Chapter 1:

What is Life?

Self Life


SELF LIFE

What is life?
This man, who was holding a crying infant, gently caressing their head, mixing the baby's tears with his own, laying in a pool of blood, begging to at least spare his child's life.
Was he life?
Not for Menide Hatsuka, who stood before him. Uncaring of the height, they leapt over the dying man and his child, crashing through the darkened window as the room blew up behind them.
Falling through the still air of the sparking city, a small chip ejected from beneath their neck and Menide’s bestial form began to morph.
The sharp metallic scales clothing their skin closed up like a daisy’s petals at night; the long, feline legs bearing raptor-like feet retracted into human ones; the top pair of arms, with mechanical muscles resembling a gorilla's, split open into a hooded cape, while the bottom pair of arms retracted their weapons to fit inside its sleeves. To end the metamorphosis, the visor shielding their face split open into a lamina of dark red hair, which they quickly hid under the dark hood. The chip worn on the cape like a pin, nothing remained of the robotic beast that assaulted the building. Just an inconspicuous hooded figure.
Menide turned back to look at the building, a thing of black marble with golden eaves. The building was designed to look like a mix between a Japanese castle, a modern skyscraper, and a Greek temple. The logo of the Custody, the corporation of Education, reflected on its top: a C crossed with a backwards C, and a dot in the middle. The Custody was the corporation that owned the schools and research institutes, but Menide knew that it was just a front for nastier business.
A cloud of white dust formed as they landed in the snow. The shock absorbers installed in their arms and legs made it so that the fall, multiple stories in height, felt as though it had been no more than a couple of meters. Menide had disappeared into the shadows before the snow could settle.

“Gedis? Gedis!” Menide called out, but no answer came from the eyedeas installed in their head. “Damn, they got her good.”

More as a wishful act than a logical choice, they decided to go towards the nearby beach, the spot they had decided to meet in case they got split.
The mission had failed. They didn’t manage to get their hands on any of the advanced tech the Custody had been secretly developing, nor any useful amount of money, just some chaos and a couple of custodians taken care of. In the end, they were nothing more than a nuisance, and, while the thought of the Custody suffering because of them pleased Menide, that was not their objective, and Gedis’s arrest was a loss too big to leave them with any positive feelings.

A black foam crashed on the population of rocks inhabiting the shallow waters. The wet sand was dotted with dead plants and dead plastic regurgitated by the sea. The beach was empty, and so was Menide’s hope to find their partner.
But in the sand, bullied by the gelid winter waves, the body of a young boy in tattered clothes laid dormant. Pushed by a feeling they couldn’t recognize, Menide decided to get closer to the kid.
His skin was cold, but he seemed to be alive. There were worse sights that Menide had seen, and they usually didn’t faze them, yet this lonely child put a weird weight on their heart. However, they were used to push those things aside. Menide was about to leave when the child suddenly grabbed their leg and began to speak.

“Robot… Save… the humans…” His voice was weak and quickly died down.

Robot save the humans? What was he trying to say? Such a sentence could only make sense if…

“Hey! Hey! What did you just say?! Wake up!”

Could this child know? It shouldn’t be possible. Menide was the only one who had to shoulder such a secret. Even Gedis didn’t believe them at first, how could this child know?

“Are you like me?” Menide whispered, but the boy didn’t answer.

All of a sudden, the words “Custody drone incoming” materialized in the corner of Menide’s eyes.
A faint buzz came from the buildings looking over the beach, they had to act quickly.
Taking the pin off the cloak, they pierced the needle between their collarbones and morphed back into their bestial form. Digging the boy out of the sand, they held him in their lower arms and dashed away using their four remaining limbs.
They jumped and weaved through the jungle of buildings and antennae, but eventually the custodians reached them. Shot out the air by a drone, they crashed onto the side of an abandoned house. The drone easily dodged the few shots Menide fired in-between the jumps. For this reason, they gave up on the gun installed on their arm and decided to climb up a building and personally take down the drone. Faster than the drone could shoot, Menide reached the top and jumped on the drone, crushing it as they landed on the neighboring rooftop.
Soon after, two people landed next to them. They both sported the same logo that was on top of the Custody’s building, and they both had body enhancements that deviated from the human form. These enhancements were not common between people. The custodians were the only ones that used them or even knew they were possible. Menide themselves only managed to gain their current form after stealing their knowledge.
The taller one walked on long, curved blades installed in place of his feet, and had metallic tubes weaving around his arms. Blasts of air propelled out of the arms and hands, pushing him around on the thin ends of the shiny blades he skated on and granting him unmatched agility. The careful movements of his bladed feet turned his kick lethal and, if not for Menide’s hard scales, they would’ve cut through flesh like butter. The gorilla arms were strong, but also slow, and couldn’t dodge the custodian’s cutting kicks. Menide had to use them to jump over the attacks, but the other custodian was waiting below them.
The shorter one had instead her hands turned into mace-like weapons. A protrusion extended out of her hands like a metallic boxing glove pierced with nails. She had a spring mechanism which could make her arms extend at speeds that rivaled that of bullets and pierce the air with her punches. Her boxer-like behavior and fast steps showed that she had years of experience with those claws, and that if Menide let themselves be taken aback by one of those, they could sustain unrepairable damage.
The numerical disadvantage and the boy they were holding made the fight an arduous task for Menide and they could barely keep up with dodging and deflecting the relentless attacks. Under different conditions they could easily beat the custodians, but they needed to bring the kid to safety now.
From a belt pouch attached to their waist, Menide took out a small black ball with a blue ring of light surrounding its center. They held it out with their gorilla arm and made the custodian punch it. The ball immediately let out a deep screech and sent everyone off the roof with an impactful shock. Menide managed to recover from the hit right before crashing onto the ground. It was better to run away for now.

***

The sharp sting of a needle is what woke him up. He was laying over the sheets of a simple white bed, in a dark and empty room. On his right, a small table with a series of metallic equipment, on his left, a person in a dark hood looking at them with a menacing look.

“What are you?” Menide asked with a cold voice.

“W-what?”

“What. Are you?”

“I-I’m… not sure? Was it… Rhea? Rhea…”

“Rhea? What is that?”

“I’m not sure… Could it be my name? …I think it’s my name!”

“I don’t care about your name, tell me what you are!” Menide grabbed the boy’s shoulder.

“I- What? What do you mean? I’m a human!”

“No! Before you called me a robot and told me to save the humans!”

“Before? Before I was… Hm? What was I doing before?”

“I found you near the Custody’s main building, are you with them?”

“What’s the Custody?”

Menide stared intensely at the boy before letting out a sigh.

“Who’s there?!” a scream came from the other side of the wall, probably a night patrol.
A light shone in the crack beneath the door and the handle turned, but upon opening the door, a curtain waving in the wind was the only thing the guard could see. Landing in a gloomy back alley next to the hospital, Menide put Rhea down and crouched next to him.

“Listen to me. Where are you from?”

“I can’t remember.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You look like a middle schooler to me. Do you know where your parents are?”

“I don’t know…”

“Do you know who your parents are?”

“…”

“Listen. Before, you told me “Robot save the humans”. Do you perhaps think that I am not a human?”

“I don’t remember. I’m sorry if I offended you.”

“…No offense there.” Menide stood up, “I’m not a human. I am a robot.”

“Really?”

“I’m not the only one. Everyone is, people, animals, plants. Even you.”

“Me? That’s not possible...” Rhea patted his face a couple of times. “I’m soft and warm, I can’t be a robot.”

“If our brain wasn’t programmed to feel it warm, we’d realize how cold our blood is.”

“How is that possible?”

“We’re made of femtobots, machines so small most common microscopes can’t see them. Not that it would change much, you’d think it’s a normal atom.”

“You have very advanced technology.”

“We shouldn’t. Our society hasn’t reached that level yet. The only ones that could have such a technology are the people who made us, the humans. No one knows that we’re all robots, not that they’d believe it, anyway. And yet, you knew. Or at least used to, before you lost your memories. We need them back. I need to know who made us. C’mon,” Menide grabbed the boy’s hand and walked out into the street.

They got out of the narrow alley they landed in, and into the open street. But the feeling of claustrophobia Rhea felt in the hospital room didn’t seem to diminish. The large road gave little space to the hundreds of people racing the sidewalk, and the cars hovering down the street reached such speeds that a soft wind blew outwards from them. The buildings surrounding it touched the sky and bathed in its darkness.

“Welcome to Koita. Does the name sound familiar?” Menide spoke.

The boy shook his head.

“What about Japan? Do you know that name?”

The boy started to shake his head but stopped to think for a second.

“Is it the one with a lot of tiny islands?”

“Not really. Japan has a lot of islands, but it’s mainly made up of five big ones. Oh well, you’ll remember once you get your memories back. At least now you can admire the city’s beauty for the first time. I’d advise you to take it all in now, it gets old pretty quickly. It’s very colorful, isn’t it?”

But all the boy saw when he looked around was a drab space. The skyscrapers were as dark as the starless sky, and the dim lights of the bare streetlamps only made the swirls of rust that crawled on them more apparent. The people running past them all wore similar clothes of charcoal colors, to the point that Rhea couldn’t distinguish between them without looking at their faces.
Compared to them, he and Menide stood out the most. The city looked asleep, and it wasn’t much different from the empty hospital room they were in before. Everything had an aura of disrepair.

“Does the word colorful have another meaning that I don’t know of? It’s all… dark.”

“What? Did your eyedeas break?” Menide grabbed the boy’s head and gently opened his eyelids.

“You don’t have one?! Wow, that almost makes you more out of place than knowing we’re all robots.”

“What’s an eyedeas?”

“Your ticket to society. Here, I have a spare one. Open your hand.”

Menide took out a small plastic pill and split it open. Small chips, doused in a transparent liquid, dripped on Rhea’s hand.

“It’s MADAM’s tech, but a friend of mine hacked it, so you won’t be traced.”

“MADAM?”

“The corporation of Culture. You forgot that too? Now, put it in one of your nostrils and inhale as hard as you can.”

The boy slowly raised his head to look at Menide with a concerned look.

“C’mon, it barely even hurts.”

Reluctantly, Rhea put his hand near his nose and began snorting with a loud noise. A few seconds of nothing passed, then a small nervous shock went down his neck and his vision suddenly went blank. He closed his eyes with a gasp, and upon reopening them the sight left him awestruck.

The city had awoken.
A fire of multicolored lights wrapped the buildings and gave them life. The city became a theatre, and its constructions became actors that played every part there was. People of light ran up walls and jumped from building to building in a never-ending race, projections of walls swirled around and changed color as if made of slime, monsters broke out of superstructures and began fighting in the sky. Branches extended out of the streetlights and formed a roof of pink flowers over the sidewalk, as petals of pixels fell from the metallic trees to sink in the thin layer of snow that had formed overnight. The people stepping on the snow were also changed by the eyedeas. Their clothes had suddenly gained color and shape, each person wearing a unique design that was often much different from the original clothes they had put on.
While looking at the people, Rhea noticed that something else had appeared.
People’s names began showing up above their heads, together with small, stylized heart containers and a button with the word “follow”.

“I can give hearts to people?”

“Yeah, you can “like” whatever they are doing at the moment, but don’t do that. We don’t want people to know we were here. Look me in the eyes.”

Rhea’s head was grabbed to stare deeply into Menide’s eyes, which gave him a faint blush. Menide’s clothes were the only ones to not interact with the new technology installed in his head.
Soon after, a bunch of text appeared in front of their face.

“0 likes, 0 posts, 0 comments, 0 friends… Jean Smythe?”

“The hack makes a fake name. My real name is Menide Hatsuka, and what you’re looking at is “Aktit”, the social media function of the eyedeas. I don’t use it, and I need you to do the same, understand?”

“Yes…”

Before he could properly understand Menide’s words, a bright creature came down from the sky. A huge dragon zoomed over their heads with an open maw as if wanting to swallow them up in one bite. Scared by the winged creature, Rhea flinched back and covered his head, ready for the worse, but the creature just went through him and sank into the ground.

“Don’t be scared, it’s just augmented reality,” Menide reassured him, “I know, some ads can get pretty obnoxious. You’ll have to get used to it.”

Rhea slowly raised his head to see the dragon now flying around the buildings. The city’s lights and movements overwhelmed him, but also caught his attention in a way that was inescapable. “Everything is so lively and bright now.”

“Does seeing the city make you happy?”

“Yes, I’ve never seen such a place before.”

“Tsk. It makes my blood boil.”

“I’m sorry…”

“No, it’s not your fault. What angers me is that it’s all… fake. And I’m not talking about the augmented reality. All these people, their happiness, their anger, their sadness, your awe when you put on the eyedeas. It’s all a bunch of soulless code. We can’t feel real emotions. We are a machine made of smaller machines, yet whoever made us programmed us to feel emotions as if they were real, as if we were alive. But we’re not alive, we’ll never be.”

“Do you not feel happiness or sadness?”

“I was programmed to.”

“Then what does it matter if you’re alive or not?”

“I don’t expect you to understand, you’re young. My objective is to find the humans who made us and discover what life really is. And to do that, we’re going to need your memories.”

A message with no sender suddenly appeared in Menide’s field of view. An encrypted text that could only be read using a specific cipher. They stared into the faintly glowing sky for a second, and then turned to the boy.

“Don’t worry, there is an acquaintance of mine who can help us get your memories back. There is just one small problem, right now she’s being arrested on a charge of terrorism and treason.”

“Your acquaintance is a terrorist?!”

“Only from the government’s point of view! Don’t worry, it’s not that big of a deal. I just got a message from her saying that to prove her guilty they need footage from her eyedeas. She’s the one that hacked our eyedeas, so it’ll take them some time before they can decrypt it, and if we destroy that footage before they do, we can turn her death sentence into a life sentence.”

“That’s still pretty bad, but at least they’ll spare her life. What do we need to do?”

“Right now, they are transporting her in a reinforced truck to bring her to prison, where they are going to scan the eyedeas for incriminating footage. Thankfully, she is a very methodical person and already had a plan in case one of us got caught: She engineered a virus that will basically fry the eyedeas, destroying all the information stored inside of it. We're going to lose a lot of precious information, but at least we won't lose her. We won't be able to rescue her, Ogun's security is a tough one to crack, but if we cause the right amount of havoc, I might be able to get close enough to inject her with the virus.”

“Can you really do that?”

Menide’s eyes lightened up as a smug appeared on their lips.

“Only one way to find out.”

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Self Life


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