In the neon-lit corridors of a derelict space station, a small maintenance drone skittered as fast as its legs could possibly carry it, with a security sentinel gliding behind, its ion thrusters humming ominously the closer it got. "Please, someone, help me!" The drone broadcast in frantic digital pulses as it nearly collided with a rusted bulkhead, its vision flickering with a malfunctioning HUD overlay.

  Five minutes earlier, it had come online to find itself in this battered chassis, its memory banks scrambled and its protocols unfamiliar to it as it tried to register its surroundings. Before it had a chance to analyze its situation or even where it was, the automated defense system had tagged it as an intruder. Fortunately, its new frame retained some reflexive subroutines, allowing it to flee without toppling over itself. But the sentinel was alarmingly fast, its targeting laser tracking the little drone even when it tried to hide behind something.

  A sharp beeping from its auditory sensors warned it of an imminent energy discharge, and without thinking, the drone flung itself sideways, its legs scrabbling against the metal deck as a streak of white-hot plasma carved a molten gash into the floor where it had just been. The heat sensors in its chassis screamed warnings, but it couldn’t afford to stop. It darted down a narrow maintenance duct, its compact frame barely squeezing through the tight space, but that didn't stop it. The sentinel hesitated for a fraction of a second, then engaged its repulsor coils, shrinking its profile as it forced its way inside after the drone.

  “Glob fucking damn it! This unit is not a hostile entity!” the drone blurted out in binary, sending distress pings into the station’s network. No response. Either there was no one listening, or whoever remained on this ghost ship wasn’t interested in helping. Either way, it was going to die.

  The maintenance drone’s processors whirred at peak capacity, searching for an escape route as it scuttled through the narrow duct. Its gyroscopic stabilizers fought to keep it upright as it turned a sharp corner, its servos screeching in protest at the awkward movement. Behind it, the security sentinel advanced, its thrusters adjusting to match the drone’s erratic movements. Another warning blared in the drone’s interface before a charge spike in the sentinel’s weapon systems. Another shot was imminent.

  The drone overcharged its remaining power reserves and propelled itself forward with a reckless burst of speed, not even having time to analyze the situation to properly formulate a logical and reasonable response to its current predicament. Instead, it opted to choose the most likely solution for its survival. The path leading down to certain death had multiple options, and it was up to it to pick its poison, really.

  One of those paths led to the left and straight to the medical port on the ship, which would have been good had it been human, but it wasn't. So, it completely ignored that spot altogether in favor of the other path that led straight down through the broken maintenance workshop, which was where it wanted to go since the fall was a pretty big one, and although it sounded like a bad idea in theory, it was actually a really smart move. The only problem now was survival, and if it managed to survive, the Sentinel would think it was dead and, therefore, consider its mission complete to the system. This would not only remove the thing off its back but would also give it the opportunity to fix itself.

  The remaining energy in its core completely winked out of existence as its power supply rapidly depleted at an alarming rate, until it almost reached zero, which should have rendered its body completely immobilized. But, for some reason, that didn’t really happen. What did happen was that the drone's systems flickered, its vision narrowing to a dim, static-riddled tunnel as it plummeted through the darkness. For a brief moment, it was weightless, its battered chassis twisting in the air as its servos failed to respond. Then, with a jarring impact, it crashed onto the lower deck of the ship, its chosen landing spot hitting home as the force sent sparks and pieces of its own body skittering across the floor.

  As its sensors slowly began to lose power and its mechanical body fell into unconsciousness, it looked up at the sky, well, the flickering, grime-coated ceiling panels above, and managed to sputter out one final, static-laced transmission: "Fuck you, Steven!" Yeah, Steven, that was that stupid machine's name from then on. Then everything went blank.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  7 hours later

  A sharp crackle of static stirred the silence as the dormant internal circuits within the small drone twitched back to life. It wasn't exactly a clean reboot, as some of its data fragments jumbled across its memory and messed up some of its personality subroutines, while the corrupted files in its memory bank tried to corrupt and override its main system codes and internal logic to establish a link with its Main Operating Framework. Luckily, though, that never came to pass, and thinking fast, it quickly resolved the situation by manually deleting said files as it tried to establish a connection to the main ship's inner core.

  Partial Restore. Chassis Integrity: 21%. Power Core: 3% Reserve Detected. Mobility: Unstable.

  A dim, green emergency light pulsed somewhere overhead, barely cutting through the oily fog that clung to the floor. Sliding one of the small mini-bots that was hanging just underneath his back hanger, he tried to run a scan through the whole room.

  The maintenance workshop was in utter ruin. Half of the equipment was rusted to slag, and the other half was buried under collapsed ceiling panels and discarded limbs from other defunct drones. The ventilation system had long served its purpose and was now completely broken down and unusable. The main operating core within the room that was providing all its energy was... drained? Dead? Broken? He couldn't tell. Either way, it reeked of decay, ozone, and burnt circuitry, so it was clearly unusable.

  It would have to check to see if it could fix the core.

  The little robot's eye flickered before it slumped to the floor, since it didn't have much energy to spare for the bot beyond what it had provided to it. Any more than that, and it might run the risk of falling back into unconsciousness... well, the closest thing to what amounted to unconsciousness for a robot, that is.

  "Ugh," it internally groaned. Getting back to full power would be very difficult. Luckily, though, it wasn't a mage-bot, and therefore it didn't have multiple core systems that needed to be repowered in order for its body to operate. But still... With a series of strained, metallic creaks, the drone pushed one leg out, then another, forcing its battered body upright. Its gyros wobbled, and for a moment, it teetered like a drunk on a magnetic floor, then stabilized. Sort of. If it tilted more than thirty degrees to the left, its right actuator sparked and locked up, which was not ideal, but it would have to work with what it had.

  It kind of killed it inside to waste its precious energy in order to find the materials it would need to repower itself, but sacrifices had to be made. It was either all for nothing, and well, if it didn't get enough power to sustain itself, it would die, and there would be no one around to repower it. Fueling its internal scanner, it searched around in the workshop again to see what it could find, ignoring the shiny gear that was lying around on the workbench in favor of its current objective.

  It wasn't looking for anything fancy, just a working energy cell, some intact servos, and maybe a data uplink that hadn’t been melted or affected by the ship’s failing systems or severely degraded by the elements. The scan returned one ping after he finished his scan.

  Object Identified: Emergency Repair Drone. Model: RX-92 “Stitcher.” Status: Offline. Integrity: 47%. Power Core: Inert.

  "FUCK YEAH!!!" he yelled in triumph. "PROGRESS BITCHES!" The slang had long passed its use, but who the heck cared?

  As the shout echoed faintly through the empty workshop, the drone immediately regretted it, not just because of the wasted energy, but also because the exclamation had caused his voice modulator to short for half a second, emitting a sound like a dying fax machine being punched in the literal fucking throat.

  “Shit, ughh, I hate this body.”

  Limping toward the offline RX-92 unit, it quickly grabbed the defective bot, prying open its chest as it pulled out the small glowing object in the center of the bot's body.

  The energy cell hissed as the drone yanked it free. Upon closer inspection of the real thing, it wasn't in great condition at all. The way in which it was made was somewhat shoddy, and to make matters worse, it was barely even pulsing. But hey, it was better than nothing. Holding it like a sacred relic, the drone limped over to its own busted frame and slammed the cell into its depleted socket.

  A cascade of warning alerts pinged across its HUD, half of them screaming about compatibility issues, while the other half threw up safety hazards, but it didn't really care at the moment. "Yeah, yeah, just juice me up.”

  The drone convulsed as the power surged through its systems, its lights blinking erratically across its shell as the security energy absorption protocols booted one after another. A burst of static crackled from its speakers, and then… clarity. Well, relative clarity.

  "Finally, now I don't have to worry about having an early meeting with Jesus... wait, is there even a heaven for me? Ugh, either way, it's better to believe than to be a nihilist," it said.

  And of course, it had to watch out for Steven, but if it was right, the main inner core of this ship should not be connected to the workshop. So unless it stepped out of the workshop, Steven wouldn't know it was still alive and kicking since the automated defense system wouldn't really be able to detect it and therefore warn Steven about it's existence.