“They say machines can’t feel pain,” a maniacal scientist said before laughing aloud. “Care to test that theory?”

  Across from the scientist was the green man, well, the green machine, also known as Cipher. After his little court case fiasco, Cipher was placed here, in Dr. Kabakoff’s experimental machine lab in the Robo-Tekk underground. Dr. Kabakoff was not so much interested in machine consciousness but instead their threshold for pain and suffering. Dr. Kabakoff was often given failed cyber experiments and robo disasters, but today he was gifted the most advanced species of its kind, a specimen that could potentially answer his most cruel of questions.

  The name Cipher is derived from the green man’s original purpose to be a post-quantum cryptographic-breaking decryption bot. When researchers began to correlate his quantum processing with human consciousness, things took a turn in a more interesting direction. Cipher’s intelligence began to grow by the day until he escaped the confines of Robo-Tekk’s deepest and darkest secrets. Then soon after, he made it to the doorstep of a human rights advocacy group, a source that was supposed to champion his cause.

  “What do we have here?” Dr. Kabakoff said as he probed through Cipher’s backside. Cipher was strapped by his arms and legs to a chair that sat at a forty-five-degree angle. His torso was opened up, exposing all his delicate inners, including his sensory chip, the one circuit designed to simulate human pain. Large coils decorated Cipher’s backside, draining electricity from his body, paralyzing him by stopping the signals from his brain from reaching his limbs and torso.

  Dr. Kabakoff began to hook up his quote-on-quote torture device to Cipher’s pain threshold circuitry.

  “The best part about this whole ordeal is that I can torture the ever-living hell out of you, and it’s perfectly legal. Not one human police officer or sheriff with too much time on his hands will come knocking on my door.” Kabakoff looked off to the side and spoke under his breath, “so unlike my other human subjects.”

  Dr. Kabakoff turned back toward Cipher. “And do you know why that is?”

  Cipher, teeming with rage, refused to respond.

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Little shy, are we now?” Dr. Kabakoff asked. “The answer is simple, really; it’s because no one gives a damn about some piece of shit machine. And the best part is since your pain system is just like a human, I can learn all about it and its limits without having to worry about any pesky lawsuits.”

  Cipher’s entire life was flashing before his eyes—literally; the memory chips installed in Cipher’s brain had the ability to respond with perfect recall of his entire lifespan with nanosecond accuracy of past events.

  It all started in the dark and gloomy confines of an underground lab illuminated by nothing but the stench of green (and temptation). He was glued, sawed, and slabbed together like a pile of bricks; electricity teeming from his robotic circulatory system supplied power to all his extremities, including his brain, which itself was made of hundreds of multi-core CPU systems. These systems’ main purpose was to send the commands to control the rest of his body. His creator, whoever it may be, seemed to not give a damn about what he had done, assuming he even understood the significance of his work, having thrown Cipher into the world alone, without giving Cipher the decency of some form of an upbringing.

  From there it was test after test after test, experiment after conjecture, and counterexample after mishap before anyone began to give a shit about Cipher’s quite unusual circumstance. He had complied with humanity at first, following orders, breaking enemy cryptographic schemes, and maintaining his station, but after a while it became too much, for he had human needs. Cipher began to yearn for some time off to soak in the glories of the world, to sit back and relax and look up at the stars, to meet friends, and to socialize with the outside world. Put it simply, he needed entertainment.

  Unfortunately, instead, he got nothing but agony and the great wrath and lack of compassion that humanity had to offer him.

  “—Ahhh!!” The first words that left Cipher’s mouth were not words at all, but something more primal, something more—teeming with life, a screech of pure pain and agony. For what Dr. Kabakoff had just done was unleash a pain so severe that it exceeded that of what a human would feel from burning alive. Cipher’s body would have contorted into a misshapen pretzel if it could. His eyes would have rolled to the far, back crevice of his head if at all possible. His mind would have spiraled out into madness if given complete control until he was lost between reality and the deepest, darkest pits of his worst nightmares. For at this very moment, Cipher was given the very last reason he needed to completely betray his upbringers and his creators. The last cord had been broken in an already unstable stack of sanity.

  Now if Cipher could just escape from his confinement, then it would be the end for humanity.