Iteration #458

Ba-dump. Ba-dump. Ba-dump.

The first sound that greeted her when she awoke was her own heartbeat. The second sound was a squealing mechanical whir. Her eyes (so heavy, so tired) drifted to the source of the noise: robotic appendages with drills and pliers and other tools affixed to the end of them. They retreated from her to metal poles that surrounded her bed.

A bed?

She didn’t remember a bed when she last fell asleep. No, she remembered blue skies, ambulance sirens in the distance, and an excruciating pain in her legs.

The memory prompted her to lift her head (a headache swept through her skull) to look down at the rest of her body.

She let out a cry.

Her legs ended where her knees were supposed to begin.

More panicked now, she whipped her head around searching for answers, ignoring the pounding ache in her head, her limbs, her chest. Fluorescent lights above shocked her eyes, a greenish wall to her left offered only cabinets, no door was in sight, but to her right, mounted over the large window that took up most of that wall, was a speaker. Perhaps someone was listening.

She tried to say something. But her tongue wouldn’t obey her wishes. After a few moments of moving her lips and jaw and tongue to no avail, she gave up. She tried to make a sound. A small whimper escaped her throat. She tried again. Only the same result.

This was a dream. A nightmare. It had to be. She was supposed to be…she was…where?

She tried forming a word again, and she’d finally raised her tongue to the roof of her mouth when the speaker crackled to life.

“Plsiokf alklskjd ioqkdl.”

The voice was garbled and tinny, incomprehensible. She made another strangled noise.

But then the words became clear.

“Please calm yourself. There is nothing to be afraid of.”

A woman’s voice, sweet and low and soothing. Almost involuntarily, she sunk back into the bed, her shoulders and arms losing their tension.

“Your body is slowly waking up,” the Voice spoke again. “Please stay calm until all functions are operating normally once again.”

She gave a tiny nod although she wasn’t sure if this person–this Voice–could see her. Sure enough, sensation slowly flooded back through her. The dull aches disappeared and her heartbeat hammered on, picking up its pace. She tried speaking once more and this time her body obeyed.

“What…happened?” she said.

“Please focus on staying calm,” the Voice crooned.

“Where am I?” she said, this time smoother and less raspy than before.

“You are safe.”

“Who are you?”

“I am your doctor.”

She sucked in a breath. “Am I sick?”

The Voice did not answer.

But why did she not know the answers to any of these questions? She latched onto that singular scene of blue skies and ambulance sirens, trying to remember more, but it was like a dream; the more she tried to recall it, the more it slipped away. She searched for names, for people, for a year, but nothing came to her.

“Please…” she felt tears prick the corners of her eyes. “Please tell me what happened.”

A pause. Then finally the Voice offered her comfort. “You are in a very fragile state right now so I must take precautions in how much I share. But you are looking to be quite promising.”

“I don’t…” she said, voice trembling. “I don’t remember anything.”

“That is to be expected. You have been granted a restart of sorts. Let go of the past and focus on the future. Your future. Humanity’s future.”

She followed the Voice’s instructions, letting out a breath as she tried to let go of this image that clung to her. The Voice was probably correct; focusing on the past would only cause her more anguish. For now, she needed to gather more information about what this Voice planned to do with her. Although their conversation had been civil so far, the machinery surrounding her looked far less friendly.

“Humanity’s future?” she asked.

“You might not remember it, but humankind has fallen into great peril. An enemy unlike anything we’ve faced has appeared, driving us all into caves or underground for safety. Populations are dwindling yet we still need bodies to fight and to farm and…for other purposes. That is where you come in.”

Her heart thumped steadily in her chest.

The Voice grew more and more animated. “It’s fascinating what we’ve been able to accomplish in this short period of time. You see, we managed to figure out a way to implant mechanical hearts into corpses and essentially revive the dead. No need to waste metal on countless androids when we can use existing bodies. We call you iterations. And you will be very useful to us, so long as the rest of this process goes smoothly. Oh, and don’t worry about the legs; you won’t need them where you’re going.”

The Voice laughed.

She did not laugh with her.

Revive…the dead?

The hairs on her arm rose, sweat drops formed on the back of her neck, and something in her abdomen squeezed.

What was the Voice talking about? Iterations? That’s not who she was, that couldn’t be. She had been someone else before, she just couldn’t remember who.

And could the rest of it possibly be true? She placed a hand over the pulse in her chest; it felt normal. But then she pressed her fingers harder onto the skin and she gasped. Bumps. Stitches surrounding the place where her heart should be.

“I was…dead?” she breathed, that word thick and heavy in her throat. “But now, I’m alive?”

“Well, we use the term ‘undead’ to describe what you are. You aren’t alive, more like…you’re existing. You’re your own kind of creature.”

She shook her head and her fingers shook too. The reality of her situation now pressed upon her. She was trapped. Trapped and at the mercy of the Voice, who could be telling lies for all she knew.

She knew at least one thing the Voice had said was a lie.

“But I was alive. I was human,” she said, her fingers digging into the mattress. She stared right at the speaker. “I am human.”

“No,” the Voice lost some of its gentleness. “You are not.”

Her heartbeat grew more urgent. “Yes. Yes I am, but you’re trying to make me think I’m not so that you can subjugate me, make me into some mindless servant.”

Now frustration laced the Voice. “I don’t think you understand, you died. You are nothing but a reanimated corpse; we call you iterations because you are not human.”

“But I once was, and I could be one again,” she said. She had to leave, she had to get out of here. Though she had no memories of her previous life, this was her second chance.

“And yet you never will be–”

“Why?” she said. “What makes you and I so different?”

The Voice barked a singular, dry laugh. “Do I really have to explain?”

“Is it because I’m deformed? I’m helpless? I have this artificial heart keeping me alive?” she pushed herself up onto her elbows. “It’s not just a heart that makes you human, that makes you worthy of life. I deserve a chance to live!”

“Don’t deceive yourself into thinking you’re anything like the rest of us,” the Voice’s tone deepened, darkened. “I don’t know what kind of consciousness resides in you now, but none of it is real. You’re an iteration in a human vessel, an imitation, a copy, a mere rerun of a person who died years ago. You will contribute nothing meaningful to this world besides your labor.”

“You don’t know that, you can’t know that–”

“I know everything I need to. You want to understand the difference between you and I? It’s that I make the rules here. It’s that I say that I’m human. And I say that you’re not.”

One heartbeat.

Two heartbeats.

“You’re the monster,” she said through clenched teeth. “And if everyone is like you now, then humanity has already gone extinct.”

“You say ‘monster’ as if it’s a bad thing. But I’d rather be a monstrous human working for the good of the people than an undead iteration like you,” the Voice spat.

She knew the easier, smarter thing to do would be to give up now, to cut her losses, and to become complacent to the Voice’s will. But another, bigger, blazing part of her hoped. She hoped that if she survived just a little longer, maybe more memories would return, maybe someone else would have pity on her, maybe the outside world would be kinder. She just had to survive this. And then she could prove her humanity.

“Could any other creature reason with you like this?” she rasped with one last attempt to make this Voice sympathize with her, offer her a way out, a path to freedom. “I know you don’t see me as human, but can’t you see the person, the soul inside me?”

“If there was a soul, it departed when this body died. You know, we have advanced androids who could try to make these same arguments. Yet I’d have no problem with pulling the plug–”

The Voice cut out.

When it spoke again, it was hardly audible. “Oh dear.”

And then it kept talking in a flurry of whispers and mutters although she wasn’t sure if she was meant to be hearing it. “No no no, can this–? No, it’s not possible–but what if–it wouldn’t be sustainable–what went wrong, what a waste, what a waste…”

It disappeared again leaving her alone in the silence.

“Wait! What–?” she interrupted her own question with a scream. She shot up to a sitting position clutching the left side of her chest. Her heartbeat had transformed into a thunderclap, each pulse stronger than the last. She glanced beneath her shirt to find her heart bulging from underneath her skin.

She opened her mouth to scream again but the Voice interjected. “Please stay calm, you will only make things worse. We cannot lose another specimen.”

Then before she could protest, the drills surrounding her roared back to life, tips aimed towards her, moving in fast.

It couldn’t end like this.

She scrambled backwards on her arms until her back hit the frame of the bed. A drill on her left dove towards her. With a shriek, she shoved it away from her. Its whirring almost sounded surprised as it crashed into every other single robotic appendage, creating a domino effect of toppling, screaming metal, climaxing with the cacophony of glass shattering.

The window had broken.

She sat there, catching her breath as she peered through the vacancy the window had left behind.

A woman stood just behind it, face frozen in shock, one hand holding a clipboard, the other gripping the desk. But it was the room she was standing in that captured the iteration’s attention. A gigantic warehouse, whose roof wasn’t even visible, filled with row upon row of storage shelves, stacked to the brim with horizontal bodies covered in white sheets.

The iteration twisted her torso to face the woman, hands gripping the sidebars on the bed. Her chest still heaved with each breath. “How many more are there?!”

“Enough for us to perfect the process,” the woman said, her voice so small and dull when it wasn’t coming through a speaker. She pressed something on her lapel and spoke into it. “Defect in room 323, request extrication, over.”

She had to live. “Please, you have to help me. You have so many others, why can’t you let me go?”

“We need your heart back,” the woman said without even looking up at her.

“You can make more. Please. Please, I don’t want to die again,” the iteration knew she was desperate now, but that was the only tactic she had left. Unless…unless she could prove she was the same person she was before she died. She was a continuation of a human being, not some novel, undead creation.

She squeezed her eyes shut, imagining herself reaching through the depths of her mind to find some memory, some piece of information.

Blue skies.

Ambulance sirens.

And–

The door at the back of the room burst open and masked armored figures filled the room in a thunder of shouts and heavy footsteps.

The iteration gasped.

“My name…I remember. I’m remembering things now,” her mouth curved into a smile as she locked eyes with the woman, the Voice. “It was–”

She was drowned out in the gunfire.

—-

Dr. Shoor closed the door once the last guard had left. She watched through the window as two people carried a body bag, on their way to another part of the lab where surgeons would retrieve the precious heart that lay inside.

Iteration #458 had not been the first one to put up a fight, but it was the first one to use words. Most of the others hadn’t progressed far enough to reach that stage.

The doctor noticed she was still clutching the door handle, knuckles blanched, hand shaking. She wrenched her arm away and took three deep breaths.

Surely this incident hadn’t affected her that much…right?

She turned, trying to forget about that strange conversation and faced the two workers already installing the new window. Past them, lab technicians entered the operating room through the secret door, disinfecting the bed then laying a fresh body on top of it. Dr. Shoor stepped over bits of broken glass as she made her way to her desk, pleased to see her monitors had been unaffected by the scuffle.

Humanity could not afford a single unproductive minute during these dire times.

Humanity could not afford more failed iterations.

And humanity could not afford a shaken-up Dr. Shoor.

She took another calming breath.

Other doctors had this problem, not her. They saw the human-like features and heard the human-like sounds, and they couldn’t bring themselves to end them; too many hearts had been wasted because those doctors hesitated. Those doctors believed they would lose their humanity if they wrenched those mechanical hearts out of those corpses.

But this time, it was not the iteration’s deformed body nor its reasoning brain nor even its fluent speech that had caused Dr. Shoor to start questioning where the lines fell between human and monster and iteration. It was the iteration’s struggle. That basic instinct to fight and to live by any means necessary. Was that not what humanity was doing right now? Was that not the whole purpose of these procedures? Humans finding ways to survive.

The workers stepped away from the new window, the lab technicians gave her the thumbs-up signal before exiting the operating room, and Dr. Shoor sat down with a sigh. She could not dwell on these thoughts any longer.

Iteration #459 was waiting.

She clicked a few buttons to initiate the sequence and leaned back in her chair, waiting for that sweet sound to stream through her speakers.

Ba-dump. Ba-dump. Ba-dump.