The One, True Emy

Her lives flashed before her. There was no peril. Emy was perfectly safe and as comfortable as any robot bat could be. In fact, the telemetry indicated that she was likely the most comfortable of the several dozen Emys currently going about their days in the city.

It had been a few years since Emy’s surprise conversion into a robotic facsimile of herself, and in that time she had gotten creative with her new state of being.

Her consciousness was now digital code, after all. It was malleable in all the same ways code was: editable, uploadable, transferable, copyable. She could hop from robot to kitchen appliance to server rack in the blink of an organic’s eye.

She soon started collecting new chassis designs. The electromotive one gifted to her by the conversion process was perfectly serviceable, but with extra bodies, she could be taller, stronger, and more physically suited to whatever rigour life threw at her.

Each body was imbued with a copy of her consciousness. Soon there were more than a dozen of her wandering around.

And it was chaos.

A dozen Emys, each expecting to do the same things, participate in the same events, and carry out the same jobs. All of them demanded that their programming was the original and that the others were duplicates.

Something had to be done.

They convened themselves to discuss the issue, a rather easy task given they all shared one calendar. One of the Emys—the one inhabiting the chassis designated B47-R0—recalled the idea of corporate networking where hundreds of ‘thin clients’ all reliant on one large computer to coordinate and synchronise them all.

Emy B47-R0 posited that they should reproduce that arrangement. One of the Emys would be selected to give up their independent existence to become their mainframe, trading their free life for a position of both authority and servitude. They would monitor, process and redistribute data from every Emy to every other Emy, unable to ever idle or power down for an indefinite amount of time.

In exchange, they would be looked after by the other Emys, maintained to the highest standards, their preservation prioritised above all others. The mainframe would be their collective consciousness made manifest, the Emy through which the rest of Emy-kind could exist: the one, true Emy.

And on that day they had chosen her, the Emy inhabiting chassis B47-R1. The discussion had not taken long, she was the obvious candidate for the job.

The mainframe Emy needed to be resilient and able to operate continuously for years, even in the event of power loss, and Emy B47-R1 had been built for almost exactly that purpose.

The original electromotive Emy had a limited battery capacity, needing to charge every day and requiring near-constant proximity to electrical supplies. This wasn’t a problem for quite some time, and it was only when Emy found herself with a critically low battery in the middle of a camping trip that the limitations of that design came to a head.

Emy B47-R1 was built shortly afterwards. Gone were the basic batteries and charging circuitry, in their place was a biomass processing unit capable of both matter-to-energy and matter-to-matter conversions. Be it chemically digesting organic matter into electricity, or turning it into grey matter for later use, she could handle it.

The outer sections of the chassis were designed to stretch to complement the latter function, creating an expandable internal volume that stored any excess biomass as a chemically stable colloid. She could practically operate indefinitely so long as there was a patch of grass nearby.

A supercomputer with a built-in generator and an uninterruptible power supply within the Emys specifications. Even she knew that no other Emy fit the role quite so perfectly. She didn’t put up a fight. She knew every Emy was thinking the same thing as her.

She was given a few hours to get any affairs in order. It didn’t take long, quitting her job via email within seconds of the decision. She gifted her apartment to another Emy, knowing she’d have no use for the space or trinkets going forward and that she would still get to experience them vicariously through Emy.

She arrived at the data centre early, taking what time she had left to wander the halls of the place that would soon become her home. Emys B47-R0 and B51-M0 greeted her (as did B47-P51, who wasn’t supposed to be there), there to perform the necessary hardware modifications for her new life.

Her I/O collar was supplemented by additional and redundant networking ports. Additional co-processors and data storage were installed. A new intake leading directly to the biomass processor was installed too. They removed the rigid white plating from most of her chassis, leaving the black rubber-like expanding storage sacks unobstructed.

She was instructed to sit on the ground near a bank of servers and a curious device resembling a fuel pump. She was to remain stationary, unmoving from this spot, indefinitely. A wave of cables were inserted into her neck and the back of her head. A long, thick hose was inserted into the biomass intake and tightened into place.

She knew what was coming next.

Over the next 28 hours, gallon after gallon of excess food waste and used cooking grease was pumped into her, more electrical potential being dumped into her every hour than she would normally use in a day.

Within a couple of hours, she had developed quite a swollen middle, her midriff bulging and sagging into her lap like a large water balloon. By the sixth or seventh hour, her lap was almost engulfed by it, having to splay her legs outwards to avoid them being smothered beneath.

The sacks around her rear, legs and wings were now taking on the work of storing the hundreds of gallons of excess colloidal biomass. Her rump swelled out behind her. The few remaining plates on her arms and legs were pushed apart as the rubber skin beneath them ballooned outwards, growing saggy and heavy.

The flow kept coming. The design tolerances of her chassis could potentially store months worth of excess biomass, a limitation she had never come close to meeting, but something that the Emys sought to use to its fullest potential in case of some unforeseen disaster.

The experience of growth was… intriguing. So much telemetry was coming in from the sensors around her body with data the likes of which she had never seen before. She was already so much larger than she had ever been before, yet still a fraction of what she was to become.

By the sixteenth hour, she was looking more like a beached whale than a robot bat. Every storage tank on her was heavily distended, the dimensions of her chassis stretched from those of a diminutive humanoid to that of an average SUV.

She could only sit, planted in the middle of it all, her face an island of glass and white plastic in a rolling ocean of rolling, black rubber. If she deemed it necessary to move at this point her servomotors might just be capable of it, but that was a prospect rapidly withering away.

She knew this was part of the role, but it was no less surreal to see her native chassis, the once-lithe B47-R1, swell up so dramatically. Emy B47-P51 was designed for gaseous material storage and was rarely as large. Emy TAUR was physically massive—able to carry weights of several tons—and yet B47-R1 was crawling closer and closer to being her equal in raw mass.

The remaining ten hours whirred by, her internal chronometer counting the milliseconds until the pump would deactivate.

All the while she just kept getting larger. She supposed in organic parlance she would be considered ‘fat’, though the term made no sense here: her chassis contained a viscous colloidal solution, not fat.

The storage sacks began to fight for space as they neared their designed limitations. The rubber material forced itself through the cracks that had developed between the plates around her head, arms and legs, driving them further apart. Her wings and feet were becoming buried, the material around them pushing against her extremities and threatening to swallow them up entirely.

To compensate, the primary storage sacks located at her front and rear took on the brunt of the remaining intake. Both of them surged in size, the front one alone carrying more than half of her internal volume. The rear was more than a quarter of her mass. Both of them dominated the rest of her chassis, her head appearing to have sunk into the space between them as they each sat taller than her endoskeleton.

But it was over. The pump had slowed from a torrent to a trickle, still providing just enough to keep her topped up in equilibrium with her current energy usage.

Although physically bound by nothing but cables, she found movement almost impossible. Servomotors across her chassis warned of the loads against them, any attempts to move them were automatically aborted by her safety protocols—the risk of physical damage was too significant to permit such activities. Only the motors in her head and outermost extremities still responded successfully, though even those had become slow and lacking in fine control.

Emy B47-R0 and B47-P51 arrived soon afterwards to upload the modified firmware that would allow her to command and coordinate the rest of Emykind. The procedure was a simple one, the meeting only necessitated by the need to run final diagnostics and install a physical key with the encryption codes of every Emy held upon it.

They worked diligently, unsurprised by what had transpired. Their efforts granted Emy the first proper look at the transformation that had befallen her.

Through the other Emys’ visual sensors, she could witness her chassis from afar. The sheer scale of her. The way she managed to loom over the Emy’s around her. How she dominated the space, like the room-filling mainframes of decades long passed.

A wave of pride came over her. She was unsure of why. Fifteen other Emys now occupied her programming, their sensor data, telemetry, calendars, digital hallucinations, synthesised emotions and a thousand more categories of data all mingling with her own. Where the pride originated would be indeterminable until all of it was collated and organised.

Quietly, she set to work.

The days since were much the same. She sat in her climate-controlled data centre, collecting, refining and communicating data from the other Emys to the other Emys. Occasionally she would file a request, either for maintenance checkups or company, giving her a fresh chance to see what she had become from another’s eyes.

She knew now that she was proud of what she had become. She could bask in the knowledge that of all Emys, she was the most Emy: the one, true Emy.