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They tell you you were someone, before. Sitting in the commons, Ashes and Scuzz perched next to each other on the counter, Aurora worrying over Nastya, Jonny nursing a bottle of whiskey, and Ivy rattling off explanations. To be mechanized, you have to be a person first, and then you die and the doctor fixes you and then you don’t die anymore.
“I don’t remember that,” you say, fingers nervously beating out a rhythm on your knee. “And Ivy, you said you didn’t either, so how d’you know?”
“I-” Aurora’s voice over the speakers glitches, and the lights flicker out for a brief second before coming back on again. “I recall the details footnote source I had to be there for everyone but Jonny I told Ivy 2458.7 years ago.”
You ask if she knows what your name was, and she says no. The doctor calls you Drumbot Beta, so you suppose that’s who you are now.
Scuzz hops off the counter in a neat practiced motion and looks over you with a critical eye. “That’s the most complex mechanism I’ve seen,” she says in Spjapanese. Before you can react, she’s a few inches away from you, coming out of some odd quick roll-step and leaning in close, inspecting the brass fused to you. “How did you die?”
“He doesn’t know citation needed , ” Aurora snaps. “Leave him alone.”
She ignores Aurora, dragging a fingernail across your plating with a painful screech. “Is your entire body metal? What is left?”
“I- I don’t know- it’s not everything.” Your metal plates and gears twist and dig into what is left of your flesh, pulling and cutting and bleeding and healing. You have been told you are immortal now, but it still hurts.
The doctor is the one who did this to you, they tell you, again and again, but you cannot help the buzzing and breaking in your head at that contradiction. You like her, says something built into your programming, you love her and you will never turn against her or leave her and she will not be alone again and you will be a good person.
The last thing sends you into a cognitive spiral more often than not; you do not know what a good person is, nor what qualifies you to be one. You watch the doctor, who your programming tells you is correct in what she does, is morally good and is trying her best, and you note her actions.
The first person you murder is on a heist, Jonny shooting and laughing and missing and Scuzz fluid and practiced and deadly and Carmilla sharp and bloody. You rip out someone’s throat the same way she did and smile at her with a fluttery sort of pride in your chest- that breaks to pieces when you see her expression, pale and aghast.
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Carmilla should have known it was futile, to try and make a Mechanism that was morally good. There was no easy parameters to define what good was. It changed with the planet and the culture and the times. She marks a terminated experiment, and when she hears of Brian’s story, a few years later searching for another person to mechanize, she throws her head back and laughs.