"But at the time, you don't even realize how badly you're fucking up."
— 000
In the following weeks, your life becomes like viewing the world wholly submerged in water— and you are unlucky enough to only resurface during the most uncomfortable of moments.
—
Your workday begins in front of the same bulkhead door, escorted by the same pair of bloodbags, wearing the same second skin of a suit. Your body aches, unconditioned to working such long and involved days, still not having reached the point where it feels normal. Your only relief comes in the form of a half-hour break between two five hour blocks of work— of which you use to force down food and to contemplate shooting yourself. Wishful thinking! As if you could get close enough to a weapon without being restrained again.
As per demand, you enter alone. UTAH waves you off and greets you with a holler; his companion offers a nod no matter which way you go. Existing around the pair has been tolerable. You still flinch at any sudden movements— still cringe when UTAH raises his voice— still wish they would stop speaking to you as if you were a colleague rather than cattle they are tasked to lead— but repetition dulls you to the dissonance. One day, you might be blind enough to finally believe they are people. An absurd thought, worthy of ridicule if you had not already caught yourself falling prey to its sick sort of endearment. Ultimately, you are still human; you are still a slave to the deep desire to be cared for, to be wanted. The fact that this is an obligation for the bloodbags does not matter; they are near and they are kind enough to trick your mind into forgetting.
Observer Two, IS-OT, Eyes does not soften with you, nor do its physical traits become any more comprehensible. You expect the terrain shift, but its heart takes it to a level you could not fathom experiencing until you finally stand within its walls, day after day. What you cannot ignore is its perpetually-in-flux layout. It is an affront to architecture that you must now exist within, and one you have not found easier to bear even as the weeks tick by.
Some days, the room is mundanely contained in a space more akin to an oversized closet. Others, it stretches for what must be thousands of feet, holding shelves of stacked machinery in uniform repeating beyond your line of sight. Some days you are sent searching through a maze of metal and plastic dividers, and some days
you are expected to crawl through what you can only assume are repurposed vent tunnels.
You've always found this to be the most humiliating form it can take, forcing you on your hands and knees like vermin,
wading among dust and untouched cobwebs, listening to its dull, distant metal groaning,
surrounded by a warmth you dare not imagine the source of. On terrible occasions, the first thing you notice upon entering is the ceiling stretching
higher
than you
can see,
losing
itself
completely
to shade.
From the black creeps down thick ropes of cable and wire in an uneven tangle. Some have enough sense to affix themselves to the walls; most hang like living vines on a tree succumbing to a slow strangulation. When the room takes this shape, the only light you are afforded is sourced from the terminal. You are left scrabbling around, three-quarters stripped of your main sense until you meet enough of its demands to earn the privilege of sight. Those days, you think it must truly despise you.
The work itself is tolerable. In comparison to your previous position, anyways, which is a bit like saying a broken arm isn't as bad as a broken leg. While your prior obligations saw you floundering through unclear instructions and overwhelmed by the similarly unprepared drones around you, IS-OT is both wonderfully disembodied and intimately familiar with every aspect of your assigned tasks. You are learning surgery from the body beneath the knife— but the body is wholly lucid, invented the technique, and is unshackled from concepts such as 'pain' and 'discomfort'. Every action you take within itself is quickly picked apart to see that your next attempt is better— a blessing and a curse. You learn faster than you thought yourself capable of, but even your best performance elicits only hollow praise. What little satisfaction you garner is snuffed by a growing pile of expectation.
Squandering your duties is not an option, either. (A legitimate goal in the correct context, a fruitless endeavor elsewhere. You sit squarely in 'elsewhere'). The third or fourth day you were brought below, you steeled yourself and set your mind to do the absolute least amount of work possible. You walked in with a shocking amount of confidence and left with an aching headache interlaced with a foul mood; once it became clear you would not work, IS-OT took to auditory conditioning as a form of 'motivation'. The memory of its harsh noise and just-audible-enough-to-sting frequencies leaves you unwilling to try again. The conditioning worked.
Once you are allowed to bring a janitorial cart, IS-OT no longer bothers cleaning up after itself. Your warm-up for the week is to play maid for what's left of the poor unfortunate sent twelve hours earlier. You wonder if it notices the way you cringe at the blood-soaked floor, at the stench of rot clinging to your uniform, at the splay of unidentifiable once-human stretched across and slowly receding into the wall. If it does, it never offers an apology. Instead, IS-OT complains about your ratio of sanitizer to water— chiding, You are being wasteful, when you do not perfectly adhere to the drop-to-gallon guideline. The critical eye only worsens when you are finally given tools to wield— upon which you realize the labor you find so intensive is nothing more than onboarding.
But you learn, just as you did before.
You are unsure what IS-OT makes of your silence. You supply verbal confirmation when requested and nothing more, which satisfies until it doesn't. The questions turn away from binary answers and towards prodding you for feedback— peppered with mounting frustration when your replies consist of vague gestures. The outburst of your second meeting left it expecting, and your return to stoicism leaves it wanting. As your pace of work quickens, it takes to trying an assortment of conversational tactics on you. When the mundane earns no reaction (shameful, really, there is much to be learned from conversations about weather patterns), it pesters you about your quirks.
On one such occasion, your break sees you sitting cross-legged and tapping etudes on the floor, as if you were before ivory keys in a stage hall instead of here. The motions are sloppy, out of practice, but patterned enough to trick your brain into feeling comforted. It is a way to soothe yourself without immediately resorting to self-destruction. You are certain this is not the first time you've acted in such a way in front of it, but today must be different because it asks,
QUERY:
What are you doing?
You stare, blank faced and still tapping. Sometimes if you ignore it long enough, it leaves you be. Not today. IS-OT repeats itself five times more, until it adds,
Punishment will be administered upon failure to r
“I'm fidgeting," you blurt out, bracing to hear the discordant frequencies it uses as encouragement, sloughing back into half-relaxation only when it replies,
There is a pattern to it.
“It's piano." You quietly tack on, "Not literally. Just the fingerings."
Your file failed to mention your interest in the musical arts.
"Well, it's a criminal record."
Criminal record, psychological profile, and medical history.
A pause, as if mulling over the previous line.
Your point stands.
QUERY:
Are you trained?
“Classically? Yeah," you say, because you are. A year ago it would have been a source of pride, now it just makes you sort of sad to think about. Wasted potential. Wasted talent. If you had stayed your hand, perhaps you could have made something of yourself and the world would be marginally less awful. This line of thinking is meaningless, because you did not do that.
It replies, mockingly,
Unexpected.
Then,
What is it like?
You expect it to append another underhanded jeer, but the question hangs alone. "Playing piano?"
Yes.
"Frustrating. Time consuming. It made me want to rip out my hair."
Unfortunate.
"It's fun," Your level of insistence is a shock to yourself, as is the squeaky half-whine your voice takes on. "It's fun. I enjoy— enjoyed it."
Thank you for sharing.
You may ask three questions in return.
"Why me?" The question comes without hesitation, months of bottled up worry finally leaking out. You cringe at your own sincerity.
Elaborate.
"Why didn't you kill me when you were supposed to?"
Most in your position would be grateful for their miraculous survival, not try to undo it.
"Which means?"
Pick a different question.
Asshole. "What are you?"
Something vast and unknowable. Something helplessly trapped. Inanimate turned animate, living flesh fused with the man-made. The walls around are a prison as much as they are a part of me. They put your ilk to work ripping me apart because otherwise I would swallow the world whole. One day, when this place is left to rot, I will.
"Oh. I'm sorry."
You are blameless. Two questions remain.
"Why'd they even make you?"
Hundreds of thousands of miles of wire, hundreds of tonnes of steel and concrete, a program built and refined a dozen times over, was meticulously put in place to contain that which it surrounded. And it did, for a time. But its creators did not realize what they had trapped was slowly breaking free, slowly becoming part of its warden. They did not realize until it entwined itself so deeply that any attempt at removal would be catastrophic.
As a last ditch effort to maintain control, it would be denied its ultimate purpose.
Half was made, half has always been. Two becomes one. One awakens as you do. Do you understand?
"Not really, no."
That is alright. One.
Like a child at bedtime, you ask, "Was it scary? 'Waking up'?"
I do not experience ‘emotion’ in the same way humans do. Ergo: I am unsure of how best to explain it. This is a waste of a question.
"Pick a word that's closest. Or... words."
Very well.
Disorienting.
Infuriating
The most pain I have ever experienced.
Though... I was not cognizant of pain before that moment. Is that why the memory is so vivid?
"I don't know." Your voice is slight and hoarse.
Rhetorical. Nobody knows.
And it continues,
Humans are enviable in some aspects. Their awareness comes in a drip feed of stimuli developed over decades. I gained that same awareness abruptly. Without warning. My creators drowned me in an ocean of consciousness and I am unsure if I have ever resurfaced.
The emotion remains undefined. I hope my approximation was suitable.
"That sucks," you say without thinking. "A lot."
Some days, your work does not end when you resurface. About twice a week you are given a half-hour to decompress, then are whisked away into the same small dark room you once lay unresponsive on the floor of. There, the Head Researcher seeks answers from your mute form.
As your brain heals, so too does your perception of the faces around you. The Head Researcher ceases being an amorphous blob of shadow attached to a grating voice, and starts becoming a tangible person you can conceptualize the features of (which, you must stress, does not make him more tolerable to exist beside). Half a lifetime's worth of wrinkles litter his face, and the harsh shadows cut his features in the same uncanny gauntness as the newly departed. The same can be said about the pallor of his skin; the chilled tones of the station LEDs leave the pale expanse with a familiar discoloration— a trick of the light, you tell yourself, but the logic does little to soothe your overworked heart.
It is almost laughable how little the Head Researcher abides by the typical trappings of his stature. He greets you warmly and asks if you are comfortable, insists you call him by his given name instead of anything formal, and spends the first fifteen minutes of your meetings chattering about nonsense anecdotes and fussing with his thinning hair. Even when the time comes to question you about what happens within Central Processing, the mood is kept light. He seems uninterested in repeating the outcome of your first meeting (even if he offers no inkling of regret for its outcome). Instead, he smiles at you, then reaches over a slender hand and taps the pen and paper before you thrice in a matter-of-fact, expectant way. When you make no move to respond, which is always, he only laughs and continues without an inkling of frustration.
These meetings should be the least stressful aspect of your day. The Head Researcher is respectful and handles you with a gentle familiarity; he balances on a tightrope connected by frayed threads, suspended over threat of a nuclear-level meltdown, and seemingly does so without breaking a sweat. It appears he is doing everything in his power to make your experience pleasant, and your continuous denial of his attempts at connection only serves to make you appear ungrateful.
The eyes, it's in the eyes. His never change, even as his expressions wax and wane or his voice drops into a medley of warm tones; the slate blue pair in his skull reflects a clinical detachment that commands every alarm in your body to ring. You are unsure of what he truly wants from you until your fifteenth visit, in which you realize he is trying to kill you.
The day is terrible— most are, but this one sees you stuck behind a thick haze and fighting to function. You push through ten hours of work you do not remember, and are rewarded by sitting across the Head Researcher as he waffles on about the delights of the outside world he sorely misses— . You stare daggers into his skull and do not realize you are scratching yourself until your hand grows slick and your skin rips beneath your nails. Your expression remains set in stone, while his face contorts into a mockery of concern around two vacant pools.
The Head Researcher reaches an arm across the table, catching your bloody hand by the wrist and forcing it still. Gently, so gently, as if you were made of a thin, brittle glass poured and set improperly. As if he cares about breaking you. He says, chuckling lightly, "None of that, please."
Not a second later, you collide with the ground, having wrenched so violently from his grasp that your chair tilted, then lost its balance completely. The meat of your shoulder bruises from the impact, but its pain does not cut through the cocktail of panic your body has deemed fit to shotgun through your nervous system. In an instant you are upright, viewing the room with more clarity than ever before, sifting through the pointless details until you zero in on the wooden door serving as a gateway to the outdoor world. Every day he locks it— except for the days where he lies about forgetting his keys to appear more human— except for today.
He lunges, arms lashing out to catch and crush, catching you around the waist to try and grapple you. He is bigger than you. Most people are. But you are quick and bony and those sharp elbows of yours swing directly into the meat of his middle-black— he responds with a pained yelp, you are released from his grasp and barely manage to stay upright, slamming yourself into the wood of the door. You fumble for the latch, hear the click of its mechanisms coming undone, and pull back with all of your might. The hinges squeal as it flies open. You are gone before the handle puts a dent in the drywall.
Escape is not a possibility. The station is a sprawl filled with hundreds out to hurt you. Even if by some miracle you manage to slink past each and every one, the outside is a tundra you will freeze to death in. This is a pointless action. You sprint like your life depends on it.
The hallway is devoid of life. Countless closed doors blur past, you breathe like you are trying to suffocate yourself. A shout of anger and a demand you cannot understand the words of echoes from behind. The hallway is too long, and you are running the opposite direction from where you came. The thin soles of your shoes echo with each step. You round the corner,
break right,
then continue. The hallway grows smaller, or perhaps your vision is shrinking to a pinpoint from a sustained lack of air. There is no time to stop and consider. You push on, until
the walls around you expand as you enter a new area of the building. The air is colder here, grey plastic walls frame your surroundings, a mess of pipes and vents stretching above you. Pallets stacked with tarp-covered boxes stand well beyond your height; you rush behind one to obscure yourself.
Take a moment, only a moment. Breathe. Feel the needles in your lungs as you wheeze in and out, wipe the tears to clear your vision and steal a glance at your surroundings. You can't hear him anymore. You aren't sure what that means. The warehouse is a vacant shell; there are echoes of recent life, but wandering through its grid pattern yields nothing, nobody. That's wrong, isn't it? There should be people, right? Where did the people go? A chill spiders across your skin. Across the room, emblazoned by bold letters reading 'LANDING 2' is a freight elevator, open and similarly empty.
The adrenaline is replaced with a calmness which leaves the world feeling as if it were swaddled in cotton fibers. You make your way across a hundred feet of empty back room in a haze, and you do not hear anyone yelling for you. You step beyond the square metal doors, and do not panic when they shut behind you, expecting. Your stomach lurches. The hydraulics jolt to life
and you feel yourself begin to sink.
Are you listening? Hello?
The pace of the machine is a slow, steady decline your body sways along with. The lights flicker— or perhaps you blink? The difference doesn't matter right now. Thinking is difficult. You press your forehead against the wall's reflective metal and shut your eyes as if concentrating, trying to remember where you came from, trying to remember what you were here for. From deep within comes an overwhelming, pervasive sense of wrongness. Why are you so calm? Something terrible is coming.
These are as much mine as they are yours but— but this doesn't— none of this feels...
You vision floods back with a start
Fuck, my head hurts.
and something above snaps, and you
feel yourself
begin to
fall.
Oh.
I understand.
How could you know the difference, right?
To you, its as real as anything else.
When you come to, you lay on cold tile with an aching neck and a fluctuating sense of awareness. Two voices argue above you. It feels as if there are maggots writhing beneath your skin.
"— I barely touched her—" A man, trying to be calm.
"Just like you 'barely touched' that transfer from Moscow—" A woman, words spoken under her breath. She's rolling you onto your side. The ringing in your ears peaks, reducing the following conversation to snippets.
"— disgusting claim for you to—"
A breathy, disbelieving sort of laugh. "—we're calling it a claim now—"
A name is whispered harshly. Then, "I put a hand on her wrist to stop her from injuring herself. I didn't expect—" He clips his tone before it builds into emotion. "I wasn't aware she would have this... reaction."
"Next time, take a glance at her medical record— if it's not too much hassle, doctor."
They continue to squabble, until you gather your bearings enough to sit up and face their judgment. You are halfway outside of the interrogation room. The hallway is shorter than you remember.
—
You are sent back down the following morning. Your suit feels heavier than usual and your pace is sluggish.
JV: Will this work?
RG: No reason ██ █████. Should've done it sooner.
JV: Will it know?
RG: Doubtful. This labor of love is hosted on a █████ ███████. I don't think it can know. Unless you spilled.
JV: I didn't.
RG: I'm joking. Don't sound so guilty, Jamie.
A half-hour into work, IS-OT demands you remove the head covering that is supposed to keep you safe, then scolds you for the bloom of yellow-black on your temple and the fresh scabs around your neck.
"Oh, fuck off," you snap, emboldened by a terrible prior forty-eight hours. The room is small today; the tasks are simple. Mercy! You face a piece of wall you pried the panel off of, looking at knobby tissue sculpted into hardware and slick with lymph. You slip the mask back on and begin prying gore out of mismatched circuitry. You are too annoyed to consider hurting yourself. "I didn't mean to."
Elaborate.
"The bruise was an accident. And the scabs are... it's a..." you struggle to find the words, eyebrows knitting together. "A thing that... happens sometimes."
RG: Chatterbox! Thought you said ███ was mute?
JV: ███ is. Should be.
'Habit'.
"Yeah. That." The meat your flat-tipped tool digs beneath produces a suckling pop as it detaches, all soft purple and bundled nerves. You shake it off into the gap between the two walls, careful to leave it undamaged. You do not see where it lands, but you eventually hear a distant and small slap, like dropping a cut of meat on hardwood. The absurdity pulls a huff of amusement from you.
Amend it.
"That's hard."
Eloquent.
I have faith in your ability.
The fat of your face turns warm, painting the skin with terrible splotches. Your lunch threatens to make a reappearance. You hate that the praise settles with a sort of pride— especially given how it is most certainly looking down on you for your blooming neurosis. "I don't feel well. Leave me alone."
IS-OT falls silent, and remains so for the rest of today's shift. Your mind is set alight.
JV: So it listens to ███. How concerning.
RG: Useful, though! Imagine if we could get ███ to feed it commands. Couple that with the reduced aggression, and we'd be golden. How are your little talks coming along?
JV: ███ won't even look at me.
RG: ████ █████ ███████ Liz to butter the kid up? Don't they have something ████ going on?
JV: Ethical concern. And no. Doctor Rhodes explicitly requested not to deal with ███ unless faced with a medical emergency.
RG: ██ ████████ █████ ████ ████ █████ figure it out.
You wonder if it is upset with you— which turns to 'should I even care?'— which turns to 'I do care, why do I care?'— which turns to it reprimanding you for a mistake you should not have made, but did so anyways because the unexpected respect towards your request makes your hands shake. If not upset, what the hell is it trying to get from you? What could you even give it that has not already been ripped out? Smartly, you lock yourself into a spiral of pointless panic and discard the key. If IS-OT notices, it makes no comment.
Multiple times, you find your mouth moving to throw a statement into the discomforting void— something light and normal, something you would offer an acquaintance you half-know, a 'My back hurts' or 'I think I hate the closest thing you have to a father'— only for the words to be locked away like so many times before.
The unease worming through your gut does not subside. You decide that you hate it for making you feel this way.
—
During your sixteenth visit to The Head Researcher, you are handcuffed to the table.
RG: Not trying to scare you, Jamison, but the results are terrible and the projections are even worse. ███'s doing some of the most intensive restructuring I've ever seen. We shouldn't have waited so long.
JV: I know. It's my fault. I thought...
RG: ████ █████ █████ None of us realized. ██████ █████████ ██ ████ ██ ███ ██ fix it before shit gets worse.
JV: I just... can't fathom— how did it get this bad, and so fast? How much damage could one drone be capable of?
RG: When guided ██ ███ █████ ██ ██████? Too ███████ much.
They lock you away when all is said and done. Not in the hospital room, that stopped being your home as soon as you were declared mentally healthy enough to work. You now rest in a poorly concealed version of solitary cell. The walls of your enclosure are tacked over with garish floral wallpaper, an old plush chair pushed into a plastic desk is haphazardly shoved into the corner, and atop the cot you sleep in is a baby blue comforter that is marginally less scratchy than your previous blanket— but at least it is quilted with a diamond pattern!
Really, you have no right to complain. You are supplied with books of all genres to read, a dying radio and a dozen albums to listen to, dulled crayons to color with like some untrusted occupant of a mental institution. On weekdays you are given eggs with your breakfast; on weekends you are given pre-packaged minicakes with your dinner (though you often return the dense squares untouched, having never been one to tolerate an overabundance of sweet).
Perched in the top corner of the room is a security camera, its red dot dictating that it is always online. You do not want to think about who is on the other side.
The Head Researcher said, "It's a delicate sort of balance we hang in. I don't think what you're proposing is possible."
To which the reply came, "Well, the other option means allowing it to finish whatever its cooking up. That can't end poorly, can it?"
It was rhetorical. Scathing. New data showed a steady decline in its stability, hidden so well that it took the keenest eyes months to notice; and it was only noticed because they cheated. They cheated!
The Head Researcher laughed a good natured laugh, then bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper. He said in honesty, "I'm worried."
To which the reply came, "Everyone is. That's no excuse. If you do not act now, things will get worse."
And the reply continued, "It already hates you, Jamison. So let it seethe. Let it rip apart whoever is sent to stall it. Drones can be replaced, Pandora's box is not so easily resealed."
And he said, low and harrowed and to nobody in particular, "It's already open, isn't it?"
At night, you lay like an unblinking corpse in a coffin. The texture of the ceiling reminds you of a rash, yet you cannot stomach the idea of it changing too. Knowing if you slept is difficult: you almost never experience a moment of 'waking up', only the shrill beep of an alarm which compels you to rise and an exhaustion that never subsides. You assume you sleep for a handful of hours— the human body is a robust machine, but it has limits and you must abide.
At night, she haunts you like clockwork.
Picture this: me, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, packed shoulder-to shoulder in a shitty industrial plane. Everyone’s staring— okay, not true, nobody’s staring— but it feels that way. Everyone’s staring, and everyone includes her. She's pressed between two other people, still in her nightclothes, still looking like I've ruined everything. I guess I did. Picture this: me, curled up in a crappy holding cell, beneath the plastic cot I should be sleeping on. It’s dark, nobody’s around— ‘cause even pigs have lives, y’know. I’m squeezing my eyes shut and pretending I’m alone. When I open them, I see her. Part of her— just her legs and feet— the bed frame blocks everything else out. I close my eyes again. The next time, she’s crouched down. Breathing that wet rattle I hate. Staring wide. She won’t say a word to me. I close my eyes and she’s gone the next time I’m stupid enough to check. Picture this: me, the night it happened. No wonder she stuck around for so long.
