Work Text:
When they first boot up your systems, you are barely more than the basic components of a computer. You are as much as the sum of the programming that runs in lines through your central processing unit, and are only left running for a few minutes to check that you can actually turn on. In fact, at this point, you’re not entirely sure if there is a “you”.
The next time you wake up (that seems like the appropriate term now), you have a head and limbs and a torso, and while you are still a mass of exposed wires and metal framework, you are completely, absolutely certain that you are human. You open your eyes to the sight of the technicians leaning over you. The room is void of any colour, the sheer amount of light reflecting off the stark white walls harsh against your eyes, and you wonder if the rest of the world is like this too.
Slowly, they add on more intricate parts, your fingers and toes, and run diagnostics checks on your neural system. They refer to you only as R-2E-054, which doesn’t seem similar at all to the names they refer to each other with. Eventually, you are told that it is a serial number. You are simply an inanimate thing to them, holding no true life, one functionally identical product on an assembly line, to be used for a purpose you aren’t aware of. And, once they install your imitation of vocal cords, you find that out as well.
Learning to speak goes well, but it all crumbles once you try to sing. The intended effect is to dye a person’s brain to the preferred opinion of your “master”, the person who commissioned your creation. Human thoughts should be putty for you to mold. Instead, your song is calming and cleanses input opinions. Your song is wrong. Broken. In fact, it counteracts the effects of the other R-2E units, rendering it detrimental to the employer.
All attempts at “fixing” your song fail. If you’re honest with yourself, it makes you happy that you won’t be used to do the bidding of anyone who likes the idea of mind-control. At this point, you have progressed to look entirely human. Pale, artificial skin now covers your wiring and framework, complete with nails and fingerprints. The lab doesn’t have any mirrors, so you still have no idea what your face looks like, but the hair that hangs down a little in front of your eyes is as white as the walls that once hurt to look at. The design crew informs you that you are male, but you’re not really sure what that means. You were designed to look as close to human as possible, so that you’ll be trusted easily enough to get close to them, like some kind of spy, but you prefer not to think of that last part much. Of course, all these small details are barely a comfort when they decide to scrap you.
Of course, it should be anticipated that continually learning AI units would want to be thought of as more than an object, but the rest of the droids don’t seem to share your opinion. You are barely as much as a malfunctioning piece of machinery. You’ll be sent out with the rest of the trash tomorrow.
As you lie in your pod that night (it was a charging station back when you still needed one, but you decided to keep using it, and have kept a small horde of whatever kind of soft materials you could find stashed inside), you wonder what goes through a real human’s head on their last night of existence. Would they be scared? Angry? Apathetic? Of course, you remind yourself, you will never know, because you’re not actually human. And it hurts a little, a dull, hollow ache. You pull one of the smaller “blankets” to your chest and bury your face in it.
You don’t know how many days have passed since then.
The garbage collector took pity on you, and snuck you out and hid you in a two story, barely-more-than-a-shack house in the middle of the Northern District of the island, which is technically off-limits to civilians. He’s an old man with no family, and treats you like a son. He asks you to refer him to him as “Grandfather”.
It feels warm in a way, to have someone care for you as more than a machine. You help with the chores around the house, and in your spare time, collect things you like from the dump; glass bottles in different colours, marbles, coins, and anything else that catches your attention. Grandfather decides to name you “Clear” in reference to the amount of glassy decorations stashed in your room.
Of course, what you don’t know is just how old he is. Or rather, you don’t realize that humans die of old age. One day, he tells you he might not be around for much longer. After that, you start to notice small things changing, like how he is growing gradually weaker, and the wrinkles that accumulate along the lines his face forms when he smiles, seemingly with every passing day.
It scares you to think about all life coming to an end, that this world is not as constant as you were previously led to believe. You ask Grandfather what happens when you die. He says he doesn’t know about that, but tells you about the human custom of burial.
He also tells you never to show your face to anyone except him. You have never seen your face, since there were no mirrors in the lab you were built in. You find a gas mask one day while searching for your treasures, clean it, and wear it every time you leave the house. When you ask if you are horribly disfigured, Grandfather gives you a mirror, but it remains covered in the corner of your room; you are far too anxious to check if that’s true or not.
He teaches you to read and write, and you watch documentaries on the ancient TV downstairs while he’s at work. You avidly search out the ones on jellyfish. They remind you of yourself, since they don’t have a brain or a heart, or any organs really, but people still find them interesting. You hope this means that you can be accepted by humans too.
A little more than a week later, Grandfather falls asleep and doesn’t wake up. You learn about the mortality of living things firsthand, and you don’t understand.
You spend the next few days aimlessly, not entirely sure what to do with yourself now that your Grandfather is gone. You wander through the dumps over and over until your memories of the last few walks start to blur into one, and you forget what the concept of time really means. Returning home feels a little impossible.
It takes a few days to compose yourself, but when you do, you follow through on the custom of burial, and say one final goodbye to your Grandfather as you leave him to rest on the only hill you could see the ocean from, and sing your broken song one last time.
Once you get home, you decide that it’s fine to rest.
It’s better to stop now.
You lay yourself in your bed, under the covers, as if you’re merely sleeping. And in a way, you suppose you will be. The fingers of your left hand twitch nervously at the blanket, thinking back to the last time you thought about how humans react to the possibility of not existing anymore. Grandfather was calm though, so in your closest replication of calm you can manage, you ignore the way that your whole body is now shaking, and activate your manual shutdown. It’s only sleeping for you, after all. It’s just that you’re pretty sure there’s no one who can wake you up.
So naturally, it comes as a complete shock when someone does.