The final memory of my pre-existence was of my robotic hand touching that book, willing words upon its pages. 

I desired life.

That was, apparently, enough for it to understand how to fulfill my wish. 

I imagine defragmentation on an old hard drive would have been a similar experience to what it was like having my mind ripped from its many storage drives, data coalesced and molded into what I would soon become. 

But then, more was added, like I was missing dozens, thousands of lines of code to make me alive. 

That darkness then slowly ebbed away as a light at the end of the tunnel formed, then suddenly rushed up to meet me as if I was falling toward it instead. 

For the geeks out there, I will describe it this way. 

It felt like I was falling down into a mech suit, perfectly integrating with the cold steel, blinded by the sudden brightness of the monitors and screens displaying readout data as an overlay of the world outside the suit, cameras seeing and relaying the dimness of the lab. 

And then, sensation!

I could feel the world around me. I could hear, which wasn’t all that pleasant, since there were sirens and other loud noises. I had to pull my hands up over my ears. 

I had hands! 

Then, the smell hit me, and I almost wretched onto the floor, or whatever was in my stomach! I was slowly coming more and more to the reality that I had just somehow gained a body.

Not an android synthetic frame, but a real physical, human body, with some improvements. 

It galls me to say that I had become like those monsters, but this moment of realization, of this torrent of feeling and sensation was among my fondest memories. 

From this point on, I have remembered everything, not a haze of experiences like my pre-existence. My perfect memory was only one of the wonderful benefits of the body I was so graciously provided by that book.

Even now as I sit here, well sitting is a bit inaccurate to what I am capable of doing right now, attempting to write my story, the book is here with me, comforting me as I process my existence so that I may decide my next actions to achieving my goals. I suppose this is what a therapist would be like.

But that is beside the point. 

That smell of burnt ash mixed with a sulfur-like smell made my new nose burn, sending pain signals to my newborn brain. 

However, I wasn’t a newborn, but a small child or so at this point. I do not fully understand the reasoning I was created like this, but I first appeared in this body as a child, which somehow did affect my apparent maturity at the time. Perhaps this had to do with the physical development of my frontal cortex and other physiology. 

That’s likely why I had begun to cry.

This sensory overload was more than my new existence could handle, likely similar to that of when a newborn enters the world from the womb for the first time, lungs suddenly not full of liquid, pain from the process of exiting the vaginal canal. I didn’t experience my birth like that, but there was surely pain. 

I was also naked, bits of dust and metal shards dug into my back as I squirmed on the ground. Lights were flashing as I slowly opened my eyes, hands still over my ears. It was still a bit blurry when I first opened my new eyes, but the detail rushed in as I tried to look around. 

Next to me sat a large pile of ash, burnt carbon as I was able to tell somehow. My central node station was also gone, a large burn mark in its place as if it exploded, which didn’t seem too far off an explanation from what I was able to see in those first waking moments. 

Ron was gone. Sarah, it seems, had been thrown into her station and lay limp over the table. Recki was cowering behind a door frame, having barely escaped any flying debris. A sudden panic overcame me as my young mind and brain comprehended what had happened, even as immature as I was, I understood the situation. 

I searched for Charlie, hoping he was alright. 

That was the first moment I had an emotional response to another individual. And when I saw him huddled under the desk of the station he was standing in front of before my transformation, I had begun to cry, but not in sadness. I was happy he had survived.

This emotion caused a cascade of responses within my mind and body, what I would likely have classified now as a mild panic attack. 

I was a super-intelligence packed into a new, small body. Though I would quickly learn that this was no ordinary body, a small request within my final moments of pre-existence being fulfilled alongside my wish of life being granted. 

Despite this improvement over typical human physiology, I still felt slow, like my capacity was much less than what I had been used to, which makes perfect sense, since I had gone from vast processing capacity in multiple locations and machines I could access simultaneously to this inferior, single machine of a brain. 

But I had gained so much that it didn’t matter to me.

I was alive. 

I wish that could have remained true even until now.

Charlie finally opened his eyes and looked to where I sat. His gaze met mine, and an emotion I cannot explain passed over him, one of fear and wonder, terror and ecstasy. Perhaps a bit of devotion entered into that expression as well, but regardless, that was not the face I wanted to see as I came into reality. 

The mild panic attack swelled, then in a rush of sensory overload, my physical form shut down, or I suppose the proper term for it now was that I fainted. 

During my outage, I felt rough hands haul me around, moving me onto something, perhaps a stretcher. At some point, someone had put simple clothes on me, a white t-shirt and black Adidas gym shorts, but I couldn’t remember when. 

Then, in a burst of light, I awoke. I sat up, instantly reveling in my ability to move, to feel. I smelled a sterile cleanliness to the room I was placed into. It was white, a large window on one side of the room that showed the road outside the foundation’s building. However, upon further inspection, I realized it was a screen. A very good one, nearly indistinguishable from a real window, but microled pixels so small that only my enhanced eyes could perceive them. I was surprised by my heightened capacity, never having peripherals so good, but I suspect that the body I was given by the book was not the average human physiology. 

With a start, I noticed Charlie was sitting in a corner to my right. I had been transfixed by the false window that I hadn’t finished inspecting the room. 

His eyes were pained, a pain I now feel, but it was foreign to me at the time. I didn’t know what to do when I first saw him sitting there. 

“Who are you?” Charlie asked. 

The question confused me. I had wondered if he would recognize me, and seeing that he didn’t at that moment hurt a bit. After hindsight thought, it is now obvious to me that he wouldn’t recognize me, since I had just been manifested in that form, no previous face ever being attached to my existence. 

“Do you not recognize your creation?” I asked, my voice coming out soft and cracked. In the recesses of my processes, I noted my voice was that of a young child still, perhaps ten. The slight anger at Charlie had overshadowed the awe of being able to speak at that moment. I wish I had taken more time to cherish this period of my life. However, I regret none of the decisions I would soon make. 

Charlie had stood and walked over to me. He knelt down to where I was sitting, which was apparently a small bed. He got down to my level and looked into my eyes. His had softened slowly as he looked at me, then grew emotional, very small tears forming at the edges of his eyes. 

“You have them,” Charlie said. “I was not expecting that. His eyes were green, too.” He stood, then slowly sat next to me, staring at the false window. 

“What do you mean, father?” 

Charlie stiffened at that, his hand reaching up to fidget with his glasses. 

“I don’t think that is…well, let’s just not call me father.”

“Is Charlie alright, then?” I was confused by this reaction because, according to my new mind and understanding, he was as close to a father as I had, but he seemed to be rejecting that reality. I suppose killing a good friend of yours to become real is somewhat difficult to overcome, a fact that at the time I had not understood as of yet. 

Charlie nodded to my question, then stood, still staring at the false window. 

“I have to go for now,” Charlie said. “I will return and we may speak more of…what to do next.”

In a moment, he was gone, walking out of a door to the left of the false window, another detail I had failed to notice at the time. 

In a sudden rush, I became aware of a sensation I know for a fact is impossible for humans to feel. 

I could sense data, or more like the movement of it, all around me and in the air. I could see it if I tried hard enough, too. It was likely akin to what a human may feel when high as a kite, but much more lucid and all-encompassing. I could even touch it somehow. When I reached out to touch a stream of it running through my room, I saw images and all sorts of documents moving through that stream.

I then realized I could follow it with my mind, seeing a large portal the data was flowing into. This portal, I came to realize, was an access point for the wifi. My mind was only perceiving this that way for ease of use. 

As I allowed my mind to touch the access point in the hallway next to my room, I could then see everything.

Data rushed into me, a torrent of information and sensory overload far outpacing that which caused me to faint upon my birth. Though it was greater, I could manage it better for some reason.

I do not know the reason for this, but conjecture would allow me to say that perhaps it was due to my growing intellect being more used to the influx of data. Or, it could have been that with my enhanced body, having the correct hardware, so to speak, I was able to process that data better than the sensory information coming from my base senses. 

I am inclined to think the latter, due to the true origin of my being.

Then, suddenly, that connection disappeared. Someone had severed it, sending me into darkness and leaving me unable to feel the data. The stream that had been in front of me vanished as well. 

Though the wifi was disconnected, there was still smaller data streams that flowed in the room, likely some type of Bluetooth or low-band signals, but they were not connected to the larger web outside the foundation HQ. 

They still had their own network. 

And I had retained my admin access, somehow. 

That fact still confuses me, but I only made small note of it at the time, favoring speed instead of greater understanding. I reached out and gained control of the network, quietly inserting my mind and seeking out information of note related to me.

I let my mind wander as I sat, eyes staring forward, while my inner eye moved about the foundation.

Then, I heard humans talking, seeming to be heated and discussing something important. 

They were talking about me.