SHTDN Week

Day 7 - Free Choice

The last time Goyou was conscious, Agape had talked him into going into standby mode in the picture of purple drapes with him. Since he had just finished another round of the PC, he didn't see the harm in resting for a while.

When he woke up though, he was in a place somewhere entirely different. It was as bright as a factory, but it looked more like a hospital or a neonatal care unit. He sat up and looked around; he was flanked by large curtains beside him, but the area in front of him looked like it was part of a bigger area.

More strangely, he was now in a bed with some kind of wire attached to his wrist. Having never been anywhere other than his PC, he didn't know where he was now, if he even caused this somehow? Was this caused by a glitch, like with Agape's attempt to merge their code.

The reminder of the virus brought him back to his senses. If he was here, then Agape was probably somewhere around. At least Agape had experience with hopping from PC to PC, so he could probably get them both back to their own PC.

Goyou stood up from the bed and removed the wire from his body. To his shock, there was a hole on the top of his hand, as if the wire was meant to fit inside there. Now that he thought of it, his skin felt like the metallic machines at the factory.Combined with the fact that his clothes were changed, something wasn't right here.

All of a sudden, a beeping noise rang out throughout this room and the next few, and the door to the room opened. A bunch of humans - or at least, Goyou guessed they were humans - came through the door with alarmed eyes and something light blue stretching over where their nose and mouths should be.

The sight unnerved the antivirus, and he backed up and tried to load his weapon in case he was attacked. But no weapon came to his hand, and he was surrounded by these maybe-humans. When his arm was suddenly grabbed by one of them, he tried shaking them off as he backed up.

There were a lot of voices, but in his panic, he couldn't understand them. Climbing over the bed and to the other side, he wondered if he should run or try to fight back. But before he made a decision, he finally heard a voice he recognized.

"Settle down, Goyou! They're not trying to hurt you!"

He didn't know where it was coming from, but that was definitely Agape's voice. He tried looking past the crowd of apparently harmless maybe-humans, but he couldn't see the angel. "Agape? Where are?" he called out.

"In the room! Don't freak out, just let them fix you up!" came the reply.

Goyou was confused, he didn't feel like he needed fixing. But when the maybe-humans came close to him and grabbed his arm again, he didn't try struggling. They guided him back to the bed and laid him down, putting the wire back into the hole in his hand. He looked at it again with a small frown, unsure of why they insisted on it.

Looking back to them, they seemed to be talking among themselves. Finally, a couple of them went to the curtain to the left of his bed and pulled it away. On the other side, Agape was lying peacefully on his own bed, wearing the same clothes and having a wire in the back of his own hand.

"Agape, do you know what's going on?" Goyou questioned, looking around suspiciously at the maybe-humans, who had backed up from the two.

"Well, only the gist of it. We got transferred out of the PC, and now we're in the human world," the virus replied.

Goyou's eyes widened as he looked around. "Wait, we're not in the PC anymore? What is this place, then? And the ones leaving the room, those are humans?" he kept asking.

"Nahahaha! Of course they're humans! Did you think they were something else?!" Agape laughed. Goyou chose to not answer that. After a few moments, Agape continued, "This place is a science lab. It's similar to a hospital, but these humans don't fix other humans. Their job is to make new things, mostly to help humans in their daily life."

"...Why is there a hole in our hands? Does it have to do with why we're here?" Goyou finally seemed to calm down at Agape's answers, so the humans seemed to decide that leaving them on their own was okay.

"Yeah, it does. We got transferred out of the PC and put into these robot bodies, though we look pretty human. Based on that, the hole is probably a charging port. We're hooked up to electricity so they can make sure they can work on our bodies and charge us," he explained.

"Robot bodies... We're really in the human world now? This is strange..." A sudden thought hit Goyou as he spoke. "I guess the PC owner never came back for us."

"Guess not, but at least a bunch of scientists did. It'll be a lot easier to teach you things like this, now that we're in the humans' world." Agape sighed and closed his eyes. "I'm going back into standby mode. Don't attack the humans while I'm out."

"Wait, how did you learn all of this? ...Agape?"

He received no answer. With no one to converse with, Goyou looked back up at the ceiling. Now that he no longer had a PC to protect, he didn't know what to do next. Getting rid of viruses - now excluding Agape - was his 'job' as the PC's Virus Buster, so what would come next after his job ended?

He looked back at Agape, who was sleeping peacefully in his bed. This place was a science lab that gave him and Agape real bodies, but for what purpose? Was it to study them, or to teach them? Or did the humans want to show them how to live like the rest of humanity.

Goyou shook his head, trying to clear the wild ideas from his mind. After staring up at the ceiling for a couple seconds, he decided to just close his eyes. If he stayed on standby mode until he was fully recharged, then maybe he would get more information when he next woke up.