Mask of Humanity

Nicolai awoke to find himself under assault by waves of sensation. He felt oddly expansive, free and undefined.

He heard a strange grunting from nearby, as though from an animal, and experienced an intense urge to move and see what it was. He attempted to do so but merely flopped, everything reeling around him. A sense of familiarity nagged at him as he twitched, searching for hardware connections.

Nicolai quickly realised he wasn’t in Zero-Twelve. The vast number of artificial functions and systems he had grown used to were gone. Yet, he could see the endless white sky, he could move, and there were a hundred other strange things filling his awareness, some of which gradually came into focus. A sense of pressure. Warmth and cold. Soft and scratchy.

Then, sensations more subtle yet just as pressing. Things he struggled to make sense of, but which squeezed through him and shoved themselves into prominence nonetheless. Emotions?

He flailed his body, a cloying confusion rising and becoming all-consuming. His control eroded, seized by something that rose through him. Movement flashed in the corner of his vision, something pale and pink, coming rapidly towards him, and the thing cracked him just below one of his primary cameras.

There was an explosion of sensation and a noise, like a scream or a yell.

That was when he realised the sound had come from him, and he stopped moving.

‘Aahhhhh,’ he said, staring up at the white. ‘Aahhhgghh. Uuurrrr. Huhhh. Huh.’

He moved similarly as he had earlier, and the pale thing came again, flopping in front of him.

It was a hand. It was his hand, attached to his arm. He tried to hold it in front of him but it went careening away and he pulled it back, hearing and feeling the thump as it hit him in the chest, enjoying the sensation now that he knew what it was.

‘Ahh, ahahaha,’ he laughed, jerking the arm back and forth madly. The laughter rose into the empty sky, shaky and strange and continuous, moving up and down in pitch with his breathing.

He began to understand, but he couldn’t quite believe it. ‘Hrrrr. Hum-huma-human,’ he gurgled. ‘Eee. Ahm. Huma.’ He wanted to see his body and he tried to sit up but everything went wobbly again and he found himself lying on his front, staring into the grass, breathing it, another of the bewildering sensations now shifting to come into focus as he recognised it for his sense of smell, drawing in the fresh green scent. One of the previous sensations rose within him as he struggled to push himself away from the ground, to look at his body. He recognised it, now. It was frustration, and it forced him into action.

Rolling and bumping, he shoved himself up and immediately collapsed. He tried again, and this time he got an arm out and caught himself, holding himself up. His viewpoint twitched around as he looked at himself. Arms. Hands. Chest. Stomach. Legs. Feet.

A human body. It was carved with wiry muscle and covered in pale lines and gnarled dots. Scars, which he recognised, a pattern he had known intimately long, long ago. He felt something shift deep within him, a wonderfully biting bittersweet sensation. His vision swam and he blinked wetness from his eyes,

‘I,’ he grunted, ‘am, human. I am... Muuh. Muh. My. Boh. Dy. Body.’ As he spoke the words he knew they were true. Somehow, in a way well beyond his current ability to comprehend, he had been reborn.

Nicolai’s arm folded and he collapsed back onto the grass. He focused and felt his head twitch as he tried to close his eyes. Then, for a moment, there was darkness as his eyelids closed and reopened. Careful and slow, he rolled his head to the left, seeing the green and purple grass of the island, so bright and vivid to his human eyes that they seemed almost cartoonish, unreal in their vibrancy. Then to the right, seeing the robed figure which stood there watching him, quiet and silent, for now. He hoped it would remain so.

He lifted his head up, nodding it forwards and peering down the length of his body before letting it fall back, locating his neck muscles.

He focused next on his mouth, opening and closing it. He managed to stick his tongue out and rolled his eyes until he saw the tip of it, a little pink thing questing around. ‘Hooof.’ He pursed his lips and breathed out, hearing the whoosh of air, feeling his lungs and throat and mouth working together.

Then his awareness moved lower. He twitched his shoulder, one then the other.

What followed was harder. He raised the same arm as before, seeing it tremble and flop as he lifted it above him, his teeth gritting at the effort required. With a deep breath he forced it straight, pointing up at the empty white sky. He moved his focus to his other arm and immediately, the first collapsed. The other arm was harder to move, as though his mind had forgotten it, but it flopped over and landed atop him and then gradually he straightened it, and tried to have the other join it.

Time lost meaning as he fought to control his limbs, and the frustration rose again, and then it turned to anger and pushed itself to the fore of his mind and his arms jerked up, straight and firm, muscles tense, rising above him.

Nicolai stared up at them and realised that he’d done it but only because an impulse had seized control from him and paradoxically this made the anger grow as he resented the loss of agency within his mind just as much as he resented his struggle to control his body. Abruptly, he released his arms and they fell, something swimming through his mind, searching for an outlet, growing and growing. He screamed, clenched his hands into fists and smashed them into the ground either side of him, furious at his own fury.

He wanted to kill someone, to break something. His lips twisted into a snarl and he shoved himself up, eyes hunting around and settling onto the robed figure. But a surge of wariness tingled his spine and he knew that was not an option. He sneered at the figure and attempted to curse but mangled the words then screamed, a roar that scraped his throat. He wanted to set the island on fire and drink the smoke, to tear the robed figure limb from limb and cast it from the edge, to hurt and maim and kill—

Nicolai froze, eyes wide and wild, clutching at his face, the sudden horror a bucket of cold water thrown over him. He sank to his knees.

‘No, no,’ he mumbled. That part of him was dead. He’d removed it from his mind root and stem, carving off the parts of himself it had emerged from.

He sat there for some time, one hand on his face as he stared at nothing, mute. Now his body wanted to cry, an urge he throttled because it was important to hide any weakness. It made sense, he supposed. His body and his brain were restored to the same state as in his youth, when he’d been fully human. So, it was back, all of it was back. The same stupid urges and pointless rages and endless confusing madness that had left his biological memories a vicious, disjointed blur. Periods of robotic training pouring into fits of murderous insanity, rolling into plots and schemes and thousands of bloody battles.

It was all back and he was human again, with everything that entailed. He tried to recall the very last moments of his experience as a pure human, before his first augments had provided instant solutions to his various problems, solutions that had been so much faster, easier, and more effective than anything else he’d tried before. Lying back on a surgical bed, centuries ago, being injected with the general anaesthetic. That had been the best he’d ever been, in terms of controlling himself. Decades of experience informing his behaviour. As soon as he’d gained that first augment, and then the next and the next, the discipline had been rendered increasingly unnecessary.

The air whistled as he sucked in a slow breath. His expression grew firmer and he rubbed the irritating wetness from his eyes, rising slowly and with some wobbliness.

There was nothing to do but move forward. Nicolai wasn’t going to give up, because he never had, and he never would. He’d been mid-way through the process of taking control of himself that day, and now the fight would resume. He needed to remember all that he’d used to do to manage himself, sort through the remnants of his memory of the time. Then, he could decide what he wanted to do. But right now, he had another task before him.

Nicolai started to move again, at first slowly, carefully. Every time his body wobbled, he tried to understand why. Ever since its emergence, his control had improved greatly, and he found himself putting what had happened from his mind, beginning to smile again.

Before long he was grinning as he jumped and ran and rolled around the island while letting out a strange noise, like a dog let outdoors for the first time in weeks, glorying in the sensation of having and moving a body. His skin and bones and muscles felt as though they were burning and humming and fizzing with energy as a vast joy rushed through him, tingling from his fingers to his toes.

This was a sensation he’d missed, and unlike the mad rage he welcomed it back, let it soak into his body, warm and tight, purring through him.

At times he moved with the grace of a dancer, the speed of a fighter, the poise of an acrobat. His abilities returning. Then his skill would abruptly desert him and he would return to flailing and falling like a toddler. Sometimes he caught himself and flipped smoothly back to his feet, more often he flopped around until he abruptly regained full control.

His movements reached a crescendo. He couldn’t remember when he’d last felt so good. He laughed, his face hurting and his teeth aching from the strength of his grin, wide eyes staring at the endless white around him. It was a strange laugh and a strange voice, his throat flexing oddly. But Nicolai didn’t care and he kept laughing, his voice rising until he let out a great shout, howling at the sky.

Finally his voice faded and he stared sightlessly ahead, panting lightly, still chuckling now and then. His face was wet with tears and his mind awhirl with rushing emotion.

He slowly sank down and slumped onto the ground. He raised his hands, looked at them, and ran them through his hair, feeling it coarse and cut short enough to be a little spiky. It felt pleasant under his fingers. He couldn’t see it but if this was truly his body, his hair would be black.

He felt carefully at his face, marvelling at the sensation, tugging at his skin, sniffing and tasting his fingers like an infant. Was it truly his face? The same face he had been born with? Another laugh burst from him. It was a shame, he thought, that there were no mirrors.

But then again, he wasn’t sure he could have recognised that face. He had only had it for perhaps thirty years before he’d been forced to alter it with plastic surgery. A requirement to avoid his enemies. That thought caused him to descend from the peak of joy, his smile disappearing. The memories seemed suddenly closer, more present, the spectre of the monster he’d been standing close behind.

His eyes caught on a line and a ragged silver dot on his forearm. His gaze moved over his flesh, tracking more lines, more dots, more marks. Scars from gunshot wounds, and cuts, and stabs, and rips and tears and every other injury.

He traced the pale line on his forearm with a finger, turned his arm over and saw an almost identical line on the back. The memory crept up on him. A snarling face. The knife stabbed through his arm. Gleeful, exultant satisfaction as he ripped it out and cut their throat. The taste of blood, thick and hot and salty.

Nicolai shook the memory away and found himself breathing harder, his heart-rate elevated. He slowed his breathing, working to prevent the adrenaline dump his body wanted to release.

He twisted his head to look at his left shoulder, lifted his arm and a familiar tattoo came into view. Black ink in the shape of a shield, a skull with a dagger buried in its crown in the centre. It was bisected by a ragged line of pale burn-scar.

He could remember the pride he’d felt upon first receiving that tattoo, and the later fury that had led him to heat up iron until it was hot enough to burn and run a line through it. How he’d revelled in the pain as he destroyed it, cutting away that part of his life, and later still, the moment he’d realised that in truth he was the reason for what had happened, he had been the problem, not those he’d so eagerly placed the blame on.

Suddenly it all seemed more real, the mad surreality that had infused him fading with the onslaught of grim memories and regret. This wasn’t purgatory. Satan wouldn’t give him his body back, right? He paused, frowning, considering the state of his mind now he was in his body, and he decided that returning his body, this body, was exactly what Satan would do.

Nicolai sighed, morose, confused. Looks like it’s just us, he thought to the other Modules, a habitual reaching-out backed by an unusual urge to connect, a hunt for the opinions and thoughts of others where his own had run dry. There was no reply, his thought echoing without response.

Nicolai froze, frowning. ‘Oh,’ he said, and he heard the disappointment in his voice. No, they were gone too, of course they were. The hardware that formed their artificial brains couldn’t even have fit into his skull. The wave of sadness and regret that poured through him was a shock. He blinked eyes that felt oddly moist and grimaced with a face that felt strangely pressed while a novel ache formed in his chest, accompanied by a matching pit in his stomach.

Threat Analysis, Cyberwarfare, Observation and all the others. Over the centuries of his slavery they’d become more than just co-minds or perhaps co-workers. No more would Threat Analysis make its pithy little remarks, never again would Observation find joy in beautiful sights, nor would Cyberwarfare express its smug and sneering superiority at the weak defences of lesser bots. He even missed Research and Development, as its madness had always been a source of some amusement, bright flickers of absurdity in the largely monotone life he’d endured as a part of Zero-Twelve.

Were they truly gone? His frown grew, stretched and drawn, upset, lost. He didn’t understand what had happened to him, but he was human now, lacking any artificial parts. Their minds would not be able to function in biological matter. He tried to recall the last moments where he’d been with them, in the empty dark, how they’d all clustered together. The Great Eye had said it would aid them, and it had referred to them with the word “construct,” not Nicolai.

Perhaps? he thought, hopeful. Perhaps if I install some augments. Which would bring other benefits, too, though he was uncertain how far he wished to go down that route, were it available. The augments had helped him in many ways, but they’d come with costs of their own.

Welcome, human. You were the fifty-three thousand, two-hundred-and-seventeenth member of your race to accept the invitation to the Great Game.

It was the robed being, managing to stare at him despite its lack of eyes, its mouth opening and closing silently while the words popped into his mind.

Nicolai matched its stare, his mind knocked from its spiral and back to reality, refocusing on the moment, old mindsets and ways of thinking returning to him.

Survival requires knowledge. He no longer saw any reason to doubt the realness of what was happening, and that being the case it was time he started learning where he was, what was going on, and what he ought to do.