Ditched: 133713

Ditched: 133713 is the first (in the way that I want you to read it) in a series of tales detailing the life of Project X Mark 1, a robot running for his life. He escapes, only to end ditched miles from anywhere in the Metasphere.

Ditched
X got up from standby, it was a clear day outside, he looked to see whether he had been found be his could-be captor yet. It was quiet as a mouse, a computer one; they are the quietest of mice. The only sounds were the waves slapping against the beach and the rusted ship he had stayed in for the past day. X sighed, then drew out the archaic tunneling device he liked to call Salvation.

It was a metal thing, a box with a drill on the front and a hinged glass roof over some simple controls. The whole thing he had scrounged together himself, a few bolts from a construction site here, a few bits of sheet metal from a merchant there.

However, his best find of all was a plate, a featureless grey plate that had no structural merit in the design of the machine at all. It was a Practical Valmak; it would cover the purposes of a Procrastinator, Time Gear, and Space Ripper in a normal time machine as well as open portals to other dimensions. X had nabbed it from a backstreet dealer for his days scavangings (a very efficient engine) and was going to use it to hop away from the inexorable force of a single bounty hunter.

He also wondered why he was being chased by said bounty hunter in the first place; he was hoping to use the time travel part of the Valmak to find that out along the way.

The first months of awareness were all sorts of a blur, sirens blaring, mobs of people, most annoying of all being thrown into a metal box and winding up sealed inside.

He had spent the time counting, counting the years he had rested unsleepingly, counting the infinitessimal locks the thing had, and counting the times he had thrown punches at the hellish door which he had made so many death threats at for all of those long hard years. It had hardened him, he had become an existential nihilist, and wanted to negate that and find some grain of meaning to the whole mess that was the universe that he had spent such a long time not seeing.

Then, after who knows how long, it would be time to leave.

He had been getting quite hot lately, some LEDs on his chest had been glowing quite brightly recently, so bright in fact they were no longer light blue, but white hot. The same was true for his eyes. His instinct for this sort of thing was to move about as much as possible but he couldn't move, therefore what was happening was these lights were getting brighter. After a while a red light on his arm turned on, a small box with a tube on the front facing his hand extended out, turned so it was facing forwards, then shot a stream of blue shaving foam at the door. leaving a nice hole where the main lock was. A few movements of his fist later and he was out.

That was interrupted by a presence behind him. The bounty hunter that he would come to run from.

In binary it spoke. "Return to the box."

X looked at it. A tall thing it was, he barely came up to it's thighs.

"Return to the box." It said again.

X looked at it again, kicking its foot, half heartedly.

"Return to the box." The behemoth said again, with emphasis.

X blinked.

"Return to the box. Now."

This went on for half a minute, X staring up at it silently, waiting for something to happen that would break the monotany.

"Final warning. Return to the box. Now."

X stared, then something happened.

"I have been patient. I have lost patience with you. I am now forced to kill you under my orders."

"Orders, y'say?" X mumbled, he had an assassin on his trail, to cap it all off.

He had been chased by the hunter for several months now. X had been getting several run-ins in the first few days until he stole a large quad bike and was able to put a few tens of miles between them.

X was going to test-run Salvation today. He opened a side hatch and found the small metal model of a face within the chamber inside. It rested on the engine that powered the structure. X placed the Valmak on the face.

Cables running from the face channeled the power of the mask into the drill assembly at the front of Salvation. The drill spun slowly.

X did a last check on the internals, got into the seat at the back, then-

A noise; a clunk noise.

X looked.

Clunk.

X saw someone on the horizon.

Clunk.

X franticly began starting up Salvation in a frenzy.

Clunk, clunk, clunk.

The drill began spinning faster and faster. The craft began to move forward under the power of the combustion engine.

Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk.

The bounty hunter was only a few meters away and X was revving the engine for all it was worth. The drill was reaching supersonic speeds and was now dragging the contraption along, purple and blue sparks were flying from the end.

"I told you. I am under orders." It said to X in its usual monotone whilst chasing X. The sparks were gone by now, forming a hole of purple and blue.

"Desist. I will have no mercy." All the while this was happening X was silent, the hunter might aswell have been speaking Mandarin to X. The drill had broken the sound barrier and was making a low rumbling sound. The hole was wider than Salvation now, the drill was starting to pierce through its threshold.

The hunter then made it's move. X hadn't realised that the hunter was heating up one of its two blades.

The overly hot blade cut the sheet metal on the right side of Salvation, striking and breaking the Valmak in the process as Salvation broke through the fully formed dimensional gate and out of the hunter's range.

Salvation careered wildly in a purple-blue void; X trying to rev the engine faster, but mde the engine cut out. The drill broke off and flew away wildly, the machine died down and fell as quiet as a computer mouse. X was stranded.

It looked across the beach, it was like he had vanished. The only traces of him left were the small fragments of metal that had flew off from his fatal blow to his hopes. It turned and left, banking that he was dead.

X drifted through the void for many hours, a faint wind blew through the vast emptyness. It was desolate, like nothing he had ever seen.

He took time to ponder where he was; in a place between universes? In a corner of a world never looked upon? The thoughts, and ideas he drew from them, made him forget that he was drifting in a void. Drifting with no reference point is very bad, he was about to get one.

A speck, a blueish speck of blue, was making itself visible. X looked at it, they were both drifting roughly towards each other.

He waited, expecting impact.

After a few hours his expectations were confirmed, X collided glancingly with the structure, he ended up embedded in the curved sheet metal structure.

"Hm." Were his only words. He set about getting out and investigating his driftmate.

It was several floors high, hollow, he could hear voices inside it, and what is more it was nothing a few whacks couldn't break through. Of course he found all of this out by pounding his fist against it a few times.

The Universal Bureau of Fiction was comprised of a central cylindrical atrium with small offshoots here and there, X had impacted an unused section of Level 9, and had now entered the Bureau.

X walked about what was going to be his new home, a vast office room, practically pitch black. Nothing stirred.