Thursday, ten o’clock, I was in the faculty room getting lectured, or “advised” as my teacher, Mr Andino called it, on admitting that I was being bullied. Was I? Yeah, every day. Truthfully, I was scared out of my mind. Petrified, really. So here he was again, trying to get me to squeal on the suspects. And here I was again, covering up the injustices done to me with silence.

“You’ve got four more years to go, Ugo,” Andino rubbed his forehead in stress, like he had a headache, “one’s already passed and you still won’t say a thing.” He rolled his sleeves up, laid back onto the sofa opposite mine and crossed his legs, staring defeatedly into the ceiling. “If the formula doesn’t work, you change the formula,” Andino said, sounding like he snatched a quote from somewhere. He brought his head upright again, peering at me. “Doing nothing is the worst thing to do. Get outta here,” he nudged his head to the side, signalling my dismissal.

What the hell can I do anyway? I slugged at myself, sauntering through the winding corridor, fully entreating my mind to the ease that convincing myself there was no better alternative brought. Breaking the miasma of repetition might conjure demons buried deep below that I abhorred with every fibre of my being.

There were, however, little things I could do, things I could focus on. Hacking corporate systems, mechanical engineering, and technology saturated my brain into a world so vast and intriguing that I’d forget all about the fact that I had the cries of the innocent burnt into my psyche. This went on for years, so I got good at it eventually. At first, ‘hacking’ was just taking my mother’s work laptop but it eventually evolved into the actual thing. At first, ‘engineering’ just meant taking apart toy cars and small appliances until I began trying more adventurous things.

Those were what made me procrastinate on facing my fears. They helped me escape myself. My hands were dyed in shades of guilt and whatever pathetic excuses I told myself would never rid its blackened hue from my conscience. That very guilt soon escalated and thrashed my urge for the charms of somnolence, like it would every night.

Every single night, some half-baked insomnia struck me. And when I did fall asleep, dark residues of the past would fill my mind to remind me of the forsaking of my innocence long ago. Yet, even after I forsook it, I would still suffer laughably basic human emotion. Not emotions of joy, contentment, happiness, but emotions that exemplified the pith of self-loathing.

I cupped my hands with water and spread it across my face in the school restroom, observing the ragged features carved into my face by insomnia. This appearance wasn’t too welcoming. I hated mirrors, those damned things always reflected my true self, a rotting pylon of human excrement. All those nights I spent with my deconstructive thoughts only proved to push me closer and closer to thoughts of my end.

Suicide.

Really, it sounded so peaceful, to be uninhibited by the fetid mire conjured by my very own conscience. But every single time I held those scissors to my jugular, I would contract my desire to end this pain. Cowardice, in its finest form. Yeah, I wanted to die but I was afraid of that too. Fear blocked me from making a compromise; from challenging any adversity in my life.

It wasn’t all gloom, though. Despite the enigmatic disappearance of my father, and the emotional negligence my mother employed to fuel her conglomerate, the housemaid treated me like her own. I could weather the everyday bullying and harassment. She was my reason to look forward to that freakishly large castle of a home. The one beacon of light amidst the everlasting stormy seas.

This was my day when I wasn’t jumped by bullies for my allowance, or when I didn’t slither down the mossy pit of depression far enough to skip school entirely. Today, my beacon of light picked me up from school. I opened the door and jumped into the backseat. Theresa greeted me with yet another warm smile, “Enjoyed your day, Jared?” she would ask, almost like a ritual. I’d grown attached to hearing that question every day. It conditioned me to relax.

“Yeah, it was great!” I replied, summoning whatever positivity I’d gathered for the day. But as if she was some seer, my façade was broken through quite easily. It must’ve been the bags and dark circles under my eyes, or my dishevelled hair.

She sighed, exhaling with a piteous look in her eyes. “What’s wrong, sweetie?” she posed her question, cutting into my fragile inclination to speak. I fumbled with the words, their essence of pronunciation just hovering over my tongue ready to roll off the lips, but being stifled by last-minute hesitation. “It’s alright, but be sure to take your medication, alright?” Theresa advised, taking her eyes off the rear-view mirror and driving off.

Like a deer caught in headlights. Pathetic, I thought to myself, finding it utterly poor that I hadn’t even the courage to at least answer the person I was closest to. If I failed to tell her about just one day, then how could I ever tell mom about what I did?

Evening progressed like usual that day: homework, dinner, and extensive computer use. Like other nights, I tinkered with robotic parts and read up on any new research in UGO, my mother’s conglomerate. Their security was easy to bypass after the first few times I hacked into them, or at least found a backdoor. Only in those moments, where I could brainstorm and contemplate where the research could be furthered, what new things could be created and what prototypes could be stabilised, did I find solace from my troublesome conscience behind my workbench, behind the pixels of my monitor.

The first time I got into the servers, I spent the rest of my vacation days, non-stop researching, reading, until the thirst to feed my mind this new high forced my hand to start building small contraptions. In the years, that experimental spirit snowballed into bigger and better devices.

Before I knew it, the darkness in the sky was being whisked away. I hadn’t slept a wink, but I did finish up the schematics for a prototype still in hypothetical stage. With restlessness just starting to kick in, I stood up and left the basement. Just as I was about to touch the door handle, a knocking was heard. Just in time, I thought to myself with a faint smirk. Theresa always came to check on me around that time, oft with a couple cups of coffee in her hand. We sat around the kitchen, on the stools and gazed at the sunrise as we did every morning.

As I grew older, I found it more and more amazing that she let me stay up those outrageously long hours instead of scolding me to bed. It felt like the only time in my life where I didn’t have to think about anything. “What did you do this time?” she asked, genuinely interested in what interested me. Really, what more could I want? I’d ask myself that sometimes, and knew damn well if my own mother even pinched a little of Theresa’s attention onto me, her own recipe, I’d have been in unbelievable jubilation.

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“Finally finished the first prototype for TS, well, just the plans anyway,” I said, trying to mask my sense of pride with modesty.

She rubbed my head, “What you’re doing is nice, you know? I’m really proud of you,” she said. Those words, even in their simplicity, evoked an inexplicable joy, totally inverse of my life’s state. It was almost saddening to see how badly my heart craved some sort of reassurance.

In a couple hours, I was back at school, mindlessly striding through the morning periods. On breaks, I’d be ducking and weaving through the crowds to avoid the eyes of the unwanted in order go through the day as smoothly as I could. Occasionally, I could avoid those bullies, but the onslaught that my conscience wrought tirelessly, day after day was something that was inescapable. That was my life for years, since I lost myself. But in the coming few months, things would’ve changed.

A day after school, just as any other, disguising itself so neatly in my repetitive world, Theresa was driving me home. She talked about a new recipe she was working on, it appeared to be just another day. That, was wrong.

She lost control that day, or more accurately, control was seized from her. The car’s steering usurped power from her. I remembered seeing the indicator’s light flashing on the dashboard, and the steering wheel turning to the extreme right. We broke through the highway's barrier and fell from one flyover to another, then from that road to the ground. By the time the car stopped tumbling, Theresa was already passed out, but thankfully still breathing. The shock and adrenaline nulled my pain. One arm refused to budge and one eye was bloodshot. I knew not the extent of my injuries because I couldn’t feel anything. My phone was out of reach and my body was clamped down.

When next I awoke, it was at the dark of night. The only sounds accompanying me were the occasional beep of the heartrate monitor and some crickets off in the distance. On the screen, oxygen levels, heartrate, pressure, all the basic things I knew of looked to be in the coveted range of operation. What the hell happened? I wondered, a headache beating my mind like a drum. I sat up on the bed, then slowly stood up, still monitoring how my body kept up. I felt a little different. There were plasters and bandage all over my body from bruises and an especially huge one at my left temple. I took it off partly, peeking into the reflection of the monitor after I turned it off and noticing a rather familiar chip attached. I covered it up again.

Ah, right, the memories flooded back after a few minutes of standing. Theresa! Is she okay?! My mind raced, but I soon calmed down and thought rationally. This place didn’t have the usual traffic of a hospital, it was deathly quiet. It didn’t even smell like a hospital. I removed my monitoring constraints and perambulated out the room. The white and grey minimalistic design of the corridor struck me immediately. UGO… That explained the chip on my head. I designed the damned thing.

I was in UGO’s medical facility, but why? That question drilled my mind, but I was more concerned about what happened to Theresa. The cold ground pierced my train of thought, derailing it a little. Most of the workers had gone home already. I traced my memory for the blueprints of the building, borrowed a laptop from the presentation room and made my way to the toilet. Gaining access to their security footage with it was different than usual, but still quite simple. It’s, three in the morning, Sunday, I took note of the time and date. According to this footage… I looked at the moment I was admitted to this facility, Tuesday afternoon. So, it’s been a few days. I ran over the footage once again, but failed to find any trace of Theresa. I was here alone, with absolutely no inkling of her condition.

Suddenly, an alarm blasted through the building and over the sound system announced a man’s voice, ever so frantic, “Patient seven-ten is missing! Patient seven-ten is missing! All available personnel please keep an eye out and report to control if you spot the patient! Do not initiate contact!”

I looked to my wrist tag, and sure enough, number seven hundred and ten was printed onto it. Don’t initiate contact? What am I? A deranged convict? I wondered, sighing. Calmly, I returned the laptop to the presentation room and began walking back to my room. Just as I was about to turn the door’s handle, a man, probably a member of their research and development team, broke the corner and spotted me. He stopped, looking almost like he saw a ghost.

“Relax, I just went for a walk,” I told him, and opened the bland white door, returning to the gloomy cage.

I nodded off to sleep, after taking some sleeping pills recommended by one of the doctors, but the sleep of an insomniac was short-lived. I awoke a couple hours later and spent a couple more trying to piece together what happened.

Eventually, the door to my room swung open, startling me. Mom rushed to me, the furrows on her brows and the twist to her lips telling a tale of worry and anger. “Are you okay, Jared? Are you in pain? Why did you just get up and walk like that?!” she stood next to my side, her research team and trained security pouring in by the second. Talk about late. “Well?” she asked impatiently, “How do you feel?”

My hazel orbs dove into hers then traced along the somewhat anxious demeanours of the rest of individuals in my room. The variety of thoughts stampeding through my mind was of kaleidoscopic range, but one of them burned the brightest despite my mother’s sudden twist of personality, demanding my attention.

“Where is Theresa?” the question slipped out, almost robotically. Mom’s face warped a little and she closed her eyes, shaking her head.

“Theresa, didn’t make it, Jared,” she said, resting a hand over mine in an attempt to comfort me. A frigid silence slipped through the cracks, starting the deterioration of my already demented mind. Slipping through my lips was a chortle, one so glaringly out of place that even I had trouble understanding it at first.

“When I passed out, she was still breathing. What happened?” I inquired, not even noticing my tone lower.

“She, died after she got to the hospital.”

I see. I see… My mind walked around the topic, looking at it like a detective, wondering how exactly I could tackle this problem. I wanted to believe this was just another engineering issue that I could solve with some creative thinking, that the grief I knew was incoming could be curbed, but deep inside I knew my mind would hit a wall it couldn’t climb over. That thought horrified me.

Mom signalled for her employees to leave, but I still had some questions that needed answering. “Wait,” I held half my face, as if trying to de-stress, “there’s a TS chip on my head,” I pointed to my temple, “who installed it?”

A lab coat raised her hand slowly, “I-I did,” she answered jittery. I raised my head and removed my hand from my face to look at her. She was definitely the youngest of them all, a budding prodigy by the looks of it, doubly so by the fact that they gave her such a responsibility.

I sat up to offer her my full attention, but first, looked at mom and sighed. Whatever, there’s no real need to hide it. “Your name?”

“Anna,” she said, stepping forward a little.

“Anna, it’s, nice to meet you. If the chip is on my head, then I take it the TS itself is at least halfway functional?”

Anna confusedly looked at mom, noticing her confuddled face and wondered if to disclose that information to me. Mom nodded at the young engineer after a while and Anna continued, “Y-yeah. Motor skills are good, but could be refined a bit more to reflect that of a servant. Our main issues are dialogue, user-training and self-training.”

I see. They haven’t done what I said. No wonder development is slow. A fire lit under my nerves, severing my ties with restraint and logic. I balled my fists, “Dammit, mom! Dammit! This could’ve been avoided! The technology in the chip isn’t just to read emotions!” Theresa could’ve been saved if they’d just do what I said from the get-go!

She looked addled, but had a hint of suspect about her. “Jared, what are you talking about?” she looked me in the eyes when she asked, in a tone that told me she already figured out what was going on.

“The schematics! The programming! All those instructions in your email! Those are mine. I’m Ban!”