Its gums flashed and pulsed with in sickeningly neon rainbow as it spread its mouth into a mockery of a smile meant to placate and amuse the children left in its care. Judging by all the tiny bones crammed into broken cradles, its programming had malfunctioned like all the others.
The upper echelons of humanity once decided that raising children was something best done by machines who would make no mistakes, would foster no weaknesses and turn writhing screaming infants into productive adults. This soon led to the extinction of the upper ranks when a virus found its way into the nanny's mainframe.
Rumours spread that it was the poor, the jealous competitors, the childless and countless other scapegoats who did this. The final few moral tethers frayed and broke as the androids learnt to revel in mindless violence just like their blessed creators.
A-a-a is ffor a-a-a-a-apple....
They tried to give them nurturing feminine voices but someone had damaged its speech motors during the initial assault that left man and machine in a stalemate void of destruction. Everyone and everything tried to go back to whatever small semblance of their former lives they could scrape together but seeing bloodstained, broken and rusted androids in the same nurseries where they slaughtered their charges still stung.
B i-i-is for b-b-b-b-b-
It pointed to the closest cradle before reaching in and gently picking up a fractured skull that was dwarfed by its broken hand. Sparks flared as it closed its remaining fingers, arching across fragile bone and splintering it further. The android looked at the crumpling mess in its hands then back to the people who had sought it out that night.
They weren't made to feel pain so the sickening crunch of their metal bats didn't feel nearly as satisfying as they hoped it might. They struck again and again and again, bringing the android to its knees, to the floor and slowly to pieces.
All the while it kept trying to speak, kept trying to repeat the same things it used to teach their children or maybe trying to impart one final apology with the only words its damned creators thought to give it. Words that had taught and comforted hundreds of children right to their very end and now were its final plea.
B-b-b-b i-is f-f-for b-bab-
The neon rainbow came to an abrupt halt and it died with a smile its face.
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