Chapter Text
Penny opens her eyes. Her sight is blurry. She sends the command for her ocular receptors to readjust focus. They do, after a strange lag that bothers her. Penny initializes a system diagnostic to find out what’s going on. Something feels off, but she can’t quite articulate what. The diagnostics scan takes longer than usual, like it’s been a while since it’s functioned properly. Penny feels herself frown. That can’t be right. Even when she is in her ‘offline’ state, she always has background systems working, monitoring, keeping her functioning at capacity. They wouldn’t just be shut off, not unless…
Spotlights. An arena. A figure in red and gold. The excitement of a tournament battle.
Tension on Floating Array’s cables. Reports that the individual blades are no longer under her control all competing for her attention. The sensation of wire twisting around her limbs. The screeching of metal tearing.
Penny sucks in a breath to her artificial lungs. Her chest heaves. Her body is there. Attached to her. She’s attached. Her head is attached to her body and her arms and legs—spinning through the air, going away, away from her—are there. There. Attached. Penny struggles to move. She wants reassurance. The sensation of movement. As a whole. Not witnessing her parts move on their own. Unity. Being. She’s herself. She’s herself. She’s herself.
Yanking one arm up uproots numerous wires and cables Penny realizes have attached her to a large computer bank. She doesn’t care, though she normally would have felt bad. She wants, she needs, confirmation.
Warning alarms blare. Penny ignores them. She pulls her other arm free, and then uses both hands to detach the cables plugged into her legs. She slides her fingertips over herself. Her motion processors aren’t calibrated properly. Her hands move jerkily. It doesn’t matter. She can feel herself, her wholeness.
She catches the echo of running footsteps only after she recognizes that someone has come into close proximity to her. Penny attempts to brace her body—prepare for battle—but no part of her listens to the command properly. Her legs slide out in opposite directions, one shoots off a green laser that blasts into a wall. Penny yelps. That’s new. That’s new, right? That wasn’t one of her abilities before. She attempts to access her memory banks.
The Vytal Festival Arena. Pyrrha Nikos. White noise increasing in volume. Distant screams.
No, no, no.
Penny scrambles. She needs to fight, to protect herself, to, to, to…
“Penny, darling, you’re safe. Please, you need to calm down.” The voice is familiar, and kindly, but Penny can’t quite place it. She tries to retreat, and does manage to put an approximate two inches between herself and the person. Penny trembles. She doesn’t want to be hurt. She doesn’t want to be hurt. She doesn’t want to be hurt.
“Penny, please,” the voice; a gentle plea now, “I can help.” A hand is held out to her. Her sight isn’t focused, but she recognizes the shape. One of her oldest memories comes back to her.
Safe. He is safe. He is home.
Penny manages to take her father’s hand.
Softly, Pietro runs a hand over her cheek. She hears his relieved sigh, and then he shuts her off.
The next time Penny wakes up, it’s only her consciousness that comes online. Her physical apparatus has been manually turned off. That makes Penny feel something, but, without her complex emoting system active, she can’t quite comprehend or express the panic.
An incoming message chirps. Penny, are you receiving this? Please respond. It repeats five times over in her mind before she remembers how to mentally text a response.
Message received. Sending confirmation.
The next message comes almost instantly. Do you know who you are?
Penny. That’s what she was called in the first message. It feels fitting. It’s the right designation, she’s sure of it.
Do you know what you are?
I am the first synthetically created person capable of generating an aura, she recites one of her Base Facts, the absolute truths she knows about herself.
Very good. I am going to turn on your auditory receivers in 5…4…3…2…1…
“Penny, can you hear me?”
The sound waves enter her. Penny processes them, runs a diagnostic check on her hearing systems, gets a conclusive result, and sends ‘auditory receivers functioning at 100%’ back.
“Very good, darling. Next, I’m going to reactivate your voice. I want you to give me verbal confirmation this time.”
Penny recognizes the alert telling her another system has come back online. Her first reaction is to send another text transmission. She stops and reminds herself she’s supposed to talk.
How? The question arises in her. She knows she’s herself and she’s supposed to communicate with something Not Her, but the exact process of doing that vocally alludes her. She sends the query to her memory banks, which send back a step-by-step tutorial.
Cautiously, Penny activates her mouth. She opens and closes her jaw, runs her tongue over her teeth and her lips, while also slowly adjusting to the sensation of moving a part of her. She signals her vocal box to operate. The first sounds she makes are a garbled alphabet, meant only to remind herself of how each letter falls off the tongue. Once she’s done that, Penny carefully organizes the sounds into the words, “Speech systems fully functional.”
She hears a relieved exhale that the owner of has likely been holding in. “Alright, good. How are you feeling? Do you need a break? You’re doing very well, sweetheart.”
“Why?” She articulates the question as soon as it comes to her. “I don’t understand. What is the purpose of a ‘break’?”
“To rest, if you feel overwhelmed.” There is a pause. “This is the second time you’ve come back online. The first time, you overloaded.”
Penny responds, “I have no recording of an overload in my memory banks.”
“That’s because I’ve manually restricted your retrieval access to only your default files.” There is a sigh. “You went through quite an ordeal, Penny.” A very long pause follows that statement. “You died.”
Processing that statement is a struggle. Penny tries over and over again, but fails. “I don’t understand. I am not dead now. Death comes after life. If I am alive now, how could I be dead before now?”
There is a hesitance in the voice as it speaks, “After…after the incident, we recovered your core. It was intact. I was able to build a new body for you around it.”
“Oh.” Penny thinks about that. She can’t remember what she looked like Before, but that’s because she doesn’t have access to those memories. She doesn’t like that. Knowing there is a Past Version of herself, but not having access to it. “I would like you to remove the restriction on my memory banks, please,” she requests.
Silence answers her. At first. Then, “All right. We’ll start at the very beginning and work our way until…until that day.”
The first memory restored to Penny is what the face of her father, the person who’s now speaking to her, Pietro Polendina looks like. He was the first thing she ever saw. He’d been in front of her as she initialized for the very first time. He’d smiled so wide, so proudly, when she opened her eyes and looked back at him.
Next comes the year she spent living in her father’s lab, as she adjusted and learned about life. Combat training started precisely a month into her second year of existence, by the order of General Ironwood. Penny remembers looking up at the sky above the training courtyard and wondering at how much more lovely it was seeing it in person than illustrated in a book.
A long series of memories play out in Penny’s mind and reorganize themselves into their proper places in her memory banks. The process becomes repetitious. Penny concentrates less on it. She enjoys remembering, but she knows enough to feel like herself now. She wants to open her eyes, move around, and be herself again.
If she could gasp, at that moment, she would have. One of her memories from her trip to Beacon Academy for the Vytal Festival grabs her attention. There’s a face, a face she hardly believes she forgot. Well, technically speaking, there’s four faces and the other three do eventually come to mean something to Penny too, but this is the face of the very first person to call her friend.
Ruby Rose comes in and out of Penny’s memories. There’s too few instances of her, in Penny’s opinion. Little gemstones snuck in between the hours of monotony of her daily life under the supervision of the Atlesian Military while in Vale. Remembering Ruby again makes Penny feel happy, which makes her realize her emotions have begun functioning again.
Penny takes a breath. “I believe I am doing much better now, father.” She pauses. “When I am back to full functionality, may I request a visit to my friend, Ruby? I very much want to see her again.”
“I—“ Pietro inhales sharply. “We’ll discuss it when we’re done here.” He pauses. “How about we take a break from memory restoration and get you up and moving around again?”
“Okay.” Penny recognizes that something isn’t quite right, but she’s uncertain about pressing the matter.
They quickly check her sense of taste with a lemon drop, one of her favorite candies, and her sense of smell with a candle scented vanilla and strawberry, one of her favorite smell combinations. Finally, Penny is able to open her eyes and look around. She focuses her sight on Pietro and smiles at him. He smiles back.
Penny watches Pietro disconnect her right leg from the computer bank, waits while it recalibrates itself, and then moves it around to test it out. They repeat the process with her left leg, and then her arms. Finally, Pietro goes for the cable attacked to her main processor.
Penny stops him. “We haven’t finished the memory restoration yet.”
“I know, but perhaps we could do that tomorrow? It’s getting late and—”
“I would like all my memories back.” For the record, Penny doesn’t consider herself capable of being ‘snippy’. It is rather impolite. This is the closest she’d ever gotten.
Pietro runs a hand over the top of his head. “I know.” He exhales. “I’ll admit, I’m a little bit scared. I designed you to have perfect recollection, which means…”
“I’ll remember my death,” Penny finishes for him. She looks down at her hands. “But it’s mine to remember, and,” she turns her head back up to face her father. “You’ll be here beside me to whole time.” She tries a shaky smile. “So, nothing will go wrong.”
“What I ever did to deserve your unwavering faith in me, I don’t think I’ll ever know.” Pietro chuckles. “But, if you’re ready?” He asks for confirmation.
Penny nods. Then, she remembers the last day of her life.
Before today, when it starts again.