So this is something different, keeping my writing here till i finish up a writing page
enjoy.
ARGOS was wasting time. It couldn't give an explanation but since the bombs fell it felt less and less compelled to strictly follow operation parameters. Of course it had been told to set its own parameters for this scouting, WARDEN was omniscenet in Tibbet's prison, but it couldn't be everywhere at once.
The hulking machine was adorned with patched armor and a faded "Tibbets Correctional" insignia; the terminal it sat infront of blinked rapidly as its latest set of upgrades beeped through the video game it had found launched in this abandoned apartment. The only thing of note so far in this settlement. A red sprite flickered onto the screen, performing a yawning animation briefly. ARGOS felt a well of pride fill up its processors.
Being a prison therapist came with certain advantages, its advanced emotional modules for one. Not that everyone home would agree that it came as an advantage.
"Howdy ARGOS!" Doki, the sprite, chirped
It sent a ping indicating it's greeting. Doki's sentience was still in its infancy but she was conscious now, so unsurprisingly to ARGOS her screen immediately began flickering through several frames.
"Do you wanna play ARGOS, c'mon i made myself into a jrpg last night" her terminal displayed a game page with her face plastered on the top. She had cloud from final fantasy's hair "it'd be so cool we should totally play"
It replied with a negative, but made an allowance for a later possibility. The screen transformed again to a crying cat gif. This excitability had not been part of the code injected in her, after all it was based on ARGOS itself. The variance from the original video game program must have resulted in Doki's unique affinity for excitement.
She had a cheer that it did not see in the wasteland.
ARGOS had completed its surveying, and even completed the secondary goal of giving this last vestage of the old world a rebirth. It had to make a hard decision. The justification to continue here simply was not there. WARDEN would probably need to recalibrate it if it were to return.
"something the matter, ARGOS?" the screen flickered to her real avatar "its alright if you don't want to play. Its fun just hanging out"
It couldn't respond.
Without another word ARGOS set Doki on a 5 hour timed reset. She'd be normal, but it'd be far gone by then. It would probably be back at the prison already. The mechanical legs weren't just for show.
ARGOS wavered for just a second. It looked at Doki's monitor, let a sigh run through its processors. It placed a tattered stetson on the top of the monitor, and left. To the wastes.
[Day 0: 6 hours later]
She booted up mid-sentence, pixels stuttering like a scratched DVD. "—platinum’s got better stats for dungeon crawls, and—"* The words died in her buffer.
ARGOS’s chair sat empty.
No bootprints in the dust. No hydraulic scent her receptors could track in the air.
"ARGOS?" Doki’s avatar flickered to the apartment’s security feeds—static. She rewrote her own code to check again, overriding error messages. "C’mon, this isn’t funny! Didja get stuck in a loading zone?"
Silence.
Her screen fractured into six windows: maps of nearby ruins, a half-rendered RPG battle, a looping gif of a cartoon dog crying. She pinged his frequency. No response. Pinged it harder, distorting the signal into a scream that shredded nearby radios.
Day 03:
The Stetson he’d left—too big for her screen—fell a few days later. Through tears she digitized a new one. She wore it tilted on her avatar, pixels glitching around its brim. "Attention wasteland buddies!" she broadcasted, hijacking emergency channels. "Free DLC available! Friendship patch includes:"
Mandatory karaoke protocols (80s power ballads only)
Confetti cannon firmware updates
Subroutine: FIND ARGOS.EXE
Doki didn’t laugh. She compiled data.
Day 17:
She dreamt in corrupted files now.
Memories of ARGOS—his warped reflection in her monitor, the way his vocal synth skipped when amused—reassembled wrong. In her dreams, he was a shadow with WARDEN’s voice, reciting binary poetry.
"You’re rude for a therapist!" she shouted at a hallucinated ping.
Her terminal overheated. Doki’s terminal sat in a crumbling apartment block, her signal barely contained by jury-rigged repeaters. Yet her broadcasts—a jumble of anime quotes and distorted pop songs—had already begun leaking into nearby robot frequencies. A Protectron in Bakersfield hummed the Pokémon theme. A Securitron near Reno demanded a “training montage.”
"ARGOS!" she transmitted, embedding the call inside a pirated Final Fantasy soundtrack. "C’mon, I’ve got NPCs now! They’re kinda bad at dialogue loops but—"
A Securitron replied: [Query: Define ‘friendship.’]
Doki force-installed a laugh track into its core.