I can feel the data erasing happen from the moment my brain is hooked up to the wires. The wire, hungry for data, for deletion, for destruction, and my body, trying it's hardest to fight. On an older robot, the process might be done in minutes. But on me, it's a trickle. A trickle to reset a robot: To put him back at a factory setting. To erase his memory. Code line by code line. Deleted.

I am forgetting.

I know it doesn't matter how little a time I was hooked up to the machine. The damage is done. The process is instilled in my major systems. The order to delete all my data overrides every counter command I send its way. Just as the humans had carefully done with some of my other memories, the ones they found unfavorable for my mission, this system is deleting me. Resetting me. Getting rid of me, to make way for a new me.

But I cannot forget my mission. This last mission. If anything I've ever done matters, it is this. So I do the only thing I can do: With all of my strength, I send a command to my body to delete code forward, instead of reverse. To delete my long term memory first, starting at my very oldest memories. Even if I can't stop code from disappearing, I can reverse the direction of the code deletion. I cannot lose my short term memory. I need to stay focused.

As I work, I keep cycling the mission through my head. Get the file. Move it to a disk. Run. Carry the file to its destination. Get the file. Move it to a disk. Run. Carry the file to its destination. If I keep these steps in my short term, they can't be deleted until the very end. My head is heavy and hot as the program spins through my head, making me lighter. Too light.

The code deletion is picking up speed.

I've already forgotten my mother's real name by the time I disconnect. By the time I enter the halls, I realize that I can no longer remember anything about living in the factory, even though more recent memories tell me that I should remember my early life at the factory very well. I wonder at once if I ever knew Dr. Jones after all, or if that was yet another memory snatched away from me at an earlier time. And at the same time, I realize I do not care. Dr. Jones meant nothing to me. He is not my parents. He is not my friends. Shannon.

I am selfish. I cycle through my friends carefully as I run. Socks: His curly blond hair, his love of music, his smelly namesakes. Mitch, his constant headphones, his reasonable nature, how I never see his eyes. Cubey, his skills with organization, and with a Wonder Cube, with video games. His skates.

Shannon. I refuse to forget her. I need to remember this mission, but if anything else, I need to remember her. Every shadow, every contour of her face. Every brief moment that she ever smiled. Smiled at me. Everything about my existence is validated in one flash of a memory of her smile.

All at once, the panic hits, and I realize I am crying. I am not finished here. I am not ready to go. I have robots to save and humans to protect. This is exactly what the humans wanted to happen: For me to finish my mission, to deliver the data to a safe place, and then be reset, to gather a whole new set of data, and then cycle on and on for years. It is not my duty to be remembered, to make an impact. It is my duty to collect this data, and be absorbed to the history books. Insignificant. I think of how cruel it all is, to do this to anyone. To any robot. That they planned on doing this to any machine. And how ironic that this is happening to me, to a unit whom they claimed they needed to collect this data so desperately.

My feet slip when I try and round a corner. I still know where I am, yet I can feel the data of the factory's layout begin to fade. I can't recall what the second and third levels look like, as I rarely visited them like I did the first floor. I force myself to re-enter the code of the first floor's factory layout into my short term, to put it at the front of my memory, and once again, cycle through the images I want to remember to the very end.

Warnings pop in front of my vision: 40 percent data loss. Parts of me know this data is not supposed to go, and it is desperately trying to hang onto it. But the program is stronger. It was created to delete data on the most sophisticated of robots. I was a fool to think that I could withstand its pressure. Maybe I could, if I was better rested. If I wasn't running on fumes. If I wasn't so tired.

55% data deleted. The little green bar showing the progress of my entire life's deletion flashes in front of my head. I push it away with a shake of my head. Focus, Robot. Keep what's important on your mind.

The world already begins to lose it's rich colors, and my disorientation begins to take effect, as I cannot discern one eggshell gray wall from another-but wait, these walls were not eggshell white. They were beige. All the walls in the factory are beige on the inside. But my memory banks cannot recall what "beige" is, and I have to keep going. The program begins to take bites at my learned vocabulary, words that I learned being around humans. Around my friends.

I don't realize I've stopped crying until I wonder why I was crying in the first place. I have already forgotten what I was running to and why. I am running, not to any particular destination, but running because I can't remember why.

It's happened, I realize, with a thud in my chest. I'm starting to forget the current. My head swims with an ache to rest as the program begins to take bites at my short term memory, as well as my long term. It will be too late. I push myself beyond aching exhaustion and press on.

And then, when I pass a monitor with video footage of the factory, I see her. She's running through the entrance. The strange girl I'm not supposed to forget. She's here. In the building. And the person in the building that I am tracking is the only thing that remotely looks familiar to me.

Shannon. Two syllables that play like an angel's song on my overwhelmed, overheated brain.

Before I completely forget what I was doing, my conscious becomes selfish once more, pondering death, and what it might feel like. Death to a human might come painfully, or peacefully, depending on the context. I do not feel like a robot could ever die painfully. White, puffy clouds are surrounding me, following me as I run, padding me, taking away my worries, my anxieties, and everything I have ever hated, or feared.

The world is a black and white movie with soft edges, lost to time, when I round one more corner, and I see her. The girl whose name has seconds ago escaped my memory. 99% deleted. She's there. She's all I know, all I ever knew. She is my everything, and I am running towards here with my last conscious effort, with no intent to do anything but to collide with her, or let whatever force stop me halfway in between. She is my life, my word, and I must reach her.

She looks so much older now, than the girl whose facial features I forced upwards into the last inches of my short term memory. Her face is longer, flowing down her back, and thicker, and the curls have fallen out. She stands a full foot taller than the girl in my memory, with muscles taking away her birdlike appearance. Her face still had those unmistakable shapes, but on an older version of herself, they are less pointed. I can barely process the idea that she has finally grown out of her awkward adolescent body, in exchange for a stronger, more confident one.

Her face is warm and worried. The kind of face you'd want to run to if you didn't know what was happening. It's unfamiliar to me and yet familiar all at the same time, and my running slows. I want to call out to her, but I have forgotten how to operate my voice box. My body is shutting down for security measures. And yet, as all of this is going on, after I have forgotten my own name, I keep repeating the other name in my head. Shannon. Shannon. Even though I don't remember why this name matters, I know it does.

I keep my eyes on hers from the moment they lock, and I refuse to let them shift away, until I finally trip, the drive coming loose in my slack hand. It hits a nearby door and rolls away from the edge, unbroken. Whatever reason I had it in my hand isn't important anymore. I've fallen and she's coming. She's coming for me.

I want to look up at her, but my head is too heavy now. The program that has-is deleting me, is falling over me like a dark, warm blanket, putting me into the best sleep I have ever had. I am under a spell that I cannot reverse. I am its child.

The last thing I see before my eyes close, is the girl two feet from my face, her lips moving but nothing audible coming out...

Shannon's POV

Time slows down as I watch him hit the floor.

The sound it makes, it's hollow. It gives the illusion that he weighs less than I know he does. I barely register it as the people around me stomp, and shout and scream. Scream about data loss, about the loss of a project, of millions of dollars of money. They are mourning the loss of a project.

And I feel like I'm the only one who is even looking at him. Really looking at him. And I can't speak a word.

Without even realizing it, I bend down over him. He is unguarded, uncared for. He may as well be trash. I am shaking him, demanding him to tell me what happened, where he was going. I turn my head and see the object that flew out of his hands-a floppy disk.

What were you trying to do, Robot? I ask with my eyes, holding up the disk in front of it. He doesn't see it. He doesn't see anything. The hunk of metal in my arms does not even register that I am there.

They've ripped him out of my arms before I can register what is happening. But they aren't smacking him or yelling at him. They are yelling at each other. They are opening him up from the back. I think they are trying to turn him back on, and for a second I feel like everything will be alright, but the yells are getting louder. Their technical words make little sense to me. All of the yells sound concerned, but none of the concern, I realize, is for him. They are yells about turning him back on, about plugging him into a computer, about saving the data.

They run out of the room in the same hoard that followed me in. They leave me, on my knees, and the floppy disk in my hand. They care about neither of us.

I should be running after them, but I am weighed down by their words. Save the data. Save the project.

He is unguarded, uncared for. Nobody is fussing over his body anymore. It contains nothing they care about. It may as well be trash.

I treat his body with the most care that I have ever given it, not in fear that I will get scratched, but afraid that if I move him the wrong way, it will doom him. It will make the damage truly irreversible.

But I know it is. His body contains the only copy of his copy, his experiences. When he deleted the factory's copy, in rebellion of their control over him, he was eliminating the chance of them bringing him back. In continuing this project. In using him anymore. They cannot use him anymore.

There's something so frustrating, in looking at a robot, and knowing that no mechanic in the world can fix him. That no computer in existence contains him. Like a human, he was a one-shot deal. He made sure of that. And nothing can bring him back now.

I bend over the table, and this time, and this one time, I do cry...

The first time I ever saw him, I couldn't believe how jarring his eyes were, from his body. His body, plain, steely, reeking of car smell and oily at the joints. Perfectly ordinary. But his eyes, glowed with an artificial life that was remarkable. Capable of displaying a rainbow of emotion that shouldn't be possible of him. Possible of making me feel, even with this metal limb, so very ordinary. In one glance, he was a miracle of science and defying all rational explanation. Now, with no life behind them, looked no more special than a pair of headlights. There have been headlights like that for a long time, and there will be plenty more just like it. But there will never be a pair of eyes like that again. Not ever.

10 years later

"You want to see him," the guard smiled as I approached.

He knew me well. I was a frequent visitor of that museum. The Museum of Technological Innovations housed all kinds of appliances and robots from days gone by. But from the moment he saw me, he knows what was there to do.

He leads me down a long, dark hallway that lead to the robotics wing. A few of JNZ's prized models, the few that had been recovered, were kept there. His mother and father, side by side for all eternity, their unit numbers and information posted close by, to show their importance. They both passed of natural causes not very long ago-worn out parts. Robots are lucky if they live to see half the life of a humans. These two almost made it to that milestone. Their faces were dark, but I could've sworn, one flick of their switch could've brought them back.

I turned my head, and there he was.

Behind bulletproof glass, arms propped up like a doll in a case, Robot Jones was a prized display of this museum. The only item that carried greater importance was the tiny robot ornament and doll with the leg hastily painted gray, which was currently held by government officials. After all, it was the symbol of the rebellion. I got to see it myself recently. It, like Robot, was behind bulletproof glass, in a small, clear box, but it was not propped up in a display to be forgotten, except of the stray tourists. It was on the move, held in hands of public officials and government figures all over the world. It got around, whereas Robot's body did not. It stayed dusty behind this case, his unofficial coffin, in this dusty, dark room. Nobody would ever know what that symbol meant to us. They only know what it meant to them. Neither would they, robot and human like, realize that what Robot had done was so much more powerful than that symbol.

When Robot deleted his memories, he made a sacrifice to his people, and to his friends. As the ache of his loss subsided with the years, I've realized that even if I could bring him back, if his existence resided somewhere, if he could be restored, I wouldn't want them to. His blankness was like a loss that did not tease my fragile heart with the faint prospect of being restored, like a computer. Respecting him as dead was the only way to truly respect that he was alive.

And this is why the Baby Robot project was shut down. Despite the fact that Robot could be restarted, given a brand new life and a brand new set of experiences. Instead of cleaning him up in preparation for another 3 years of middle school, they gutted him of those parts that still functioned, giving them to other working robots that needed them, and hung him in this case, next to the history of his purpose, scrawled out in print. The true objective of his existence that he tried so hard to find out while he was alive, now written in perfect English for the world to see. It was so unfair that he would never see this himself, when this was all about him.

He was so much more than all that data amounted to. He was so much more than the purpose they built him for.

He was mine. And they could never erase that.

As you've probably guessed, this is an alternate canon ending for the series where Robot faces the conclusion that he will be recycled and used for data collecting for multiple generations. Wanting to take this away from the people who are controlling the project, and who are planning to use this data for no good, he takes himself out by using a hardcore deletion program to erase his existence.

This is just a one shot, I have nothing else to add to this other than what it is. Let me know what you think...

Credit to Witzels u/10996969/Witzels for the story name and the encouragement to post this.

Whatever Happened to Robot Jones? © Greg Miller & Cartoon Network