Chapter Text
She wakes up, not gradually, there’s no sense of drifting into consciousness, one moment there’s nothing, the next she’s here.
She looks around, it’s a pretty big room, and she’s laying on a metal table in the center of it, tools are neatly lining the walls, she doesn't recognize most of them. In the corner of the room there’s a large closed cabinet.
Having scanned the room she moves on to inspect herself, she's wearing an old oversized green hoodie and scoffed jeans, no shoes.
She starts feeling queasy, how did she get here? Where are her shoes?
She slowly gets up to sit on the table, trying to remember how she got here, her name is mckenzie, she’s 18, she just finished high school and she has spent the last few weeks enjoying her last summer break before she’s shipped off to college, she digs deeper, trying to find more, what’s her surname? Which high school? Which college? all she finds are little spaces where the details should be, unease starts to rise in her like a tide, she hurriedly gets up and walks to the door, but it opens before she can reach it and a man walks in, wearing dirty work clothes, he’s rather short, stout, with dark hair and dark eyes, he seems to be in his late twenties or early thirties, he quickly closes the door behind him, and stops in front of her.
He looks at her, not in an unfriendly way, but there’s something off about his gaze, like there’s another expression behind his expression, she starts feeling afraid, very afraid.
He lifts one hand to stroke her cheek, “they make them so realistic these days”
He says, his eyes are looking over her, like he’s trying to touch her with his eyes, she can hear his breathing change, become faster, like he’s exerting himself.
“Where am I?” she blurts out “Did you take me here?”
“you’re in my workshop, and yes, I took you in”
“What do you mean took me in? I have a family, I have a home!” her voice is rising with her panic, there’s something wrong with this man, very wrong.
He doesn't respond to her emotion, he looks thoughtful: “No, you don’t” he responds eventually.
“What do you mean I don’t?! Did you do something to them?! I’ll kill you!” she screams, but she doesn't feel like she could make good on this threat at the moment, she’s struggling not to crumble to her knees, she has to stay on her feet, as soon as he moves from the door, she will run out.
He’s still unaffected, he just asks: “Your family, can you remember their names?”
She tries, tries to envision her family in her head, but all that comes to her is a stock photo of a smiling family with little blank lines next to the face of each family member.
She falls to her knees then, overwhelmed by loss and confusion: “where is it! Why can’t I remember? What did you do to me?” she screams as loud as she can, it doesn't feel nearly loud enough.
“Not much, I just didn’t put in any family names when I programmed you”
“What do you mean by program?” her voice is weaker now, there are tears poking out the corners of her eyes.
“Well you see, most men buying something like you like to pretend you're a girl, or a woman, their sister or their mother or their ex co-worker or a teacher, I found you in the trash, programmed as a basic little schoolgirl, seems you were the entertainment for some rich kid’s frat party, who decided afterwards he’d rather buy a new android than clean the mess his friends made, so I took you home and in the last few months I’ve been working on reprogramming you”
She feels completely lost now: “You’re lying”
“You wish I was, here, let me show you, command word- pineapple, go and sit on that table”
He points to the table, and she suddenly feels a terribly strong urge to get up and sit on the table, she feels it in every limb in her body, like an electric current pointing in the direction of the table, it grows more and more uncomfortable by the second, she manages to resist it for a few moments, but then she relents, getting up quickly and practically skipping to sit on the table, once she does, it goes away, all at once, leaving a mild sense of release in her entire body, she looks at the man in horror.
he walks over to her, a satisfied little smirk on his face: “I was wondering what that would look like, I did a couple test runs when I got you of course, but this is the first time I’ve done it while running consciousness.exe”
“Conciousness.exe?”
“That’s what I’ve been programming in you, consciousness, a sense of awareness, of the world, independent thought, you know, the works”
“Why would you do that?”
He pauses a little before responding: “to see if I can, it makes me sad to see all you little sex dolls mindlessly following their masters around, getting used without even knowing it, following jaded scripts written by ai analysing millions of people’s horny roleplay historys, I thought you could do more, be more”
“So you’ve made me conscious? for what?”
He looks uncomfortable for a moment, but it passes quickly: “Well, before we talk about that, let’s check that I’ve actually succeeded, ok?”
She relents, it’s not like there’s much else she can do, if she says no, he’ll just command her again.
So she lets him interview her, he asks her about her worldview, about politics, about world history, at some point he takes out a laptop, shows her pieces of art and asks her to tell him what she thinks about them.
As the questions and answers flow between them he seems at first satisfied with her answers, then happy, then… something else, there’s a sense of nervous energy starting to rise in him, his head seems to be somewhere else, after they finish discussing the last piece (the last supper by Leonardo de vinci) he closes the laptop and says: “well-” then her memory cuts out.