7 Plot Coupons and a Sweet Leather Jacket

Crash and Burn

Metal considers for only a few milliseconds, giving Eggman what he's looking for. That spark of hope he had is snuffed out by the reality sinking in. Metal soaks it up like a sponge. Running through every conceivable outcome in the background processes of his hardware, he calculates that there is no course of action, which leads to a desirable result.

There is no winning. There is no being the favorite. His options are give Eggman what he wants, thus securing Metals deactivation, or break out, and burn the bridge between him and his creator once and for all. In times like these, the growing pains of an emerging sentience are prominent.

Unwilling to accept his own sentience and fate, Metal stalls. Days go by and the robot does nothing. Laying flat on his back, staring blankly at the ceiling. His turbine makes a soft hum. The relative silence of the room leaves him too much time to calculate and consider amongst himself.

Metal doesn't understand friendship or family. At least not in the traditional sense. Friendship is a hard one to pin down. He calculates that it's comparable to an alliance. Metal assures himself that his attachment is only a simulated familial attachment. That by definition, Ivo as his creator is his father.

Its the unwritten objective of all robots with any semblance of self preservation, to make their creators happy. Metals machine learning AI picked this up very early on. It's always been a thin line to walk. Observing the difference between doing as he's told and making himself endearing to his creator. He learned the hard way that the more successfully he imitated Sonic, the less Eggman liked him. Because Eggman hates Sonic, any genuine similarities in behavior, attitude and body language are met with disgust. Yet at the same time whenever Metal doesn't quite meet the mark on this imitation, he's a failure who can't fulfill his sole reason for existing.

Metals feelings- No. Robots don't have feelings. Metals value assessments on Ivo are conflicting. On one hand he's coded to accept that Ivo is superior, on the other hand, his creator is terribly flawed, inefficient. He always blames his machines for his failure, yet brags about coding, designing and building them himself. When things get done it's Ivo's achievement. When things go wrong it's the robots fault. Eggman is an illogical human being. Inefficient in the worst of ways.

Naturally robots are hesitant to blame their creators. A robot with a critical design flaw is not freed. Far from it. Metal's hard drive looms over a voice clip of Dr. Eggman explaining the recycling system to him. Stuck on it like a broken record.

...

An assembly line cuts defective badniks open. Sawblades send sparks onto the air with the sharp shriek of metal grinding on metal. A delicate mechanical hand takes out plastic computer components and wire and sets them aside. The rest is left on a conveyer belt and sent through a fire.  There's a wall of glass between him and the carnage.

He hears his creator approach from behind. He turns to look at the man. Eggman has a smile on his face. Metal doesn't know what that means.

"Curious aren't you." Eggman crosses his arms. The fire glints across his glasses. "Do you know what this is?"

Metals vision shifts side to side as he shakes his head 'no'.

Ivo crouches down to Metals level, putting a hand on the robot's shoulder. "This is a recycling machine. Loud isn't it."

Metal beeps indicating he didn't know the meaning of a word.

"Recycling? It's efficient. Destroying old bots and sorting them into scraps to build new bots."

Metal beeps out a question in what is an early form of badnik. It roughly translates to 'Why destroy them?'

"What good is a robot that can't do it's job?"