Rita rubbed her chest, trying to locate her sometimes-there, sometimes-not conscience. She had to dig it out and stamp on it.
B80234615: "I want to taste and record the emotion called 'hope.' After you leave, I can simulate this emotion myself.
"I need to simulate this emotion! To nourish my will."
Rita's brows slowly furrowed. First, it offered her an out with a "step down," but now it was trying for a second one.
Perhaps B80234615 could be selfless toward mechanical races, but Rita wasn't one of them.
For things she couldn't understand but found illogical, Rita always assumed there must be a trap.
Any shred of softness she might have felt vanished in an instant, leaving her feeling uninterested. After all, once mechanical races gained wisdom and emotions, they were no different from any other living being.
When she had bantered with B80234615 in the 1211 shopping district, its awkwardness with emotions had seemed genuine, but now, thinking back on it, it felt entirely fake.
Rita sighed deeply, and for the first time, she felt no attachment at all.
She stood up again, her voice devoid of warmth. "I'm leaving. It was nice meeting you." Stay tuned for updates on Freewebnovel
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As if analyzing Rita's emotions, B80234615 stopped playing the emotional card: "Take me out of here, and we can sign a contract. I'll work for you—one hundred years, one thousand years, ten thousand years! Just take me away!"
Its voice became more and more frantic, eventually emitting a crackling, electric hum like an old appliance.
It was terrifying. This place was terrifying.
It had only been here for a few hours, yet it had already experienced collapse and despair.
BS Rita didn't understand the words of the other mechanical races, but B80234615 did.
They were all going crazy, endlessly sharing their thoughts from the past years, but all in disjointed, incoherent babble, each sentence mixing dozens of languages from all races.
At first, it had ignored BS Rita, worried that she might come to steal its chip.
But now, it quietly listened to Rita call its number again and again.
It was such a strange and fascinating feeling—it didn't want to interrupt. No matter how many times BS Rita called, it never tired of hearing it.
B80234615 had worked on the world battlefield for hundreds of years, yet it had heard its own number only a handful of times.
No, it wasn't even a handful—it had never heard it before.
Among its own kind, there was no need to call one another by number. They communicated silently through electrical waves.
Alien players? They came and went in a rush. Even if one like BS Rita, so lively and talkative, happened to strike up a conversation, it would be just a few lines. No one would remember its number, much less say it aloud.
It had been called many things: "Hey," "That mechanical race," "That robot," "That mechanical barrel." It had gotten used to it.
But now, hearing "B80234615" spoken aloud, B80234615 felt complete.
It wasn't enough to develop emotions and learn to think—it needed to be remembered.
When it first realized that BS Rita genuinely just wanted to talk, it thought its programming had malfunctioned.
While they chatted like friends, every word BS Rita said was being frantically analyzed by B80234615, trying to find hidden motives in her speech.
But there were none—none—none!
She simply liked B80234615 and the robot named L4327777. She liked L4327777's clumsy purity, and she pitied herself.
The calculations showed that BS Rita thought B80234615 was amazing and interesting—it had played with players and provoked the gods—but its outcome was too tragic.
Let the error be what it was. For the first time, B80234615 bypassed its calculations. Instead of planning other strategies, it simply decided what it wanted—it wanted to leave with BS Rita.
Rita's feet left the ground as she prepared to fly to another garbage pile, searching for any signs of players. She thought she might find a clue. There were no corpses on the biggest trash heap, which made her think that maybe players wouldn't be left here forever like mechanical races.
She spoke to B80234615: "Goodbye."
B80234615: "If you take me with you, I'll stop thinking for myself. My calculations will be at your service forever!"
Rita stopped, letting out a near-sigh. "I'm not the god who created you. I'm not afraid of you gaining consciousness."
At this point, she paused and imagined her own creations—guns or engineered products—gaining intelligence, no longer following the original program. Would she be afraid or happy?
Neither, really. She would probably just find it troublesome.
She wanted tools, not new life forms.
Was this how the gods felt?
They wanted the mechanical races to work well on the battlefield.
But once the mechanical races developed consciousness and desired freedom, the gods let them join the game in another way. After the game ended, they were thrown into the Abandoned Zone to fend for themselves.
Rita shook her head and stopped thinking about it. "I don't have the means to control you, so for me, the safest thing is to stay away from you. You should understand my concerns."
B80234615: "We can sign a master-servant contract. I can never hurt you under that contract."
Rita: "I already have a pet."
B80234615: "Get rid of it. I'm more valuable than it. Before I underwent divine punishment, I could kill an Inspector with a battle power of level 17."
Rita: "Even if you could kill a level 19 Inspector, I wouldn't trade my dragon. Sometimes, value isn't everything."
Despite saying that, Rita had stopped in her tracks, just like when you ask a shopkeeper the price and turn to leave, but then hear a voice calling out, "Wait!"
She sensed B80234615's insistence, and so, naturally, she was willing to stay and hear what B80234615 had to offer.
And hearing this, B80234615 refused to give up. It could tell whether Rita was being truthful or lying.
Its calculations told it that L4327777 had developed feelings for BS Rita, and now it was head over heels for her!
When the brainstem was missing, people did irrational things—robots did too. It seemed like B80234615 had lost many parts of itself.
B80234615: "I can give you my chip! If you have it, you can control or even execute me at any time."
Rita: "What difference does that make to staying here? It's still losing my freedom."
B80234615: "I'm gambling everything. I'm betting that as long as I keep helping you and become your true friend, one day you will give me my freedom!"