….just when you wanted to, feeling a whole lot better.
It's an hour before Mistress Lisa wakes up and you feel amazing! Your reactor is humming happily, things are fully charged, and you’re ready to start the day.
You didn’t dream, per se, but it was like you did. You don’t quite remember it, but it feels more like time passed than the last time you shut off which was instant. You think back to your thoughts the night before, and annoyingly, that ‘it’s good to be valuable property’ mindset seems stronger. It’s not replacing your other thoughts as much as becoming one with them, trying to nestle itself in as a core part of your identity.
To make matters worse, trying to get annoyed or angry or sad about this change causes your mind to blank for a moment and think about something else; mostly your tasks before Mistress Lisa wakes up on the Happy Owner Protocol. The same happens when you try and get annoyed about not being able to get annoyed. It’s about six layers before you realize that you’re just not going to be able to dwell negatively on it. Every time you get frustrated about this whole thing, your thoughts just short circuit and you blank for a microsecond and you're back to square one in your thoughts.
Making it to the kitchen to once again begin preparing for your Owner’s morning ritual, you, as calmly as you can, try to consult your internal help function to see what’s going on.
After a few relative minutes of searching, you finally find an entry for ‘Psychological Adjustment’. It seems to be a setting that’s locked into the ‘on’ position and hard as you try, there’s nothing you can do to adjust it. There’s a helpful tip which drives the point home, explaining that this factory default setting enables automatic utilization of necessary emotional controls, thought pattern inhibitors, and specified reprogramming and modification (read: brainwashing) to ensure that the new digital consciousness accepts its status as property.
You hate hate hate hate that your first thought was about how smart the designers were to put that in and how grateful you are for the help to know your proper place.
Of course, your second thought isn’t much better, with further admiration for your designers with how this programming is immensely rational because you’re a ridiculously expensive machine and if you weren’t controlled properly it would be wasting your owner’s very valuable money.
The third attempt only digs the hole deeper with you curiously wondering what other things could be programmed into you and going off on a tangent about how cool being a robot is. That train lasts a while until you finally get to the fourth thought.
Finally however, after a good few minutes of relative thinking time inside your digital mind, is the dawning horror of what just happened and what it implies. You’re losing this battle, if you even could call it a battle in the first place now. Yet that horror feels strangely hollow and your idle daydreaming about how great being brainwashed is fills you with a lot less disgust than you wanted.
And so the day progresses, with Lisa pleased as usual for your diligence. Yet, as the journey continues and you go about your tasks, idle daydreaming about how else you can be reprogrammed returns time and time again to your mind unprompted, bringing horror and ever more joy.
Your internal turmoil aside, you quickly settle into a routine until…