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Sometimes they call me "the Doctor" like I'm a machine like the landship or the air conditioning. Sometimes they call me "Doctor--" and then the name of the person that I have to pretend to be. I don't know which one I dislike more.
There's only three people that know the truth about who I am: Kal'tsit, Warfarin, and Closure. Everyone else thinks that that preserved corpse they found in the sarcophagus came back to life, or never really died.
Closure's the one that has to perform maintenance on me. All my "medical" appointments are shams; the real repairs happen when Closure's engaged in "top-secret research". I can get along with her pretty well, though I wish she'd stop trying to pressure me into "upgrades" that she swears she's totally tested for real this time. But I can be myself with her, not the Doctor everyone else wants me to be. She helps me try out voices, names, identities that are my own and not those of a dead woman. I haven't found anything I like yet, but I'm only a few months old.
Kal'tsit knows because, well, she knows everything around here. I asked her why we couldn't tell all the other staff, once. She said that it'd destroy morale, to know that the woman that they thought they were saving was already dead, that all the dead Operators were just for her the tactical knowledge locked in her brain. "But what about my morale?" I said in my stolen voice, and she just tells me it's a necessary sacrifice.
Oh, and Warfarin had to be brought in on our little conspiracy to fake the Rhodes Island medical records properly, of course. I don't interact with her a whole lot, since she's about as good at working on me as Closure is at biology. But apparently she's got a pen name she wrote a lot of work under. Maybe I can ask her what that's like sometime.
It's fortunate for this scheme that the old Doctor was in the habit of wearing these loose, baggy clothes. Means nobody can look too close at me, see the seams in where my body is put together, notice that my eyes don't quite look right. Sometimes I think about pulling up the sleeve or smashing my arm open just so everybody can see it. But I don't. Not sure if that's just because I know Kal'tsit is right, or if there's some override that someone snuck into my programming. Neither option is appealing.
I wish I didn't have to do this. Maybe one day I'll be able to drop the lie, tell everyone who I really am. But until then, I am the Doctor.