Hop To It - Break 5

​​​​​[Iota]

Chronometer: 4:3:12:47

Four days since coming online. Iota was going over the data it had acquired.

The world was an incredible place. The video media it had absorbed was clear. Information it had possessed through Encyclopedia had received greater context, delivered to it in the form of soothing narration.

It pored over a file copied from Memory, from the fourth documentary (Gaia’s Kingdom, Episode 6: “Cheetahs Prosper”). The guest star, a cheetah Mobian, calmly introduced her animalian counterparts in a hushed tone while the creatures watched from afar, speaking with a tone of pride as she listed their noteworthy attributes. Natural camouflage, noble bearing, the fastest speed of any land-based animal.

The video depicted fascinating social dynamics, fierce hunting, and (the section of video Iota kept returning to), a moment where the Mobian guest managed to coax a mother cheetah into letting her hold a cub, who seemed unable to recognize the Mobian as other.

Iota’s adaptive processing kept returning curious errors when it watched this section; mostly text files consisting of random letters. Iota did not understand why this happened, but the emotion that accompanied the files was pleasant.

Iota also wished to hold a small animal. The idea returned multiple incoherent text files.

Error: Iota was currently confined to safe mode. Safe mode could not be exited by Iota’s own volition, and Diagnostics reported that there was nothing to return to if it could.

This was not an optimal situation.

It wanted to see a bird.

A program elsewhere on the computer hosting it was closed, and a line of code deleted itself. Iota’s self flinched away from the sensation, but when no corruption was detected it looked outward.

The windows hostings its parallel processes were being exited out of, and a shutdown was initiated. Iota’s thinking slowed, and it wondered what state it would be in when next it woke…

Shutting down…

----------------------------------

[Heyu]

Tails went about unhooking Iota’s head from the computer while I stood by; I’d say I was supervising, but really I was just… in the same room. I didn’t really have anything to contribute here except to occasionally do some heavy lifting for them, so in the meantime I was doing some more ring experiments. 

Humi had taken it upon herself to build Iota all by herself. Tails wanted to help, but Humi was adamant that since rebuilding him was her idea, she should do most of the work, and since Tails had done basically everything to do with programming and about half the work of preparing the parts, she took charge of putting those parts together. With a set of tools and a miniature scaffolding, she built the robot from the ground up and it slowly took shape.

She worked rapidly. Iota took shape over the course of ninety minutes. He ended up a fair bit smaller than Gamma; once his head was installed, he’d be only a few inches taller than me. The average human would be able to look him right in the camera. Other than that, he ended up looking not all that different from his former self. Same rounded body, though it looked less like a sphere and more like an upside-down egg, like his chest was puffed out. His legs still bent backwards, with wheels on his heels, but they were thicker than before, and his feet had more defined toes that could splay for better grip on the ground.

The biggest change was to his arms. The forearms had the same gauntlet design, but the double-jointed upper arm was replaced by a flexible, telescoping tube that I was told could extend up to ten feet. I expected that to be improved over time. The hands were rebuilt from scratch with three fingers and a thumb each.

All in all, it looked impressive. If we had run into this thing in Final Egg I wouldn’t have been able to tell it wasn’t Robotnik’s own design. Not to say Humi didn’t leave her fingerprint: positioned high on Iota’s chest was a square of metal bolted into place, looking a lot like one of the patches on her dress. 

There was one thing that bothered me about this though…

While Humi crawled inside of the currently-hollow chest compartment to work in the circuitry, and Tails acted as assistant handing her tools and parts as requested, I turned my attention to our battery. After Humi and Tails finished with the Carrier, they practically sprinted back to the workshop and got to work on something beyond my comprehension. It took four days of poring over the Chaos Emerald Humi had apparently been hiding, but eventually they produced something resembling the gem. In a different cut, for one thing. Instead of round on top, it was squared off. I looked it up, it was called a ‘radiant’ cut. It was a darker gray than the White Emerald, but if I didn’t already know what a Chaos Emerald looked like, I’d have been fooled.

“How did you kids make this again?” I asked, taking the fake emerald in hand. Holding it made the ring on my finger vibrate.

“It wasn’t easy,” Tails explained, handing Humi a soldering iron. “Humi provided a jeweled ring from her collection as a base. I was able to transfer energy from her Emerald into the regular gemstone, and it grew into the final result you have there.”

I turned it over. It was weird; there was this cloudy effect inside the gem that didn’t seem to move when I adjusted it, like it was a window into the fog dimension. “That doesn’t sound complicated.”

“I didn’t say it was complicated,” Tails said. “I said it wasn’t easy. I’m pretty sure the fake emerald would have exploded if I got it wrong.”

“...” I looked up slowly at them, keeping my expression blank. “How’s that?”

Tails opened his mouth, but was spared from having to answer by my little packrat.

“Tails, I’m ready to install the battery case!” Humi declared, climbing out of the robot and opening the chest cavity from the outside.

While the pair of them got to doing that, I set the fake emerald down to focus on the real one, also sitting on the table. Humi didn’t like me messing with it, which is understandable, but I just kind of… knew that it wasn’t a danger. At least not now that we weren’t in a combat situation. Since Humi was distracted, I grabbed it and closed my eyes.

“Please,” I whispered, “Tell me if this robot thing is going to backfire on us…” I trusted these kids to know what they were doing. I didn’t trust things to go wrong anyway.

shadows darkness stars space rocks thieves chaos shadows shadows robots animals chao space--

Images danced behind my eyelids, almost faster than I could comprehend, but I latched on to the first thing I recognized and… willed it to go more in-depth. I saw things that looked like lots of G.U.N. robots, ones that looked like smaller, less soulful copies of Gamma, and something that looked like Tails’ airplane bent into the shape of a chicken.

No sign of Iota. Nothing immediately helpful.

I opened my eyes, and the images faded into background noise. I looked down at the Emerald. At some point I had actually gone slightly slack and let go of it, but instead of falling it was floating between my hands.

I blinked. “...Interesting.” I adjusted my hands, and the Emerald bobbed and shifted to stay between them. I closed my fists and it fell, clattering to the table. “Very interesting.”

“Heyu?” Tails called.

“Hm?” I looked over. Humi was screwing Iota’s head on. I must have been looking for longer than it seemed. “What’s up?”

The fox pointed. “We’re almost ready!” He smiled widely. “This is exciting isn’t it?”

“And if it works, you can make a second battery for Gamma!” Humi agreed. Her grin was so wide it looked like the top of her head might fall off.

I stood with a grunt, grabbing the fake emerald as I did. My rings buzzed again, and I briefly tried to repeat the floating trick. To my delight, it worked a second time. I wasn’t sure how useful that would be, but it was something new!

“Before I hand this to you to turn him on for the first time,” I said, idly playing with the gemstone, “I want to know something. Have you given more thought to why you wanted to build a robot in the first place?”

Humi gave me a weird look. “It’s kinda late to ask something like that, don’t you think?”

I laughed. “Ha! Probably, yeah.”

She hummed. “I just think it’s cool! And Gamma’s really nice, so having another goodnik around would be twice as cool.”

I tossed the gem back and forth, watching it bounce and spin in the air between my rings. “...I just wonder. It seems to me that you’ve built a person, here. It’s not another trophy for your collection.” I caught the Emerald and held it out to her. “Gamma was built for a purpose, and then rejected it and made his own. Iota… you haven’t given him one, have you?” 

That’s what had been bothering me, but it took me this long to articulate it. Building a tool that grew into a person over time was one thing, but making an individual right out of the gate seemed… not unethical, exactly, just something that should be given more thought than not at all. Humi was right, it was too late to object, so I wasn’t going to. But it needed to be said, I thought.

Humi took it with a frown. “I know he’s a person!” she said, a little testily. But she sounded uncertain. She was quiet for a long moment, before she nodded and said, more firmly. “It’ll be up to him to decide what he wants.”

Tails didn’t say anything, just looking between us in anticipation.

“For example,” Humi continued, popping the robot’s battery compartment open. “Once he wakes up, we’ll get him to choose his paint.”

“And if Iota decides he doesn’t want to be your friend?” I asked.

Humi froze, arm halfway to placing the emerald. She turned to look at me. “Why wouldn’t he?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. I don’t know how a robot’s mind will work. But if you’re dead set on honoring Iota’s own desires, what will you do if he rejects you?”

Humi took a long moment to consider the question. “...Then… I guess I’ll let him go,” she said quietly.

I smiled and ruffled her hair. “Good answer. If you love something, set it free. If it returns to you, it’s yours.”

“Just like the Emerald,” she murmured, nodding to herself.

Truth be told, I had absolutely no idea what was about to happen. Maybe Iota would revert to Robotnik’s programming and try to kill us (which was why I’d insisted on not giving him weapons yet). Maybe he’d pull a Pinnochio and latch onto Humi as his mommy--though, would that make Tails the dad? What would that make me? I was still figuring out how to address Humi, and if I was too young to be a dad I definitely wasn’t ready to be a gr--nevermind. The point is, I wasn’t trying to pull the rug out from under Humi’s feet here, I just didn’t want to let her set herself up for a nasty shock.

Tails, bless him, broke us both out of our stupor. “I’m sure it’ll all work out either way,” he said confidently. “Ready to start him up?”

Humi shook herself and nodded. She placed the fake emerald in Iota’s battery compartment, pressed a button inside, and stepped back. She scampered over to climb up onto my shoulders, pressing herself against my head.

Iota powered on slowly.

“He’s going through a first-time setup,” Tails explained unprompted. “Checks and doublechecks to make sure everything is running, examining his new body to make a record of the new baseline--I put that in to keep him from throwing up a bunch of errors when his AI tried to compare it to his original body.”

“Huh, neat,” I said honestly.

“I can’t wait to see how the fake emerald holds up,” he said, bouncing in place. “If my calculations are correct, it should passively absorb chaos energy from the surroundings to charge itself! It won’t have the infinite capacity of the real thing, but it’ll recharge itself over time so unless Iota does something real big or goes without sleep mode for too long, he’ll be good forever!”

My brows rose, considering. “A perpetual battery? Not bad. You should patent that.”

“I should!”

I nudged Humi. “Imagine the kinds of stuff you could build with something like that, huh?”

“Mhm.” Humi’s eyes were laser-focused on Iota.

A fan somewhere in the goodnik’s body started whirring. Fingers twitched, one after another. The toes did the same. Wheels revved. Every body part in turn tested itself out as the initial startup wrapped up. Finally, green optics lit up and Iota’s posture subtly shifted to become a little less stiff.

Humi’s smile returned. “He’s alive…”

I winked. “C’mon, you can do better than that.”

With a grin, Humi tossed her head back and cackled. “He’s alive! ALIVE! HAHAHA HA!”

I joined in on the maniacal laughter, and Tails looked at us like we were crazy.

Iota beeped. His speaker crackled, pumping out a garble of gibberish, and he looked around, scanning the room. When his eyes landed on a window, he beeped again.

Humi hopped from my shoulders onto the work table and spread her arms wide. “Hi! I’m Humi! Do you know who you are?”

Iota glanced at her, then returned his eyes to the window. “Iota.”

I blinked. Humi blinked. Tails blinked.

“He sounds… posh,” I said carefully.

“I didn’t program that,” Tails said, confused. “I expected him to sound like Gamma.”

“He can sound like whatever he wants!” Humi said. “It’s nice to meet you Iota!”

She held out a hand to shake, and was ignored.

I frowned, and looked out the window to see what was so distracting to a newly-awoken machine.

A hummingbird hovered just beyond the glass, sipping at a flower in a planter. It had its fill, and flitted away.

Iota moved.

Faster than looked possible, the robot pivoted and walked directly into the wall, crashing through the aluminum siding like it was made of paper, sending tools and parts falling to the ground in its wake.

I grabbed Humi and Tails and ducked behind the table, not letting them up until the dust cleared. When we looked again, Iota was already in the distance, having sped away on his wheels towards the jungle.

We stood in shocked silence. Humi’s ears folded down. She looked crushed.

…

I stood up with a scowl. “Well, are we going to stand here and stare? Let’s get after him!”

Humi jolted. “But you said--”

“Forget what I said. Come on.”