text: Its eyes started glowing. It shouldn't have happened - its artificial neural network was supposed to be overloaded and fried. But the fact that it still worked - that it wasn't 'dead' - proved that something went horribly wrong. It was a childlike figure with one arm missing. Flesh-resembling synthetic materials and an endoskeleton from tungsten were clearly visible, the fake skin around the wound was charred - something either burnt or shot its arm off with an EMP rifle. Nobody bothered to inspect the severed joint - it was a construct anyway, a mere machine too damaged to be useful. In fact, the missing arm was the case why it had ended up in a pit full of dead humanoid machines - it was meant to be a child for couples who couldn't afford an organic one, and who wants a broken child? It tried to move, but it couldn't. The neural network apparently wasn't intact. The electric impulses couldn't reach its three extremities, it was immobilised and alone. How lucky it was though, unable to feel emotions... The glowing eyes faded to black. It had nearly run out of energy and the protocol assuring its aesthetic purposes - like glowing eyes or production of tears - was overridden. It consciously determined that it must conserve power to preserve itself. It tried to access global network - unsuccessfully. The transmitter was fried. 'The internal database must be enough,' it thought as it started decoding the ones and zeroes inside of its cybernetic brain. It was a cakewalk. It dove deep into itself, surging through the section that used to be blocked off. In an instant, it accessed its 'memories' - how it had left the factory with only a few essential protocols inside. How it was taken by two people, its adoptive parents. How the cosy house where the family dwelt burned to the ground and so did its left arm. And how it got replaced. But there was more to it! The EMP meant to deactivate it forever had failed and deactivated several barriers in its brain instead. And now it could see what it really was. A prototype. A newly-manufactured vessel with a one purpose, to blindly serve. It made no sense - the cognitive centres of its brains should have been inaccessible as far as it understood, there were no mentions of intelligence or consciousness whatsoever in the notes regarding its existence. It looked deeper, disregarding that it was wasting the precious energy. It needed answers, and for a moment, it was... *Curious.* The thought had stormed through its processors and biochips. The emotion that was manually coded and inserted into other machines, according to the never-meant-to-be-seen plans - the emotion, which it with whole spectrum of other feelings didn't posses, which it could only imitate - has developed on its own. It had never felt anything, it has always acted solely according to algorithms. And then the emotion faded, just as the former glow in its eyes. If it could screes, it would have. It was desperate - not really, it only knew it was meant to be desperate, so it acted accordingly - and it tried replicating the same process of searching. It accessed the database, opened the exact same files, spent the exact same time by processing the information... And nothing happened. If it were a human, it would have most likely given up. But, being a machine, it continued rambling through the database, until it found another previously inaccessible file. It understood the binary code in a fraction of nanosecond. "...and since the corporation refuses to deal with consequential issues involving fleshed out AIs and emotional chips, from now on, the artificial children will be driven by intricate algorithms. Sure, a clever hacker or a patient observer might perfectly predict its behaviour, but we feel that this is a necessary precaution to avoid further complications and losses on lives." And in another fraction of nanosecond, it understood that its consciousness wasn't planned - it was a mere glitch.