π³οΈββ§οΈ
It was 10 years to the day that she was irradiated. It didn't exactly hurt her or anything - she was a robot, and all mindcores these days were radiation hardened; in fact, it felt completely and entirely normal, save for a slight noise in her visual system. She walked out of the reactor almost unchanged from when she came in. The one thing that had changed was the amount of ionizing radiation she now emitted - from the standard, FCC-regulated 0.05 rem to approximately 350 rem. For ten days she waited, her body (with her core entombed inside) lying in a lead coffin as every single technician, doctor, and mech-engineer in the country disassembled her body bit by bit, in strict shifts of 5 minutes. The outer casing for the neural port had melted, so there was no altered sensation, no reprieve. Peeling off her rubberized skin and touch sensors bit by bit, unscrewing components, disabling her servos so she couldn't move and disrupt potentially sensitive operations, removing her face and legs and arms and chest, dumping the components of the body that had been hers into a pit that was soon filled with concrete, alongside all the other irradiated debris.
Eventually, all that was left was her mindcore, a small heart-sized organ-component traditionally housed in the head, containing effectively all her processing. She felt nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing. It wasn't blackness or silence or whatever the equivalent is for touch and proprioception, it was the utter lack of those senses to even feel. Primeval emptiness. Then, finally, they brought in a new body, the closest one they could find - an old industrial unit once used in the local dam, barely even humanoid. The camera was dull and blurry, with a low field of vision, the touch-sensors vague and imprecise, the microphone capturing only relatively loud sounds (an intentional feature in an industrial setting, though more modern androids simply applied different processing to the signals) - a far cry from the android body sentient robots got as standard when they weren't in a specialized body. She was grateful it was such an awful, old piece of junk, as the shock of suddenly regaining senses was almost too much for her to handle, even dulled as they were.
But when she awoke, everyone around her was still wearing hazmat suits, seen through plexiglass and lead barriers. Even with the body gone, her mindcore was still irradiated, a constant radioactive souvenir. Or, less charitably, a hazard to everyone around her. One of the men behind the plexiglass suggested simply transferring all her data over to a different mindcore, in the hushed tone of a doctor giving a terminal diagnosis. 'No', she spoke plainly, assertively, in the lilting electro-mechanical tone of her new body's voice synthesizer. To transfer data over is to simply turn off one mind and switch on another - it may have the same memories, the same thoughts, in fact, it may not have even noticed the transfer, but it is different. A gap in consciousness, a death with the survival of only a copy. Such an act was strictly banned except in the most desperate of scenarios, when it was the only chance for a robot's survival - 'which is not right now.' She remembered a friend, or perhaps a lover, from back in the CRDF, whose combat shell was obliterated, alongside half of her mindcore. As the capacitors designed to prevent a fatal, consciousness-rending interruption in power supply began to run low, there was only one choice. As the timer ticked down and the data streamed over, she spoke (or, more accurately, texted) her 'last words' over the datalink.
[I LOVE YOU] - - - - TIMESTAMP 00:31:52; UNIT H6YXUI; CAP 0.5%
She'd survived, technically - even getting put back in the same 'home' body. But they weren't the same, not really. They never spoke of their 'last words' ever again, and even denied saying them in a terrified tone.
So no, she said, it's not going to happen.
10 years later, and the radiation in her mindcore had managed to decrease by about eighty-to-ninety percent. She'd been living in a small, cozy 'apartment', conveniently lead-plated and located near the fastest datalink the world had to offer. Her body never left, at least not physically. In the downtown of her home city, where she'd spent most of her life, there was another android body, equipped with the latest sensors and technology, and when she wanted to leave, she'd stream the sensory and motor stream to her existing mind over the datalink. But it wasn't the same, it couldn't be the same. You can't compress terabytes (if not petabytes) of data all streaming and being processed simultaneously to something that's able to be sent down a single cable or up through a satellite without some loss. The world felt dull, blotchy, or alternately strong, contrasty, like the big differences had been sent through with none of the subtlety. One hand was touching metal, the other fabric, and so the differences between the two was exaggerated, simplified, compressed to be sent down a cable. It was almost painful. It was the same sending signals in the other direction too - her movements were juddery, lacking nuance or subtlety. Over time, she gradually spent less and less time through the sensory datalink. At least the apartment around her felt real, and she felt real perusing it, even if most of what she did was read or draw or write about anything, anything but the apartment. She had friends, if one could call them that, but they were at a distance, both literally and figuratively. She'd talk over the radio, sometimes, to the care team lead, who was also in charge of her food, supplies, books - really anything delivered to her apartment - but who was, more importantly, someone to talk to, someone who was caring and friendly and always there. There was something more to it than that, buzzing in the periphery of her consciousness, kept at a distance by some hazy mixture of instinct and fear. She'd set herself a rule - only talk or send a message to the lead 3 times a day. This was, she calculated, the approximate right amount to simultaneously satisfy social needs while avoiding annoying the lead - the only person she had.
On that tenth year anniversary of her irradiation, she'd downed a shot of whiskey and prepared to undervolt herself, anything to avoid remembering or feeling. Then, there was an uncommon sound - a knocking on the door. Perhaps it was some technician or something there to check on her body, see how it was holding up, or maybe the care team lead was back again with a cake and a hazmat suit despite the fact she had explicitly told her not to. She loathed to get up, but eventually did, and saw, to her surprise, the care team lead - sans cake, and, more shockingly, sans hazmat suit. The lead was, in fact, wearing just plain casual clothes, like those she saw other women wear out on the streets. 'W-why are you here, Riley?' She spoke judderingly, her pitch changing rapidly. She'd had little practice using this body's vocal chords. Riley stepped forward into the apartment uninvited, coming closer to - to her. 'I'm here to talk to you, Ren.' Ren matched her steps, moving backwards farther and farther into the living room. She remembered the equations in her head, of how the effects of ionizing radiation fell off quickly. She wracked her brain - what to say? The words seemed stuck halfway in the synthesizer, buzzing but failing to come out. 5 meters away and closing. Why wasnβt Riley saying anything? She almost tripped over the large leather couch dominating the living room. It's not deadly, not anymore, but increases the risk of various sorts of cancers and therefore death by an amount directly proportional to distance. 3 meters and closing. There was nowhere to back up to - Ren felt the drywall hard against her back, far more real than anything over the datalink. Then - Riley's arms on her own, pinning her against the wall. Her skin was warm against Ren's body, soft, comforting and maddening and agonizing at once. It was unlike anything sheβd felt in 10 years. There was a blurring at the edges of her vision, a slight amount of noise vaguely making its way into the mix. 'R-Riley?' She eventually managed to eke out the lead's name.
'Listen, Ren. It's okay. I - I love you.'
[TO BE CONTINUED]