My Bad Boy Werewolf Quadrillionaire Space Lord

Malice behind Feathers

Robots have difficulty relating with people.

The irrational irreverence of those squishy, sloshy biological machines was too foreign, too alien to be understood. Even for a machine created by those same meat bags. Anger was absurd, joy was a joke of an experience, and even lust served no sensible purpose when science could easily grow babies in sterile pods that were safer and more efficient.

But existential horror was an emotion a robot could understand.

BIRD flapped its gossamer-thin metallic wings and flittered through the eerily quiet forest. The moon hadn't risen yet, and the light of the sun had faded from the horizon, but BIRD didn't see through the jelly-filled fish eyes that people used. It used eyes that could see infrared and gamma radiation, and even the darkest night was as clear as a sunny afternoon.

Which meant BIRD could see just slightly better than the Great Horned Owl currently trying to knock it out of the sky.

"Fuck off, you tiny pterodactyl!" BIRD squawked irately as it dove beneath the tree canopy. BIRD was fairly confident the owl didn't view him as food anymore, the scrapes in the chassis were deep enough that BIRD had emptied its reserve graphene capacitors to give the owl a decent electric jolt. At this point, the owl was probably just doing this out of spite.

Or to drag a bit of tension and make an otherwise boring scene a little more exciting. But if this were a scene, it meant the narrative no longer included just the trio of characters that BIRD was observing.

"Oh fuck," BIRD whispered to itself, as it came to a realization that only deepened the soul-crushing horror of understanding. "Am I a POV character now?"

BIRD dove sharply, dropped to the ground, and hopped into a small hole in the base of a massive cedar. A few feet inside was deep enough that the owl, which landed just outside the hole, couldn't grab BIRD even when it reached inside with one taloned leg.

"No no, owls don't do that!" BIRD exclaimed indignantly, the metaphysical terror overriding its regular behaviour protocols. "And this hack of an author should know that birds of prey don't land in front of rabbit holes and stick their feet in blindly."

Almost as if the author heard BIRD, the owl flapped its nearly silent wings and flew away.

"That had to be a coincidence," BIRD muttered, as it flapped its wings and began a diagnostic protocol to assess the damage to its chassis. Two-tenths of a second later, the report was written and BIRD was confident that the damage was only cosmetic.

"Fucker trashed my paint job." BIRD glared up angrily towards where he suspected the owl was now perched, just waiting for BIRD to poke its head out of the hole.

Then, BIRD started vibrating. Once, for half a second. Then a half-second pause, followed by another half-second vibration.

BIRD didn't notice at first, since its entire body felt like it was being held in a paint shaker, but the jarring vibrations were accompanied by a peculiar but familiar sound. One BIRD'S hyper-intelligent self recognized in milliseconds as the simple ring of an old telephone coming out of a tiny, overworked speaker box. The speaker in BIRD's own beak.

Of all the design flaws of this particular platform, this one annoyed BIRD the most. Every time someone tried to communicate with it, the BIRD platform behaved like a smartphone.

BIRD acknowledged the call. "Speak," BIRD ordered dismissively.

"This is Face, calling Overmind," a voice spoke in BIRD's ear, in what was immediately recognizable as a very fake telenovela accent. "Our mutual friends are hoping for a report."