WARNING: This chapter mentions fetal and child abuse and death, if these triggers, or with a possibility of damaging your mental well-being, skip it.
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The planet was freezing over? Why? How?
What the fuck?
My mind was spiraling somewhere thinking of the world freezing like a goddamned popsicle–maybe we were really damned–maybe God fucking got tired of taking care and hearing his creations' shitty prayers, and damaging the Earth so he just iced the whole planet over. Everything was covered in snow, so pretty much all that my sight could reach was an endless white, they even made my eyes hurt because it was like staring into nothingness.
I scanned my surroundings again, hoping for any movement–any color–excluding the light sprinkles of flurry snows dropping on the ground silently. Any kind of road or path was nowhere in sight too.
"It was just summer yesterday." I murmured.
"The last summer, or rather, the last season change I became aware of was sixty-plus years ago." Elliot said, walking past me. He had his hands laced at the back of his head, but his nonchalant attitude was contradicted by the sad tone of his voice.
I traced his footsteps-or rather, the line he was making because the pile of snow was up to his knees-unsure to where he was taking us. It was still unknown to me how I could put my full trust to this person whom I didn't even know existed until a while ago, I just did so. And that was fucking creepy.
But this is just a dream. A tiny voice at the back of my mind whispered.
Yes, no? Even I, didn't know anymore.
Maybe Leib would come in my room and yell at me awake any minute now.
Leib. He was my big brother. But the familial connection I expected to cling with the thought of him was nowhere to be felt. It was like I knew him but not really knew him. The details were there, the moments when we were together were there, but there were no feelings.
It seemed as if I was just told that I have a brother and he was this and that but never really got to be with him.
I tried to recall my parents and friends and it was the same, nothing to feel, a blank slate of emotion.
"Where are we going?" I asked my companion.
"Somewhere where there are no wires." He answered.
I didn't know the connection of those wires to explaining to me what really was happening and I didn't further ask about it for now. "What happened?" Here. To everyone. To the world.
"Your question is too broad, do you mean you?"
Shit, I forgot about that part right there.
The crunches of snow being disturbed were the only sounds I heard for a while. Because I was itching to know, at the same time, a part of me was afraid to hear the truth that what I knew all along were all lies.
"There's really something wrong with the fluids I gave you, or was it me? Did I deliver it wrong?" Elliot sighed. We traveled a pretty far distance but I sense no weariness from the both of us. "Never mind that. Okay, I shall start at the beginning as per the data I gathered and of course will try to tell you in a concise-but-detailed manner."
I nodded from behind him, but replied a "Yeah," later on.
"BioGenetion Merge Subject Thirty-Five, code number 9401902604, that's your full name. You were created in a laboratory using a spliced egg and sperm. In short, you got no parents and you were a lab rat. Seventy-nine years ago, they successfully 'grew' you into what looked like a year-old baby. The main objective of the study was to test the theory that it doesn't need the introduction of a fertilized egg in a female for it to grow and develop-simple, innocent even-but a military organization caught a whiff of you and proposed-at gun point-to incorporate something that will enable you to be the country's war machine, and then create many others like you if it became a success.
"So," He turned and gestured at me while walking backwards. "Here you are, a conclusion of the said test, a subject close to being indestructible."
Elliot turned back.
I waited for more but he stayed silent.
"That's it?" I asked.
Listening to him tell me information about the real me was like experiencing déjà vu, my subconscious mind remembers it but my conscious one had only bits of it and needed a catalytic agent to fully recall it.
"Oh no, that's not just it." Anguish was very evident in his voice. "You were looking like a toddler in her early years when I met you, I had no body yet at that time just a mere data encrypted in a machine, but hey, I was alive and I got to roam around the system anytime I wanted to," The sadness never left him, even from behind him I could feel it radiate off of Elliot.
"Anyways, you were 'more normal' at that time and kinda like a child, it didn't take long though, they strapped you in a metal table and sliced your torso open. I never could forget your pained cried as they poked your organs one by one, I could never forget what you looked like every time you die and then resurrected only to die again." I didn't know if he was crying but he sounded like it.
The empathic stupid A.I. A fleeting voice in my mind whispered.
The hairs at the back of my neck stood at the words I heard. My emotions were currently in shamble that my brain didn't know what to make me feel, so I was left with an empty sentiments.
"They trapped you in a glass tank, you were put to sleep and you were kept there." He stopped walking and talking altogether, he just stood there and looked up at the gray sky above us.
I waited for him to move and continue my story that he was unfolding.
The fucker just had to stop at a crucial part.
We halted a few meters from what used to be a one-floor-mall or a supermarket, I couldn't see the sign as it was already hugged by the thick frost.
"Is it bad to think about jacking that building right there?" I pointed at the structure I was eyeing for a little while now. "I'm suddenly starving." I rubbed my stomach, easing its growling.
Elliot seemed to snap from whatever he was thinking and looked at me. "We can do that and then I'll tell you the rest in there." He made a move to the building.
"Wait. Aren't there like, people-inhabitants-that are probably there?" My words made him stop.
"Naw, if there really are, they're probably dying or dead."
I looked at him funny, "Why would you think that, humans are tougher than you think."
"Right, if they can survive a negative twenty-eight degrees Celsius temp then kudos to them, bud." Though sarcastic, the drop of temperature surprised me.
How were we not human icecubes right now, when I was only wearing a thin, white long-sleeves and a matching pants and this sucker a black jeans, a lab coat, and a shirt with holes the shape of hands ? And oh, he was wearing combat boots and I...was wearing none. Just casually walking barefoot in this pile of snow at death-degrees Celsius.
Elliot must've seen my astonishment because he chuckled. "Not a human," He pointed to himself. "Not really a human," He pointed at me.
Right, the astonishing truth of him being an artificial intelligence slipped my mind.
"How come you have a body? Where are we by the way?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I tell you that we are at a place previously known as Africa." He started to walk again. "And I built my body, aren't I awesome?"
Africa, then I was a long way from home.
Home?
I could only chuckle, I didn't have a home nor parents. I was a fucking synthetic made to kill people.
"As far as I know, Africa is a hot place,"
After digging a feet below, Elliot opened the frost-coated glass door with a squeak and gestured for me to go in first. "Like I said, the world froze over."
The store's lights were miraculously on, the tiled floor was dry and no signs of disturbance caught my eyes. "There's electricity."
"Yep, there is." He replied from behind me. "It's not like there was a zombie apocalypse or typhoons and hurricanes to damage power lines."
I grabbed a cart and walked to the lane that said instant noodles. "How did this happen then?"
I heard Elliot grabbing things on our way to the said lane and then later on dumping it in my cart. "A sudden drop of temperature one night, a bit of rain, slight wind and then there was ice on roads the next morning. After that, the temperature continued to drop until heaters couldn't provide enough warmth anymore and people started evacuating to warmer countries."
The cart was half-full at this point, we were just grabbing things that we wanted to eat and some supplies in case of emergencies. Wait, could he eat?
The place was dead silent and Elliot's voice and the cart's wheels were the only noise that filled the large area. "There were news channels updating the changes of the weather until the fifth year but suddenly stopped in the middle of the sixth. No noise was heard from televisions or radios from then on. There were still some on social media, but also died a couple of years. The last I heard was the term 'The world is hibernating', 'til now there are no news if there are still people-living things-who are still alive."
So, there was a possibility that we were the only ones alive roaming this planet, "What about those back in that laboratory, weren't they humans?"
"Do you think they have an electric cooker so we can cook hot meals?"
I shrugged my shoulders.
"Those back there are not humans per se," We stopped on the electric supply aisle and grabbed some cable extensions we also carted a small electric cooker on the way.
"Oh! Let's sit on one of those sofas." He did a hard left to the furniture area. I had no clue that this place was spacious. Maybe they have a slogan in the lines of 'Looking for it? We got it!'
Then something occurred to me, "Do you know how old I am?" A stupid question but I had to know.
"Hmm, you're a few years younger than I am-probably fifty-seven or sixty-one."
Okay, I was a bit surprised but nothing could top the 'the world froze and possibly no human is left living anymore' news.
"Gosh, I'm old."
He plopped on the leather on-display couch for a few seconds and then stood back up and took the extensions along with him.
"Hey,"
Elliot made a sound in the back of his throat.
"About the thing you were telling me about me being kept in a glass," I wanted to know, and whatever he injected me with to trigger my actual memories was not doing its thing.
"You haven't recalled anything yet?" He plopped back down. He rummaged through the thing we'd taken in the cart and took out the small sack of frozen potato, knife, the rice cooker, and a few bottles of water...with iced contents.
Grabbing a potato, he started peeling it with the fruit knife. "You were kept in a tank alright, and the goal of those mad people was to 'powerize' you. To do this, they ran a series of tests on you again like testing the flexibility of your DNA to adapt to foreign introductions." He took another one and did the same.
I was sitting on a couch across from him and I listened to his every word with the hope to jump-start my brain and remember my memories so that I wouldn't be a fucking clueless piece anymore. The thirst to recall everything that this guy was telling me was increasing.
"Months past until they figured out your make up and several dead babies later, they were still problematic on how to 'evolve' you."
Dead babies? Oh, what had the world become? "What the fuck, babies?" I was utterly grossed by what I heard.
Elliot used the knife to slice open the bottles next and dropped their contents to the rice cooker. I watched him move about, he wouldn't be mistaken for a robot by the way he shifted. "Yeah, you told me before, you always dreamt of that part after your conditioning-at the beginning of the tests."
The baby with gray eyes.
It was real..? Was that me?
There was it again, the sudden confusion of knowing which was the reality and which was not. For a second there, I got lost by the torrential images of babies floating in tanks in my thoughts, that I momentarily forgot where I was.
"Why were the babies dead?" I gagged, I couldn't help it. The pity for them and the disgust to those who did those were a ball in my throat that was so hard to swallow.
"They tested on them because the percentage of each test working on you were very low and the probabilities of it destroying your body upon introduction were higher. Thus, the safest way-their words not mine-was to test the DNA extracted from various subjects to those poor little ones, to prevent damaging you, but sadly none of them survived."
Fuck. I grabbed the closest thing I could see-the vase sitting on the side table beside me-and vomited. The thought of those small human beings being poked and who knew what else was done to them made me hurl my guts harder.
Elliot was quiet as my gagging filled the silence of the furniture show room section.
It took a while before my throat calmed down and when I thought I had emptied my stomach of gut-juices, I pulled my face away from the hole of the vase and faced the A.I.
"T, you're green."
No shit, Sherlock. I could feel my greenness and for whatever reason, the shaking of my knees.
"Shall I continue?"
I answered him with a nod because my throat was raw and it stings to even swallow.
Elliot uncovered the lid of the rice cooker to check his potatoes. "They finally gave up when the last batch of these kids left no survivor, and decided to just move the testing to you." He put the lid back on and stared down at his hands.
His blacker-than-black hair moved down to frame one side of his face. The man had his hair in a sort of a Mohawk cut, to which the long strands of his hair at the top faded shorter as it went down to the base of his head. Eyelashes as black as his hair hid his gem-like eyes as it momentarily fluttered close.
"First testing and you died,"
What? I clutched the vase tight.
"Not for long though, you were fortunately revived and had no violent reaction towards the subject introduced to you-well, apart from you dying."
I didn't say a word and let him continue.
"They injected a mutated gene of a thermophile in you,"
"Geogemma barossii" I murmured. "Just like the one in the..." I didn't know what to call it, 'the other world I woke up from'? 'My alternate reality', 'the virtual set-up'?
He opened the lid again and peered inside the pot. "Yup," Elliot returned the cover with a frown. Guess the potatoes weren't cooked yet. "And those were fragments of memories, Thirty-Five-from other people-they just made it look like they were yours."
I wanted to cry, because his words were like a slap of reality. The reality of me being alone with no real memories of a family.
But all my sadness and self-pity disappeared after a few seconds. I was very much aware and it amazed me. One moment I was ready to bawl my eyes out, and then next I was okay. It felt like another consciousness in me was eating away my memories from that white room.
"It was a war whenever they introduced things in you because you would fight and resist them with all you could. But they were big and your strength was not enough to stop them. I mean what could a two year-old child do, right?" This man in front of me, wiped his tears and directed his eyesight to the pot. "I could only watch through the surveillance cameras surrounding the rooms but I wasn't aware of feelings yet at the time.
"Tubes and needles would be in your body after each gene-injection and you would lay there unmoving for weeks. You basically grew unaware that you were even existing because those continued for a decade!"
The anguish in his tone made my own tears well up. How could a machine like him feel this much, rather, how could he feel at all?
"Pain didn't bother you anymore to the point that you weren't even given any anaesthetics every time you underwent operating procedures." When Elliot finally looked at me, his eyes were glistening in pain. I stared at their beauty and sadness. "Hurry your brain up to remember so that I won't be telling you these anymore because they're just too painful to get back to." He sniffled and checked his potatoes before taking them out one by one with his hand.
"Do robots eat?" I was sad and angry, but surprisingly not as sad and as angry as him. I had to direct the talk to something else because he clearly hated reminiscing those no matter how badly I wanted to know it all.
His amethyst eyes met mine once again. "This one does." He bit the boiled potato to emphasize his point.
"Do you-you know-take a dump?" I got more curious. "What are you made of anyways?"
He narrowed his eyes at me, "I know what you are doing and it's as obvious as that vomit in your vase."
Ah, he noticed. I stood, walked to the other side of the area and placed the vase putrid with my vomit beside its wall.
"And no I don't take a shit because my body-which is made with both organs and metals-utilizes the foods I intake into energy right through its very atom so none will be excreted." I still heard Elliot's voice-though softer-from the other side.
I was racking my brain for things to ask-because there were plenty that my brain was blanking out, but then my thoughts went back to his words at the underground place, "Who is Nathan?" I sat in my previous spot and looked at him.
"Are you sure you want to know?" There was indecision in his face.
"Why? And you also refused to tell me back then." Why bother mentioning his name when he was not going to tell me who he was anyway?
Elliot raised his hands as if to surrender, "Okay, let's just put it this way. Nathan was our friend and then he was not ."
Uh-huh.
I was about to retort that that was not a valid explanation when I felt a familiar tingle on the back of my head. A garbled "What the fuck?" Were the last words that came out of my stiffening lips before my body dropped and seized.
I was aware of my surroundings, it was just that I couldn't control my body's erratic movements, but I never heard Elliot get up from were he was seated. No noise-not even a breath-came from him.
My hearing was becoming muffled and my vision was motherfucking clouding, and it was dizzying as hell.
"Thank goodness." Were the asshole's words as my body continued seizing.
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A/N: Hi! It has been a long while and here I am again dragging a day for a couple of chapters. Still working-for the longest time-on my descriptions, because words fail me most of the time.
Thank you for reading and keep safe!