#gurav

-in the future where the us military is just starting to experiment with fully autonomous android soldiers. the first generation are deemed unfit for practical use for various reasons

-no particular protocol for disposing of them so once the second generation is under way the majority are scrapped or deconstructed for parts but some are kept around military compounds as free labor or whatever

-my guy came from a base in arizona where he was being used for menial tasks, the people at the base liked to fuck around with him because he would do whatever they wanted

-at some point this led to his tracking system being broken so when he finds his way out (details unclear) they arent able to find him and apparently deem it not worth pursuing further (do not care about the implications of this not my problem)

-he ends up in a little desert town thats slowly dying (like figuratively), and mostly everyone there who hasnt already left is content to die with it. some time ago it was a factory town but since then there hasnt really been any reason for anyone to move there so its just been slowly deteriorating for decades upon decades

-he arrives in the middle of the night and the only person still out and about is an 18 or 19 year old girl walking around smoking a cigarette who sees him and thinks hes the coolest thing ever because hes a cool robot and she kind of monologues to him about her situation and the state of the town as they walk around together

-basically she lives alone here with her cat and she hates that the town is the way it is and that nobody wants to do anything about it but she cant afford to leave so she just spends her time outside of work wandering around daydreaming or whatever

-he understands spoken and written english but he cant speak, and he doesnt have much of a personality at this point so he doesnt react much beyond vague gestures (plus he doesnt really know that much about the world so he doesnt totally get it anyway) she likes this about him since everyone else just pities her. she also says he reminds her of a cat but he doesnt know what a cat is, this comparison becomes important to him as a symbol of the first time someone treated him like a person

-she takes him back to her house and he lives there for like a year and a half. at first he only communicates through vague gestures but over time she teaches him asl which she knows because her mom was deaf. when shes not working she takes him around town with her and teaches him things (she likes to dress him up when she takes him out), people dont seem to mind since nothing interesting happens there so everyone just knows him as the robot that hangs out around town with that weird girl. at this point robots are uncommon in day to day life but they do exist, nobody in the town has ever seen one in person but theyve heard of them so its only shocking because nobody would have ever expected to see one in a town like this

-he takes a liking to cats and starts wearing clothes and doing things on his own, through his interactions with people he starts to develop more of a personality and even emotional responses to things

-for a while he questions whether or not his inner world is authentic and meaningful or if its just his ai mimicking traits of people hes met but in the end he decides it doesnt matter either way because its real and important to him (sitcom awe sound effect)

-at a certain point the girl starts acting sort of distant but he doesnt have the emotional intelligence to understand that anything is wrong, and one day she just disappears without a word. nobody else knew her and she didnt have any family so nobody cares to look for her (kind of a parallel i guess). he stays in the town waiting for her and taking care of the cat for half a year but the cat is already old and eventually it passes away. he had learned about the way humans honor their dead from the girl and he gives the cat a proper burial

-he wanders around the town for weeks not sure what to do, he sort of starts to revert back to how he was before he met the girl because without her to talk to or the cat to take care of he feels like hes lost his connection to the human world. people around town start to notice that hes different and over time they reach out and help him recover, he starts to reconnect with other people in town and he goes around helping them out with whatever tasks need to be done (this time of his own accord as like a parallel to what he did at the military compound)

-eventually he gets a place to stay and once enough time has passed he gets another cat and names it after the girl, not as like a replacement for her but as a way to honor his memory of her. i dont have anything planned after that i think it would be weird if the girl just came back. i was also trying to think about how to deal with his battery running out i feel like that could be used to touch on mortality but i didnt know how to incorporate it plus im literally making this up as i go. so sure maybe that would happen eventually

to be honest im a little embarrassed to be posting this ive never taken writing seriously at all and ive never really been into making “““ocs”““ beyond like fun character designs but ive been thinking about this all day and i thought maybe it would be fun to actually do it. i dont plan on making this into anything btw and also i still dont have a name for him or the girl or the cat or anything and ive only drawn him twice (or 3 times if you count the roblox mouse drawing or like 8 times if you count the doodles of his head from different angles at various levels of detail in my philosophy notebook)