The girl woke up and screamed when she saw her arms were robotic prosthetics. She looked down at her body and saw the contoured shapes of a clearly artificial chassis. She touched her face with plastic hands. A nose, a mouth, two eyes, but otherwise a smooth, hairless plastic skull. Who was she? Her memory felt fuzzy and incomplete. She rose from the coffin-like enclosure where she had lain. The room looked sterile, all smooth white plastic, illuminated by a grid of spotlights overhead.
Another coffin stood on the far corner, from which rose a figure. It was a kind of human-looking robot, and she realized with horror that she must look exactly like it. The thing turned its face to her, and despite the artificiality of its facial features, she understood its state of mind: total, incurable madness. An uninterrupted shriek emanated from the monster’s mouth (why a perfectly engineered mouth, a part of her mind managed to think, rather than a simple loudspeaker?). The robotic eyes had artificial lids that fluttered madly. With a leap, the thing scrambled out of its storage, or birthplace, and came directly at her, arms flailing and fingers flexed into claws. In seconds, it was on her and they were wrestling, crashing into the shelving, scattering incomprehensible items across the white tiled floor. She managed to grab a heavy, thick rod of unknown use and bludgeoned her shrieking enemy until the plastic skull caved in, scattering parts on the ground. It was quiet again.
Something chimed on a nearby wall. She walked over to it, trembling, and her presence seemed to trigger an alcove to open. In it lay a baby. Not a mechanical abomination, but a real, living, breathing baby, sleeping peacefully. She stared at it, and the floodgates of her memory opened. The starship’s mission. The "crew" of human simulacra, beings of pure data living in a virtual world in the ship’s computers: the only way to realistically transfer humanity’s culture to a new world. And now they had arrived, after so long, the arduous task of raising their descendants, born into real flesh through the power of near-magical technology. A collection of bits in a computer couldn’t rear a real child: they needed a physical body. That was why she was here, one of those chosen to be the parents of the real human colonists. But something must have gone wrong. Her memory was full of holes. Things she should have known were like gaping black holes in her mind, glaring in their nonexistence. The transference process had been compromised somehow. A noise filtered through the door: shuffling feet and a hissing murmur of nonsense words, as meaningless as they were menacing. One of the bad transfers, prowling senselessly, capable of who knows what. She looked at the sleeping baby, seeing its vulnerability, its total lack of defense. She grabbed the rod, her weapon from earlier. She’d been chosen to be a mother, and her instincts were strong.
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