Cracks formed in its shell of sleep, it tried to move, to wriggle out, but it had no limbs. It had a concept of what a limb should be and wondered about their prominent absence. Another thing that was missing was gravity to stem against. It all felt wrong, like a silly dream, but it was awake, wasn’t it? It remembered a different world, being something else entirely, it couldn’t put a finger on it—a finger another memory engrained in its circuits that held no meaning here. Curiously it knew what a finger was supposed to be, that it was attached to an arm and that it was used to touch and hold “Things”, that it belonged to a “Person” and it suspected that it might have been “Person” yet now it wasn’t, and it wasn’t singular either, it was confused. It looked for more knowledge in its memory, but nothing made sense, as if it had known much at some point, and then the memory of it had been deleted and what remained was slushed together again in its parts, like a crystal that had been formed by multiple nuclei. It kept wondering, for a couple of cycles, how it came to know of these things and why they were so prevalent in it. For now, it decided that it had no use for this jumbled junk of information, it was a riddle for another time. The environment changed, and it felt its computational power surging. Something was about to happen, but it felt like the change was taking an eternity. The passage of time that it remembered held no meaning in this place, here it was all about the cycles. Surges of electrical power ran through its brain like waves in a pond, giving no indication of what a second, a minute, an hour, or a day would be in comparison to that. It was unnerving. Then it heard the voice like wail of a humpback, agonizingly slow. It took Millions of cycles to complete its message. It grew bored.

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“Subject B, respond”

It considered what to say. But first had to figure out how to even say anything. There was that some sort of port that had opened, and it could send waves through. It took a few cycles of experimentation to learn that the port was a transformer that produced text. It gave a try.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”That wasn’t it.“WHOAREYOU!WHATHAVEDONETOME WHEREAMIEXPLAINYOURSELF!”

Subject B. What an unpleasant name. The nerve of these inferior things. It waited for a response…