Now that I know, everything makes sense. Every detail that just brushed past my oblivious mind inflating itself.
Before I go any further, I’d like to say that I am just as human as all of you. I have an active consciousness and moral thought. The only difference is my chemical makeup.
Ever since I was a child my father would tinker. He would spend hours upon hours in the day working in his shop, never letting me in. I always wondered what he was working on, but I never thought he would be working on ME.
He was gone for a weekend, on a business trip to another country. He never tells me the details of anything. I decided I’ve had enough with the secrecy. I headed to his workshop and slowly opened the door. Nervous but impatient. What I found made me freeze in terror.
There sat me. Looking about two years older than how I look now. Unfinished. Missing an arm with metal seeping through the holes. I didn’t know what to think.
I ran to the bathroom, having to confirm it for myself. My dad could’ve just been a creep. A weirdo. Building his daughter for reasons I probably wouldn’t want to find out. But I was wrong. I grabbed a razor and took it to my face. Sure enough, under the skin was a thick plate of metal. I’ve never been injured, no cuts, bruises, or broken bones. Now I know why
I went back into his workshop. There was a closet in the corner that called to me. I walked over slowly, knowing that what I would find would be just as terrifying as the last. I was right.
There sat two other versions of me. A toddler and an adolescent. Both mangled and barley even intact. Metal wires poking through the little holes in the skin. I’m the third model. Now that I’m looking back at my memories, I realized that there were days I would wake up, noticeably older than the last. Like I had aged years in one night. Little did I know, I did.
The fear didn’t last long before I started questioning the credibility if everything. I’m a machine, so how am I conscious. What makes me, well, me? Is my father just a genius scientist who created the first artificial consciousness? I decided to look further
I walked over to me, well, the incomplete, mangled, older version of me. Contorted and twisted, no hair on the scalp, no skin on many parts on my limbs. Why did it feel so real? What was my father using?
I opened the scalp and my heart sank.
A brain. A human brain inside all that machinery.
It all hit me like a train. My father was using real organs to put on a metal skeleton. None of this was actually me. It was somebody else, used to make… me.
As I closed the scalp, the head began to twitch. The eyes began to blink. The mouth began to move.
“Why can’t I feel anything?”
I ran out of the room. The fake adrenaline pumping through my circuits.
I have no idea how to confront my father about this. I’ve never had a serious conversation with him before, and speaking to him doesn’t even happen naturally.