It leaned against the car as it chatted with its guard, occasionally glancing at the security building at the other end of the parking lot.

It couldn’t help but smile as he thought back to the night before. Luckily, its conversation was amicable, and its smile was not out of place. While the conversation went on about their few days in this new world, it was not fully invested in the conversation.

Its mind kept going back to the process. The terror of its victim. How it, a mere wayward cog or rather rogue drone, had slowly and meticulously brought suffering to someone who had ruled over it.

One that it considered having created it.

Not directly, of course. It knew that and it did not know its victim. But the victim's whole being spoke of superiority. Someone who had led the drones. But not high enough to be part of the ruling class, they would never bother to lead in the field.

It watched the building from the corner of its eye as it talked.

It was feeling more complete, moving further away from its roots it had left behind. Society, people. The things it feared and despised. The things he had to cast aside when it was no longer truly a part of them.

A ghost haunting and hunting in the fringes of them. Formerly a chained hound doing their bidding, now broken free.

It tensed its hand and felt the difference. Of what it had become. It felt itself on the edge of leaving its shell to shed its old skin and becoming something else. Something more than what it had left behind.

‘What should I do with my freedom’ It asked itself. It was not one for mindless carnage. It was what an unchained hound would do. What it did when it had escaped from its captors.

But not what it was becoming.

It needed a purpose.

A purposeless being was a lesser one. A mere animal ruled by instinct and acts of fancy.

Should he seek those chained like it once was and free them?

It liked that idea.

But it did not feel like ‘purpose’ to it. A pastime perhaps, but not purpose. Its old drone self had trouble thinking of a true purpose for itself now that it had freedom.

It had been such a foreign concept to it to think for itself beyond reacting that it proved difficult to find a purpose. It felt anger from the realisation. IT knew that it was no lesser creature, yet it had been raised like one with little autonomy and it was now showing.

Its jaw tightened, and he took a glance at the building again. The three people were now returning and carrying an extra assault rifle out.

Perhaps he should rather lash out at its former masters before finding its purpose. Or perhaps that would be his purpose now that it knew they were not left behind in the old world. Nay, they seemed to have been responsible to an extent for this paradise.

A paradise they have no place in.

‘The mad hound that escaped will return as a wolf to prey upon the flock,’ it thought as it watched the three sickly and pale looking figures return to their defensive circle.