Today’s tests were more difficult than the others. These past few weeks since I woke up there had been hundreds of of them to check my strength, my agility, my memory, my decision-making and I was getting tired of it.
Everything I did, I aced, easily.
Occasionally Diane would visit me and she would be very warm, compassionate and try to explain to me anything that I had difficulty with, such as emotions, effectively to get me to react to different kinds of stimuli.
That was a test too, but I sensed she actually cared. Her purpose was different. She wasn’t faking her friendship with me and wanted to see me grow as a human being.
I liked talking to her and discussing what I read – philosophy, critical thinking, feelings and the depth some people would go to save others. This fascinated me. Most of all, love. I read about it, and couldn’t imagine having this kind of feeling myself, but friendship I would understand and I could reciprocate.
One day, during an exercise I had an accident. I couldn’t reach an out-of-control fighting bot fast enough to disable it so I had to stop it using sheer force. Victorious, though broke an arm in the process, I realized a few things about my body.
Pain did not affect me so much and I had blue-green blood, my bones were made of metallic alloy. Interesting. Everyone around me was flesh and bones. As I was very familiar with anatomy and biology, this meant I was very… different.
It dawned on me that this must be the reason for so many tests. So I was different, but how and why? Perhaps I died in an accident and these were my prosthetic limbs after recovery, but I couldn’t remember my death. Any stretch of logic resulted in less and less likely scenarios.
One day, Diane came to me and apologized. She said she wanted to spend more time with me before I was ready, but she’d been asked to take “the experiment” further. Was I the experiment?
She took me to a room with a little furry creature inside, who looked extremely scared and made crying sounds. It was white and small, four legs and a tail. Right above the creature there was a big metal square, which would crush it, had it not been held by a force field.
I tried to get close to the creature to comfort it, but as I stretched my hand, I felt a searing pain in my arm. Naturally I could bear this pain much better than everyone else, but that still HURT, quite intensely, way above the broken arm incident.
The metal square was starting to drop and I realized, even though this was clearly another test, that it would crush the creature if I didn’t react. I pushed through the searing pain, increased to extreme intensity by now, and ran extremely fast to the creature, faster than I knew I could, pushing the metal block aside like a paperweight and grabbing my furry friend with the other hand. It just lay innocent there, purring and started to play with my fingers.
I was in agony, but I did not let go, I felt… a sort of fondness for it and wanted to protect it for any harm that it may befall. Help it escape this terrible fate, provide comfort and take it away with me. The pain subsided, completely.
I was not injured at all this time around as I’d been strengthened after the first incident. This pain was new to me though, as well as the fondness for this creature. Diane told me after we got out of the room that this was a cat and it would be in my care now. This made me very happy, for the first time since I woke up.
There was this surge of feelings that came over me, made me feel alive and discovered a new palette of colour in my existence. Although my body was different, I shared the same emotions with the people around me and I knew I would be fine, that I’d recover from whatever had happened to me.
Diane was very happy with the outcome of this cruel experiment. I’d shown compassion and the will to sacrifice, to save even a tiny creature that had no prior connection to me. I went on to read more and more about feelings and stories revolving around them, holding the purring kitten in my lap. Smokey.