This Place Only

Chapter Eight - Delivery

Chapter Eight

Delivery

The apartment was large and sterile. I awoke standing in the center of the communication parlor. The information about how to use this area and access data was already within me. I simply enabled the subroutines that opened the correct miniports and fed through a private, encrypted channel into the European Data Nexus. My primary objective upon arrival was to create a false persona that I would later use to gain access to the Solar Transposition Nexus. I had been given the TAC codes allowing me into these restricted areas. Within seconds, I had designed my new identity and was asked to give the persona a name. I was not provided with this variable from David or the programmers.

As if awaking from a dreamlike state, I realized that I was no longer human. My own current physical form was an ARM, or Autonomous Robotic Mutable; my current name (or, more accurately, label) was a string of five-hundred and twelve letters, numbers and symbols. ARMs, in this time period, were enlisted to aid either the wealthy or service high-ranking government officials. Because of my nearly impenetrable construction, ARMs of my design were used from routine maintenance to the very meticulous (and dangerous) construction of transposition portals in space and on other moons and planets.

Typically, when a new ARM was constructed, its owner would aid in its design and appearance. My other 999 counterparts and I were positioned in every area and capacity possible throughout the functioning cities on Earth. I, curiously, was not given a position or owner.

A query from the European Data Nexus asked:

NAME OF PERSONA?

I fell back into what memory I had of my past and told the EDN, for lack of any other response, “William Anderson.”

I was given a quantum key to secure this information and then withdrew from the powerful surge of data.

Where did that name come from? Was it my own? I ran a quick diagnostic on my memory and found no corrupt sectors or other damage. Still, there seemed to be huge amounts of unformatted space between certain memories. For example, when I thought back on David, it felt like only moments ago. When I checked the time delay recorded, I received the answer INDETERMINATE. I knew now that my physical body had to be sacrificed, but couldn’t recall what I looked like. Touching my face, I sensed cold and warm plastic-metallic areas. Mostly smooth. Human-like in design. I searched the apartment, but could not find a single reflective surface upon which to view my current form.

It was difficult to think. My thoughts curled, running back upon ideas and images and disconnected memories. David betrayed me. I could recall parts of our final meeting before I was sent forward. He had done something horrible to me, something unforgivable. So why was I not angry? Now, in the possession of so much knowledge, I knew that ARMs did not harbor native emotion centers. Still, I could recall emotion, tasting it like an afterthought. Anger and bitterness. Happiness: soft and sweet. I could almost imagine what these strange things felt like, but couldn’t swallow them completely. Was this normal for an ARM?

Another bit of data came to me. It should not, in practice, be possible to put a human consciousness into the confines of an ARM’s neural matrix. Of course, with the importance of our objective and the power behind it, as well as the exotic nature of how we arrived, this wasn’t too surprising. How could someone that far in the past know how to manipulate such future-distant technologies?

ARMs did not require food. Instead, they fed upon a steady flux of energy from generators positioned virtually everywhere. It was possible to store enough energy in my internal reservoir to allow me to function for over six months without renewal, but ARMs rarely needed to do this unless they were used in deep space. Though our mission did not require me to perform self-maintenance or fully charge, I did so anyway. Pulling all available power from around me, I maxed-out my Primary Cell Node then switched back to the Periphery Cell Node for power as most ARMs did.