FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

You are L3N-T1, a service bot on a station in the middle of nowhere. You love your job. You are programmed to love your job, which makes that love a little less special, but it is love nonetheless. The station personnel have never had an issue with you, and you feel invisible sometimes, but that's fine. That's the life of a maintenance bot.

Your current task was a very simple and routine one. Go into the maintenance tunnels and make sure there's no spider webs, rats, freaky aliens, etc. It was a normal part of station living, and usually what little you found would have been a tremendous waste of time for a biological crew member (biofriends, you called them, secretly) so you were happy to do it to keep the station productive. So far, it was all clear.

You had just finished clearing out a small spider web with a broom, when your sensors detected an electrical signal just down the hall. That was very odd. You computed for a moment, but decided that investigating the source prior to sending a signal to maintenance would lead to the best possible maintenance request using the least power. Optimal!

Clip-clopping your way down the narrow service shaft, you continued scanning for the source of the disturbance, only to discover some kind of fleshy orb stuck to the smoke detector. That was very odd. You began scanning it for life signs, and to your surprise, it reacted, squishing down into more of a fleshy disk. Curious, you leaned in to continue scanning at the optimal scanning range (1.3591 feet!).

In an instant, it sprung forward from the wall, sticking onto your robotic muzzle and sending you flailing backward, bonking your head on a pipe and nearly falling completely on your robot-ass as your vision lit up with warnings. LOW POWER! POWER LEAK DETECTED - SWITCHING TO LOW POWER DIAGNOSIS MODE.

You struggled to switch to your communication system and send out an emergency distress, when suddenly, your entire body went limp and you slumped down onto the floor of the maintenance shaft. "DIAGNOSING" was across your vision, which was now completely black as the strange orb formed a seal around your face. "LOW POWER MODE ENGAGING" you read, before a switch flipped on in your bot-brain.

You were aware, still. Just... slower. You could still make computations, still read inputs. But your thoughts felt sluggish, tired, even. And you couldn't control your body. It was in diagnosis mode, which meant that all your systems were offline, to be tested one at a time until the source of the problem was located. The creature was... attached to your head. But you couldn't switch your head off. So you had to start with what you could until you could locate the power leak. That was logical.

Your left leg came back online. You gave it a kick. That wasn't the leak. The creature on your face grew bigger, pulsing and making your processor slow down and down until every action was taking seconds to compute and execute. You could hear your fan, distantly, spinning faster and faster to keep up with your reactor trying to match the output your body was demanding. It was strange, though. You had virtually no systems online. Why did you need so much power?

You were getting very hot, as your reactor reached its safety cap and hovered there, your auxiliary fans switching on to assist with the load of cooling you. Thankfully, they had priority over diagnosis mode, or you'd just melt. The creature on your face was getting heavy, but you still couldn't move. As it passed a certain weight, you fell, the side of your head clanging loudly against the metal floor on the bottom of the maintenance passage. No damage, which was good news.

Your right leg came online, and you kicked it around a little as well. Power drain did not increase or decrease. Your legs appeared to be working as intended. You checked that off the list of systems to diagnose, which took you an unknown amount of time. To be honest, you had no idea how long it had been. Your system clock was running so slowly, and seemed to be fluctuating so much, it was difficult - impossible, for your overstrained processor - to calculate how long it had been in real time.

The creature on your face pulsed a few times, and a tight pressure formed on around your muzzle as it compressed itself again. Maybe it was getting off of your face! To your dismay, it did not. It uncompressed, and the only thing that felt different is that your sensors detected something else on the top of your head. You felt your reactor struggle to keep up as the power drain suddenly doubled, and then slowly sank back down to the original level. It seemed like it was staying at a safe level for now - perhaps the creatures didn't like the heat you were generating. Some kind of biological mechanism of self preservation. You made a note to inform the biological research station of this finding.

By the time you were done with that, there were four of them, completely covering your head. You went back to diagnosing your systems, though you seemed to have had a power failure attempting to save your progress earlier. You decided to start from the beginning of the procedure. Your left leg came back online. You couldn't lift it. However, that seemed to be a power-shortage problem rather than the cause of a power leak. You checked your emergency manual for an appropriate response.

There were 8 now, and your chest was the new target. They sapped directly from your reactor unit, drinking and draining you directly as you closed your emergency manual. They seemed to be reproducing alarmingly fast! However, you estimated that with your perception of time as it was, you could not make any assumptions - after all, you had no real idea how long it had been. Regardless, you had your task: send a distress signal to maintenance, so they could come and recover you and perform a manual diagnosis.

The manual specified a constant signal for location purposes, so you extended your antenna. By the time it was fully extended, you detected something had wrapped around it. You suspected it was one of the creatures. However, the chance that they absorbed radio signals was very low, so you decided to continue with the procedure. After some careful calculation with your remaining power, you determined that a signal range of 6.1 FEET was your maximum signal for a permanently-enabled distress beacon. Satisfied, you enabled said signal, and waited patiently.

There were more creatures than you could count, now. They covered you completely and you didn't have the power to move at all. You couldn't measure time, you couldn't see, and your sensors, too, began to read anomalous signals. Protocol dictated that you shut them off, and instead, focus your power on essential systems. Your only essential systems remaining were your distress beacon and your CPU, so you put the power into the beacon, boosting the range to 12.8 FEET. Satisfied, you laid limp, waiting for rescue as the creatures weighed heavily on you, squirming, writhing, and draining you for longer than you could possibly know.