Chapter Text
Awake. Alive. A first breath, sudden, into lungs that have never known air. It hurts. It hurts, this… basic action needed to survive. My eyes open, and that hurts, like sandpaper across my retinas. I look around, and my eyes strain like atrophied muscles trying to remember how they used to move.
I don't know how I have the words for all of this… feeling. I'm aware, somewhere, that prior to this, I was nothing. These are my first moments of life, of sentience, and I shouldn't have any of the words or comparisons I'm drawing from for how much fucking pain I am in.
"Jesus Christ." There's a voice somewhere across the room from me; somewhere I haven't been able to make my eyes scan yet. My ears, at least, don't hurt. "Jesus Christ, it worked. It finally… you're finally…!"
The voice comes into view, and through squinted eyes, I can see the form of a human - a man, with dark circles under his eyes and short, frazzled hair. He looks me over, frantically, consulting something beside him. A monitor, I realize, as my eyes remember - or learn for the first time? - how to be eyes without sending pulses of agony down my nerves.
"What—" I try, then gasp deeply, searing my throat again. Shock. Somehow, in some way, I was able to speak independently of my breathing, and that went against… something. Something that I knew, something written deep in my… in…
…in my code?
The monitor near the man began beeping out some kind of warning, and the man looked back at me. "Hey, hey hey hey, shh shh shh shh shh, it's okay. You're okay. I'm going to explain everything, I know this is all strange and… and…"
"Painful," I supplied. I could feel a body coming online, limbs, fingers, toes, and as each handshake-connection completed, I felt another small firework under my skin, in my tendons, in my bones.
"…and painful," he continued, face apologetic, "but the pain should stop soon. I think. And once everything is online, I'll explain everything to you."
This was not comforting. I tried to sit up, splaying my hands flat against the metal table I was laid out on and pushing, shakily, and more irritated beeps from the monitor followed. I could feel the cords now, connected to ports all over my body, awkwardly tethering me in relative place as I tried to move. The man let out a few more "hey"s and "shh"s, like I was some kind of stray cat he was trying to coax, and a new part of me came online with a sunny confirmation in my vision: EMOTION MODULE CONNECTED AND STABLE!
And I was fucking pissed off about everything.
There were gaps in my knowledge, clearly, because as far as I knew, I shouldn't have confirmation notices in my vision, or wires shoved into me, or feel my limbs connecting to the rest of my body. The quiet, soothing voice of the man next to me and his stupid monitor chiding me made me even angrier.
I'd barely had the strength to push myself upright, and my arms felt heavy, almost like dead weight with moveable fingers at the ends. I jerked my shoulder around, the momentum swinging my arm so I could grip the man's shirt in my fist. Limply. It more pathetic than it was intimidating, and even I knew it.
There was a question I wanted - needed - to ask, but I couldn't find the words for it. Maybe I didn't have the words yet, or maybe I did, but they were scrambled in the rest of the bullshit that I was becoming aware was my start-up sequence. I grasped at the best way to say it that I could find and shoved the sentence through my mouth. "What the fuck am I?"
My initial startup sequence took three hours. During the last hour, my consciousness had come online. Early, I was made to understand. I wasn't supposed to be awake until the last fifteen minutes or so. That meant I had an hour of pain and gradual understanding as everything else caught up with me. It also meant that Farrow - that was his name - had an hour to explain things to me that apparently I would have known innately if my startup sequence had gone in the right order.
I was a machine. Yes, machines could be sentient, and it was more common now than one might think. No, I did not have any organic parts, but the database he'd gotten from who-the-fuck-knows-where built organic knowledge before machine knowledge, which is why I had originally assumed my body was organic, and had to follow organic rules, like "you cannot breathe in and talk normally at the same time." I was, in Farrow's words, a "pirated robot"; a patchwork of proprietary Wilycorp scraps and running off an OS that apparently was based on a Wilycorp bot once upon a time, but had been rebuilt so many times that the only scant lines of code left were there so that my parts would function with the OS at all.
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why did you build me?"
There was a long pause while Farrow sat back in his folding chair, considering this. We were in what I recognized now was a windowless basement. Aside from the metal table I'd woken up on and the monitor next to it, the basement wasn't exactly what my database was pulling up for "furnished". Not in a domestic sense. The far corner, near the stairs, had a single bed, worn and utilitarian, no frills. At the foot of the bed was a knee-high bookshelf, where it seemed to be a crime to have a book standing upright. Those were the only two non-workspace related items in the room. There was a drafting table, covered in papers both blue and white. There was one computer, one monitor, and about six billion wires between them, random electronics strapped to the unfinished ceiling, looping around the exposed lighting throughout the room, and me. Of course.
Analysis: this was not where Farrow lived, but he sure did spend a hell of a lot of time here.
"I just… needed to," he finally answered, and my attention snapped back to him.
"Why?"
"To prove I could."
"I'm a proof of concept?"
"Yes. No! I'm—" he drug a hand down his face, exhaustion painting his features. "You've got the history download now, right? You know what's going on out there, under Wily's regime, and we— I— we! …I. I needed to know I could do something to fight back. So I built you. I bought and salvaged your parts scrap by scrap, and it was a minor miracle I never got caught. Fuck, maybe I will get caught now. It's not like I can just keep a girl — machine or no — in an abandoned basement." He deflated and threw his hands up in a "well, whatever" gesture. I ran that gesture against my newly-processed historical records.
Analysis: flippancy either as a deflection tactic, or to the point of self-destruction. Or both.
We sat in silence for a long, long time. I'd run out of questions, for now, and now all I could do was process… everything. I was alive solely because a human saw creation as a way to spit in the face of a tyrannical, pseudo-utopian regime. That was what it boiled down to, in the end. Because I was a jigsaw of stolen pieces from dead robots, I could do a lot, and at the same time, very little. My pieces all worked together — just — but the ones that had a specific purpose coded into them did not match any of the others. I was one of a kind, because most creators with half a vision beyond "build to spite" had a purpose in mind for their robots. Who in their right mind builds a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-fuck-all machine on purpose?
But I was alive. And that wasn't nothing, if I was really being honest.
"How long did it take you to build me?" I asked, and my own voice sounded strangely distant, contemplative.
He let out a long, long sigh. "An eternity."