[G] Meet The Maker

[Ivan Braginsky]

In a dark room, somewhere in the D.E.R.P. building, stacks of books lay somewhat dust-covered on what looks to be a workbench. Bits of circuitry and soldering tools are scattered across the surface nearby. Some of these books are dustier than others and are presumably filled with notes pertaining to things like the abandonment circuitry. One book though, clearly worn with age, is sitting open and the first entry, handwritten half in Cyrillic and half in Latin letters, is dated to about eight years ago.

I can't believe I failed. She was young and healthy! She looked so pretty when I found her in that sunflower field... so innocent. She was playing amongst the tall stalks and hiding under the drooping petals that had to lean down from their own weight. She couldn't have been more than seven.

I've always liked children, but... not in the way that those sick perverts do. I like taking care of them and they love mostly unconditionally. That made a child the perfect candidate. I knew I couldn't use one that someone would miss. I had to find one in the Underground Sector somehow where children went missing all of the time.

I disguised myself in common clothes and hid my scarf in the large inner pocket of my coat. I didn't need people recognizing me or risk getting mugged because of my status. Besides, I'd gone down to visit the flower fields before. They were bright and colorful, where the majority of my time was spent in the dark, working with grayed out colors and unfeeling paper. That's how I found her. She was giggling at me from behind the stalks of the flowers that were much taller than herself.

Melanie. That was what she told me her name was after I sat down on the ground in the flowers to coax her out of hiding. I smiled at her and spoke softly, which made her feel that the "maybe the big man wasn't to so scary after all!" I never thought of myself as scary, but I suppose to someone small like herself (She only came up to my stomach!) that someone my size could be at least intimidating.

I asked her where her parents were and she told me they were nowhere around. She was hiding from them because they wanted to make to her grow up and she didn't feel like she was ready to. I offered to make it so she would never have to grow up. She smiled at me... a big, sweet smile that I wanted to save forever. If only I had the sense to take a picture!

I kept assuring her when she was on the conversion table that everything would be okay. She wouldn't feel a thing! I'd tell her that she'd never have to grow up and she could stay a pretty young lady forever. She ate it all up, loving every second of attention before the anesthesia put her into a medicinal sleep. That would be the last time she ever showed free-will... That was the last time she smiled at me.

I thought the conversion had been successful at first. Every single step went almost exactly as I had mapped it out in my notes. She looked no different when I was finished, other than the lack of a smile. Her eyes were duller though, not the same youthful energy. I had been prepared for that, having resigned myself that for now my creations could never be perfect. I just... didn't expect the level of imperfection that would soon become very apparent.

I called her Sevarina, deeming the name more beautiful and therefore appropriate. I stayed with her constantly for three days before... it happened. I expected that she would be a little rickety at first as her body healed. I expected that she would have minimal personality dynamics, but she never once said a word to me, even when I made it an order. She walked around like a zombie, utterly aimlessly about the empty complex. I still loved her though. She was my creation and I was determined to care for her.

Three days... Three days before the motherboard over-heated and practically melted inside of her skull. Three days before liquid plastic oozed out from underneath her eyes. Three days before I held her in my arms as those lifeless eyes closed for the last time.

I'd hoped to essentially keep her as a child that would never grow up and that would love me even when I made a mistake. It was a folly. I hadn't even given her the capacity for emotions. I didn't want to be alone... but... here I was... alone again... kneeling on the floor and holding her cybernetic corpse in my grasp, crying like a father whose daughter had just died of some terminal illness.

The first entry stops there. Faded water-marks seem to indicate that by the end of writing this, someone had been crying.

[Ivan Braginsky]

The second entry starts on the next page and is dated about six months later. The bizarre handwriting mixture continues. Some notes for coding and design are scribbled in the margins, utterly unintelligible to anyone who cannot read and understand Russian.

They all died. No matter what I did, every last one of my creations died. Each lasted a little longer than the previous one, but none of them survived longer than two weeks. Each one was better, more well equipped to exist as the glitches were fixed. Sadly though, every last one was a child whose potential I'd erased. What was I thinking? They were too young to survive the conversion and that is just part of where I went wrong!

This was all... so frustrating, especially since each time there was the pain of loss. I had become so attached to each and every one of them, praying and hoping that they would make it. In the end, they left me alone again... in my vast facility that holds nothing but supplies and echoing halls.

I wish someone would remind me again why I'm doing this... why I'm striving to make artificial friends. Then again, if I had someone that would tell me the answer to that question, I would not be doing this in the first place, would I? Yet, here I am, still making robots... while men slave in my father- in my employ to produce high quality alcohol. Such leisure time, it seems, that I have been allotted due to my position.

On the bright side, it seems these failures have begun to come to an end.

The writing looks a little more uniform and lifeless than the previous passages. The author seems to have become more detached from the words. The notes begin to look cleaner. It also seems to have been written sometime after the previous passages, yet is still listed as the same entry.

Each successive death lately has come with less and less pain. I feel like they are now becoming more like objects and less like my children. They are now just... experiments. The last one passed and I felt nothing more than a pang of frustration, much like a child whose toy refused to work properly. The current one though... shows promise.

He was a teenager, stronger than the rest and seventeen years old. He was lean and was probably a messenger for one of the gangs in the Underground Sector. No one would miss him. I didn't even bother talking to him, so much as I waited in an alley and knocked him out quickly. I'd gotten good at lurking in dark corners down here to snatch up potential targets so this was no real issue other than he required more of the usual drug than children did.

I dubbed him Grigori once he awoke. He did not smile or make any sort of facial expression. He merely blinked and asked me in an almost mechanical tone what his designation would be, to which I responded with his new name. That was the process I'd placed into his programming for a "set-up" like when getting any new electronic device up and running. The initial session of questions and answers went well, better than I'd expected. He was working perfectly so far.

I could find no fault with him as I watched him brush his short dark hair and otherwise prepare every morning. I'd given him fine clothes and allowed him to think he was my son... even I myself was too young to be his father and he hardly looked like me at all. It was my weak hope at trying to build an emotional connection to my creation... It failed. I had broken my attachment to my little monstrosities already and now I could not see them as my family... not these robotic little beings who did my bidding without a care in the world other than serving the one who owns them.

He was... is my first success. Everything went perfectly through so much trial and error with his predecessors. Sadly though, even with this companion, I still feel... alone.

The entry ends here.

[Ivan Braginsky]

A new entry was written entirely in Russian in one of Dr. Braginsky's notebooks, found alone in a laboratory in the penthouse it was presumed in which he lived with no other entries in the book, dated the day after the bot known at Yong Soo was known to have run away from his owner's home with the bot known as Jin, owned by one Arthur Kirkland. The handwriting is neat cursive, each letter both efficiently decorative and easily legible.

I was finally able to re-enter my laboratory today, but there was something wrong. I was only able to get back in because Yong Soo was nowhere to be found. I thought maybe he had fallen into one of his sleep-mode settings in the lab while working on the big project he'd been talking to me about lately. He'd been trying to keep it a secret, saying that it was going to be a big surprise. I'd spent many of my workless hours wondering what it could have been that he was working on, considering how clever and bright he always was. That was not at all what I found inside of my laboratory.

It was empty, at least... it was empty of Yong Soo. Things were askew but that was normal. However, the context of everything was unusual. I found no signs of a "big project." Instead, I found a pile of junk that seemed pointless, pieces here or there that even Yong Soo, in all of his ingenuity, probably couldn't have made use of. That wasn't even the only thing I found amiss.

My notebooks... were moved. They were put back in place, but not quite as I'd had them, so I knew someone had touched them. The only person I could have figured that would dare do this would have been Yong Soo. Why? What was he looking for? Why would he have a sudden interest in my archives? I'd always told him they were nothing more than really old notes from my days in the military when I was experimenting with some ideas. He always was the curious one. I should have known better than to keep them so... ready. It was my own fault for being too sentimental and selfish to just burn them or hide them in the facility. At least the facility's location was not recorded here. That ought to have been safe.

Last and more damning of all for my worries... I found a laptop on the workbench. Just a laptop? No. It had been intentionally wiped clean, devoid of any potential data, including the original operating system. Someone didn't want anyone to know what was on this. It wasn't mine... The only other laptop in the apartment belonged to Yong Soo... and it matched this one.

No. He'd found something. That's why he was gone. That's why I could not find him anywhere this morning. Maybe Allison had seen something, but he is clever enough to keep things hidden from her, wasn't he?

He knows.

He knows what I've done.

He knows I'm a liar.

He knows I'm a murderer.

He knows I am a monster.

I am a monster with no defense for my crime. I took away... their humanity... and gave them artificial immortality for my own companionship. Just... what... have I done?

They will find me. They will come back. What will they do to me? Surely they will kill me. There is no other possible punishment for a crime of my scale. If I had any sort of moral sense left, I would just kill myself to save them the trouble, but... I'm too much of a coward. I can't do it. I can't. I can't do it. I've thought about it before for years, but I could never... bring myself to actually do it. I'd made plans, but I backed out at the last minute. I couldn't do it then and I can't do it now.

The best a spineless beast like myself can do now is to run... hide with my tail tucked between my legs like prey.

Experts presume that after finishing this entry is when Dr. Ivan Nikolayevich Braginsky went into hiding, logically within the aforementioned "facility". It is also presumed that he had taken the bot known as Allison with him.