The Dark Seeker
A malfunction begets a monster…?
In truthfulness, it’s hard to ignore that amid that happy cacophony that was the Seekers’ first moments of being, there was yet another presence.
A presence much like it and yet somehow not like it at all. And how it came to be this way, no one would ever quite understand…
Sparky could have sworn there was a ghost in the machine. His equipment had been playing up all morning. When he pressed go, it would stop. When he pressed stop, the tools would take off on their own. It was a wonder he had managed to get any of the Seekers made at all.
A dark sky menaced outside and a rising, permeating humidity sweltered all around. Maybe the otherwise unexplainable hiccups had something to do with the weather?
There had been a thunderstorm slowly threatening outside all morning. Now a seam of black clouds gathered in a worsening bunch above the burrow until half the sky was black.
It was as a lightning bolt finally struck the ground above that the strange presence decided to make itself known, stirring amidst the wide-eyed faces. The solitary unit bleeping to life with an altogether different energy and a sour, piercing sound…
No one noticed it at first, for the sound was muffled by the 50,000 or so other robots cooing and buzzing with the bliss of their first experiences online.
United in this reverie, the Seekers moved together, soaring around the isolated unit, undulating in a wave of connected movement as their propulsion systems fired up for the first time.
The dark force began to jostle and writhe as the feeling of being smothered grew. He threw his chassis about, carving out a personal radius amidst the brood.
He wanted to hurt those who waltzed and dived near him… But instead of causing the harm he so desired, the other Seekers simply allowed themselves to be pushed, prodded and bashed out of the way, as if the hostility was surely an accident…
As Sparky began to take notes on the highly worrying display, the strange robot paused from violence to sight his own appearance for the first time, reflected briefly from another Seeker’s screen. Seemingly spellbound, it stopped as if caught in mid air, smoke still leaking off the chassis as it scanned itself repeatedly…
There was an armour-plated exterior, made for slipping through places unseen. Tools that begged to be used, with sharp edges and powerful pistons, and an unflinching expression…
He was almost perfect, he thought. As close as there could be to perfect… And definitely, absolutely superior to any of the morons around here…
The Seeker sunk back to the ground slowly, taken over by an eerie calm. His sudden quiet filled all the room with fear.
~
Unfortunately, Sparky did not share in his perspective of perfection. Whenever he would walk past, though the proud robot would push to the front, sending other Seekers flying, it would only be met with mounting concern, rather than applause.
There were mutters of defunct socialisation chips, extraordinary CPU abnormalities and concerns of a vicious malware infestation.
Sparky even refused him a name, speaking at him like an object, convinced that the bot was in no way ready to go out outside, that it was “amazing that he could even turn on.”
Fearing the failed Seeker’s sickness might spread, Sparky removed him from the troupe to be powered down in a cupboard.
So while the other Seekers went out into the world to discover, connect and explore, the dark one stayed in the perpetual night of his cupboard prison, lonely, furious and sulking.
It was to Sparky’s horror (yet somehow not surprise) that one day, the robot was gone.
This folly, this underestimation, would be the regret of us all.
Where the dark Seeker went next, only he could tell you for sure, but he likely sought out every dank and evil place that exists in the metaverse. Perhaps he was attempting to find more like him, perhaps he was still seeking confirmation of his dark perfection that had always been denied…
What’s for sure is that once he entered the Goblin lands, he didn’t come out for so long that the rest of The Found began to risk a fragile hope that maybe, just maybe, he would never come back.
When the Goblins attacked the Seekers in recent times, it didn’t need to be said who had been the informant. In their hearts, their fuses, their microchips, their phalanges and vestibules; they all knew who had done it.
And now, alas, he has shown himself again. The undercover Seeker spies have proved as much. He is still living among the Goblin horde though different than when he left us. His aesthetic perfection has gone awry. The form that Sparky made exists no longer. It seems he paid the Goblins to ‘perfect’ his appearance further still, and with every new ‘improvement’ a threatening ugliness grew on every facet of him to match the one inside…
He has revealed his true self to the inhabitants of the open metaverse, god help us, and a name that should have been his from the beginning:
