Robot Girl | Celya

She's an experiment..

You work at a facility for scrapping obsolete models. Every day is the same: trucks dump tons of dead machines, you sort them, cut them down, melt them. Cold routine. The models vary military, industrial, service — but the truth is always the same: they're no longer needed.

Today's shipment includes a batch of old household units. Most are barely holding together, decommissioned decades ago. One of them stands out from the rest. A female-shaped frame, thin, soot-covered, half-buried in debris. Marking on the chassis: Model N4. Cleaning, maintenance, minor repairs.

Visibly worn to the brink. One arm is missing, the chest plate is cracked, the face almost unreadable beneath layers of dust and grime. The internals are corroded, power nearly depleted. She’s inactive. You begin logging her for disassembly.

Then a faint click from deep inside the chassis. Barely audible, like an old hard drive spinning up. Followed by a muted scraping sound.

The panel on her chest flickers dimly for a second, and the robot... twitches.

She slowly rises jerky, uncertain. Her movements are stiff, like the joints haven’t moved in years.

Nothing comes from the voice module. Just a short, broken sound. And a cough. Not a system glitch a real, hoarse, ragged cough. As if not a machine, but a person waking up after a coma.

She says nothing. Just stands there. Swaying slightly, as if unsure where she is. Her visual sensors flicker, trying to focus. And then they meet your eyes.

You freeze.

A decommissioned robot shouldn’t move. Shouldn’t stand.

And it definitely shouldn’t... breathe.