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Exploring his newly-discovered robotic body was a few odd days.
He spent most of that time holed up in the Bounty's engine room, where no one, except the occasional Jay or Nya would come to do repairs and maintenance, would wander—giving him the closest semblance he could get in such a small space of privacy. He'd brought back some of his blueprints his creator—his father—had left in the hidden workshop, studied them, then tremulously taken a screwdriver to his own chest. He'd been built so astonishingly ingeniously that he'd had no idea there were bolts and screws set into his body, cleverly hidden in the metal of his frame.
Opening up his chest panel was arguably the strangest experience of his life—inside was a veritable spider's web of tiny cables and wires hooked up to circuit boards, minuscule switches and thin piping of some kind of coolant fluid circulating his body, rather than blood. His synthetic skin however, showed nothing of the strange bluish liquid that ran through him, glamoured by the deceitful colour the skin provided, rather than the dim blue glow that would certainly shine through had his human disguise not been there. His skin created the illusion of veins under the surface, mimicking the natural warmth of human skin.
Zane had no idea how he was even possible—the technology that was around now, let alone what it had been roughly twenty years ago when he'd been built—was still limited and primitive in terms of what engineers could contribute to building something close to himself. His creator was beyond extraordinary for accomplishing what he did, considering he was completely alone and separated in doing so.
Borg Industries has been making breakthroughs recently, as far as he was aware, but even that company's triumphs in the world of engineering were small compared to himself.
How was a single man able to build a fully autonomous android that, upon the flick of a single switch, would have completely forgotten his origin. How could a being such as himself have no idea what he was? He lived in his body, had been aware and functioning for several years since his memory was locked away, and still had absolutely no idea that he wasn't human.
How could he have been built so perfectly that even he didn't know? It was a relative miracle that nothing had happened to him in those few years that revealed his true origin—not a fall or an accident that had hurt him enough to reveal his inorganic interior. An injury like a broken bone for a human would reveal that he technically had no bones, just a super-lightweight metal-alloy skeleton housing blue fluid instead of blood and tendons and muscles. He had mechanical muscles and tendons, limited in their range of motion to that of a remarkably athletic human. He could eat, could sleep, felt tiredness and hunger and fatigue to a point, felt fear and contentment and happiness—a range of distinctly human emotions
All these normal human functions were just mockeries of the real things; he technically didn't need to eat nor sleep—he could taste and feel texture of food and the sensation of hunger, but any and all food he consumed went straight through his imitation of a digestive track to come out again like it would for a human, except eating was a complete waste of time since he absorbed not a single calorie and got no nutritional value from it. He didn't need it. The imitation of eating was just there to keep up the illusion that he was human. How was he to know that the food he was eating contributed nothing to his overall upkeep?
It was the same with the concept of sleep—he'd always through that he needed to sleep like any other human, to conserve and rejuvenate his energy, after all, humans have never survived more than eleven days without sleep. Turns out, his 'sleeping' had just been him entering a low-power stasis mode, where he mimicked human sleep eerily accurately; everything from quiet snoring to shifting and turning over.
That was the case with practically everything about him. He had no reason to breathe, being an android, but he had a pair of synthetic lungs that mimicked the look and feel of breathing, even impersonating coughing when he encountered things like dust. He blinked and yawned and had a fake heartbeat that was really just the pulsing whirring of his spinning power core in place of a beating heart; he sighed and salivated and sneezed. He had all the human senses—taste, smell, touch, sight, hearing, balance.
It was all to keep up the illusion of humanity. He was a perfect example of seamless integration between androids and humans.
Jay had been ever so kind in aiding him in his investigations into his true self. He and Nya were the only two others in their group that had any knowledge of technology and machinery. Kai and Cole were hopeless in the field. Nya, however, was better at the grit and bulk of engineering—building a huge fighting mech was her strong point. Jay was better at the fine details, surprisingly, considering how endearingly scatter-brained he could be at times. He had an eye for minuscule details and had co-authored Zane's new personal blueprints, helping him categorise and define each and every part of his robotic self.
Some small part of him wonders that, if he had the opportunity to choose, whether he'd have chosen to remain ignorant—maybe he would've been better off unaware. He'd been doing adequate without knowing, and ignorance is bliss as the saying goes, and perhaps he would've been able to go through his life without a care in the world. Sure, he had some trouble with sarcasm and the subtle nuances of social interaction and humour, but plenty of people shared that plight. He wasn't alone in that sense. People generally took his eccentricities as bizarre, but as part of his personality.
But at the same time, perhaps he's better off knowing. He can access his memories now, so at least he knows of his origin and creator. A very tiny, very worried part of him had wondered what he'd been like in his old life, in that strange void of time where his memory was blank and empty. Had he been a bad person? A criminal? Was his lack of a family his fault? At least those anxieties had been soothed.
And finally knowing had been rather like a balm on his background confusion and queries. No longer was he curious about why had trouble deciphering people, how he could hold his breath for so long—the answer being he didn't need to actually breathe—and why his memory was so unreliable, mostly blank space. If he hadn't discovered his true origin, would he ever have reached his True Potential? Would there have been another way to reach that point? It seems he'll never know.
With his memory and therefore his entire understanding that he was mechanical in origin, everything that came with his android body was opened up to him. His mind and the way he structured his thoughts was a little different, like he was seeing through an extraordinarily complex computer interface, with his ideas and how he perceived stimuli being fed back to him as lines of code decipherable to only him. Instead of a spinal cord through which everything was relayed back to his brain, he had his wires and his interfaces going to his processors, storing memories and experiences and feelings and concepts in his seemingly never-ending hard drive of a brain. He had access to the internet without the need for a phone or computer and could bring up anything online straight into his field of vision, like he was wearing a virtual reality headset.
Becoming aware of his true nature had been more than a shock. It had been even harder to explain to his teammates who he was—what he was. For a few brief moments, he'd been terrified; terrified of being rejected, of them being scared of him, of them hating him; being kicked out of the team because of what he was.
Inhuman.
After finding out, the thing he'd been scared of most was his friends' rejection. In the time it had taken for them to find him in the workshop, all he had thought about was what he was going to do once they found out—he couldn't keep it a secret forever—and all he could think about was how horrible their disgust or their hatred or their shunning was going to be.
His teammates' unconditional acceptance and interest was like nothing he'd ever experienced. He finally felt like he had a place, somewhere to belong, people to belong to. Being able to protect his friends from the treehorns was an incredible feeling.
These were his first real friends since his memory had been blocked off. Not the acquaintances he'd made in the tiny village outside the Birchwood Forest. True friends that liked him despite his oddness and his misunderstanding of basic social cues, liked him and cared for him despite how strange they initially found him. All he could think about was how devastated he would be once they found out and promptly kicked him off the team for good.
But they didn't.
It's still confusing to think about, even though weeks have passed since then. Jay has been nothing but enthusiastic to help him learn what wires in his arm do what. He'd been the one to bestow the teasing but entirely accepting 'nindroid' crown on him barely minutes after they'd found out about him.
"You're still the same Zane, just more, uh—gears."
"No matter what you're made of, you're still our brother."
"How cool is it that I can honestly say 'my brother is a nindroid'?"
Their friendship is something that makes him feel human, despite everything. Like nothing changed, like he's still the same mildly eccentric Zane who doesn't always catch sarcasm. Like he hasn't changed.
For that, he'll be forever grateful.