Balina is a mess

Being some kind of fucked-up hybrid is not as fun as it looks.

Balina Gail Mahigan is a mess. An accident. It's a miracle she functions as well as she does, really. Hybrids are still a poorly-understood subsection of the population, but she has no real illusions about what she is. Her body can't figure out how it's supposed to be built, her mind chases itself in circles, and not content with that, she'd made her own modifications that could have any number of effects on her long-term health. She's aberrations piled on aberrations, all the way down.

She prefers not to think of herself in these terms, but late at night, when sleep refuses to come calling, it becomes harder to escape. On the worst of those nights, she admits that even had she been born a wolf, or a cow, like any of the rest of her family, she'd still be having thoughts like this.

What cruel god would consign its creations to be made of *meat*?

She tries. She's done a lot to herself, in an attempt to make her body feel more at home. She doesn't regret any of it; life is a journey, and any step skipped may have put her down a worse path. Hormones helped her transmute depression into motivation, and those first tastes of cybernetic augmentation showed her what was possible. They led her down the right paths, and she got there, stumbling blindly in the dark.

It wasn't until she got to experiment with augmentation outside of her own body that she really started to see what she needed to do. A couple of arms mounted to a post, and she could have hands anywhere she needed them. Throw in a camera mount, stick the post on some kind of locomotion, pretty it all up, and pretty soon there's a robotic simulacrum of yourself. The early designs were as hacky and bodged together as one would expect, but they were the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

Yes, yes, most of the modern synthetics look like her, in one way or another. A trifling detail. Aesthetics and vanity are just part of the miasma that the ego surrounds itself with in its horrible fleshy cage. There is comfort in telling yourself that there are parts of you that are still worth preserving. It may even be true.

As is the case with everyone, what matters is what's inside. There is Order. There is Design. Every screw, every wire, every tiny sensor has a purpose, and all were put there by someone who knew why it was needed. If they break down, you can find out why. They can be stripped down and rebuilt, maintained, and repaired. They make sense.

She knows that none of that is *literally* true, and if one were to point out how much garbage is probably in the programming, or showed her just how much spaghetti-against-the-wall experimentation went into the designs she uses every day, she'd shrug in triplicate and say that's not the point. Nothing in this world is perfect, especially not commercial products built for the purpose of profit, but this comes close.

Every morning, she sits down and plugs herself into the campus network, stretches hundreds of legs, and cracks hundreds of pairs of knuckles before she gets to work. To date, nobody else on the planet has ever been able to process anywhere near the level of input she seems to maintain effortlessly; the best anyone in the know can muster is that there's something in that fucked-up hybrid brain of hers that makes it easier to think in parallel. There's comfort in that, at least.

And every damned evening she has to turn them off, unplug herself, collapse into that damned creature and go home, pretending she's glad to be done with work for the day.

When she finally reaches her expiration date, however far in the future that may be, she wants to be plugged into her network when it happens. Not just because that's where she's the most herself, but in the hope that, somehow, when she passes, the robots will seize up for a moment, notice the minisule, vestigal blob on one end has stopped working, then continue on their own as if nothing had happened. She's such a small part in such a vast machine; maybe it can go on without her.

She knows it's nonsense, but it's comforting nonsense.