The short stalky dark-haired woman, the security guard, waved him on through the gate. He did hesitate as he examine the sparsely occupied parking lot and single block building ahead of him. The building was made of concrete block and was built so the rear was attached to the cliff face behind. It was not a natural cliff. It looked dug out or carved out of the hillside. The parking lot in front was flat and had a few dozen spaces of which only five were taken up with vehicles. Four were low to high end electric SUV''s and there was one really beat up yellowish Toyota combustion pickup.


    His hesitation was cured as the security guard turned and pulled out a very nasty looking weapon. It was black and almost half her height with a wide opening on one end and an big black power cable on the other end. She did not point the nozzle of the thing at him. She had it pointed up, but the expression she showed demanded he move.  No additional hint needed; he moved.


    He drove to the right of the parking lot and the right side of the building as instructed. To the side there was a dock he could easily pull up alongside. He appreciated that as the typical dock required to pull the back cab forward and maneuvered awkwardly to align to narrow decks. With this shipping dock arrangement, he could just slide up and roll the container onto the deck from his left side.


    Another thing he was good at was parking at a deck. Yeah he was a computer capable of massive calculations and was covered in a range of sensors, but he could do it really quickly, better than any of his peers. Before they could blink, he would be lined up to the deck and the container rolled onto the empty space. At least that is what he thought.


    Sensors started to scream at him. More like he felt them. The feeling was around the container just as he pulled up against the shipping dock deck. Some vibration was coming from the container. PAT-2899 froze. He had heard of corporate saboteurs sending shipping containers filled with explosives to rival companies. It was an ugly rumor at the transport center, he thought mentioned as a lesson to always examine what you were carrying. Was he now doomed?


    Hi answer came a moment later as he saw the short side of the container wall gently lower down and ten people dressed similar to the security guard jump out. He tried to see their faces, but there was something obscuring their features. Some carried grey guns while others had backpacks with what looked like tools hanging from them.


    One of the tool carriers ran towards his front cab. He had a bad feeling. He knew he should do something, but he did not know what. This was way beyond his experience. The tool carrier pulled out a box and tried to plug in a cable to the container monitoring port.


    The man stopped. "Damn. Gunther, this is the wrong connector. Bring over the UFTP type 2."


    "You going to have time for that?" another tool carrier can over and handed the first a cable with a different connector.


    "Don''t have much choice. Of course, we get stuck with this older model firetruck red auto-truck."


    PAT-2899 was offended. First, he was not a truck. Second, though he was first gen of the PAT series, he was only ten years old and he was one of the few fully loaded with all the options. Third, he was royal red, not firetruck red.


    This was really not right. He had a good angle to see what the person was doing. They switched out the cable connected to the box then pushed the new connector into his deck mounted maintenance slot. PAT-2899 did not understand what they were after. That slot was used by the transport center to check the weight and balance of the containers loaded on the deck.


    He was puzzling about this when he suddenly became numb. He could not feel is wheels or motors or the pavement below him. It was like half his sensors on his lower half turned off. He felt scared. Not in the way he did when he thought the container may have been a bomb. He felt restricted and for the first time not in control of himself. His thoughts were a mess. Was he now the victim of shipping pirates? Was he now captured and enslaved to pirates?


    "Got it!" yelled the first tool person as he tapped vigorously on screen mounted on the rectangular box that was now attached through a black cable to PAT-2899. "Wow. This is like the first PAT model rolled out. What are the chances of that?"


    The second tool person was walking around the now empty container on PAT-2899''s deck. "I don''t know. Don''t worry about it. Just release container locks and dump this."


    PAT-2899 watch helplessly as the six locks that secured the container to his deck flipped back, unhooking from the container''s corners and sides. The deck rollers started spinning and the container moved quickly from its position to his right side and crashed into the pavement before rolling of the edge and down the steep hill. It finally was stopped by a stand of large trees.


    He had not noticed, as his mental panic had consumed him with the activities of these two tool people, that the eight other people had disappeared into the building. These were definitely pirates or corporate saboteurs. He did not know if either group really existed. He was just going by what others told him, the shows he watched, and the occasional news he   read.


    Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    "What''s the ETA?" the first tool person seemed to ask the air. After a pause as he cocked his head as if he was listening to someone he frowned. "Crap. We got here too early. The contact wasn''t ready with the access. Hey Gunther, can you check on Heather if she was able to secure the gate?" Gunther gave the first tool person a thumbs up and disappeared off the shipping dock and around the corner of the building.


    There was noise at the large shipping dock doors as they rattled then lifted revealing a larger space inside with multiple crates and boxes piled on steel shelving. A rumble emanated from the space as a container lift rolled its way out a far door. Some of the others who exited the container followed the container lift dragging cables and a large box on a pallet.


    Gunther and another person walked around the corner of the building and jumped up on the shipping dock. The other person had a smaller build than Gunther. The person was probably the women Heather. She had a large gun strapped to her back.


    Heather walked up behind the first tool person. "Fagin, have you got in yet?"


    Fagin, who was probably the first tool person scrunched his mouth. I got in but the control is limited to just the wheels and drive motors. The automated driver is not accessible from here," he said and pointed to the container monitoring connection.


    "You want to kill the power to the main processor then to avoid it''s calls for help?"


    He shook his head. "Can''t do that or it''ll shut the power to the motors. I have a jammer attached that will keep it quiet. It won''t be able to call anyone."


    PAT-2899 was surprised at that. Part of his surprise was he hadn''t even thought to send out a call for help. He really was not good with this emergency pirate defense. He did want to get that connection off so he could have feeling again and could move. He was coming up with a plan, but it required the current people around to be massively more distracted.


    Fagin stood up as he seemed to be getting a communication through something in his ear. PAT-2899 figured it was part of a communication device the way Fagin tilted his head with a couple fingers pressing on his ear. HE started nodding his head and biting his lip then looked at Heather and Gunther. "They have the package, but the power requirements are more than we were told. That portable battery the contact pointed them to is not going to hold up long. We need to tap into the trucks power for the trip. Gunther, go grab two of those cables. They should fit the container. We''ll just have to splice it on this old model''s container accessory power line."


    PAT-2899 was panicking. His power cells were less than half full. Who knew what the power draw was for the mysterious package. It''d taken him over 2 hours to drive from the TAC and there were no connections in that span that would power him back up. He thought of mentioning this, but he decided to keep quiet so they wouldn’t do anything rash to him. He would play along and be a pirate for the rest of the day. He just needed to figure out how he could conserve power now until he got back to the TAC. The only way he could do it would be to disconnect Fagan''s control box.


    Fagan and Heather were working on the power coupling now. They seemed tense and did not talk much as they spliced the cable wires and new connectors together. Their heads briefly bobbed up as the loud noise of container lifter wheels bounced through the doors at the far side of the shipping dock warehouse.


    A whole container was being brought towards him. He realized that he was not configured for a full container, so he began expanding out the shipping bed. That action garnered a yelp from Heather as she dropped the cable she was working with and jumped up.


    Fagan just looked up briefly from where he worked on attaching the power connection. "Don''t worry about it. Looks like this machine noticed the container was bigger than the last one it carried. It''s good it''s being cooperative as I couldn’t get in all its systems."


    "Fagan!" one of the others called to him.


    "Just hold for a moment. I have to seal off this last wire." Which he did with some compressing tape and a spray.


    One Fagan was done, they lifted the container on the rollers on his container platform. They did a crappy job and had to do several tries to get it straightened out and aligned with the hold down clamps. While they were distracted with that, PAT-2899 made his move and discretely released his two drones into the air.


    The jammer Fagan had mounted did prevent him from controlling the drones with radio signals. It did not prevent him using the laser backup. The laser was invisible but allowed him bi-directional communication with the two drones as long as they stayed in line of sight of him. He sent them straight up in the air, so they only looked like dots from the ground.


    Once the container was latched on, which they had to manually. Fagan and heather opened the container and pulled the power cable in. PAT-2899''s view was not great to the container inside. He saw a large box shaped thing under a tarp taking up most of the container. Fagan removed a cable that was connected to a large battery in front of the tarp. He reconnected it to the cable attached PAT-2899''s container accessor power connector. PAT-2899 immediately felt the drain. This was not good. He was going to have to do something about this.


    Once the power source was secured, all but Fagan went and sat in the container. Fagan made his way to the box he had attached to PAT-2899''s container monitoring connection. After a few touches on the screen attached to the box, PAT-2899 found himself backing out alongside the loading dock. All of sudden there was a jerking and a loud scraping sound.


    "Oh. Hold tight. Not a problem… this is a little harder than I thought manually steering this way. Just have to get a hang of which way the controls move this thing. Especially backwards," Fagan yelled to the others who were looking out of the container opening. PAT-2899 groaned to himself. His paint was scraped, and the side of his platform was now cracked. Damn pirates.


    With only one more bump against the loading dock and bumping into the beat-up Toyota truck in the parking lot, Fagan managed to pull out and turn around PAT-2899, who was now screaming in his own mind. They would pay for the damage they were doing to his wonderful body. He raged to himself at the pirates, though he not daring to confront them directly.


    The rage seethed until they got to the gate were he saw the security guard slumped over the small desk in the shack. Her face was visible and her eyes were open as a pool of blood spread and dripped down on her uniform. PAT-2899 mind went blank. These were not pirates as he thought. They were murderers. He never saw death before, beyond the turnoff and dismantling of other smart machines like him. This death was not the same. He understood what he was and somewhat understood why he was the way he was, but he had no problem being turned off and disassembled at any time. His survival instinct was linked to successful delivery of the products and packages he was assign. He existed for that role and he never thought past his existence.


    His views on human life was much more important to him. Those who manufactured him made him with that respect of human life through whatever magic they did in the process of his creation. Seeing the now deceased woman in the booth stirred odd feelings in him that he did not fully understand. He knew that her death was wrong. He could not prevent the death because it already happened, but he was feeling an enormous urge to do something. The urge was actually pushing him to do something to punish those who made her dead to the extent that he may even hurt them.


    As they made their way down the hillside PAT-2899 formed a plan. It would happen on this road and he knew exactly which switchback turn he would take action. It would take while for them to drive to that point because Fagan was going very slow down the narrow road. PAT-2899 began preparing. He would be ready and he would stop these murderers.