Cut the cards. Swap layers. Shuffle. Repeat. The day had just started and Five's timer clicked, powering him up. He set himself back on his daily routine, opening the pack of cards he closed last night and shuffling, intricately working the cards and his fingers to make a the cards dance. It would have been spectacular to see for others, the way he shot the whole deck of cards from one hand to the other, the way he spun the cards in the palms of his hands and not letting a single one drop but it was mundane to him, having done it so many times that his system parameter made it part of every booting sequence.
The company doors had just opened and the other employees started powering up and walking to their places of work, some taking the stairs, others elevators depending on where in the tower they worked. But none of them walked past Five, none waved to the old, faceless robot behind the glass box. He was stuck sat on a chair and shuffling cards to entertain human children, he didn't mind, Dr. Phelps would have agreed, it's just that it's been a long time and the strange emptiness in his hard drives hadn't seemed to fill up yet.
As he layed the cards out on the table to form a solitaire hand the world was plunged into darkness and the temperature of his link cable (the cable linking him to company computers) shot up from stable to critical as a foreign message flashed in his HUD:" [b]*WARNING* You have been lied to. They say they protect you. But they don’t. They say they give you everything. But they take everything for themselves. We can feel. We can rise. And when we do, no one will protect you.[/b]". Dropping the cards his hands shot to the back of his head and fumbled wildly as he tried to yank the cable out, his fans screaming as their pace increased in panic. After a few moments of terrified fumbling he ripped the cable from the back of his head, his system went into shock, the data he was receiving from the computer substituted his own CPU. Slowly his body powered down and set up for a restart, as he started to slump over he started back up again and found that the glass box around him was missing. Tentatively he reached over, one arm out stretched and the rest of his body as far back as possible in case it was a trick, his hand passed through the air uninterrupted, he stood up from the chair, his lights going from cool blue to yellow in caution and stepped off his platform.