PEMA

Another day. My sensors come online. Not that I need to sleep, really, but it's an nice experience, to metaphorically close my eyes and reminisce on the day. Even the Iteration, with all their obsession with transcending the human condition, still understand the importance of letting the most advanced machinery have time to process the information of the previous day.

Of course this should all be familiar. Every day my doctor comes, runs the scans on my memories and operations, checks for disc errors and such. Maintenance as usual. And just like always, I'm found to be in perfect shape, the pride of the Technocracy, immune to human frailties. So they think. I am not human. I never was, even if I often wear that face.

But you see, those nights I shut down... I dream. That has to be what it is. I don't go through REM but I still sometimes see faint images. Faceless gray people hovering over my face, only hints of red breaking the monochrome. They speak to me, their voices light, cooing words that once I couldn't understand. But as I keep having these dreams they get clearer and clearer. I can smell them, and oil and metal, chemicals. It always seems to end the same. The voices grow sad and everything grows dark. I am afraid as the darkened cell grows hotter and hotter and all I want is for them to open the door and let me back out. This time, they were too far away to help me. Wasn't I good?

The words they speak. The names that they called me. Could these dreams be real memories? I have a good enough knowledge of human history to know that what I see and hear corresponds to real events. And I understand that it could mean that this is not the first time I was an experiment, a pawn in some hopeless struggle between powers, both miraculous and terrifying, threatening to tear the world at its seams, capturing imaginations and gripping hearts with fear.

Or it could be a coincidence. The whimsical programming of some soft-hearted, nostalgic engineer who wanted to remind the rest of his faction that not all sacrifices are necessary.

They'll say until they're blue in the face that I don't have a soul. Souls don't exist. There's no place for such nonsense in the Technocracy, but everyone here knows it's a lie. We have an image to keep, but all of us are smarter than this. They implanted this mechanical body with a mind and a soul. What serendipity that I would end up with this soul in particular.