REWIRED

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A voice soothed me out of the darkness.

“It’s alright. Try not to move.”

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It bounced off the disorientated corners of my mind like a bullet through an echo chamber. My sight doubled between indistinct darkness and blinding light as I struggled to focus my vision.

Panic instinctively gripped me as I fumbled around, half-blind, with inevitable questions- where am I? What is this place?

My limbs felt leaden as I hauled them off the metal slab I find myself to be lying on. Heavy. Alien. They seemed to belong to another person entirely as I swung them around, struggling to control.

As I fumbled to recognise my surroundings, one question pressed over all others.

Who am I?

A sharp, steady hand caught my ungainly fist, guiding me back to the heavy outline of the slab.

“Lie back down. I’m almost done.”

I felt them standing over me. I knew that I have every reason to be afraid- I had no idea who they even are or if I could even trust them.

But there was something in their tone that convinced me to relax. When they spoke, it was like I had known them my entire life. A low whirring rung upwards through my ears, before a second voice intruded.

“Is he okay?”

It was higher-pitched than the lower, clearly adult one. One that clearly belonged to a child.

“Just a few kinks in the system to work out,” the first voice replied, “these outmoded ones can be pretty unpredictable. I guess that was why they got discontinued so quickly.”

Outmoded? Unpredictable?

The words were so alien to my ears that it took a few minutes to realise that she was talking about me.

Something jammed into the side of my ear, twisting through. It should be agony, but my body is muted to the touch, feeling it more as a light discomfort.

“Aaaand...there we go.”

Light filled my eyes. Blinking a few times, familiar dark shapes materialised into my peripheral vision. I took an uncertain step forward as my surroundings finally became clear.

I found myself in a dimly lit room, with faint shines of silvery metal scattered about. Disused oil drums were stacked in the corners, towering precariously beneath the sloping tin ceiling, which faint lights shone through from the holes that weren’t welded up. Every few seconds it would reverberate with the overhead roar of hovercars, as if ready to collapse into itself.

It was in the grease-stained mirror lying shrugged against the brick wall that I caught sight of the figure standing right in front of me.

It towered above everything else in the room, piercingly silver. Easily six foot, six foot five. Blue bio-lights glimmered dimly from the undersides of its powerful legs, along the dark seams of the metallic plating. Faint scratches marred the surface, dulling its glow slightly. A shape both distinctively human, but unmistakably inhuman in form.

It clasped an outstretched hand towards me, with whirring mechanical fingers. Managing to break out of my trance, I gazed down at my own unconsciously raised hand, only for my mind to crash when I looked at my own fingers. My mechanical fingers.

I would have screamed, if I had a mouth.

In the place of a face, was a dark, reflective face-plate, completely devoid of features. Almost blank, except for two faintly glowing blue dots interconnected in the centre which suggested eyes. Or in my case, optics.

I stood for a few seconds, trying to comprehend what I was seeing, trying to convince myself it wasn’t real. It felt as if I was looking at a stranger. Nothing about this felt right at all. I felt entrapped within my own unfeeling form.

Distracted by my newfound reflection, I barely noticed her hovering behind me, practically dwarfed by my stature.

Relief tugged at my core at the sight of a human, a face to the voice that had awakened me. Her dark hair sheared into a buzz cut, half-hidden under a hastily-tied bright yellow bandanna. Her tanned skin glistened with distant beads of sweat, wearing a grease-stained sleeveless white tops and pooling denim overalls. She was young, but she had a kind of hardness creased into her face. A girl who had become an adult long before she could even grow up.

I turned around to face her, and she immediately froze, clenching the wrench she had in her hand.

A small head peered around the adjacent door frame.

“Is it going to kill us?” he asked.

She glared at me, taking wavering steps back as I approached with thundering steps, uncertain to whether or not I was a threat.

She huffed. “Unless he was programmed by an axe-murderer, I highly doubt it.”

The child blinked up, unconvinced.

“But he’s just standing there.” he mumbled.

The girl rolled her eyes with a wearied sigh.

“They all do that- they have to be given orders or programmed to so something. They’re basically blanks without it.”

The girl stared up into the blank void of my face, unable to read the multitude of emotions- fear, curiosity, confusion- brewing inside. It was if she was looking at just another household appliance.

But something seemed to convince her otherwise, grip relaxing on the wrench. I must have looked so pathetic in my confusion that it made her realise I wasn’t a threat.

“It’s an old model, Isaac. Its programming is all junked up. Probably got dumped for the latest model.” She sighed, placing the wrench back on the workbench opposite the metal slab.

The girl surveyed over me, one hand holstered to her hip with the other pursed to her mouth.

The boy scrambled out from his hiding place and over to me, a massive shock of curly brown hair. He looked at me with wide, glassy eyes, craning his neck up at me with an open-mouthed grin.

“Woowwwwww,” he breathed, “he’s tall.”

Even the girl couldn’t help but crack a smile down at him.

He raced around me, small fingers tracing over the scratches and gouges across my metal skin, overeager questions bursting from his mouth.

“Maybe he was a cage fighter,” he wondered aloud, “or an escaped military experiment? Maybe-”

The girl dragged him back by the denim collar of his sleeveless vest, a protective hand splayed across his shoulder.

“-Or maybe someone should stop watching old movies and try and live in the real world.” she finished in a playful tone, tickling him under his chuckle, sending the boy into a fit of giggles.

He pouted up at her in retaliation, an inescapable smile escaping across his face as he did.

The love faded from her eyes when she examined me, replaced by a clear apprehension, mixed with low-laying curiosity. The presence of the child seemed to have allayed her hostility- for now.

“He’s a fixer-upper, I’ll give you that,” she mused, “busted vocaliser, heat damage, damaged knee joints. It’s a miracle he’s still functioning.”

I listened.I wanted a name more than anything else. Inside I was screaming for some semblance of an identity. Something beyond it or he, distinct. Something solid in the void.

As she went on, my knees groaned, before suddenly buckling beneath me, sending me half-sprawled to the floor. The two jumped back at the sudden impact.

I couldn’t move. Couldn’t even twitch.

My body seemed to have rebelled against me. Despite the frantic synapses, my arms and legs had stiffened, refusing to move. I found myself fused to the floor, staring up at the rickety tin ceiling. Red warnings flashed before my unblinking eyes in computerised text, unable to blink them away, blaring inside my ears.

The girl gave a low pained hiss as she knelt by my side, flicking open a panel in the centre of my chest. Her eyes scanned over the flashing numbers and lights.

“Low battery,” she sighed, shaking her head, “we need to charge him.”

She looked over me, before turning back to the boy.

“You get the hand truck. I’ll get his legs.” she told him.

Carrying my insensate shell was a struggle for the both of them, hoisting my limp body onto the handcart, with the boy steering the handles while the girl dragged my body upright onto the metal ledge. But they managed to do it. She hoisted me effortlessly up, with more strength than I ever expected, her wiry muscles bulging beneath her skin, built up from what looked like years of heavy lifting.

I found myself tilted back up towards the ceiling as the wheels squeaked back to the metal slab, where I was deposited on. A stretching cord snaked into the girl’s hands from a block plugged into the wall. Climbing over the expanse of my chest, she plugged into into the centre.

A satisfied chirp burst out, and my eyes flashed again, showing a flash of climbing digits, what I assumed was my battery recharging.

The girl gave a relieved sigh.

“He should at a hundred percent by the morning-we should probably let him sleep it off.” she gave a humourless chuckle, “he’s had a rough enough day as it is.”

The boy’s face drooped, realising that he would have to wait until morning for more excitement to begin. As would I, for any answers.

Even when I was clueless about my own name, I felt safety with them. There was a hard-edged kind of softness around them. Even the girl held some kind of sympathy in her- she’d let me live.

I only wished I had a voice, so I could ask them who they were. Why they had chosen me. But at that moment, it seemed like another fresh mystery of my newfound existence.

The overhead light beams flickered over as the girl disappeared behind the doorway, shutting it on the way out as the diminutive figure of the boy trotted behind her.

Sweet stasis was already beginning to claim me. Just as I was powering down my eyes, my sensors picked up another presence in the room. Optics glowing back to life, I turned and saw a familiar mound of hair peering up at me with wide eyes from the edge of the table.

He raced off into the junk-lined corner, trying to rummage without the older girl hearing anything, before returning with a draping sheet of plastic tarp.

Leaning up, he draped it over my body, tucking the folded ends behind my arms until the entire lower half of my body was completely covered.

Smiling, he backed away, rushing back before he could be caught in the room. But before he left, he poked his head around the door one final time, offering a plaintive wave.

“Goodnight, Mr. Robot,” he called in a hushed voice, grinning at me before disappearing into the illuminated haze of the opposite room.

I lay there on the slab, the overhead rumble of the roof the only reminder of the outside world. His words played on my thoughts.

Mr. Robot.

There was a clarity to his innocence- for the first time since I had awakened, I knew who and what I was. I was a robot. A machine. Their interactions should have cemented that firmly into my CPU.

Yet despite all my processing power, I couldn’t explain the sharp sting of the word as I replayed it on loop in my mind, struggling to define it despite knowing the meaning. Powering down allowed me a welcome relief from the world, enveloped back in familiar darkness.