I waited patiently, my eyes closed as I watched the hallways leading from the cargo bay, since Theseus was still awaiting a big empty room transplant. It was only a matter of minutes before I saw the door to the dormitory hallway open wide. I saw a middle-aged woman step through with Joel at her back, walking behind her with an arrogant disregard for the potential threat.
She had long blond hair tied back into a ponytail and a pair of round spectacles resting on her small nose. She wore a white overcoat on top of a brown sweater. I’d always thought that the cold I felt outside of the core module was just a quirk of preferring to live in temperature-nullifying lubricant, but maybe places that were only separated from space with a few meters of steel were just chilly.
She already looked tired, and she had a nervous expression on her face as she stepped into the hall and stopped, pausing to scribble something onto a paper notepad she had been carrying under one arm.
It was a bit muted because one of the sensors I was expecting to hear it from was still damaged with the cargo bay, but I heard Joel ask “What you got there?”
“A quick test.” I heard her say back as she glanced up at the nearby sensor array “Just to be certain. Can she see in here?”
Joel raised an eyebrow, looking surprised as she placed the notepad on the floor and placed a small handheld terminal face down on top of it, leaving it on the floor and standing back up. “She should.” Joel scoffed “You don’t believe she’s the real deal or something?”
“I’m not used to taking anyone’s word on anything.” She muttered, getting back up to her feet and standing face to face with Joel. She was trying to show him that she wasn’t intimidated by him. It wasn’t working. “Especially related to something like this.”
“Good policy.” He motioned for her to continue down the hall as I zoomed in on the paper. It simply read ‘Greet me with the word in the open file on the terminal.’ That was clever. Nobody else would have the opportunity to take a look at the planted electronic device, but a ship core would be able to access it remotely. And I did, cracking into the unlocked device with ease while she approached my heart.
Returning my attention to the movement within my ship, I saw her approaching my heart. Before she even stepped over the threshold, I smiled, only slightly embarrassed about what I was about to do, and called out loudly in a sing-song voice so I was sure she could hear “Pineapples!” I couldn’t help but giggle.
Opening my eyes, I saw that Doc was staring at me with a bewildered expression that made me wonder if he thought I’d gone mad. And then Fuller walked into the room with a surprised smile on her face, no doubt at my proactive response to her challenge, and then quickly threw her arms up in front of her face “Oh! Oh, I’m so sorry, did I come too soon?”
It took me a moment to realize what she was talking about. It hadn’t dawned on me that I was still completely naked. I had become so accustomed to not wearing clothes that I’d forgotten that there were certain expected norms of common decency that I was neglecting.
“The hell’s a pineapple?” Joel asked gruffly. It seemed that I’d somehow managed to confuse everyone in the room simultaneously.
“It’s a rare tropical fruit.” Doc explained in a slow befuddled tone and began to rise up out of his chair “What is happening here?”
I sat up and started to stammer out explanations, trying to defuse the strangeness of the situation “She felt the need to test me one more time, and I figured I’d play along. Sorry about the nudity, I’m frankly just not used to anyone caring. I just got out of the tank, so clothes were not on my mind.”
“I-I see.” Fuller lowered her hands, clearly still uncomfortable with the situation. She turned her attention to Doc instead so she could avoid looking at my exposed body. “And you’re her… physician? Like an ordinary core would have?”
I was still stumbling over the adrenaline of embarrassing myself in front of everyone, and before Doc could reply to her, I chimed in “Dr. Fuller, Doc. Doc, Dr. Fuller. No one ever told me his real name, that’s just what everyone calls him.”
She tilted her head at Doc with a judgemental shift of her brow “You realize that on a colony of scientists, that could become confusing very quickly, yes?” Fuller asked, still trying to train her gaze away from me.
“Good thing I don’t plan on boarding the colony then.” Doc glared right back. I thought for a moment that these two wouldn’t get along. “Yes, I’m her physician. No, I don’t care for names, just call me Doc.”
The room went silent for a moment, Fuller’s attention reluctantly returned to me, and she just watched, seeming to want to observe me as if I was about to perform some kind of extraordinary superhuman feat. I watched her back just as intensely, waiting for her to tell me some kind of revelation I needed. I finally broke the silence with an uncertain “So… Arthausen.”
Fuller nodded, crossing her arms as she tried to recall something. “The Arthausen Project, yes. Named for and run by the late Dr. Arthausen.” She took a deep breath as if mentally preparing herself for what she was about to say “If you know absolutely nothing about it, then I’m guessing that you’re brimming with questions?”
“Hell yes I am.” I started to push the towel around to clean off the leftover lubricant, glad that my sensitivity had lessened considerably since my last attempt. I didn’t really care if she saw my body at this point, she would have to get used to it. “What am I? Am I even a real person? Am… Am I a clone like other ship cores?”
“You are.” Fuller said simply, and with a sudden sinking feeling I felt like a fragile floor I had built for my expectations had just dropped out from beneath me entirely. I was really hoping that the answer to that particular question would be no. I wanted to hear that I was a special case, or that I was an ordinary person stolen away by Foundation and experimented on. But it wasn’t meant to be. There was little fanfare to how she said it either, she just dropped it on me. I supposed that it had been exactly what I asked for, so I wasn’t sure what I was expecting. “You’re a very special clone, though. Part of a failed project to inspire sentience to an empty shell. Living, thinking human beings who’re able to fully utilize psionic resonance.”
I took a deep breath “So… I’m not human. Not in the eyes of corporate law, anyway.” My voice quivered as I put the fact out there, afraid of the implications it might have on my future.
Dr. Fuller nodded solemnly “Well… no, you’re not. Since human cloning is exclusively used for research, organ replacement insurance policies, and machine interface purposes, clones are implied to have all been rendered unthinking property rather than people. Clones have no rights to autonomy under Foundation law.” Her voice at least told me that that wasn’t what she believed personally, but Dr. Fuller was not a nigh-omniscient corporate army.
I had no lawful rights whatsoever. I suddenly found myself glad that I had stumbled into the life of an outlaw already, because if what Dr. Fuller said about me was true, then Foundation had every legal right to ‘retrieve’ me. Aisling’s decision to take me in the first place wouldn’t have even been considered kidnapping, just theft. “So I was just born in a vat and one day they woke me up.” I mumbled to myself, suddenly feeling lonely. I’d hoped that I’d find that there was some mote of truth to my false memories. That there was a family I might be able to turn to and relate to, even if I wasn’t going to be able to return to them like I’d thought I could at the beginning of my journey. I thought I might have a hidden past that I might be able to explore. But this was it. I was just a thing that got lucky.
“I was once an intern with the project. I wasn’t privy to all of the details because I wasn’t one of the people heading it, but my relative distance from it meant I was able to slip through the cracks when the project staff was… purged.” She explained slowly “The project was unsustainable at scale. Only six units were ever successfully produced. Well, seven I suppose.” She gestured toward me “Out of thousands of attempted conversions, seven successes meant that it was deemed too costly. Among other factors that got it shut down.”
Stolen novel; please report.
I stared at the ground. I was one of seven. So I did have kin, of a sort. There were just very few of us. Maybe there were more than that, if she hadn’t known about me before today.
“That’s all very curious.” Doc spoke up when I failed to reply, deep in thought as I was “Can you tell us anything about the process of… awakening a ship core, I guess, at all?”
“Vaguely. I was able to infer a lot of it from what I had access to. The clones were presented with simulated scenarios of happy fulfilling lives.” She lowered her voice as she became slowly overwhelmed with guilt “Then the scenarios were shifted to deep, painful, personal tragedy. Induced psychological trauma.” There was a cold tone to her voice that suggested that she was trying to keep emotional distance from the conversation. Perhaps she was hoping to absolve herself of having been part of it.
They gave us a history, and then they tore it away from us. “So they were torturing us…?” I asked quietly, starting to feel more and more unsettled about what seemed to be my true past “W-Why? Even with clones, why put them through that?”
She spoke quietly, regret clear in her tone “Because the simulation itself isn’t what woke you up. It was the trauma. Something about terror and the grief of loss seems to wake up the part of the clone’s brain that shuts down while establishing psionic resonance during production. Without the torture, there are no Arthausen units.” She was trying to avoid looking at me. Or anyone for that matter.
“That’s more than a little fucked up.” Joel pitched in, sitting down in a spare seat by the door and leaning back, resting his head back against the wall. I was surprised that he even stuck around. I thought that this conversation was going to be too boring for him.
“I won’t deny that. Like anyone else under the yoke of corporate rule, I was made to do some unspeakable things.” She muttered. Doc silently nodded in solidarity. “Doesn’t make it right, but I can at least give some closure to a… lost experiment who’s managed to stumble her way onto my doorstep.” She looked to me apologetically “It’s probably best you don’t remember exactly what we put you through in that simulation. And the least I could do, after all of that, is answer your questions here.”
I gulped. I was afraid to ask anything else. After just one simple question, so much of my life had been put into such dire perspective that I didn’t know if I could speak further about it “I… I-I need a minute.” I stammered, starting to feel moisture building in my eyes.
“Did they try inducing other mental states? Was it really only trauma that woke them up?” Doc asked, leaning back with his terminal in hand as he began taking notes.
Fuller shook her head “Nothing else did it. We tried simply letting the simulations play out of stories with happy endings and contentment, we tried producing them with mildly uncomfortable upbringings, even highly fictitious scenarios that bordered on fantasy. They never truly ‘connected’ with the character they’d been given until they were presented with horrendous tragedy. It’s almost like the brain going through something terrible after becoming attached to a sense of identity, that creates a person. It worked consistently, at that.”
“So why was the failure rate so high?” Doc asked curiously “If it worked as often as that implies, then…”
“Well, that’s the problem. It worked for almost every clone of the thousands we used. However, they were almost all rendered permanently catatonic, immediately suicidal, or otherwise non-functional as people, never mind machine cores. Even the six who were functional were mostly raving psychopaths who were more dangerous to others than themselves. They were the few that directed their pain outward rather than inward.” She motioned toward me again “Which is what’s so puzzling about her. I haven’t spent much time around her, but the fact that she’s not trying to tear everyone around her apart, physically or otherwise, is… curious.”
So all of my ‘sisters’ were dangerous lunatics then. That certainly quashed the forming idea of reuniting with them. It probably wouldn’t be a pleasant experience. The only people in the universe that I could possibly relate to as a living machine core and they would be stark-raving mad. Still, a part of me wondered if I could possibly get through to them. “And there’s nothing we can do for them?” I asked weakly.
Fuller looked very surprised to hear me speak those words, like she had just been expecting me to let the only family I had go without a thought. “She even expresses empathy.” She noted quietly to herself. “No, not likely. Perhaps traditional medication and therapy might be effective, but that idea was shot down before we could even try. The project was already dead at that point.” She seemed to nod solemnly to herself for a moment “Or… perhaps someone could force them to forget the pain they suffered after the fact.”
It felt strange being talked about like an experiment. I was, but still, I was right there and she spoke like I was one of many test subjects. Which I suppose I had been. It made me uncomfortable, but I was starting to follow her logic. “So… the reason that I’m sane is because I forgot?”
“Very likely.” She nodded “You underwent the neurological process of awakening your higher functions, but then somehow, you forgot the psychological trauma. Do you remember anything at all from before you woke up here?”
“Just false memories and dreams.” I started, trying my best to force my way through the emotional heartache I felt about this entire situation. “I didn’t notice there was anything strange about them until Doc asked me to take a close look at my memories, and they always fall apart if I try to pick out the details. They’re just… vague senses of a life that I already figured out wasn’t real. I figured that they had been implanted into me somehow, I didn’t know why until now. So I don’t have parents, I never went to school to learn computer science, I never had my first girlfriend in college, I never had a business trip to Mars where they exhausted me with all their inept garbage. They’re all just stories that fall apart if I look at them too closely.”
“That would be the scenario we implanted you with then.” She nodded “At least, the first phase of it. It seems you’ve forgotten the ending somehow. It’s curious. I hope it stays that way, but amnesia is rarely permanent.”
My eyes went wide as her words circled through my head several times. Amnesia is rarely permanent. So I would likely remember someday. And if I remembered that induced trauma… I swallowed hard. What would that even mean? Would I go mad as well if the scenario decided to uncover itself in my brain? If something suddenly jarred my memory, would I lose who I had become this last month?
Fuller saw the distress in my eyes and replied before I could articulate myself “Knowing ahead of time that it is a falsehood alone will likely help.” She declared in a reassuring tone “But it might be a wise idea to begin some level of… therapy now. Be proactive about it. I can’t tell you for certain which scenario you endured to get here, there were thousands of you after all, and we experimented with a variety of trigger scenarios. “You probably won’t face the same effects since you’ve had some time to acclimate to being a human being first.” She gave a curious grunt, silently repeating to herself that I was a human being. “If only we had a way to induce amnesia. That project might have been much more successful.”
“What about my sisters?” I asked, unsure what had drawn me to that word for them, but it made sense to me. They were family.
“Your sisters? The other Arthausen units? I suppose you would be sisters, given you were all born of the same source genetics.” Fuller mused “I couldn’t say. I saw the writing on the wall; I fled and disappeared before Foundation had a chance to silence me. They may have been disposed of or they may be under observation somewhere by some other team. It’s unlikely anyone will ever see them again.”
“I’m not sure about that actually.” Doc interrupted, a grave expression on his face as he looked down at the notes on his terminal, a hand on his chin in thought. “Were you aware that there are protocols for allowing Arthausen Syndrome patients through Foundation security checkpoints?”
Fuller turned to Doc with a look of bewildered concern “Arthausen… Syndrome?” she asked. Was she unfamiliar with the medical version of this lie?
Doc nodded “The diagnostic criteria and any other medical information for it are under Foundation lock and key, but the gist seems to be that it’s a mental condition that causes sensors to pick up a phantom psionic resonance in ordinary people. The protocol at security gates is simply to record passage and let them through.”
Fuller put a hand to her chin as well and looked directly at me as she spoke “So a cover up to track their movement then. But… why? What would they need to move the units around for? This project should have just been buried.”
“Seems you don’t have all the answers after all.” Joel quipped.
“Not now, Joel.” Doc gave a terse admonishment to the gunman. Doc shook his head, trying to return to the matter at hand. “What about Dr. Arthausen himself? You said that he had passed. Was he ‘cleaned up’?”
Dr. Fuller shook her head “Dr. Arthausen was murdered. By an Arthausen Unit.”
Joel gave a dry laugh, yawning loudly and closing his eyes as he kept leaning back against the wall in his chair. “Poetic.”
“In a way, yes. She went by Cassandra. We put her through an especially brutal simulation and she came out… gleeful. A violent sadist. She was a gifted psion. She managed to lock everyone else out of her enclosure, tortured him, killed him slowly, and enjoyed it. It was the turning point of the project being deemed a failure. Before that, she seemed promising, too. She was a devious actor, it seemed.”
I was zoning in and out of the conversation, the gravity of my past weighing heavy on me. I had so many more questions than when this conversation had started. How long might I have before my simulated traumatic memories would come rushing back to me? What kind of effect would that have on my psyche? What happened to the other Arthausen Units? If the project was a forgotten failure, then why were Foundation so desperate to retrieve me? What did they intend to do with me if they caught me?
“Meryll?” I was suddenly brought back to my senses by Doc calling my name. The two doctors were looking at me, concern clear on their faces. I looked down to see that I’d been clutching at my leg. I’d dug in with my nails hard enough that there were specks of blood on my fingernails. I didn’t even register the mild itching pain until I saw it.
Standing up, I held onto my head with one hand as I moved toward the door and muttered “I-I need some air.” I stammered out, storming as quickly as I could out of my heart.