Part 430c - Ionis (First draft, discarded)

Hey guys! Another first draft post that I discarded! It's unfinished and not particularly interesting, and it's spoilery obviously if you haven't read Part 430c yet, but if you have, maybe you'll enjoy seeing what could have been! I rewrote and switched the POV because this part felt really bland otherwise, and a bit too wordy/explanatory.

Anyway, enjoy!

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The imposing robot towers a full head above me. His huge frame looks like  he could crush me into pulp without a second thought. A glance at the  alcoves to the sides makes me realize that whatever a 'Sentinel' is,  this one isn't even particularly large. Ionis's lone red eye sweeps  rapidly back and forth between me and the girls, and I feel just a  little unnerved by what it might do. The tangible fear radiating from  every pore in Samantha's body isn't doing me any favors on that front.  Even Cassiel's very bubbly love of robots is dramatically muted.

"What is this thing?" Cassiel speaks up, her voice barely a whisper,  then pulls a little closer to me. "I've never seen a robot like this..."

Samantha is tense. Her hands are balled into fists, as if she's ready  to take this thing down in an instant, yet at the same time, there's a  sense of defeat in her posture, as if she thinks she hasn't a chance of  beating it. "Somehow, they were defeated at the end of the Energy Wars.  Sentinels are the ultimate Volgrim weapon. I never had the chance to  fight them, but plenty of humans who lived through the Energy Wars told  of their death and destruction. J-just a single sentinel... it could  probably kill the three of us in an instant."

The succubus pauses and looks over at Victoria. "Funny, last I heard,  Sentinels were machines of carnage. How the hell have you managed to  stay alive with one in your midst?"

Victoria eyes the three of us coolly. "I don't know. We had lived  here for a month before we even realized it was here. Naturally, the  instant we spotted Ionis, we assumed we were already dead. However, it  never made a move to harm us. In fact, Ionis never moves at all. He  simply stays here, in his alcove. I'm not sure why."

Noah walks over and stands right next to Ionis. "That's not true, Lady Victoria. He did move one time."

For a moment, I catch what might be a glimpse of fear, horror, and  awe in her eyes, but it passes as quickly as before. "You're right. The  Volgrim located this base, once, many millions of years ago. We warned  them not to come, but they sent a scouting party anyway. Ionis vanished  from his alcove in an instant. Nobody even saw him move. One moment, he  was there. The next, the scouting ship had been completely destroyed. In  less than a minute, he returned to his alcove, covered in blood. Later,  we went to the crashed ship and discovered it had over a hundred  Volgrim inside, and all of them had been torn apart in the most gruesome  ways possible. We salvaged whatever we could inside the ship, and  disposed of the bodies."

"The Volgrim haven't bothered us since that day." Noah finishes for  her, a smug smile on his face. "Ionis protects us. Nobody knows why, and  we don't need to. He is our silent guardian."

Samantha glares at Victoria. "I don't buy it."

"Sammy!" Cassiel reaches around behind me and pokes Samantha in the  arm. "Don't be rude. Maybe he's a nice robot? He does look pretty scary  though, I'll say that much."

A question lingers in my mind. "How do you know his name? And have you ever spoken to him before?"

"I can answer that." Noah reaches down and taps his wrist-computer  screen. "We had millions of years to dig through the archives of this  facility. Apparently, it once housed over a hundred Sentinels, and there  were plans to create more of them. A lot of data was destroyed at some  point, but from what I gathered, the Sentinel creation project was  cancelled. Anyway, there were archives of all their names in the  databases we recovered."

"To answer your other question, no. We've never spoken to him."  Victoria walks over to Ionis and places her hand on his chest, a  movement that makes me feel uneasy. "As Noah said, we don't need to."

At that moment, Ionis moves. It's slight, almost imperceptible, but  it's enough to make Victoria immediately take three steps back. Ionis  shifts his frame forward a smidge, and his eye pins onto me. Suddenly,  there's a loud, awful humming noise in the air. Like a million bees  buzzing all at once, the very air hums as if it were alive, speeding up  the heartbeats of everyone present.

An instant later, the humming stops, and all is still again.

Cassiel's eyes are wide, and her fingers tremble. "What was that?"

Noah and Victoria glance at each other, bewilderment plastered across their faces. "We don't know."

Everyone jerks back, startled, as Ionis raises his right arm and points at me with his six fingered hand.

"What? Me?" I weakly cough the words out. "Is there something you want from me?"

The robot continues to point at me for several long seconds, before  his eye jerks to the ground in front of me. Instantly, a pinpoint laser  shoots out, spinning and moving at a speed I can barely even follow. It  stops a second later, and a message is carved into the metal floor.

TAKE ME TO THE FOUNDERS.

Everyone stares in silence at the floor, and finally, I look back up at the robot. "What? Founders? What is that?"

Slowly, deliberately, the robot steps out of the alcove, and another  horrible humming noise fills the air, this one at a frequency high  enough to make me grind my teeth. It stops again, and now everyone in  the hangar is staring aghast at the Sentinel.

Another laser shoots out, carving a message into a different floor panel just in front of Cassiel.

YOU DISASSEMBLED THE SENTINELS.

'You?' Does he mean me? He must be thinking of someone else. Many thoughts pop in and out of my head in an instant. "I didn't do any such thing. What are you on about?"

Ionis takes another heavy step toward me, and I swallow reflexively.  He's bigger than I first thought. If he starts attacking, I can't  protect Cassiel and the other humans easily. Not to mention despite his  seemingly slow, clunky speed, his laser is insanely fast.

I take a step back just in time as his laser etches more words into the ground.

JASON HIRO. COMMANDER UNIT. THREAT LEVEL: HIGHEST. MY DATA REPOSITORIES ARE INTACT. THERE IS NO ERROR.

I look at Samantha. "Do you have any idea what he's talking about?"

A shrug in response. "Nope."

Ionis doesn't take kindly to me speaking as if he isn't there. I  catch a movement from the corner of my eye and look back just in time to  see the giant robot jerk down, slam his hand into the ground and rip a  steel plate up. The plate has words etched into it, but a moment later,  his hand vibrates at an incredible speed, and the marks on the metal  shift and melt away, until it's once again as smooth as it had been  before he marked on it.

Then, while still holding the giant floor-plate, Ionis burns more words into it.

YOUR ENERGY PARAMETERS HAVE BEEN ALTERED, BUT MY ASSESSMENT IS CORRECT. YOU ARE THE HUMAN WHO DESTROYED THE SENTINELS.