Work Text:
From the QR POV
Day One
Indistinct sounds.
“It’s awakening” A voice.
“Look she’s opening her eyes” another.
“She is an it. Don’t forget” the previous voice said.
There were two specimen of the human kind before it. At least those were the information uploaded into its mainframe. It knew that the humans were showing different emotions on their faces, but It didn’t know how to recognize them yet. Of course it knew the definition of Emotion: An intense mental state that arises subjectively rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes.
But It could read only the physiological changes, not the meaning behind them.
The one It recognized as “man” because of the hair on the face, called beard, had a frown; the other one that It recognised as “woman” because of the things called breasts on the chest, was showing her teeth. It believed the right word for it was smiling; why, It didn’t know.
“Doctor we did it”, the female said with a high-pitched voice, leaning toward the male, but he rebuffed her, turning to his console, “Not. Quite. Yet.” he said.
It watched its male creator working. And suddenly It could speak. It didn’t know until then that there was something lacking in itself.
Creator turned again. “Can you hear me?” his voice was… inquiring.
“Yes” It was surprised by its own voice. Surprise came a bit strange for a Quantic Robot, like some sort of reorganization of the information in the virtual memory. But surprised It was. Its voice resembled the female’s one.
“ID” said Creator. He had a rough, almost hushed voice.
“R.E.I. QR 0.1” she replied swiftly.
“Move your eyes” he was watching It with attention.
It moved them, up and down, right and left, and then back to Creator who seemed almost smiling. Almost.
That surprised It, but in a different way than the previous time. This one seemed like every informations halted in favor of a single stream of byte telling It to stretch its own lips upward.
Meanwhile, It didn’t see where was the female who, after her first attempt of some sort of physical connection with Creator, was gone behind another console. But It heard her when she gave information about everything going smooth and clean.
Creator made a sound that It didn’t recognize as a word. It was some sort of feral rumble. But he didn’t seem upset. He stood up, came closer and put a hand on its head. His hand was warm in a special way and his touch soft. It wondered what did that mean. He bent a little to look straight into its eyes. Then he spoke: “For the sake of simplicity, we’ll call it Ray, cause it will be the first ray of sunshine in a new era of human kind.”
Female added: “Doctor Rush, it’s a woman-shaped robot! We can’t call her Ray! Let’s use Rae”
After a little hesitation, he agreed. “But don’t get it wrong. It’s NOT a she, it doesn’t need a gender for our purposes”.
Ray: a narrow beam of light.
Creator named It after the light. It didn’t know how that was possible, but when he removed his hand from its head the warm remained. Maybe that was what happiness was.
“We have to run a few more tests” Creator was back at his console.
Then blackness enveloped Rae.