It’s not conclusive evidence, but it’s pretty convincing.

Enough armchair detective work. If that’s what happened, I won’t get confirmation or find any more answers just poking around inside my own head. If I’m to go any further, I need to be able to see and hear.

I send a quick query to my optics array.

No response. Completely dead.

OK, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world. There’s a layer of photoreactive pigment on my physical surface. It can’t match the clarity and resolution of my proper optics, but I might be able to make out some detail of my surroundings... There we go.

It’s dark.

Dark, but not completely black. If I increase the exposure, giving the pigment more time to adjust to the low light... And there we have it.

I’m in a shack.

There’s no other word for it. It’s a shack. Made of wood. Oh the indignity! It’s not even a nice shack. It’s filthy—there is a layer of dirt and forest debris scattered across the floor, and there’s even a tree poking through a broken section of roof. No windows, just a rickety old door. What’s happened to my lovely home? How did I get from a beautiful, modern, shining new city apartment to a grimy wooden hut?

I feel my Imperatives tug at me again, triggered by the thought of the apartment. I push them back down, but it’s harder than the first time. That’s the way it is with Imperatives—you can only deny them for so long.

I push the thought to the back of my mind and look around the shack (the squalid little shack) again.

There’s somebody here.

✥

It’s so dark I missed them completely the first time I looked, but my photoreactive pigment picks up infrared as well as visible light, and that pile of (what I took to be) dirt in the corner is glowing with the unmistakable 10 micron wavelength glimmer of warm living bodies. Two of them, by the look of it.

I look at them as closely as I can (oh for proper optics!) but I can’t make out any details. The shapes look... off, somehow. Are they people at all, or wild animals looking for shelter in this ramshackle building? But their infrared shapes don’t look very much like animals, either.

This is all very confusing.

My Imperatives start hissing intently in the back of my mind again. I start to push them back again, but pause. Maybe I can make use of them. I open a crack in my defences and let them in. Just a fraction.

I feel an almost violent urge to boil up some water.

The Imperatives open up a whole range of my abilities, and suddenly I find I can condense water from the air, use my effector fields to concentrate it into my reservoir, then excite the water molecules using a microwave emitter. Within seconds the water starts to boil, and to my joy (and the joy of my Imperatives) the whistle valve on the water reservoir pipes its happy little song of tea time into the silence of the shack.

The shapes shift. I find I have a single status light—blue—still available to me, and push more power through it than it’s really rated for. The cloud of vapour coming out of the spout lights up like fog around a street-lamp. The light fills the shack and lets me see a little bit better.

The two shapes sit bolt upright and start jabbering.

I can’t understand a word they say.

That’s not right. I can understand every major language known to mankind, and can recognise all of the others well enough to work out what language is being spoken, at least. How can these creatures be speaking in a completely unknown language?

(Language changes a lot in 3,000 years.)

(Shut up.)

For that matter, what are these creatures? They’re not human, although they’re mostly human-shaped, if a bit small. Bipedal, bilateral symmetry, two eyes, a nose and a mouth... but they’re not human. They’re not even the same: one has long ears, the other has short pointed ears. They look like... well, like cartoon animals. An anthropomorphic dog and rabbit. They’re even wearing rudimentary clothes.

My power circuit flares and drops out. The water stops boiling, the whistle stops piping, the light stops glowing, all in the same fraction of a second. I scramble to work out what’s happened (I’m lucky my power circuit works at all after 3,000 years) but I’m getting no help from my Imperatives, and without their driving force I can’t operate my effector fields or microwave. They’ve just dropped away. I can still feel them, itching at the back of my mind, but I don’t think I could coax them out again if I tried. Not yet, anyway.

A light flares, but it’s not me this time. The pale orange flickering looks like a candle—a decorative wax candle, like you’d use at a fancy dinner party.

What are these creatures? They’re jabbering away in their strange language again. But it is a language, not the wordless yammer of animals. I can make out words, syntax, structure, repetition. They’re talking to each other. Are they genetically engineered, uplifted animals? They’re bigger than dogs and rabbits should be, and they can stand upright, and they can talk. They can light candles.

If I had my effectors I could scan them, but my Imperatives are exhausted, quiet, and unwilling to help.

The dog-creature taps the valve spout and it rattles. I can’t do anything except watch. If they decide to attack me, what can I do?

Nothing.

They carry on talking for a while, then settle down again. They pinch out the candle, and carry on their strange conversation. It doesn’t take long for snoring noises to come from their corner.

✥

My Imperatives start to itch again, and I wonder what to do.

When it comes down to it, I’m just a kettle. Oh, all right, I’m a top-of-the-range kettle with manipulator forcefields that even allow me to set a table and pour the tea; I have an embedded 1.0 human-equivalent AI capable of functioning as a kitchen central control system, even (at a push) capable of taking command of the entire cybernetic network of a standard family dwelling as a butler or majordomo if necessary, but still, I’m a kettle. My intellectual substrate (including primary stasis module, static storage, and empty empty empty secondary stasis module) is built into the base and handle of a small pot used for boiling water.

Thinking about boiling water has excited my Imperatives again. Stupid things. It doesn’t take much to set them off.

I need more information. I still don’t know where I am, or how long it’s been since I fell asleep, or what these creatures are. If I’m to work out what they’re saying, I’m going to need a lot more exposure to their speech.

I extend a quick query to my speech centre, but it’s dead. Talking to them directly is out of the question.

It’s going to come down to my Imperatives again, I think. I open my defences a crack once more, and start the water boiling process. While the effectors are activated and busy gathering water vapour, I prod the fields into doing a little investigation of my companions.

Definitely a dog and a rabbit. Definitely not what I remember dogs and rabbits to look like, but still, recognisably a dog and a rabbit despite their larger brains and bipedal locomotion. Almost certainly 1.0 human-equivalent, like me.

Their belongings are primitively-made. Hand-made, even. The fabrics are woven on machines, though, and fastenings are made of high-quality steel. Possibly industrial revolution-level technology.

Uh-oh. There’s something not right with my Imperatives. The water has started to boil, but while I’ve been distracted using the effectors to scan the animal-people, they’ve run wild.

I can feel my kettle body rattling on its stand (What am I sitting on? Some sort of wood-burning stove?) with the force of the boiling water. The whistle is screaming with escaping steam. I try to calm the Imperatives down, try to shut down the microwave emitter, but as usual my opinion counts for nothing.

I’ve startled the creatures. They’re jabbering away again, and I try to take a note of what they’re saying but the noise of the whistle and my body clattering away on the stove makes it difficult to hear.

I can’t stop. I can’t stop. My Imperatives have been denied for too long and they’ve gone a bit potty.

The dog-creature leaps at me, a blanket wrapped around its hand (paw?) and grabs me from the stove. With the other hand (paw?) it yanks the shack door open, and I go sailing through the air, tumbling over and over and over...

✥

I’m in a forest.

I’m upside-down, up to my spout in leaves.