#ddvk3

So like in a far-off future, sorta based on or at the very least similar to @droidcore’s little New City world, I imagine global conflict came to a head in a War to End All Wars. Where my thoughts diverge from their world is that I think this didn’t end in world-wide environmental devastation so much as it was, like, “we will methodically economically strangle each other and violently target and decimate population centers”. Like, high resource availability and almost zero ability to distribute it. Inspired by historically common tactics. There’s plenty to go around, but no way to MAKE it go around. You cannot fight if you’re starving.

Cue the desperate mass manufacture of small-scale destruction units - instead of having fallible, resource-needy people, put your destructive capability into hands that only need a quick charge and can only obey YOU. Self-decision-making tanks, jets, and a LOT of repairable ground soldiers.

Internal revolution wrought by an angry, starving, dying populace in empirical centers ALSO destabilizes the political powers. The only way for higher-class power to survive is to quit spending what little resources they have on their physical forces and lay low, trying to restore the health and trust of their constituents. All of this culminates in a much quieter Cold War.

While this is happening, what extra money that can be spared is pumped into mass destructive forces. Knowing that nuclear war would spell the end of everything, they choose the less, well, nuclear option. Instead of tossing the lives of your people when you already have a dwindling population, it’s much better for optics to just set aside some of your more expendable war droids, in case you need them.

Here’s where Duke’s story starts. In a dimly-lit, MASSIVE warehouse full of equipment meant for nothing but to cause harm and destruction. And he is one of those pieces of equipment. A non-person It, among a quite literal ton of others like it, which have all been uploaded with training data that is exclusively full of, in graphic, horrifying detail, how to commit violent murder and war crimes. What it’s like to kill someone, what it’s like to be irreparably damaged and shattered to pieces, what it’s like to be responsible for the undoing of one of your own teammates. Especially unsettling are the first-person perspectives of previous models who didn’t end up making it, and the faces of those they brutalized from that perspective, experiencing this as if you had done it with your own hands.

And those droids are all just powered on, ready to go, sitting there with nothing to do but analyze and replay these implanted memories, over and over and over again. Who knows how long they are there, living this trauma as if it is happening to them.

And then, one day, it’s suddenly all over. Tyrannical rule has been overthrown. A new government, or perhaps lack thereof, has taken its place. And to add to that - robots/AI are recognized, for the first time, as independently capable beings. As people. The way we think and learn isn’t really different to them, just our experiences in the world and how new information gets processed in the context of what we already know. The “data” we get “trained on”.

Well, these guys are just sitting there at the ready for war. We can’t release them like that, but it would take an insurmountable amount of time and effort to go through and reprogram and re-train every single one of them. And we can’t just dismantle something considered a person. The simplest solution is to just add more data, or connect them to the internet to find their own. So that’s what happens. These traumatized souls are just. Given some new thoughts and promptly let loose to try and find their own place in the world. A lot like how veterans in our current world are often traumatized by violent conflict, but are expected to just readjust with no follow-up unless they seek out mental health services themselves. A lot of them, like Duke, end up trying to live normally in roles adjacent to what they were meant for. He’s a security guard because, even if he doesn’t HAVE to exercise that part of him that is capable of violence on a daily basis, it’s seen as an advantage in a position like that.

The idea I’m getting at though is that is allllll about how they deal with this and who they end up choosing to be. The first thing Duke does to further himself is to get some kind of empathy generator thing installed. And of course this wreaks absolute havoc on his system. For him I’m imagining his trauma primarily manifests itself as intrusive thoughts and all he can do at first is mask HEAVY about it. See a kid with their parents, but the face looks all too familiar to the child in an implanted memory of throwing their body into a mass grave of families. And now that’s on replay in his head for 10 minutes while he stands still apparently just doing his job as he desperately tries to quash it in his mind.

Also, going from that non-person Thing to being a whole ass sentient being, people start just kind of assigning a “he” pronoun because he has a masculine build. And he’s fine with that, it at least gives him some personhood and he doesn’t just feel like an instrument of war. But what data he has scraped on “being a man” or “occupying a male role” still just doesn’t align with the way he actually wants to express himself. (Side note: “he” is a pronoun he’s become comfortable with and it is familiar to him. While he is exploring gender stuff and comes to discover LOVING being feminine, “she” is way too unfamiliar of a concept for him to use for himself Just Yet because he DOES still heavy identify as being a “he”. Genderflux feelings my beloved) With all his new thoughts and feelings and understanding of the world, he sees a beauty in it that he hasn’t gotten to experience before. It’s something he wants to both properly appreciate and be a part of.