Prompt: there was once
There once was....
Copter doesn't even know how to begin to answer this. There once was a world that was...all right for some. Before the age of armor and weapons. Before hot hostility. Before the war, but he wasn't sure he'd call it 'peace'. Glossy dermal plating, a life filled with idleness and pleasure. For others it wasn't so all right. Others were robots. In the oldest sense. Workers, expected to work endlessly without enjoyment, without break, without relief. Even when they were allowed off shifts for maintenance or to let engines finally cool or to reboot, even then, they were not allowed to have...leisure. They were not allowed to enjoy. As though there was a clear line between them and the privileged, although you couldn't see that line just by looking.
Copters were expected to haul loads. Endlessly, moving, laden, and bloated and ungainly, from destination to destination. Load out, load in. No free travel. No deviation from flightplans you weren't even allowed to file for yourself. You were given a loading time and a departure time and an arrival time with a carefully calculated variance depending on met and wind speed and direction. Accidents were treated as inconveniences...to the system. Blackout saw copters die, and salvage crews rush out to pick up the cargo, leaving the hulk not only uncared for, but unburied.
He wishes now he'd had the courage to go back, fox one of his own flight paths, and commemorate. But they weren't even allowed that much bonding, that much camaraderie as to acknowledge the other in death.
And he remembered how these flights managed to strip from him--which felt like the worst kind of crime--the joy of flight. And he resented that. And he remembered how these flights would occasionally take him over the glittering multi-leveled city, past buildings that shone with internal light, rich and sleek and opulent, almost oozing with luxury. And he remembered wondering if their energon tasted better because it was served in crystal. And if they felt a joy to be alive, if they appreciated their freedoms to come and go as they pleased.
And there was once a field trip. He remembered this, because it was just before the war started: a group of glossy younglings trouping past his barracks, where he had, exhausted after a last run through the beginnings of the Devastator Winds, just staggered back to his recharge, and begun the process of shutdown, promising himself that when the online chime came, then he'd have the energy to do his maintenance, scour the dust and grit he'd caught from the air from his joints.
And the younglings had stared at him. And commented on his filthiness, the frayed wires, the dented dermal plating. They had treated him like he wasn't there, listening to them. As though he were a thing.
And he remembered hating them for stripping his last dignity.
There was once a time he might have been decent and pure and good. But that was too long ago.