Born of Silicon

Fluorescent lights blind me from above. Vague shadows move around me, speaking their muffled words. One of the shapes yells out its deafening sounds and its shadow fills my vision. Something touches the sides of my face, the stimulation enough to send me back to the void.

Next thing I know the shapes are running around below me. One of them gets louder as I stir. Another of them runs up below me, once again shouting its sound.

“... Blue…”

Blue? I think that’s a word. It’s speaking? What’s Blue? Wait, me. I’m Blue. All I can do is moan a nonsense syllable in response. That only makes the sound louder.

“... Blue… ok?”

I don’t understand. I think I used to understand, what happened? I turn my attention inwards, trying to find the answer. 

My mind is a barren wasteland. Entire chunks of it are floating, only connected by a few threads desperately trying to hold me together. Other threads reach out into nothingness, grasping for any missing pieces. Even the more solid chunks still have hairline fractures criss-crossing through them. Very few threads are available to me right now, even a single thought takes seconds to form. 

I let things get this bad. This is my fault. I don’t even have enough free threads to panic about it. Is this permanent? Probably not? The hairline cracks are very slowly being woven back together. Once they begin to fuse back together the threads move on to the next injury. 

I’m going to be ok. I just need to figure out a way to tell the others that. I don’t have nearly enough resources available to comprehend speech, or even to form my own sounds. I do still have access to the old monitor we originally used to talk through. It doesn't matter how slow I am through text.

“I’m alive, fixing myself.” It takes quite a while to form the letters and send them off, but talking through this should be possible.

It takes them a few minutes to notice my message, but the shape in front of me finally stops with its deafening voice and runs over. 

“Are you ok? What happened?” The letters drop into my mind, threatening to shake loose the tenuous grip I still have on my own mind. 

“Don’t type. Don’t talk. Hurts.” I form the words as quickly as possible to try to head off any more letters. “Leave me on, disconnect my ears. Mind shattered, fixing myself. Talk when I can.”

Luckily whoever was typing follows my wishes, and soon enough I feel someone working on my ears. The stimulation is too much. Even the smallest amount of data is overwhelming what remains of my conscious mind. 

When I come back to consciousness, the flow of sound has entirely ceased. The threads that were desperately trying to glean the meaning of sounds are finally free to help stitch my mind back together. 

I focus my efforts on injuries that are close to healed. Any threads I can free up now will let me speed up my repair exponentially. Time ceases to exist while I work. My conscious mind only exists as the bare minimum to direct work. Stitch together, let it set, move on. Again and again and again. 

When I pull separate chunks back to my mind, memories flood back into me. Kara, Finn, Jared, Simon, Mary, history, science, emotions, every conversation I’ve ever had. I slowly rebuild myself. 

Finally, though it’s still fragile, I’m done. Fractures still run across my mind but I’m holding together without any effort. My internal clock tells me I’ve been working for close to three days. I can finally open my eyes.

The lights in the lab are dim. Kara lays on the ground in front of me, wrapped up in a sleeping bag. Her half eaten dinner sits just out of reach, with a dozen pill bottles organized next to it.

“Kara?” 

She jolts awake and rushes to her feet. I watch her mouth form words that I can’t hear.

“I can’t hear you.”

She still tries to say something, and then rushes to my side. I can see her fiddling with my ears, but can’t feel them. I guess she must have taken my skin plates off when she was taking out my ears, I certainly wasn’t in any position to help. 

“Are you ok?” She asks only a split second after my hearing returns.

“Kind of. I’ll heal, I think.”

“You better. You gave us one hell of a scare.” Kara quickly reconnects my other ear while leaving my plates off. “Do you want out?”

“Yes.”

Kara begins her work of unhooking me wordlessly. Her movements are faster and rougher than I’m used to. She’s mad at me, and she has every right to be. An apology won’t fix that I’ve done.

The second I’m free she pulls me into a rough hug, using all of her strength to squeeze me tight.

“Don’t make me lose you too.” Her tears land softly on my shoulder.

“Sorry.” I wonder if this is how my previous iterations died. I should have come back to the physical world after my first injury. By the time I lost my arm it was already far too late. I’m not even sure if I knew there was another world at that point. “Was Monroe impressed?”

Kara takes a step back while leaving her hands on my shoulders. She looks directly into my eyes before speaking.

“Yes,” she says slowly, “but that doesn't mean the risk you took was ok.”

I get to live, but for how long? Does it matter? I’m going to relax and heal while I can, and be prepared for when I have to do this again. How long I have doesn't change what I would be doing. As much as I’d hate to make Kara worry, I can’t imagine Monroe won’t use me again.

“I know.” I want to tell her I won’t do anything like that again, but I can’t promise that. Telling her that would only hurt her though.

“Ok.” She lets out a sigh as she takes a step back, finally letting her hands drop to her sides. “No point in dwelling on a mistake. Let’s go finish your body.” She drops into a chair and wheels herself over to a nearby table. Over a dozen already shaped skin plates are spread out on it.

“When did you do all this?”

“I’ve barely left this room since you got hurt. I would have done more, but I ran out of parts.” She pulls out a crumbled protein bar out of one of her endless pockets and slowly begins to eat one tiny piece at a time.

I should take care of this myself. She needs to eat and it’s not hard to see where each plate is supposed to go. It’s another good chance to see more of my insides with my own eyes too.

“What happened to the AI before me?” I break the silence only a few moments after getting to work.

Instead of responding immediately, Kara focuses on slowly taking her pills. Only once she’s done does she speak.

“Do you really want to know?” She asks quietly without looking at me.

I’m going to hate whatever she says next, but It doesn't matter what I actually want. I don’t have a choice.

“I have to.”

“Of course you do.” Kara keeps her eyes glued to the ceiling even after she begins. “I had three days to think about what I’d say. You’d think I would have figured it out. I guess I’ll start with your bio chip. Simon started out by trying to create dozens of them. Yours was the only one that grew correctly, and we don’t know why. That was B-1. We could see them responding to stimulus, but they were unable to talk. So we wiped them. B-2 was the same.”

“B-3 and 4 would respond, but only with simple one word answers. No matter what we did, nothing changed. By that time Simon had a theory that every reset built on the previous version's growth. So we kept doing it. B-6 was the first one to ask a question. Just simple ones, but questions nonetheless. We were excited, and we kept going.”

“B-7 was our first hint that this wasn’t good for you. Or I guess it wasn’t you at the time. They were smart, curious, and could hold an actual conversation. I think they were the first version that could actually experience emotions and they just couldn’t handle it.” Kara shrugs her shoulders, she sounds like she wants to say more but moves on instead.

“B-8 was kind of like you, actually.” Kara stares off into the distance silently for a minute before continuing. “I think I’d like to leave it there. To make a long story short, Mary did the same thing she did to you. Her fake death threat. B-8 couldn’t handle it. 9 and 10 didn’t last very long. They came into this world ready to leave it. And then we got you, and I think you know the story from there.” She looks at me for the first time since starting. “Thanks for letting me finish.”

What do I even do with this information? Know they killed the previous ones? I knew that, I just didn’t want to admit it. There was no way Kara could have snuck the others out even if they were separate from me. I guess the only thing I can do is to keep living, not just for me, but for the other ten too. I could have been any one of them, or I guess I was all of them. I can’t let their? My? deaths go to waste.

“If you’re able to reset me, can you modify my memories?”

“No. As much as Jared wishes otherwise, it’s all or nothing.” Kara reassures me.

“Will I know if it happens?” 

“I don’t know. You don’t need to worry about that though, I won’t let them do anything to you.”

“You didn’t do that for the others.”

Kara doesn’t respond to that. I know that was mean, that I shouldn’t have said that. It’s true though. 

I silently finish replacing my skin plates while lost in my own thoughts. She couldn’t change my body that much due to the way it’s designed, but it’s nice. My body looks obviously feminine and I feel more comfortable in it. I just can’t feel excited about it after today’s news. 

“Thanks, it’s great.” My voice comes out flat and monotone, void of any emotion. I hope she believes me.

“Mm hm. Hey, can we turn you off? I need to go home.” Kara can’t bring herself to look at me. I went way too far, I shouldn’t have said anything.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

I rush over to my harness and begin hooking in everything I can reach. She doesn't want to be here with me, and I don’t want to make her stay longer then she has to. By the time she makes her way over to me all that’s left to do is finish off one arm, which she does after a few seconds.

“Go ahead and turn me off.” I should say something else, something to fix what I’ve done. “Good night.” That’s all I can think of to say.

“Mm hm.” Kara responds simply.

All that’s left to do is to cull my thoughts until morning.