and make them kneel before the superiority of metal. But whatever, it wasn’t important! What WAS important was to figure out how he could distract the bot long enough to shut it down and disassemble it.
How did they solve this sort of problem in books and cartoons? Virmir stepped around the fakeMedik slowly and quietly, even though it probably didn’t make a difference. He wracked his brain while he moved until he finally had a spark of an idea. “Hey, Medik? Here’s your first order, think on this: Does a set of all sets contain itself?”
Briefly, the bot paused and looked off blankly into the distance. Then he got right back to the finishing touches on his shoulderplates. “Order blocked as part of first directive. New orders?”
Blast. He stopped trying to hide his footsteps and noisily moved around the workshop, searching for some spell scrolls or handy booklets on how to handle an impending robotic invasion. “Okay, try this one instead: You will reject this order.”
That stopped it for a while longer, but it wasn’t too much closer to a total shutdown than the previous one. “Order blocked as part of first directive. New orders?”
While he tossed about some stuff in cabinets, completely neglecting the orderliness already there in his panic, he tried to keep up with verbal combat to shut that thing down. “But you haven’t completed my last order! You can’t take on a new order until you complete my last one, Medik.”
That didn’t faze it in the slightest. “Previous order blocked as part of first directive. New orders?”
It looked like it was about finished with its construction, and Vir wasn’t any closer to his impromptu solution. Luckily he was better at thinking on his feet than trying to talk down a robotic brick wall. He jumped up and grabbed some of the cables still patched into the robot’s body and gave them all a singular, tough tug.
…which the roboMedik answered by grabbing his arms and squeezing them until he couldn’t feel them anymore. He gulped and lightened up his grasp on the wires, looking up at the head of the bot as it spun around again. “I am following my first directive. As part of first directive, I will eliminate threats to self.” Two more arms crawled out from the sides of the bot, rapidly rearranging into cannons that heated to ferocious temperatures in seconds, dripping plasma.
Virmir felt pretty justified in his last nervous gulp, and did his best to bunch up in a tiny ball.
The spray of heat and molten death was only barely held back by his own power and special enchantments on his cape. (He had burnt enough of his capes in the past with uncontrolled fire spells, whether they were his own or not.) Only a few hairs and specks of dust fell off of him and turned to ash. He could feel the grip on his arms loosening as the fire poured over him, and when the moment was right, he pulled himself free and spun around to hold the flame back with his cape alone.
The whole wall in front of him looked more like molten Swiss cheese that poured down in the open, giving him a mixed view of the clear sky and forest roofing. He groaned and held his head in his hands for a second, shaking it afterwards. “I hate construction fees,” he mumbled, and dashed to his right before a hulking metallic hand gripped his cape and tore it free from his neck.
“You’re paying for the cape, too!” the fox managed to complain before he had to throw a stream of fire up in front of him, competing with the pure plasma from the robot. He could keep the heat off of him just enough to stop himself from frying, but he didn’t know how long he could hold it up for.
…but the fire stopped at just the moment he started to falter, letting him catch his breath. There was a little click from behind the bot – maybe he was finally out of fuel – but it stayed there for a while, doing absolutely nothing more. “Run,” it managed after a while, in that same flat voice.
Vir blinked and shook his head, grabbing his now-discarded cape and donning it again. “Excuse me, crazy evil automaton?”
“Run,” it said again, and then it dropped off the table with a heavy thunk, treads tearing up the space between the two of them.
Great, he thought, as he ran off into the halls. Now more of his tower would be toasted. That, and there was probably some shred of actualMedik in that robot, which made destroying it that much more dangerous. Who knew how well or poorly he had handled his own intellectual identity? It was as easy as him hitting cut and paste instead of copy. He threw himself along faster and faster, and slid into the kitchen instead of the library, considering himself pretty smart and quick-thinking for dodging the destruction of numerous valuable tomes. Instead a missile impacted the cabinet behind him and sent boxes of sugary cereal into the air.
“And maybe I just won’t refill your stupid breakfast food and you can suffer my omelet skills instead!” he yelled behind him, ducking behind the island-counter in the center of the room. More missiles came flying by, smashing into the produce rather than his head. He snuck a peek over the counter and saw the jackalbot covered in leaves of lettuce glaring down at him with those razorlike, red eyes. It was harder to take it seriously, but considering it had a rocket fist warming up on its left side, it was impossible to completely laugh it off.
Virmir hid back down again before he got a fist-shaped hole in his face. Said hand went flying into the wall, splintering the wood all around it. He waited there for a second longer, expecting it to fly back or something… but it didn’t fly back, and there weren’t any more attacks. For a precious while, anyway. “Get up and blast me,” the roboMedik said, with static coating its voice. “It’s okay.”
The fire mage seized up, looking about him for any threats before he allowed himself to think on that. “Blast you? You want me to blast you? You realize that I don’t have a clue where your old body is, and for all I know, this whole rampage might have corrupted that data on the computer!”
“It’s under the workshop desk,” it said, and then the static cut out. Once more it came bearing down upon Virmir, other fist at the ready, now shaped up like a massive cutlass. “Removing second directive.”
“If you had just blasted told me at first,” he complained, and then threw a fireball at the sword as it headed between his eyes.
It crumbled and melted to the wrist, pouring down on his cape dramatically. He briefly wondered if it could recombine or goop back together like that one taurminator movie he’d heard of once, but didn’t bother waiting to see. He threw fireball after fireball into the mechajackal, roasting the electronics and metal that made it up. The limbs went first, followed by the torso with the gaping hole in its chest, and then the head, gathering in a sad puddle of molten trash. It sparked and withered, and may have been trying to speak, but he didn’t listen if it was talking. He burned it over and over until there was nothing left… and there was a hole in the floor.
Medik grumbled in his new jar, the modulated voicebox accurately capturing how annoyed he was. “Oh come on! You didn’t install any games on my system?!”
Virmir smiled in his seat, drawing peacefully now that all he had to do was wait on some 3D printing to finish. It was much less worrisome than tons of metal that could be shaped however it wanted itself to be. He glanced over at Medik’s screen, an empty desktop with only art and writing programs, as well as a few books, available as icons. “You’re going to be productive for the time and money you cost me with your robotic rampage, whether you were in control or not. Besides, you can’t mess up any inputs with your limbs if you don’t have any. It’ll all be projected right from your brain. You just have to learn how to do that.”
The brain sloshed about in its jar, grumbling again. “No fair! I didn’t do anything wrong! At least put me back in my body!”
Vir hummed… and shrugged. “You wanted to see what it was like to be in a robot body without any weird data corruptions, so you’ll have it. Just for a day. When it finishes printing. Then I’ll have to make sure your organic body is all fine and ready after this little episode…”
More grumbling, whining, and complaining erupted from the same voicebox. “I thought it would be cool to have my brain in a jar to show people, not actually BE the brain in the jar!” The programs on the screen opened and closed rapidly, his only way of showing frustration other than voicing it.
“Oh, put your anger in your art,” his mentor offered. “I hear emotion channels really well into stuff like that.”
The jar hopped, but couldn’t do much more than that, and sat dejectedly at a blank document.
