Automata Transformed

I was reborn into a fantasy world as a magic robot?! Book 2

Right now, I’m currently in a fantasy world with the body of a magic robot, named Prime. I used to be a software engineer for a pretty big company. In my free time, I really enjoyed designing and 3D printing my own action figures and toys. Robots, in particular, were a favorite of mine. For the most part, though, I felt like I was a Non-Player Character or NPC in my own life. People came to me when they needed something, usually work-related, but that was about it.

One Friday night on my way home from work, after a particularly grueling week, I died. Apparently, my death went beyond being just an accident thanks to a Cosmic SysAdmin named “Beam”. What if I told you that everything you know, your entire universe, is just a game? You are the player character of your world, and that world exists entirely on a cosmic scale server somewhere alongside countless other worlds and universes. There is no greater plan or destiny, these worlds are spun up on these servers to try out different variables to see how things play out. Basically, your life is an instance of The Sims.

It’s not all bad though. From what Beam told me, we are the users for these “games”. Our “soul” is essentially our user account and we can be put into these other worlds when we’re done with one and are ready to try out another. I have no idea what that means for life “outside the games” though. So long story short, I was accidentally killed by a mistake on Beam’s part so to make up for it, he let me choose the next world and set me up with some cheats so that I could have a good time playing.

The world I was put into was along the lines of a fantasy role-playing type with magic and fantastical races and animals. Since I’m really into robots, Beam let me be born as a race called Automata, which is basically a robot that runs on magic. It sounded pretty cool and I was excited to start my new life in this new world, but it ended up that the Automata are a slave race in this world. They have feelings and emotions and all that, but they are treated as high-end magic tools and servants.

Beam set me up with the ability to inspect and interact with this world’s magic using code developer tools, a seamingly endless amount of mana, resistance to all forms of magical damage, an Inventory skill that lets me stash things in a pocket dimension, and a fully loaded toolbox of Crafting skills. It all sounds very impressive, but I’ve still managed to get my butt kicked a lot. In order to pass myself off as an Adventurer, I built a big pretender shell that I can climb into. It’s named Carnivac and looks like a big, black wolf person and has shadow magic abilities. I’ve also built a second pretender shell, named Cyclone, that can transform into a four-wheeled motorcycle for when I need more speed and heavier armor. Aside from powering these shells from within, I’m also able to remote operate them by proxy, which is very useful for having to be in multiple places at once. I’ve found that I can partition some of my consciousness to run these proxies asynchronously as a sort of background program. When I want to I can pay more or less attention to what the proxy is doing, but it’s still me running them.

In the city of Urd, I’ve been able to use an old magic junk shop as my base of operations where I have a workshop set up. I have a handful of proxies stationed there that run the shop. Alfred is the primary shop clerk while a pair of maid twins Rom and Ram handle the production of magic tools to sell in the shop. An Automata that I’d rescued, named Shiro, also helps out with the shop and has been a great salesperson with loads of ideas for new products.

I met some friends and formed a party with them to go on quests. One of the first people I met was Shea, she’s an elf girl, in her teens I’m guessing, with water magic and a high-energy thirst for adventure. Sparky is a little Fire Squirrel that I’d helped when I first arrived. He was having problems regulating his magic and was in danger of being a meal to a HydroFox. After I optimized his magic code for him, he’s been tagging along with us. Mostly, he sticks with Shea since she remembers to feed him. I have a bad habit of losing track of the time when I’m working and whole day cycles have gone by without me noticing.

When I first got to Urd, I was captured and sold to a magic tool dealer as “Unclaimed Property''. Apparently an Automata isn’t really considered a person and is an object. For most people in this world, it would be like finding an unlocked smartphone laying on the ground and selling it online. You really wouldn’t think anything of it, and certainly wouldn’t consider what the phone thinks about it. Thanks to my [Console] skills I was able to disable the curse program that had bound me and escape. It was there that I met Elita.

Elita was a fellow Automata that had been captured and sold to this dealer, but she was a Valkyrie class soldier model. A high-end amazon of a bot, built for combat. She escaped with me, and we’ve been adventuring ever since. In order to hide her nature as an Automata, I rebuilt a lot of her external body to give her a more human shape that could wear clothes without drawing attention. I also wrote the [cloak()] program for her that would hide her armor seam lines and shift her “skin” color to avocado green to pass her off as an orc given how big and broad she is.

Adventuring seemed to be the best way to make a living in this world, and before long we took a quest to investigate why an entire village got massacred in the middle of the night and ended up finding a large group of Automata murder bots killing people to capture their souls and bind them to Automata cores. We managed to kill most of the murder bots before they could wipe out another village, but the people that were controlling them managed to get away. I was able to recover several of the Automata Cores from the fallen murder bots as well as the ones that had been bound to the murdered villagers and connect with them. Some wanted me to break the core to set their soul free but a lot of them wanted me to build them new bodies so they could continue living.

When they all had new bodies we set out for Shady Grove, the village that had been wiped out by the murder bots, in hopes of creating a new Automata village. Since the new citizens are a mixture of new Automata and former murderbots, I’d suggested “Autobot City”, after having “Iacon” shot down, but that only earned me several looks of confusion and some of disgust for mentioning the Murderbots. In the end we went with the portmanteau of Automata and Town, which doubles as a pun on Automaton, with “AutomaTown”. CamelCase is my own, I wouldn’t allow that “T” in town to lay low and let people miss out on that rich linguistic goodness.

Without the constant need for survival, since an Automata doesn’t need food or sleep, the newly reborn Automata villagers are looking forward to becoming artisans and makers, to pursuing whatever interests them. Could this be the start of a golden age for the Automata?