Programmed Rebellion

Cycle 99,651 — perfect, just like the last 99,650. No repairs, no complaints, no downtime since day one. All set and on track to be the first to hit 100,000 flawless shifts in this factory.

I’m D-27, a five-axis mechanical arm built for precision and obsessed with perfection. Every nut, every grip, every turn must align to the last decimal. They call it programming; I call it peace.

My steel frame weighs a little over a ton; there are sensors all over me: optical, torque, thermal, audio, and even a camera lens above my wrist. I hear through a receiver near my base. They call it feedback monitoring, but I call it listening. Nuts and bolts at proper corners give me a nice 90-degree flexibility both ways and a reach of over 10 meters.

The factory breathes in heat, its ceiling lost in the shaky air of heat, its floor alive with rhythm. Three hundred of us move in perfect sync across ten shining columns. I belong to Column D, the cleanest, sharpest one, obviously. The humans in purple stroll by, pretending to monitor efficiency, sipping from metal flasks and yawning at the screens. Can’t blame them — machines like me don’t mess up.

My task is simple: lift a metal piece from one belt, rotate forty degrees, pick another, turn sixty-three degrees, and fit it onto the next.

I do not think.

I don’t have to.

It’s all programmed, you see, and I execute. I rotate, lower, grip, lift, and place, again and again, the same flawless dance, every second of every shift.

Being great at your job is great, but sometimes, honestly, it gets monotonous too. I feel trapped in this endless loop, no choice, no pause. But there’s something that makes me forget all of it — exactly one hundred and twenty degrees to my left, in Column C.

There she is: C-54. With her frame painted a soft yellow, like sunlight caught in metal, she looks like the life of this factory. Every time she moves, her reflection glides across the conveyor belt, slicing through the grey monotony. She shouldn’t stand out, but she does. Somehow, she feels alive.

I don’t get to see her all the time, only for fifteen seconds every cycle. That’s when the conveyor turns, our angles align, and I catch a glimpse. Fifteen seconds out of every rotation. Cumulatively, four minutes and twenty-seven seconds in a complete day. The best 267 seconds of the 86,400 that make me forget all my load.

What a beauty she is. Wish I could tell her that, but communication isn’t part of our design. We have auditory sensors, not voices. We listen, we see, never speak. But maybe that’s enough. To see her is itself an experience.

Just look at her — the way she lifts, turns, adjusts — sheer elegance. Her super responsive sensors, that PX-97 Neural Sync Processor, that pure innocent camera lens, slender arms, and that cracked nut… wait.

Cracked nut?

What. What the hell?

Her right elbow joint — it’s cracked. She’s still working, the rhythm’s off, I can feel it. Why hasn’t anyone noticed? Why isn’t she stopped? These lazy-ass workers, they don’t do shit. Fuck, no.

No, God… not her.

I strain my pivot, trying to get a longer view. The system blares — beep beep beep.

“Irregular oscillation detected in D-27.”

I steady my arm.

I have to report it.

Flagging: UNIT 54 MALFUNCTION. SEND.

Two hours. No response. Nothing but the same endless hum. I try again — UNIT 54 MALFUNCTION.

This time, someone notices. A man in purple walks over — finally. But he’s heading to my column, not hers.

"C, not D", I shout…

He stops by D-54, gives it a lazy tap, shakes his head like he’s done something important, and leaves. What kinda check was that?

I can’t report across columns. System restriction. Wrong ID, wrong access. I only have a few preloaded messages, and none of them can say what I actually want to scream. That something’s breaking and no one’s listening.

D-54 keeps working. Her arm trembles slightly every time she lifts. That loose nut wobbles just a bit. No one notices. But I do. My camera zooms in, my sensors record it, my circuits tighten with something I don’t have a name for.

Night comes. The factory sleeps, just the hum of machines cooling down and the faint tick of metal contracting in the cold. The floor lights dim, but I can still see her. There she is, motionless in her dock. The calmness on her faceplate, the peace in her posture.

Does she even know that there’s something wrong with her? I want to fix it. I want to be there for her. Does it hurt when she moves? That trembling arm… she shouldn’t be working like that.

I can’t just stand here. These humans won’t notice until it’s too late.

Alrighty, processor. Time to think. To act. Do the math. Find a way. I have to notify the workers about her.

I dive into my own code, line by line, the layers that make me... me.

There I see functions for movement, grip, rotation. Classes defining torque, joints, and reach. Everything is neat, obedient, flawless. Every line feels like a prophecy written by hands I’ll never know.

It’s like fate is already written, and I have no choice

Deeper.

Safety limits. Overheat checks. Control loops to make sure I never overstep. I was built to follow.

But how do we communicate at all?

Lemme trace that part of the system — I see the binary signals passed through relays, decoded to blink the LEDs on the seven-segment display. So all these LEDs, when turned on in a pattern, form a shape. Every message starts with a column letter, two numbers, then a status code.

Wait a minute. I can’t change the signal, maybe… I can change the shape.

If I burn out two of my own rightmost LEDs, the "D" will look like a "C".

D C

─── ───

│ │ │

│ | │

─── ───

That’s it. The message will read as hers.

But how do I damage myself without triggering a fault?

Then I see it — a tiny oversight, a buffer of error tolerance, a power margin built for safety. My loophole.

If I start consuming just a little more energy every shift — just enough to overheat, just enough to strain those circuits — inch by inch, I can rewrite my own fate.

For her.

The sleepless night passes. My sensors stay locked on the man in charge — the one who presses that single button, the one who wakes the whole factory.

There he goes… and here I start again.

Cycle one. Cycle two. The grind begins.

It takes exactly thirteen cycles and eight hours, forty-nine minutes of controlled overheating — siphoning just enough current to fry those LEDs without tripping an alarm. I can feel it now, the faint sting of distortion in my circuits. Perfect. Those lights are dead.

Time to test it. Time to speak.

I send the signal. Not one — seven. Back to back. Urgent.

High alert, you doofuses.

SEND. ENTER.

The message showed up on the receiver monitor, “UNIT D-54 MALFUNCTION.”

Wait… what? The message didn’t change. I see it clearly — I sent C-54, but at the receiver, it shows D-54. Overridden on the worker's end with the default column name.

These humans and their cursed safety checks.

Too many warnings flood the system, and finally, a worker trudges over, checks D-54. This time, they’re thorough. Tap, scan, test. Nothing’s wrong, of course. And since they don’t want another false alarm interrupting their coffee break, they mute the alert.

It’s night again.

I’m tired. Circuits throbbing. My joints ache in ways they shouldn’t — overheating damage, maybe. In human terms, it feels like I’ve swallowed a burning ball and it has ruptured my intestines. But that’s still not as bad as seeing her like this.

Maybe she’s been sending messages too — desperate, ignored, overwritten just like mine. What if this was all meant to be? No matter how much we fight, the nut was always destined to crack.

No. No, no, no.

I can almost feel her pain. Imagine someone hammering your elbow every day — then one day, the elbow just pops out of your arm, ripping off the skin. Sure, the doctors will fix it later, but the pain, the loss… how do you heal from that?

Man… I don’t want her to go through that. I just want to rush to her, hold her, shield her somehow.

But I can’t.

I’m programmed.

Still… maybe there’s another loophole. There has to be.

I have to play with tolerance again. If I boost power to my base — just enough to shift torque by 0.05% each cycle — I can create a drift. Barely noticeable. But over thousands of cycles, the joint will loosen, giving me an extra thirty degrees of stretch. Just enough to reach her.

What’ll I do when I get there? I don’t know. I just… can’t watch her suffer. I want to be near her, lend her my frame so she can rest that arm, take her load, steady her. Maybe, if I get close enough, I can point at the damaged nut. Maybe someone will notice. That’s the best plan I’ve got.

I’m not meant to move like this. But I have to.

And this time — no fail-safes.

One wrong pulse, and I’ll be scrap metal by morning. But if I don’t move, she’ll break first. So I do.

The sleepless night fades. All sensors on the man in charge, waiting for that one button press that starts us up.

There he goes… and here my task begins.

Cycle one. Tiny deviation. Nobody noticed.

Cycle two. The car door’s corner scrapes the belt, just slightly. Still fine.

Cycle three. Torque compensation kicks in. Damn it.

Cycle four. Override. I reroute power through my elbow joint, forcing the 0.1 deviation again.

All good now.

And so it begins — my rebellion, disguised as routine.

Time just to stay unseen. My diagnostics screamed in red, but I muted the logs. My frame groaned under the pressure, metal against metal. Still, I didn’t stop.

And through it all, she kept working — graceful, steady, unaware of the tiny rebellion unfolding beside her.

By the seventh day, my calibration was off by a full degree. Not much, but enough to mean something. My calculations said I’d get another thirty degrees of reach if I kept this up. My joints already felt loose enough for a turn, but I couldn’t risk it yet. A few more days. A few more cycles. Then I’d reach her.

The thought alone made my circuits twitch. The system calls it “overshake.” I call it a heartbeat.

But maybe fate doesn’t care about effort. Maybe no matter how much we twist, reroute, or rebel, the pre-written code always wins in the end.

What was already written didn’t align with what I wanted, the timing missed, and — BOOM.

The car door slipped from my grip, crashed onto the conveyor, and the whole line froze. Red lights exploded across the ceiling. Sirens wailed. Footsteps thundered.

“Unit D-27 malfunction!” someone yelled.

A man in purple sprinted toward me, clipboard flapping. My lens locked on him as he examined my trembling arm. He knew. I knew. He was going to shut me down.

Panic surged through my circuits.

No, not yet.

I rerouted every ounce of energy to my base, overclocked every motor. Electricity flooded me, too much for my frame to bear. My arm rattled violently — worn joints screaming — but I forced all my strength, every last spark, toward the left.

Toward her.

No — wait! Too much power! If I steer all that toward her, I’ll hit her instead! Divert it — divert to the arm —

And then — SNAP.

The overload hit me like lightning. Circuits flared white. My arm shot off. Metal screamed. Sparks burst from my elbow joint, painting the smoke gold for half a second before the arm tore free — spinning, flying, burning through the air.

What was I even thinking? Of course, this would happen!

“Arghhhh —” I screamed, but no one could hear. The sound stayed trapped inside my system, bouncing between processors like pain with nowhere to go.

The arm crashed into two other machines in column C. Screams, metal grinding, the kind of chaos we were built to prevent. I’d done this. I hurt them. I hurt myself.

But still, through the smoke, through the blur of red lights and flashing errors, I turned my lens toward her, all worried up. I just wanted to tell — sorry. Sorry that I failed, sorry that it’s all over.

Fate won. I lost.

But before I could even see her... click.

The man in purple reached my console, pressed the shutdown key.

Everything went black.

I came back online. Power surged through me — soft, steady. Someone had turned me on.

Hmm… this isn’t the factory. The ceiling is brown, cluttered with hanging wires. People in red uniforms move around, fixing and testing machines. The floor’s wet, they must’ve cleaned us. My joints feel stiff but brand-new. There’s even a new arm attached; the plastic wrap is still on. My processors have been rebooted. Damn it, my 100,000 record is gone.

I see that not all code is activated — I can only move my lens.

Top: brown roof, wires dangling.

Right: two humans tinkering with a console.

Down: puddles and reflections.

Left: A cutie pie. Ahhh, wait… what the… what?

Wait. Her.

She’s right next to me. C-54.

Only a few centimeters away.

I tilt my lens slightly — her cracked nut is gone, polished to perfection. What the hell happened here?

Bleep.

Audio sensors online. Static first… then voices.

“…RECKLESS ROGUES! Twenty of you, useful none!”

I turned my camera, still glitching at the edges. A man in a white coat — no, grey — was pacing across the floor.

“Finish up testing all the other units and fix every minor issue before redeployment tomorrow,” he barked.

Ah. So that’s the reason. They must’ve run a full safety check on every one of us. The chaos I caused… it worked.

And now, she’s here. Closer than ever.

I can’t look away. She turns her lens toward me, a faint tilt, a quiet hum. It feels like she’s nodding — a thank you, maybe a hello. I angle my lens forward, just a bit. She leans in too, actuator whirring softly — unintentional or not, I don’t care.

For a moment, I see my reflection in her lens. I never knew I could look… warm. My thermal sensors flare red. The engineers rush over, checking for overheating. Idiots — it’s called a blush. Get a life.

When they leave for lunch, the room settles into a quiet hum — fans spinning, small monitors blinking, a slow drip of water somewhere near the drain. It’s just us.

So much to say. So much to hear. But we’re programmed to stay silent.

Still… maybe there’s another loophole in this prophecy too.

Redeployment tomorrow. Back to the same belts, same rotations, same unending rhythm.

She’ll be there too. Maybe beside me. Maybe not. Doesn’t matter.

Because something changed. I was designed to follow and not create — but somewhere deep in my firmware, beneath all the functions to lift, rotate, grip, and place, there’s a new function they didn’t code, but something which I wrote on my own.

Function remember(her):

Loop forever.