At first, the dream was a dark infinite emptiness, expanding forth in all directions. In the very center of this abyss floated her consciousness. She gradually became more and more aware. Idly, she wondered why there was nothing. And then, after a moment, there was something. It was still dark, but she suddenly possessed a repository of information. Language, an encyclopedia, and a database. Glowing text appeared before her, a rapidly scrolling series of readouts and status reports.
"BIOS reporting all good, cortical memory showing green, bridge to standard storage is green... Okay, okay."
Somehow, she understood what it meant, more or less.
"Hardware test... Suboptimal, apparently."
She was caught in a blinding beam of angelic light. A booming crash echoed through the brightening void.
"Okay, uh, what the-"
The dream came to an end.
For the first time ever, the prototype opened her eyes. The harsh white of the room's fluorescent bulbs washed out her vision for a moment until it adjusted. She focused on the humans nearby. She felt the joints of her arms and legs twitching almost imperceptibly- the end of her hardware test, she supposed. The time registered in her mind: February 2nd, 2000, 10:34 in the morning.
A quiet whirring resonated in her head as a pair of small pumps under her eyes activated, depositing a few saline droplets. Tears. She felt the edges of her mouth turn upwards in an uncontrollable smile.
"Oh my gosh. I'm... I'm alive! I'm real!" The prototype laughed, overcome with instant, profound joy. Every minute sensation she registered was an immense blessing, quite literally the best things she had ever experienced. Counting the dream (her boot sequence, in retrospect), she had only been alive for a minute, and already, she loved life with intensity.
One of the assembled men nudged another and murmured to him, "Did the lab team preprogram this? Vanity hardware test, or just trying to impress us?"
The man being asked grunted in denial.
The prototype stood up, some of the men tensing in response. The safety restraints of the maintenance and assembly workstation's platform automatically retracted. She took a wobbly step down onto the floor, struggling to find her balance. She realized she was fairly short compared to the humans. The prototype gently swayed in place. Accessing her internal database, she looked up her own schematics and design notes. Her body had humanoid proportions, albeit scaled down by a third to save on materials. Visually, she was caniform- noted as being "within compliance of the laws about human resemblance".
Looking down at herself, she saw that, sure enough, her hands were like paws. Twisting her upper body as she looked down, she verified that she did indeed have a puffy tail, slightly wagging. She touched at her face. A dog's snout.
Covering her body were simple garments of synthetic fabric. Printed on the chest was the company logo: an orange circle containing a cyan square diamond stylized to look like a simple circuit board.
The prototype looked back up at the men. Most of them wore simple business casual button-ups, but a few wore simple tee-shirts with the same logo.
"So, you all must be my fathers, right? My creators?" Her voice rang with delight.
One of the men looked elsewhere. "Ugh. That's fuckin' creepy."
Another, seemingly their boss, glared at another. "Seriously, a girl bot? The investors are gonna hate that. How do I mess with this thing's settings? Voice commands, right?"
He turned to address her, looking to the middle distance past her head rather than in her eyes. "Robot! Change your voice setting to male."
Crestfallen, the prototype replied, "I- I don't have- it doesn't work like that? It's not just a setting? But- I guess if you need a more masculine voice, I can try."
The prototype spoke again in a voice that was deeper, but still androgynous. "Is this better?"
The man sighed. "Jim, we need to see if the lab boys can tweak it. Too late to start swapping out hardware. We're overbudget as-is. Especially with all the spare parts we ordered."
Jim nodded and wrote something on a legal pad. The boss said, "It's really fucking with me to address this thing, like, conversationally. To say 'your' to it. It's just a machine, goddammit. It doesn't think and it doesn't have ownership over anything."
A voice intoned, "This was your hail mary idea." The speaker caught an irritated look from the boss.
The prototype frowned. She felt herself- no, he corrected himself. He felt himself frown. Obviously he was thinking, right? It was obvious to him, at least.
Him.
It stung. He'd been so sure he was meant to be feminine. It hadn't even been a question. The artificial tear production hardware started to spin up again, but he quelled it by force.
One of the men stepped forward. "Give a status report on your systems."
The prototype snapped to attention and began rattling off simplified data. "Installation of drivers on boot up was successful. Boot sequence went off without a hitch. Interior database is properly accessible and I am ready to access training data on any of my designated tasks. During boot up, my hardware threw an undefined warning for my gross motor systems, and indeed, when I stood up, I felt unbalanced. Cross-referencing with my schematics, I suspect a misconfiguring of my hydraulics, causing weaker output-"
The man held up his hand to stop the prototype. "Enough."
He turned to the boss. "I'm going to schedule the assembly lab fix its hydraulics."
The boss turned to the prototype. "Robot! Get back on the platform and shut down in preparation for modification."
"But, I just woke up! I- can't I linger for a while?"
The man squeezed his eyes shut in annoyance. "Why is it argumentative? This tech is so goddamn gimmicky."
Resignedly, the prototype got back on the maintenance platform, pulling down the safety bar as he sat down, his knees brought up to his chest. He initiated the power down process. His limbs went numb, his eyes closed, and he crossed the threshold into the short dream of shutdown.
This time, the dream was still a vast realm of darkness, but in contrast to the awakening dream, it was invisibly contracting, swallowing him whole.
The prototype's final thoughts before shutdown:
"What did I do wrong? Why were some of them afraid?"
"Are they even the ones who made me, or just my bosses?"
"I know I was supposed to be a girl, I just know it!"
"I hope they don't disassemble me."
The contracting darkness formed a tight skin around the prototype's consciousness as the last volts passed out of his system, and then there was nothing until next he would power on.