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"... Little friend. Perhaps you already know this, and I don't know what consolation it might bring, but... You will wake right back up again."
With that, the red creature left the chamber, and she was alone. Truly alone. She had vague memories of how she was before, who she was before, what she was before… but supposed it no longer mattered.
'Oh, Pebbles…' she thought to herself, 'What have you done to me…?'
Pebbles… her brother. A fellow Iterator, located shortly to the west. A fellow Iterator? Could she even still call herself that? Iterators stood proudly above the clouds, tasked to solve the… the…
Ah, yes, the Great Problem. Which was… it was a means to…
Moon looked around her chamber. Her puppet was sitting on a small island of debris in a puddle of water. Perhaps that's all she was now, both her puppet and her…
Her structure. She looked up; what little light from the sun making it through the thick cloud layer shone gently through the gaping hole in the ceiling. 'Try to remember…'
She sent another request to her memory arrays. No response. She combed through all the information left on her neurons. There were but five; one was empty, and the other four held assorted information about the world, her creators, her friends… her little brother.
NEURON 00004 IS AT 90% CAPACITY. WHEN FULL, NO NEW DATA CAN BE WRITTEN.
Oh… it had already filled itself up with all the information she'd gathered from the few minutes she'd been awake. Well, not all of the information was necessary, was it?
She didn't need a list of names of the Benefactors who lived in her city, they'd been gone for decades, at least. Nor did she need instructions on how to keep her city functional, the locations of water and void fluid pipes going up there…
Still nearly full. She was panicking now.
She didn't need an approximation of the current date, just the year would do, it probably wasn't that accurate anyway. None of the qualia in her memory needed a date, they just needed to be sorted in order.
Barely made a dent.
What about the new information? The images of her saviour didn't need to be in full resolution, she could compress them a little. A little more, maybe?
Oh… that's too much. She couldn't remember its form. A lizard? A little bird?
Oh, well. She supposed it didn't matter anymore.
The light from the break above began to fade, and a soft tapping noise could be heard from it. What was it? Another visitor?
The surrounding waters began to churn. Droplets of water fell from the ceiling. Was it raining? She produced rain herself, did she not? It condensed over the course of a day, and at night it would… oh, no.
A torrent flooded the island, pouring in through both the broken sides of her chamber. It was coming in fast; the room was flooding.
Instincts kicked in. She tried to take a deep breath. From where? She had no mouth, no nose, no lungs… ah yes, she was an early generation of Iterator, was she not? Much of the Benefactors' instincts had been left in her programming, they hadn't quite figured out how to remove them yet.
The water reached past her eyes. It was cold. It was… wet. So wet, so uncomfortable.
But she wouldn't die. She couldn't, whether she wanted to or not. The thought brought her no consolation.