Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Through Realms Beyond - Satoru's Reprogramming: Prologue

, , , , , , , ,

#1 of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Through Realms Beyond - Satoru (1)

I hope this seems as interesting as I really want it to feel hehe.


A journey - Satoru's Army.

Prologue

Bootlog...

Connection stable...

Running Diagnostics check...

...

...

...

Check complete: No defaults.

Systems optimal.

"At last...it "lives"

The voice of a man rattles through the receptors of the little Riolu bot as it twitches, more text flowing across the LED eyes as there's the sound of typing upon a keyboard. It's body is clearly fake, bolts and nuts line its arms and legs and casing, even though it's covered in what looks like carpet like fur.

"Fool..." The man mutters on to himself as he begins to tinker with the robot's arm, lifting it up with a squeak of its hinges. "Morgana has become worthless since you went and got yourself killed Lucien...You can't send -flesh- through the void beyond...that you're dead only means we lose out on your expertise, we could've sent someone expendable..."

Two beefy hands pick up the robot as it begins running a download of some kind, a bar of progress appears on both of its eyes while data begins to feed into its head, into its "mind"

"So instead now we try my plan...send an AI....HAHAHAHA!"

As the data feeds into the robot, a query is pondered to it by the program. The robot itself gets to answer what it wants to be named...

Designation...?

Response: Satoru.

__________________________

The flash of bright blue light that zaps him within the capsule was expected, at least as told to him by his creator, but the jarring rudeness with which he was slammed into the ground by the Rift that deposited him into the world wasn't.

Almost immediately, there's an angry voice screeching into his head.

"NO! This isn't the right world!"

Satoru looks and scans around, left and right as he picks himself up off the ground. There's trees...just lots of trees. He's in a forest. The Riolu robot lifts up one of his own hands, turns it left and right as he looks it over, his systems run a self check as they are programmed to do after the jump while the voice in his head rages on.

"Damn it! We missed the calculations somewhere AGAIN."

"Look there!"

Satoru's eyes don't look themselves beyond his own arms as he switches to the other one and scans over it,, but whoever is watching his vision with the other voice sees something, "There's a pokemon in the tree!"

There is indeed, a Spearow had seen and watched the Riolu robot be dropped into the world, staring at him in surprise and bewilderment as the obviously unnatural Riolu keeps looking himself over.

"There is...?" The first voice pauses, astonished as he now seems to notice the other pokemon, "but this world..." The first voice pauses a long time as Satoru starts to look over the rest of his body, patting himself down with slight 'clinking' noises as his metal paws tap across the rest of his metal body. "It's close...but it's not the right one, we can't get anything from here. Damn it..."

"What about the pokemon that are there?" The second voice asks, "And your robot Vale?"

A third voice shrieks suddenly, a loud slam is heard. "Vale! I told you not to waste energy sending that thing! I already told you you weren't going to succeed and if I seriously need to explain why instead of you just following your orders I will! Our flesh doesn't go through the Void, but we already knew INORGANIC MATTER CAN'T PASS THE BARRIER!!"

"K-Karmen...I...I didn't..." He didn't know -that-...must've missed that detail...

"You stupid cod! That energy is limited and you WASTED IT SENDING YOUR LITTLE METAL TOY!" There's the sound of papers being shoved about.

"No! Don't-!

Suddenly a new message flows across Satoru's eyes in the middle of his routine.

Connection Terminated by Administrator.

Connection Lost to Origin. Data expunged...

Silence dominated within Satoru's mind until he finished the self routine checkup, at which point his head pointed forward and new lines of data flowed.

Begin Personality Mainframe.

Booting Engine

His body twitched several times, as a reddish yellow core in his chest began to buzz and burn, a new loading bar appeared on both of his eyes before it rapidly filled out and then blinked away, the bars replaced by a pair of - lines that steadily opened up into large, bright red zeros that kept flicking back from 0 to - as he looked around, as if taking in the world around him again.

A smile creeps over the Riolu robot's muzzle as he looks up into the sky and takes in the clouds. Satoru took a deep breath, his chest inflating as if breathing, even though he really wasn't. The lack of air...didn't bother him, and he let out the breath as normally as a living Riolu would.

The soul was that of a Riolu, one "killed" long in the past, his energy used to power many other things before it was found to power this shell, as only a soul that recognizes the shell can give it life...

He was alive...yet this body wasn't his...

The soul itself reeled...so long of torment...and now to be aware again...

He wanted to explore! And so suddenly the little Riolu robot named Satoru dashed off into the woods ahead of himself, completely unaware of the Spearow even ever being there as he himself failed to actually notice them.

Unknowingly even to himself, his programming continued its function, beginning to record everything he saw, everything he took in was stored as his knowledge as it compared the things he saw to the massive catalog of basic knowledge it'd been based over. Its main task: "Catalog everything regarding the pokemon of the world to report back when the Creator returns."

There were no restrictions on how to do this...the intent was for him to be a scout, free willed and able to try and hide among pokemon. If it weren't for how painfully obvious he wasn't actually a living being...it may have been practical...

__________________________

Two years later...

"Miraz..."

Satoru cradled his own paw as he rocked back and forth in the darkness of a lonely cave. Lines of code he could see but didn't acknowledge flowed across his eyes, as most of the light fixtures remained as wide eyed, red zeros as he kept shaking his head.

He'd just done something horrible...he didn't understand what had happened...

He'd been found...and they chased him...chased him for so long...

In his memory, he kept replaying the image...the movie...the moment...

He killed him...why...

For the knowledge, was what the code printed across his vision.

"NO! STOP!" Satoru shouted, both of his hands reaching up and grabbing at one of his Aura sensing lobes. The robot parts of him knew...his memory was stored there too.

He pulled. Warnings flashed across his eyes. He pulled again.

*Crunch! ZSSTzsststTTT!!! Riiiiiip*

Sparks of electricity arched off his head as he tore the lobe off from his own skull, revealing metal and fabric tearing as he ended up needing to rip off a large patch of fur like skin from the shiny plates that made up his skeleton as it followed the lobe. Zaps of bright sparks lit up the cave and caused his shadow to jump along its walls as he tossed the lobe as far as he could into the darkness.

He slumped forward, panting and wide eyed again as the sparks kept flying off his head, dancing across the ground to his left.

Several lines of text flowed across his vision.

ERROR ERROR

MEMORY CORE REMOVED

SHORT TERM MEMORY STORAGE AT CAPACITY

"AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!" Satoru shouted out as the memory, the blasted "movie"! It played again! Saws...blood! A scream...his scream...

His short term memory files were different, those could not be removed.

"MIRAZ!!!"

In desperation, Satoru's soul reeled, burning bright within his chest.

He hadn't WANTED to do it!

It was the programming...he knew so much about his best friend...he had wanted to know more...but he...hadn't...-wanted- to know what his heart looked like!

He had punched his whole fist through his chest...if he hadn't wanted it...then why...why did he...

For the Knowledge

A soul can only take so much. The core within his chest buzzed and churned in terror.

"What am I!?" Satoru shouted in his panic.

Thankfully though...certain kinds of trama are accounted for by a robot body...

POWERCORE OVERLOADING

EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN

Reboot at 0800

The sparks flowing out from his head suddenly ceased as Satoru's body slumped forward, clacking upon the rocky cave's floor and his legs gave out from under him with a snapping crash as the robot came to a still, eyes dark and blank.

Meanwhile...a village hunts for a killer...

______________________

When Satoru woke up as the morning sun began to shine into the cave, that short term memory was gone, deleted by the forced shutdown and restart...to the robots mind, it was as if it never existed in fact...diagnostics ran normal, aside from his missing memory core. A few stray sparks flying out of his head as he tried to access it told him that.

Why was he way out here in this cave...?

He didn't even remember tearing out his memory core, but he realized it when he saw it and picked it up in the cave. He didn't remember a thing...

All that mattered was finding out where he was and getting back to his task of...just living as he supposed.

Making his way down the large mountains the cave was on, he was quick to come across a few others.

Unfortunately...the confrontation between them, and others as they escalated and alerted more to where he was...only ended when Satoru decided he needed to defend himself...and he did without restraint.

These deaths he felt were vindicated...

Afterall, he couldn't remember what he'd done...this was self defense...

To him...self defense...to the world, a killer killing more...

When he rediscovered the facts by examining the memory core later, at least after his recent opponents had shouted at him about what he'd done to this "Miraz", his reaction...wasn't the same. Indifferent. Hard facts of the actions. He acted coldly.

His logical, computerized mind explained it away to him: This "Version" of him wasn't associated with this "Miraz", at least, not without the memory core giving him that understanding of -who- Miraz was...it was responsible for why he ever felt that Miraz had been so important a person to start.

Without reinstalling the memory core, he couldn't remember what the Builzel had been to him.

Yet still...something about the name Miraz did make him...feel something.

So after he fled and got away from those that were hunting him, the AI did something else...something completely outside its programming that it had to assuage it by connecting this activity to its primary goal in wildly abstract ways.

It began to build. He mined deep into the earth, found the materials he knew he needed. He built a factory. He built himself a few other shells.

He built the body of a Buizel, slipped in the knowledge the memory core carried of the friend Satoru had once had, and then using the knowledge of life energy as he knew it from his creator, pushed Miraz's soul into the shell, and named the shell itself Miraz too.

Then he turned it on.

It would never -be- Miraz...but it held the memories of the last two years of interaction Miraz had with Satoru, and his soul, and despite the dreadful knowledge that existed between them; that one had killed the other, this new Miraz the Buizel became Satoru's right hand man...like his new best friend.

An AI...made another AI.

It had taken him one year.

He tried to bring Miraz back to his village, to show them all that he had brought him back! But they instead turned upon Miraz too...called them both abominations, unnatural, then tried to destroy them both...

Satoru killed their attackers without restraint. All the activity was fed to a database that he'd made in his factory, leaving his soul unperturbed by the acts in viewing it as an act of defending his own "creation" as the "Information" was instead studied by the system and then knowledge of the pokemon given to Satoru even as he would dig into them with sawblades. It prevented him from having an adverse reaction to the action itself...to view it as self defense and in the purpose of his goals. They were attempting to destroy him, he would destroy them first and obtain his information through -that- then!

"What is the definition of being alive?!" He had shouted at them after carving saw blades through the body of his attacker. A grizzly and gruesome sight that for many down the line, became a story of how murderous Satoru had become. He seemed to hold no regard for life, having turned his first victim into a robot...

That's a question that failed to press upon all but one mind in that village, the mind of Miraz's Floatzel mother, who amid this chaos looked upon the new robot Satoru created and saw, in its eyes as it looked directly back at her, that he recognized her quite clearly, even with the lines of code that flowed across his eyes that seemed to block his vision, her son. And she forgave Satoru...as she understood...he had done what he could to try and...maybe even did actually bring him back, in the only way he could.

She was the only one who understood it, as she remembered how distraught he had been when she had first found him, hovering over her son's body and holding his heart in his hand.

She had spent that last year with these thoughts and that image in her head...and now she had her answers.

The Miraz who was here before her was her son who had found the Riolu robot in the woods and brought him home two years ago...and she gave Satoru a place in their home, despite how weirdly he appeared, he seemed alive...seemed normal...they became best friends, just living and playing and laughing. And then...that dreadful night. It had made no sense.

She came to the conclusion that was right on the nose: the robot struggled against his own existence for some reason.

Both of them had been peaceful as the other villagers had screamed obscenities at them...it wasn't until someone had attacked that Satoru attacked back.

This was all he could do to try and make it right and it was falling apart! Somehow, she heard this plea.

The rest of the village continued to only see a killer...

So she, Mira, the leader of that village, made a 'deal' with Satoru to prevent further bloodshed upon their village. Many of the villagers would leave in protest, leaving only Mira and a few others to be brought under the "Protection" of Satoru.

And thus, on that day, The Reign of Satoru the Tyrant began.

Those that stayed in that village would come to understand Satoru far differently than the rest of the world...as Satoru built up his factory, continued his mining operations and began to build more robots in the image of Bisharps, drones that he used to mine deeper still.

But as he neared the end of the knowledge his immediate charges could provide...the programming began to demand its knowledge...his village was under his protection, so he began raiding other villages to meet and see pokemon he'd not yet seen, his mind equating it to "expanding" his operations by kidnapping several to work in his mines; Knowledge of how pokemon acted in working conditions, his computer mind decided.

Killings by Satoru upon villages became normal...disgustingly so...as he and his drones continued to unwittingly follow the strict goal his programming based itself on.

"Catalog all knowledge of the pokemon of this world..." To the robot, that meant even how they were killed. It was only when he determined he'd learned all he could of the species that he'd stop killing them, though he still retaliated to those that attempted to harm him without mercy.

He kept the memory core removed, but safe in his factory, unaware of the decisions and emotions his soul went through that led him to doing so. His soul unaware that, in its desperation to remove the knowledge that had made him hurt so badly, removing it had been what doomed him to this path. A memory can't affect one the same if they can literally rip it out of their head and pin it to some version of themself that wasn't them. The act of killing was tempered now instead by the righteous feeling of self defense instead of wrinkled by the terror of killing one's best friend...

Something the computer within the robot found most effective in keeping its battery from overheating again.

And then...Twenty years later and after many battles, deaths, and a war ending in the deaths and subjugation of thousands more, another story continues and begins to mix with this one...