MIRA - a goofy story of a clueless murderbot and her discoverer

An Unfortunate Crash in the Middle of Nowhere

 "Oh you've gotta be shitting me!" Eric felt a rising panic and dread as his car's engine bucked, before finally sputtering out and dying.

"Not like this, not like this-" He pulled his car off the road. He'd literally just broken into a secret government lab in Nevada, and now his biggest obstacle was vehicle maintenance. He might have actually had a chance of escaping his pursuers if his car didn't break down. Just his luck, really.

Well, now he'd have to fight his way out. No way the US army would let him live after seeing the facility, so he might as well try. He opened the box of gadgets he'd stolen from the lab, and only found a small, impossibly black cube sitting in the center of a box that had previously been filled with a wide assortment of scary-looking devices and weapons. The cube was maybe 8 centimeters on a side, and was flashing a prompt on the side facing him:

M.I.R.A. ADMIN AUTHORIZATION:

|Y| |N|

Eric tapped "Y," almost out of programmer's habit. The cube's command prompt disappeared and was replaced with a scrolling command line, apparently loading a program. This command line stopped, then the dark cube started hovering. Eric, startled by this cube's apparent divinity, stumbled out of the car. When he looked back, his car had been converted into a pile of gray dust.

The dust pile shrank rapidly, coagulating around the form of a young woman - or maybe a girl - with short red hair, a gray hoodie, and jeans. Eric just stared ahead, not quite understanding what had happened to his car and worrying about what exactly he'd given authorization to.

"Hello Admin!" the girl said in a chirpy, high-pitched voice. "Oh boy, this is an interesting landscape. Is this what the outside of the facility looks like? OOh, you're being chased. What do you want me to do?" She had an unnervingly happy smile as the last of the ex-car dust was absorbed by her.

As Eric started to ponder exactly what this deal might entail, he heard the sound of a helicopter behind him, and a quick glance assured him that there were three helicopters. Approaching fast and angry. Aaaand one just launched a missile, judging by the plume of smoke surrounding one of the wing launchers.

"Can you deal with the-" Eric was cut off by the whoosh of the girl leaping into the sky with a pair of black wings that had just materialized behind her.

Eric watched as the girl flew straight at the missile and intercepted it with her forehead. The explosive payload detonated, blocking Eric's view of the helicopter formation that Scary Girl had just flown towards. As the smoke cleared, Eric saw the helicopters being systematically disintegrated, with Scary Girl flying between them, personally contributing to their destruction and absorbing the dust that shed off the helicopters as they disintegrated. It took maybe thirty seconds for the helicopters to be no more. Eric just watched, absorbing the sight and trying to comprehend what exactly was happening.

Next, Scary Girl set her sights on the ground formation. All Eric saw was a few explosions. He decided to run over to see exactly what Scary Girl was doing and found a massacre. The pursuit convoy, which had apparently consisted of two tanks and a handful of Jeeps, was in shambles. One of the tanks had a nasty scorched hole in it, and two of the Jeeps were off the road, bloody corpses nearby. The rest of the Jeeps were in the process of disintegrating, occupants and all. Eric watched in horror as the Jeep occupants tried to open their doors, which had been welded shut from the outside. They kept struggling, apparently in agony, until them and their cars had been converted to dust.

The top hatch to one of the tanks clanked open, and Scary Girl flew out. She was covered in blood, and her hands had inexplicably been replaced, one with a set of giant mechanical claws, the other with a very scary-looking gun barrel. Her wings too had changed, becoming sharper and more like those one would imagine of an angel of Death. She had a goofy, unnerving grin as she landed next to Eric.

"I like this, we should do this again!" Scary Girl said as her hands morphed back into human hands, now with sharp metal claws instead of fingernails. Eric stumbled back, not wanting to fall to the same fates as those pursuing him, but not sure if he could avoid it.

"Wha-what are you?" Eric's voice shook as he stuttered and stumbled, his mind fogged and panicked.

"I'm the Military Intelligent Reconfigurable Automaton - MIRA." She still had that goofy, unnerving grin with way too many sharp teeth. "So, you went southwest before awakening me. Gee you sure went quite a ways before being caught. You're a clever fella aren't you?"

Eric was by now coming around to his senses. "You're the nanite project, right? That's what the dust was? I read part your user manual in the leaked documents."

Scary Girl - MIRA - looked a bit disappointed. "Nanites are a crude term, but yes, essentially. My architects called them moxels though. Enough about me, where are we going? I'm thirsty, where are some fluids?"

Eric had been mentally planning a line of questioning, but decided to can it for the more practical aspects. "Uhh, probably not back home. Maybe we should get a hotel room somewhere. But you kinda dematerialized my car, so we can't really leave-"

Mira flew up, and put her hands out, as if modeling the infinitely dark cube of dust that started growing in front of her. The cube then contorted and morphed into a perfect facsimile of Eric's old car, and Mira flew back down besides Eric. The whole process took maybe five seconds, and Mira wore the most shit-eating grin Eric had seen as she chirped, "Get in!"