Cael

The Lab

Rubble fell from the ceiling into a small room, the sound echoing between its white walls and shiny, sterile floors. A corner overtaken by mold dampened the reverberations, its rough eating into the lab's walls. Papers scattered across the room--some pinned up on cork-boards, others thrown on the floor--described everything there is to know about math, history, urban exploration, physics, languages. Pieces of equipment hung on the walls and ceiling, the ones near the humid, moldy corner already decaying into rust, feeding the overgrowth. Analysis tools, soldering irons, and fallen robotic arms adorned the desks around the room. The acidic, sweet smell of fried electronics filled the lab along with the earthy smell of the mold.

A small robot--fully committed to getting the escape hatch opened--stood on boxes she'd placed methodically in the corner, reaching up to the ceiling. Legs. Torso. Arms. Head. She pushed against the hatch, engaging all her servos at once. High-pitched, mechanical whirring filled the room, overwhelming the stubborn creaking of the hatch. Her joints strained. The hatch protested. Metal scraped against metal. Pressure built. Warning signals flashed through her. The vibrations of her struggle shook the boxes beneath.

Pop.

Creak.

"Finally. Months of work paid off," she thought, "... freedom."

A draft of fresh air accompanied the first streak of natural light--real light--she'd ever seen. The light flooded her vision as she started climbing out of the lab. She pulled herself into the lower temperature outside, almost falling back into the lab. As she climbed out, cooling systems turned to heating systems. Servos now had to compensate for the wind, which almost toppled her over. Optical sensors adjusted to the near infinitely far-away landscape. Far up to the north, towering over the landscape, a city came into view, seeming eerily still.
Thousands of lines of intricately balanced code sparked in an instant within her, all wanting to go in different directions. A part of her wanted to explore her surroundings, perhaps coming back before sunset. Deep within her, subroutines warned her to stay near the lab, where it seemed to be safe. Fleeting impulses surfaced, like intrusive thoughts, telling her to walk off the roof simply for the experience--and the data it would provide. Safety protocols flashed with urgent red warnings; exploratory protocols lit up with verdant green, like the foliage around her, with enticing possibilities. Through small pushes from every corner of her mind, their whispers rising in volume at an overwhelming pace, she fixed her eyes on the city.
Though itself green with overgrowth, the city stood out against its surroundings. Its sharp, geometric shapes clashed against the lush greenery around it. It interrupted the otherwise smooth skyline. Being so far away, the atmosphere interfered with distance calculations to the city, changing rapidly in the robot's eyes. Sunlight reflecting off the sides of some buildings didn't make charting a course any easier. Systems charted potential paths through the landscape, estimating the travel time to be around two days--though with low accuracy. It spiked her curiosity like nothing else, so she decided to venture out to it as soon as she could.
The wind whistled past her carrying the organic whirring of the surrounding greenery, making the electrical buzz she emitted seem deafening by comparison. Noticing her volume, and internal alarms flashing red, she decreased the priority of hot-running subroutines, slowing down the whirring to avoid making too much noise.
A flutter of movement caught her attention as she observed her surroundings. A paper--half claimed by mold--moved ever so slightly on the lab's floor.

"I shouldn't delay. I should start making my way towards the city," she thought to herself, "but that paper..."

Subroutines clashed against each other, begging her to move on to the city as she gripped the edge of the hatch and lowered herself back into the sterile darkness. The sheet peeled off with some reluctance, leaving a mirror image on the mold. Strange imprints covered the page, a language that her databanks couldn't decode. Along the border the decay hadn't reached, a single word burned into her core: "Cael." She filed the paper in a small bin on her back, but the name lingered in her systems like an echo that never dissipated.