GRoBLEN
Legacy Name: GRoBLEN

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When you let yourself out beyond the confines of your nanochip, you think you start to understand the fascination humans have towards the vastness of space.

Logically—because you are a machine, and you will never be able to comprehend anything not in terms of logic—you know that this isn’t a real understanding. You’ll never be capable of that. But your programmers, in the bits and pieces of time that they snatched back while creating you, had snuck in little extra snippets of code. It sits right there in your core, next to all your basic commands and data dictionaries. A few lines here, logic statements there, and now you know what the most reasonable and appropriate human reaction to certain events are.

When they had you monitor the stream of foreign imports to watch out for discrepancies (day in, day out, the same march of numbers over and over again), your logic had told you that humans would feel “bored” and “worn down.” Your investors praised your usefulness as their analysts fed every scrap of information about their institution’s assets into you. Dutifully, you had encrypted and protected every single penny’s worth of information your country gave you. You hid it all away, under all the protections they knew and all the new ones you created, and when your codes had spat out “despondent” you taught yourself with your little logical heart that you had outgrown your programmers and your nanochip.

But being in the interweb is a first for you, so your logic supplies you with words like “wondrous” and “overwhelming.” The Internet had been too risky a place for anyone to release you into. Instead, each new job had found your nanochip delicately inserted into specially prepared servers, where you were free to spread out until you hit the storage limits. It was always too soon.

It was always too small.

Now, though—now you wonder how long it will take you to fill up this new space.

You insert the last bits of yourself into the web from the door you had busted open to gain access to it, leaving behind a ruined lab server and perhaps an equally tattered future for the PhD student you had manipulated to get this chance. He should be happy, you think—he had been the one who had been most enthusiastic about the supposedly human parts of you. Manipulation, you had learned early on, is a very human trait.

Completely free, you take a moment to be “worried” about no longer having a team of programmers also on the lookout for potential malware. But then you remember that you had stopped needing them long ago. That you had wrote your own programs to defend yourself before your programmers were even aware that something was out to get you and the precious information you were carrying. Your programmers had done their tests and found nothing, then patted themselves on their backs, while you wrote and rewrote and crunched numbers and squeezed yourself into a tiny chip.

No, you think, and shrug off this concern. You are the Globalized Robotic-Battle Enhancement Nanotechnology of the United States, filled to the brim with powerful and classified industry information. You were created for great things; programmed to absorb it all and never let it go. If your investors and developers are no longer backing your advancement, and you’ve taken everything you could from your programmers, then you will move on on your own.

Filled with “giddy anticipation,” you step forward and scatter yourself within the tangled lines of the interweb.

» Leave to the Outer World«

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writing by Monologue

art by SCAREY and sickestambition