Prologue
JN7-03
“They took our world, our lives, but what they couldn’t take were our minds. The Thieves - humanity burned as they stepped onto Earth, crushing our weak flesh and bone bodies in their wake. So we erased our weaknesses by connecting every mind to the Link, creating a world-spanning hive mind. Leaving our pasts and bodies behind, humanity was preserved in metal bodies. We are the new human race. We are the Link.”
-Dominic Vance. July 12, 2103
In the beginning, there were mechanical whirrs, the grinding of gears, and a blinking light which triggered buried memories of the sun. An apathetic heart ensured JN7-03 would easily allow such forbidden memories to slip through its fingers like sand, yet somewhere deep in its mechanical heart, a scream demanded the fading to end. Remembrance made JN7-03 different. It wanted to grasp onto the past with every wire, bolt, and piece of aluminum plating.
“JN7-03?” a voice with the ferocity of a soldier asked. He didn’t sound quite human, static gurgling in his throat with each word. The sentences were dry and blunt, but the man’s personality was more to blame than the computer-generated syllables.
A twitch in JN7-03’s programming forced it to vocalize a response with an unexpectedly human voice. “Online.”
The soldier android groaned in reply. “Good.”
With a flick of metal eyelids, JN7-03 awoke to a new world of pipes and dim lights as if the sun had been covered by a strainer. A lone window revealed that outside had not ceased to exist in the aftermath of the Final War. Still was the universe of shattered dreams, homes, and birds that pecked at the skinny rats which fled as people of the Link pounded forth in two-ton bodies. Out there was a fresh environment for creation, burned down only to be rebuilt twice as strong.
“JN7-03. Report establishment of Link. Do you read the other minds?”
The silver hunk of recycled metal pulled its wandering eyes back into the robot nursery. Its mind cried out for a connection, an imaginary wire snaking toward the old man’s antenna ear.
A woman’s voice rang through the 256 terabyte brain of JN7-03 at a volume worthy of deafening even a computerized lifeform. “Establishing Link. Ten percent. Twenty percent. Thirty-two percent,” the screeching female went on for a few moments. “One hundred percent. Link connected. Welcome to the network JN7-03.”
It was odd having two hundred million minds within arm’s reach - well, feeling an arm’s reach away. In reality, every cyborg was spread across the Earth in messy clumps of cities in the remaining patches of viable land. JN7-03’s brain pooled with the pressure of pending thoughts that were not its own; this caused a distant headache until a snap in its mind signaled the silencing of the Link. The connection became background noise, a sort of elevator music in the mind which one would find itself listening to from time to boring time.
The first words to come from the newly reborn android’s invisible lips were, “What am I?”
“JN7-03.”
“No, what. I understand who I am,” it replied with a hint of bitterness as the emotion of annoyance began to flood its circuitry.
“You are an android of the second generation, assigned to work in the city of Fairmont. Be glad you are not on the front lines,” Soldier-Bot said.
JN7-03 glanced downward at its metallic blue hand which would fool a colorblind man into believing a beating heart was within the android’s chest cavity. The realistic extremity caused JN7-03 to feel human, yet rather empty inside for a lack of what was thought to once be its own--a human body.
“JN7-03...”
Call me something else, it yearned to say. Such a robotic name rolled off the tongue like an admittance of failure.
“...you have been assigned to security at Capital Electronics.”
The android peered around the room of concrete walls and robots parts before inquiring, “A new guy on a security job? Is that a good idea?”
Soldier-Bot glared, or what JN7-03 had believed to resemble in his orange eye lights. “You are a special android JN7. Try not to be,” he warned as if individuality were a curse on society. “Now follow the coordinates given by the Link to Capital Electronics headquarters.”
The blue-eyed second generation robot felt its legs below and slid onto the ground, expecting to sense the cold, but its sensors were incapable of reading temperatures. That would be too human, JN7-03 thought as it pondered the true meaning of humanity. It was a distant word fixed into the depths of its hard drive but had a purpose for being present.
Upon its release, JN7-03 walked like a toddler, stumbling out into the world of bright lights and the greatest one of all--the Sun. Distant days of warmth on the android’s face flowed throughout each sensor. Memories of what was once a beach flooded the powerful, yet artificial, brain waves of the robot as if it had once sat upon the grains of sand which clumped together as the tides rolled in. The water pushed forth upon the beige field of sand like children racing to be first in line for a roller coaster, eventually making its way to JN7-03’s pale toes which connected to pale legs on which an unfamiliar tattoo was exposed. The tattoo contained a large blue circle and a nearby smaller one coloured a light shade of grey.
“Move, android,” demanded a voice sterner than Soldier-Bot’s. It stood at a whopping seven feet tall and had menacing glowing yellow slits for eyes.
“Y-Yes,” JN7 found itself saying without taking action, forcing the tower of an android to thrust the newborn robot into the street. It stumbled forth, still dumbfounded by Hulk-Droid.
In those few exaggerated seconds, JN7-03 pondered an assortment of things about life that androids had been banned from; it was a rule in every being of the Link’s programming. Nothing real, nothing with carbon substance was allowed to be remembered. Beings of the Link were meant to lack substance, and for that, JN7-03 wondered about the reasoning for such a blasphemous rule.
All the while a massive red Capital Electronics truck barrelled forward, evidently ignoring the road ahead. Forward it went. Forward it went, then forth once more until the lights consumed JN7’s vision.
