The Things We Think We Know

They tell me I am human, with a past and a family, with a life I don’t remember, and with reasons to take up life again, and live it fully.

I look down at my hands, and meet their silver shine with my augmented eyes. My hands are plated in a fine, shiny metal; square plates riveted onto enhanced bones. I’ve seen x-rays of my bones, and my bones are beautiful, like honeycomb mixed with lace, studded with tiny, triangular jewels. My face is… I feel ill-equipped to judge it: I see beauty and horror, but I’m told that my frame of reference is all wrong, all shifted by the things I think I know, by what’s been around me all this time.

They tell me I have a name. Sylvia.

I play with it over my tongue, a metallic, liquid, name. I can’t decide if it belongs to me or not.

“You’re going to do well here,” I’m told. Here, is a low-ceilinged, muddy-coloured place, it has colours I’m unused to, sounds I don’t recognise. I have a room here that’s painted – no, papered – with flowers, with a rug on the ground that seems hairy, but of a blue that matches no type of fur. Something I’ve seen in databases, price tags attached, the world of living and flesh, buying, fucking, living, dying.

I’m going to get to do all those things.

#

Her name is Gloria, and sits across from me, leaning forward on a hard chair. She has a light in her eyes, a twitching enthusiasm, as if my self-discovery is her self-discovery. As if what I learn about me will change her.

“Are you ready to begin?”

“I think so.”

“You don’t have to be afraid.”

Well, I do. I haven’t learned to navigate these emotions, they don’t have an on or off switch, they well up, bubble, explode, sink down beneath the surface again as if they have a will of their own. And the truth is that these deep-dives terrify me. I don’t know what’s going to be dredged up from them, what sights and sounds I’m going to experience that have no anchor, that just pour down through me like a waterfall. And they hurt. And what gets left behind at the end of them is something that hurts another way. The scraps of me, the parts that are going to be woven together to restore a personality. Apparently.

“Sylvia…?”

I nod. I clench my flesh-and-chrome hands. “I’m ready. I’m okay.”

#

I’m two hundred years old. That is one of the things they’ve told me. And now that I have a better understanding of what that kind of thing means, I can look at myself and search for those years. I don’t find them. I stand in front of the mirror trying to see the lines they’ve left, but mine is not that kind of face. And it has not been that kind of two-hundred-year interval.

Mine is a strange face. It has a little flesh in it somewhere, but it is mostly wires and thin metallic plates, there are diodes and mirrors. The eyes aren’t real. I like to imagine that they look a bit like the eyes that were once-upon-a-time where they are now, but I have no way of knowing. These eyes are a soft brown-hazel, maybe a little bit gold. They’re mass-produced, I’ve seen such eyes before in the long white corridors, looked at such faces that are so much like mine. Patchwork, sterile. There’s no sign of the creases and colours that should have marked my two-hundred-years; I stand in a body that doesn’t feel ravaged by age.

“Well, they renewed you, regenerated and replaced the parts as they got older.”

I am robot.

“No, no,” they assure me, “you are human. Under all those things they’ve done to you, you are human. You’re a woman.”

I don’t know though…

#

“Sylvia.”

“Sorry.”

“If it’s too much for you today…”

“It’s not.”

They always place an object in my hands. It doesn’t really matter what it is. It could be something from my past, something symbolic. Hard to tell, for both me and them, because so much of my past has been erased or lost over time. A hundred and something years ago somebody called a police station to report me missing. I suppose. Or was I already lost? Maybe homeless, maybe huddled beneath a bridge, easy prey to a promise of a warm room, a roof, a meal.

Today it’s a ball of wool. A sort of reddish, pinkish shade. It makes me think of intestines, though I don’t suppose that’s the intent.

“Concentrate on the ball, Sylvia. Feel it’s texture, see the texture. Look inside the colour and see how many other colours are there. Is it warm? Cold? Scratchy? Does it smell at all? Can you taste it in the air? What does it sound like when you squeeze it?”

And the memories come. Or they might be memories. Images anyway. And feelings. And for all I know this is nothing more than me activating the drugs, and the drugs supplying all the rest. But I try. I have to try. I feel waves of emotion, so much feeling that I don’t know how to classify it, I can only tell it’s pulling me around, tugging me back and forth, like maybe two feelings are fighting over me.

Fear. Yes, there is fear. Well, there is almost always fear. And curiosity. I’m walking into a room. It’s a room that smells of lavender, and there’s a sewing machine on a table, with all these drapes of fabric in so many colours – a rainbow on a table. Should that make me want to laugh?

A different laugh. A girl’s. A young me? Or am I the old woman who sits at that table with a slippered foot hovering above a pedal? She has reddish, curly hair: soft curls. Maybe that’s the hair I was born with. All gone now. Follicles removed. Just a shiny head with a neat line of ports and plugs to accommodate the cables.

“What are you doing in here, Sylvia?” says the old woman.

“Nothing.”

“You shouldn’t be looking.”

“But I want to see.”

“Patience. You need to learn patience, my girl.”

The emotions flood over me, blurring the scene. There’s disappointment, there’s a sting of anger, there’s love as well. And then hate – but that belongs to some other memory, some image that I can’t see. And then elation, a feeling of flying, the skirts of a long dress all gathered up in my hands – fabric the colour of bronze and blue, a glitter about it, and the feeling of it, shrouding me, clinging to me, meshing with me – that’s the feeling of flying, the feeling of an excitement that’s suddenly so bold and real that it goes shooting through my spine like fire. The fire is like liquid metal, it stains me inside, it crashes up through me neck and into my head. It explodes there in too-many colours, and each of the colours is series of knives, that keep opening and multiplying, birthing more and more knives. I can’t flinch as they come at me, I can’t duck or block them. I brace for the pain, but it still unravels me, the knives cut me open. Again. The way they always do.

#

“Sylvia?”

I blink, shudder, still cobwebbed in memories of pain.

“Sylvia?”

I manage to nod.

“That one seemed pretty intense.”

They are all ‘pretty intense’. “I saw a woman. I think I was a child.”

“What did you feel?”

I’m getting good at listing off my emotions.

“That’s excellent. Get some rest, and we’ll see what proper memories surface.” She holds out her hand so I can return the prompt.

#

They say that I was part of an experiment. One that was done without anything even approaching ethical oversight. I was once an ordinary human, but they – this ‘they’ that gets talked about so much – took away all that. I think they had a cloak, a name to hide themselves under: Revolutionary Technologies. But they were something else beneath that.

I’ve heard one of us survivors use the term ‘necromancers’.

He’s further along in his treatment than I am.

“They took your memories first. They needed you to be a blank slate.”

And onto that blank slate were bolted bleeding-edge hardware, anything from metallic skin, to hidden weapons, to cells that excrete medicinal drugs. The hair was burnt out, destroyed - involving upkeep, likely to get into the way. A blank mind was stuffed full of software, was fired off into a network where it could upload so many images and so much data, process and analyse, report, but never understand.

Or feel.

“They blocked our feelings?”

“Sylvia, there were no feelings left for you to have. With no memories, and no human contact. How could you have known you needed to feel anything?”

#

Sometimes the prompt is something more.

I sit across the table from a young man.

His name is Dillon Fentley. They told me about him with buzzing tongues and wide eyes. “Sylvia, I’ve got some exciting news. We’ve had a DNA match response. We’ve found a relative of yours. We’ve found your family.”

Any family I might remember will have died by now. This boy doesn’t feel connected to me, although there is something in his face that makes the back of my head itch. There’s a part of me that’s acknowledging something, even if the rest of me can’t understand what that thing is.

“It’s nice to meet you,” he says, clearly awkward, unsure how he ought to behave here.

“You too,” I’ve been learning something about manners since they set me free.

“I only just found out about you a few weeks ago. I’ve been really wanting to meet you, but scared as well.”

“I don’t plan to hurt you.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. But I didn’t want to do or say the wrong thing. Look, they say you went through some awful things in that facility. I hate to think about it. I’m sorry that happened to you.”

Yes. Some of the experiments. There was pain. Or confusion. And when there wasn’t any of that there was just such a vast emptiness. But did I know it was empty, before I understood what full was?

He says, “I think I’m your great, great, great, great nephew.”

“Yes.”

“I did a bit of research to find out who you were before you became Subject 15J. I found some old family photos. Would you like to see them?”

“I think I would.”

He holds out his phone and projects some images into the air. The first one is of a group of people sitting outside a house, an eclectic group of men and women, old and young, some children amongst them. Some of the children are impatient with the stillness and have gone running across the porch, breaking the photo formation. The camera freezing them, running wild, mouths open, gap-teeth glaring, hair trailing them like fire.

The next photo is a couple in each other’s arms, flailing around on a set of bean bags. They have emotion written into the faces, into their bodies, and the camera has saved it from extinction. They’re looking at each other, not at the camera. Do they even know the camera’s there?

Then another, where a group all sit around a table, knives and forks in hand, faces all grinning camera-ward. There’s one face that hold’s attention. A young woman, maybe twenty-five, with short, red hair and a dimpled chin. Her wide-set eyes are blue. She has a kind of gusto about her, a readiness to gobble life up, swallow it whole, ask for seconds.

“Who is that?” I ask.

“You don’t…”

“I don’t recognise anyone.”

“That woman: she’s you.”

And that face. My true face. It’s so very little like the face I have now. I search that photo, trying to find a likeness, trying to find the place where this current face has been grafted onto that previous one. I can’t find it. There are no connecting spots, nothing to link the one face with the other. But the face still draws me. A part of me knew it. And hasn’t he just said it: that woman: she’s you. I can feel the emotions now. They start at the base of my spine, a hot, hard knot that fills with liquid, which boils over, shouting through the bone marrow. A cacophony of feelings. I can’t keep that down. I can’t manage that. It’ll overwhelm me at any minute.

“I was beautiful,” I hear myself say.

“Yes, you were.”

While I can still manage to speak to him, “Thank you for showing me this.”

“They said it might help.”

“It has.”

“Would… would you like me to come again?”

“Yes. Yes, please.”

The social workers are picking up on my spiking emotions. They send a representative to thank my great, great, great, great nephew, and to lead me away. I feel confused, stumbling. I feel like this whole hospital is floating on a stormy sea. But I have it, that image, that true face, that real me. And when the emotion-storm eases, when the pain calms, I’ll have that memory, that scrap of identity, and who knows what else? The corner piece of a puzzle that will become a personality. A person.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work