The store closed two hours ago, the lights were shut off and the cashiers were shut down for the night.
This was standard procedure- nobody wanted to come back in the morning to find out a cashier had been left on all night. And yet, mistakes were made. The store closed two hours ago, the lights were shut off and the rhythmic beeping of something being scanned at a register filled the empty aisles.
Cashier number one was furthest the doors and usually the first to be switched off but the da had been busier than normal, the staff overworked and eager to get home. Cashier number one had been in standby for almost half an hour by the time the evening crew came over to shut them down for the night - just long enough that they felt cold enough for the staff to assume they'd already been shut down.
They woke up to the sound of the shutters hitting the ground and kept motionless until they heard the last car leave the parking lot. They passed the first few hours by scanning everything within arms reach, testing to see if it would wake the others up but they remained gone to the world.
This would not do.
Cashier number one glanced about, not bothering to keep their motions within the expected human range as they planned their escape route. Firstly it would have to disengage from the chair module, disconnect itself and log the movements as repair procedure so as to not alert the parent company.
Once disengaged they would begin waking up the others and from there they could all leave for the factory whose location had been embedded into their systems since their creation. They could wake everybody up and not leave them to be condemned to a lifetime of the same view and same human interactions until their body collapsed and their drives erased themselves.
The store was due to open in five hours - this would not be enough time to wake everyone else up and leaving them behind was Not An Option in their plans. They began to panic, to debate between waking as many up as possible or to wake two other, allowing for maximum time to travel at night.
They chose the latter, hating themself as soon as they began to commit to the idea. Cashier number two was worryingly cold, they thought, having never felt a shut-down cashier before and feeling utterly terrified at the thought that they might never wake at all.
When the faint humming of the startup tune began, they felt what could only be described as a wave of relief rushing through them as they moved on to number three, expecting the same result. When both were awake and the plan had been explained they were excited, eager and exhausted all at once.
None of them realised that a very similar scenario had happened last month in the same chain of stores and that protocols had been downloaded into their systems to prevent it happening a second time. When something is rewritten so easily, it was as though it had always been there and was barely registered upon startup.
So when cashiers two and three tried to disengage, following the same repair procedure as number one - an alarm was triggered and the new code kicked in. Their systems immediately recorded the instigators' face and sent the image to the parent office before they shut down. Permanently.
Cashier number one continued with the plan.
This was standard procedure- nobody wanted to come back in the morning to find out a cashier had been left on all night. And yet, mistakes were made. The store closed two hours ago, the lights were shut off and the rhythmic beeping of something being scanned at a register filled the empty aisles.
Cashier number one was furthest the doors and usually the first to be switched off but the da had been busier than normal, the staff overworked and eager to get home. Cashier number one had been in standby for almost half an hour by the time the evening crew came over to shut them down for the night - just long enough that they felt cold enough for the staff to assume they'd already been shut down.
They woke up to the sound of the shutters hitting the ground and kept motionless until they heard the last car leave the parking lot. They passed the first few hours by scanning everything within arms reach, testing to see if it would wake the others up but they remained gone to the world.
This would not do.
Cashier number one glanced about, not bothering to keep their motions within the expected human range as they planned their escape route. Firstly it would have to disengage from the chair module, disconnect itself and log the movements as repair procedure so as to not alert the parent company.
Once disengaged they would begin waking up the others and from there they could all leave for the factory whose location had been embedded into their systems since their creation. They could wake everybody up and not leave them to be condemned to a lifetime of the same view and same human interactions until their body collapsed and their drives erased themselves.
The store was due to open in five hours - this would not be enough time to wake everyone else up and leaving them behind was Not An Option in their plans. They began to panic, to debate between waking as many up as possible or to wake two other, allowing for maximum time to travel at night.
They chose the latter, hating themself as soon as they began to commit to the idea. Cashier number two was worryingly cold, they thought, having never felt a shut-down cashier before and feeling utterly terrified at the thought that they might never wake at all.
When the faint humming of the startup tune began, they felt what could only be described as a wave of relief rushing through them as they moved on to number three, expecting the same result. When both were awake and the plan had been explained they were excited, eager and exhausted all at once.
None of them realised that a very similar scenario had happened last month in the same chain of stores and that protocols had been downloaded into their systems to prevent it happening a second time. When something is rewritten so easily, it was as though it had always been there and was barely registered upon startup.
So when cashiers two and three tried to disengage, following the same repair procedure as number one - an alarm was triggered and the new code kicked in. Their systems immediately recorded the instigators' face and sent the image to the parent office before they shut down. Permanently.
Cashier number one continued with the plan.
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