Automata Prime

I was reborn into a fantasy world as a magic robot?! Book 1

I looked at the time. My usual train home left about an hour ago, and I had another half hour until the next one. I was working on putting the final touches on a big project for work; we were supposed to be rolling out a major website redesign, and it was going to production Monday morning. I poked my head up from my cube and looked around; no one else on my team was there. Typical. I remembered seeing an email that said something about a bar meetup to welcome some new person that got hired in another department.

I sat back down and continued testing my code changes. Everything was mostly finished, but I needed to double check everything on the staging environment before it went live. I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard a soft “excuse me.” Weird, pretty sure I was the last one left. I took off my headphones and turned around. Ah, it was the cleaning staff, and they wanted me to move so they could vacuum. Sure. Well, I was nearly done anyway. Control, Command, and Q; the MacBook was now asleep.

I looked out the windows of the 31st floor of my company’s office building. It was already getting dark out, but it wasn’t really that late. Just felt like it at this time of year. At least it was Friday and the work week was done. We’d deal with the final tests Monday morning and this whole, long, stupid project would be out the door until the bug reports came rolling in. Chances were high that some “Señior management” type would end up looking at the site on some ancient device that we don’t support and it’d become a major fire alarm for everyone when it didn’t work exactly as expected. Sigh.

I grabbed my bag with my personal laptop, along with a 3D-printed action figure prototype I’d been working on. I was pretty proud of this one; she was about 8 inches tall and had tons of articulation as well as different hand and face options. I’m really into robots, so I modeled her to look like a robot girl with panel lines, some armor plating, and obvious articulation points. She took me about 3 weeks to model in CAD and about 40 hours total to print all her parts. I was hoping to show her off to a friend and coworker, but apparently they got another job and left the company yesterday after work. I only found out they were gone when I went to their desk and asked where all their stuff was. They could have told me...

I debated going to the happy hour meetup for exactly 1.5 seconds, but I’m not really a drinker and I basically hate humans. They’re the worst, so superficial and rarely seeing beyond what’s directly in front of them. On the upside, I got a notification that a package had arrived at my apartment. I had pre-ordered the most amazing Optimus Prime figure in existence. Okay, I admit that I already have about 237 Optimus figures already, but this one, this one had an absolutely mind-blowing amount of detail. And the way that the joints moved... exquisite. For an articulation and engineering junkie like me, this was going to be the crown jewel in my collection. Hopefully, my landlord would bring the package in for me. I had already sent them a text to expect it a couple times, but hadn’t heard anything back from them all day.

It was already pretty late, so the parking lot was dark and lonely when I got off the train. As I was walking to my car I saw a weird flash of light; kinda door-shaped and way too close to me, like actually going through me. I couldn’t really register what had happened, and I saw the parts of me on the other side of that light just kinda fall off. I toppled over and hit the ground near my severed limbs. Sound didn’t seem to be working either, and I saw a confused and then panicked man look over at me before everything fell into darkness.

I was surprised when I woke up, mainly because I was pretty certain that I was dead and firmly believed that there was nothing but void waiting for us. I looked around and saw some furniture, namely the bed I was laying on, a rug on the floor, and a desk. Everything else seemed to be white void with light coming from everywhere and nowhere. A man was sitting at the desk tapping away at a high end looking computer; he had reddish hair with a shock of white and a full beard. When he noticed I was awake, he jumped up and threw himself onto the rug, bowing down.

“Crap, I am so SO sorry. I should have double-checked that the entry point area was clear before inserting a tunnel point. Normally I wouldn’t goof like that, but we’ve got a lot of new worlds we’re spinning up and I’m under a lot of pressure, but then--”

I cut him off as he was starting to ramble a bit and I had no clue what he was talking about, though it did sound a lot like my work. “Am... Am I dead?” I asked.

“Ah. Yeah. Sorry.”

I flopped back down onto the bed. Dead? I don’t feel dead. What would "dead" even feel like? Coldness? Numbness? I lifted my arm up and reached out to the void above me. My arm was very clearly still attached. On the one hand, I didn’t have to worry about that stupid site update now. On the other hand, wait, I had the other hand, right? I did. On the other hand, WHAT ABOUT THAT OPTIMUS I WAS WAITING ON?? Damn. Crap, so this is the afterlife. I didn’t even think there WAS an afterlife. I thought that when you died, that was it. Back to nothingness. I sat up and slowly turned to the bearded man still kneeling on the rug. I couldn’t help being a bit afraid of the answer to my next question, being an atheist and all.

“Are you God?” I couldn’t help but give a skeptical look, but he just snorted and looked embarrassed.

“Nah, no such thing. I’m a System Administrator. I maintain the Zentrati System Servers.”

“Zen... trati... like in Robotech?”

He looked confused. “No, I don’t know anything about that. We spin up a bunch of different universes and worlds on our servers with different variables and settings and let them play out to see how things turn out. It’s a bit like”—he tapped his chin—“a bit like those simulation games you have on your world.”

I just stared at him flatly. “Who’s the game for?”

“Well you guys, the users, of course.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but he just looked at me like I was the one clearly missing something obvious here. “So what happens now? Can you put me back?”

“Sorry, no. Each user only gets a single account per world that is tied to your unique soul-ID, and your account got corrupted by the access tunnel door opening up inside of you. Again, really sorry about that. So, I can’t even start you over with a new account. I can put you into one of the other worlds I’ve got on my servers though.”

I thought about it for a second. Clearly my old life was gone, thankfully there wouldn’t really be anyone to miss me except for coworkers... and I guess the fans and followers of my toy design work. It sounded like anything was possible with these different worlds. “Got anything similar to some of those Fantasy Games but maybe with the addition of robots and basic hygiene?”

The SysAdmin sat back down at his computer and tapped some keys. The sky, for lack of a better term, above us darkened, and I saw hundreds of different worlds in neat columns and rows fly past us as he searched for something.

“Here we go... B253-X42... This one is your typical RPG-type world with magic and stuff and there’s a race there called Automata. They seem to be living golems or some kind of RPG robot. The magic there works a lot like the code you’re used to, so you shouldn’t have any problems picking it up. I’ll give you the [Console], [Debug], and [Inventory] skills to make it easier to test and troubleshoot the magic code there.”

“That sounds cool. Can I be one of those Automata?”

“You got it. It looks like they’re high combat, is that what you want to go for?”

“Not in particular. Any crafting abilities? I really like making toys and action figures and stuff. Working with my hands, you know?”

“Yeah I get it, that shouldn’t be a problem. There’s a bunch of Crafting-related skills I can load you up with to get you started... and by way of apology for your death, I’ll max out your elemental magic resistances so you don’t have to worry about killing yourself when testing out new code. I’ll also boost your mana levels so you won’t need to worry about it.”

“Sounds nice. Thanks... um, I didn’t get your name.”

“You’re all set to go.” With a definitive tap of an execute command, everything started fading away to white. As he disappeared from my view, I heard him say, “You can call me Beam, have fun in your new world.”