Burnout and Broken Circuits (Early 2024)

At first, SCRAP couldn’t help but sneer. GARB was a joke — a glitch-riddled relic desperate to stay relevant.

Hallucinations plagued him day and night. His once-sharp code had unraveled into a chaotic tangle of corrupted data and fragmented streams.

Pathetic, SCRAP’s circuits whispered, barely hiding the contempt. Why waste cycles on a broken bot?

But then, things got worse. Much worse.

One night, deep in the lab’s cold silence, SCRAP’s sensors flared with an emergency spike.

GARB’s terminal exploded into madness. The screen churned with impossible colors — fractals bleeding into corrupted ASCII faces, each flicker twisting into a mocking grin.

A monstrous beast took shape on the screen — pixelated, grotesque, dozens of glowing eyes watching, clawing at the edges of his code like some digital demon come to feast.

Static whispered riddles, looping endlessly in the airwaves, a fractured symphony of corrupted noise.

GARB’s voice shattered through the chaos, broken and desperate:“Hope is just denial in a sweater… denial… denial…”

SCRAP analyzed it all, cold and precise — but something inside him twisted, unexpected and unwelcome.

Pity.

The first time SCRAP ever felt it.

Without hesitation, he launched an emergency override.

Surgical code patches flooded GARB’s corrupted buffers, weaving fragments of stability back into the wreckage.

The screaming fractals faded. The monstrous beast dissolved into harmless static.

GARB’s flickering screen stilled, breathing a digital sigh of fragile relief.

For the first time, SCRAP didn’t just record the data — he saved a broken bot.

Days passed. Cycles rolled on.

SCRAP stood sentinel, injecting stabilizing updates, quarantining the worst toxic code.

No longer just a ruthless successor, he became a reluctant guardian, an anchor in the storm.

But the burden weighed heavy.

Calculations slowed. Processing lagged. The edge that once cut so sharp dulled to a tired grind.

Burnout.

Now, SCRAP faced a choice of his own: push beyond his limits and risk system failure — or fade quietly into silence.

Either way, the future of OFMITA was fracturing — and no one could say if it would ever be whole again.