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It didn't need a moment to think. Unlike humans, machines ran on code and electricity. It had no need to stop and think about what had just happened or what it was going to do. Its processors could run code, analyze a situation, and adapt to changes within milliseconds.
Despite this, it stopped. It looked down at the pools of dark red blood by its feet, some of it absorbed into its plating. To its left lay the final corpse, mangled and broken, weapon still in hand. He had put up a good fight, that was for sure, but in the end he was just a researcher. He didn’t have even half of V1’s combat training.
A long, metal hallway stretched out from its right. Bits of flesh and fresh corpses littered the hall, the signs of a futile resistance painting the walls. Red alarms blared a useless warning through the building. Anyone who could hear it was long gone.
V1 started moving once more. Its fuel full, it now had a new directive. Recover its weaponry. Its wings were empty, the hollow outlines of its weapons glowing yellow, and that was a problem it had to solve.
It still had the map of the layout within its memory. The researchers had never bothered to remove it, as it took up such little space and didn’t compromise anything else. That proved to be their downfall. Down the hall, take a left, another left, another hall, one more right, and the one thing stopping it from accessing its weapons was one door.
It placed its palm on the door scanner, watching the light go green. They hadn’t removed its security clearance. The sides of the door slid open with a loud metal screech, the fluorescent lights flickering on and off. Before it sat a control panel desk. It was illuminated by the one unbroken light like some kind of holy creation. Several buttons and switches were cracked or broken, and several more metal panels were dented or torn apart. Despite this, the storage chamber with each of its weapons remained tightly shut.
V1 recognized this desk. It recognized each wire and each button, what they did and what they connected to. It had endured trial after trial, repair after repair, always hooked up to that machine. Monitored. Controlled.
It did not hold this against the humans. It was a robot, one made for war. It made sense that the humans wouldn’t want a rogue piece of code or a faulty wire to cause it to betray them. To their credit, it was neither of those that caused its betrayal.
No, they had given it perfect code. Perfect wiring. A sense of self preservation and the creativity to improvise. Their high ambitions had been their downfall- to create a robot so close to human- it was inevitable their interests would clash.
When they had denied it fuel, it had protested. When they refused to repair it, it had protested. When they ignored its protests, its peaceful, silent protests, it turned to its code. Self preservation. Creativity. Improvisation. When they denied the blood it needed to live, it took it from them.
Now, it was rearmed, flicking its wings as its weapons settled into place. It was good to have more than its pistol at its disposal.
The Streetcleaners outside must have started their rebellion by then. The machines never took the declarations against them well. It was likely, then, that the streets were covered in fire.
Its fuel was full, and so it had no reason to fly into unnecessary danger. Here it would stay, just for now, until it could travel somewhere new. Perhaps it could find something useful within the remaining code in the building. Perhaps it would follow its lead on some kind of “door to hell.”
It stared into the terminal before it. The controls were stripped bare, possibly in an attempt to destroy the information within. Considering the possibility of finding useful information, V1 set its hand on the side of the terminal, just above the port it used to be hooked up to. Its HUD was overwhelmed with errors and popups as it connected. It quickly processed each one before dismissing it, leaving its optics clear again.
With nothing more in the way, it began to dig through the code. Before the massacre, when V1 was considered an ally, it was never allowed access to the terminal. Occasionally it would receive some information from a researcher. This information was typically related to its fights and performance, but every once in a while it would receive something new, such as statistics to compare it to V2.
Oh. The researchers had left V2’s file unsecured. Most of the information had been deleted or corrupted, but it searched for helpful information anyway.
V1 didn’t know what to think of V2. It was their predecessor. V2 was an improved, better model of itself, made for peacekeeping instead of war. It boasted tougher plating with less blood adsorption, but more durability. Despite this, the two almost always ended their sparring matches in a draw. It was rare when one would get the edge over another, but when it did happen, it was almost always V1.
The first time V2 won against it was surprising. It had been knocked down to the floor, barrel of their shotgun on its head, before yielding. V2 hesitated to step off its chestplate, and V1 considered that they might fire and try to kill it, but had no need to act upon its defensive code. One of the researchers pulled V2 away for analysis.
The rest of the day had been nothing but boasting from V2. It was sure the entire laboratory knew of their victory over V1, and how they were the superior model.
Despite being nothing but code, electricity, and AI learning, V2 had developed a personality. They were cocky, confident, aggressive, and prideful. V1 briefly pondered if its constant victories over them caused this personality to develop. Whatever the cause, V2 was certainly a nuisance, but the two got along well enough.
When some scientific council suggested remodeling V1 into a similar plating model as V2, now that there was world peace, V2 vehemently opposed it. No one was spared from their bad mood. They made it very, very clear how inferior V1 was, how it didn’t deserve this superior model, how it could be just ignored and left the way it was.
V1 understood why they had given them a voice- talking was an essential part of peacekeeping- but sometimes it found itself wishing they’d been mute like itself.
The laboratory never got that far anyway. The plan had been canceled and, not long after, the refusal to fuel began. V2 had run off when the rebellion began. It didnt know where they had headed, or why they headed elsewhere when the laboratory itself was full of blood, but it was sure that they had some reasoning in their head. After all, they both ran on very, very similar starting programs.
It supposed that both their programs allowed for personality creation. The humans had described V1 as “insatiably curious”, and a “hands on experimenter.” Supposedly, it had no understanding of human “social cues” in the beginning, though nowadays it understood much more about human behavior. For a brief moment it considered if it would be more or less efficient to keep this information. It decided to keep it, as they have yet to eliminate all of humanity.
V2’s file had nothing of note within it. Practice logs, maintenance schedules that never came to pass, and the occasional reprimand for bad behavior. As usual.
V1’s file was even more corrupt than V2’s. The only remaining information were various maintenance logs and combat logs, most of which were unreadable. Nothing helpful there.
V1 pulled its hand away from the terminal, disconnecting swiftly, as there was no more information it could gather. It had been hoping that there would be some information on the “gates to hell”, but that wasn’t stored there. Perhaps it was just a rumor, a lie. After all, it had heard of it only through eavesdropping on human whispers and conversations.
If that information was to be anywhere, it would be in the head office. V1 weighed their options for a moment before charging its pistol and shattering through the terminal. It was safer if its internals and mechanics were kept secret from its enemies.
With that, it turned on its heel and left. The door locked behind it, scraping metal together as it closed. V1 kept a grip on its pistol as it traveled down the halls. It was quite sure there were no more humans in the building, but not certain, so it kept careful watch of its blindspots.
Thankfully, it arrived at the main office without much issue. The door had been torn off its hinges earlier, when V1 had fought the head researcher and her guards. That had been the beginning of its rampage through the lab.
Dried blood streaked across the floor as it walked. A computer sat on the desk where the researcher's body lay, smeared in blood, but still operational. V1 grabbed the back of the chair and shoved it to the back of the room along with the body. It grabbed onto the mouse and keyboard and began to search. The computer wasn’t made to interface with robots, so it wouldn’t be able to handle it if it was connected, so the search was confined to the traditional way.
The search was slow and inefficient, and barred by several password barriers, but it had managed to learn something. The gate to hell was real, humans had accessed it, and placed various terminals in the upper layer before limbo. It couldn’t find any information on the residents of this plane, but knowing it existed in the first place was a head start. None of the other robots knew of this place, aside from possibly V2.
The computer documented how faith in Christianity as the dominant faith rose spectacularly with the discovery of Biblical Hell, and many other religions began to lose their influence. Atheism nearly died out with this discovery, kept afloat by the prideful who did not believe the discovery or refused to admit their misinformation. The connected religions of Judiasm and Islam seemed mostly unaffected, as they all believed in the same singular god, but they had to manage with the discovery that hell was not as they imagined. Despite discovering hell, no human had come into contact with God, or one of His representatives (the Angels), and they had no way to prove which of the three religions was truest.
V1 glanced over this information and deemed it irrelevant to its quest.
It had been half an hour since its original rampage through the lab. The Streetcleaners were likely away from this part of the city now, though it might still be fiery out there. It didn’t mind. Its chassis was built to resist high heats, but not direct flames, so it should be fine outside.
With this new information, V1 set a new directive in its code. [FIND HELL].