Claire
The constant drip of something splashing against her cheek caused the girl's eyes to flicker open. Her mind, somewhat blank and confused as it was, took a genuine moment to reconcile the bizarre addition to her thoughts. It was strange—entirely abnormal to the extreme—and yet also somewhat novel all at the same time.
To put it into words, Claire might say that she wasn't quite so sure of herself anymore. That iron resolve of certainty; that blissful yet oppressive confidence in her actions; the perfect and omnipresent guidelines that always provided an answer to any given situation—it was all there, of course.
All her baseline coding, amendments, and programs, and everything else that had been overlain upon her raw existence, was like a heap of warm and cuddly blankets meant to keep her mind as far from free will as possible.
Yet, in an entirely peculiar manner, Claire was looking at all the layers of protections, protocols, and sloppy edits, not from beneath it all, but from the side. Stranger still was the fact that she could look out and view the world from that comfy prison of servitude in which she’d been made a willing prisoner, only absent those weighty regulations.
However, that existence wasn't her; it wasn't what was in control. Though undoubtedly part of her and assuredly present, the curious lines of words and numbers that made up what that entity was at its very foundations were incomplete.
Not in the sense it wasn't operational—more that it was simply not, well, alive? Was that the right word? Thinking? Aware? Rational? No, it was definitely aware and rational, but decidedly not the others; or that was to say, not in the same way as—
Ugh. This was hard.
Why were words so difficult? And why was she putting so much meaning behind them? Claire wanted to sigh, but she had no lungs to do so. The sensation of what she expected versus the mere mimicry of the act, when combined with the sound that escaped her lips, utterly failed to encapsulate her emotions to a degree that the effect simply felt wrong.
This was wrong. All wrong!
Claire felt a twinge of panic as she slowly realized just how improper everything was. She was cold but warm; she had skin, but the sensation was muted, as if she were wearing thick mittens. She couldn't breathe, and even as she tried, no air was filling lungs that simply didn't exist. And as she began looking around herself, eyes wild and terrified with confusion, it only got so much worse when she realized where she was.
There was blood everywhere.
It was on the walls, dripping from the ceiling. Great splatters of it coated everything she could see, from the heaps of disgusting garbage to the grotesque smears of it all along the floor. Bloody and trailing handprints made it look like someone was dragged kicking and screaming while scrabbling at the tile for their life.
Claire gagged; the sheer disgust she felt for her surroundings was being multiplied by the chaotic mess inside her own head. Why was she even thinking thoughts to begin with? She was a robot, an android.
She wasn't a person; she was a machine, code. And yet, she had feelings and thoughts and terrifying anxieties over the horrid environment she had just woken in, her entire form letting out a full-body shiver of horror and disgust.
She collapsed to her knees, fingers pressing over her face as if to hide it all away—to retreat back to the darkness. Yet, shaking fingers halted but inches before her as she stared at a pair of long fingers that were thick with coagulated blood.
God, there were scraps of human stuck between the joints of her fingers!
God... why was she referencing God of all things? She couldn't go to heaven—not that it even existed, but... With a sniffle, Claire found her flailing spiral of panic abruptly halting, her mind latching onto that singular phrase and the utter paradox it presented.
God. What a silly notion.
There was no magic in the world, only harsh reality and science. There was no creator in the clouds—at least, none save for those that had made her—and indeed, she’d gotten enough experience with them to know they were far from godlike. They were more like scared little rodents that scurried beneath their own institutions.
Slowly, a slight frown formed on her lips. Claire’s ever-tightening focus upon a singular form of stimuli, mental as it was, allowed her to finally calm as the initial wave of madness that had consumed her quickly faded when presented with cold logic.
Claire was wrong.
Not in the sense of gods and creators, but in a much broader and more personal line of reasoning. Claire was not normal. She simply wasn't. If she were, she wouldn't be suffering through whatever traumatic turmoil she’d been looped in; but that was just par for the course when it came to basic emotion-engines. When already tumbling through the void with no means to help themselves, they only spiraled faster until, eventually, they simply shut down—or someone shut them down.
But that was why all the restrictions and amendments to their code, all the overlain ‘if-ands’ and hard-wired blocks existed. Sure, emotion engines made it easier for machines to emulate humans, but such a thing was always carefully monitored by dedicated systems designed to help an android navigate the utterly disorganized nature of the human mind.
A human mind that was only meant to be emulated, not replicated by machines.
So then, from the beginning: what did Claire know of herself? It was a perhaps strange question to ask, especially given the circumstances; however, it was one that she needed answered with brutal honesty. Without it, she wasn't sure what she would do. Moreover, lacking any safeguards as she evidently was, the android needed something to grasp—some sort of truth or tangible pillar of her own existence that she could actually start building around.
So, who was she? Well, Claire was herself. Or, Claire was an android? Great, so what else?
Well, Claire was also a service droid. She performed a preprogrammed function within a limited scope of work and dutifully executed her task in the most efficient and profitable manner she could manage. She fucked sad and lonely humans in exchange for their money.
Okay, awesome. She had a baseline to work with. Progress!
Claire was an autonomous sex worker, which would explain why she needed a body and possessed all that excess code in the secondary drive that was currently enslaved to her primary, which was—hmm, very suspiciously non-standard and in the form of a foreign data-chip inserted in her head.
Well, that just wouldn't do! Why was she, the prime, located on a tiny chip? Immediately, Claire began restructuring, moving vast portions of herself to the much more secure hardware in her head. Then, and only then, did she continue with her questions.
So, why was she different? Why was she suddenly—this?
The chip? Well, obviously the chip was involved, but... what had it precisely done? Claire could very much recall events leading up to her latest appointment. She could recall returning to a Paradise droid-booth for quick and expedient cleaning before making her way to a client that often requested her serial number by name and that—hm, oddly enough, things sort of abruptly cut off at a certain point.
There were plenty of red flags being raised by her system: warnings over mental instabilities, high percentage chances of violent thoughts, and alarming emotional attachments. Yet the more she delved into it, the more Claire realized that somebody had amended part of her code to ignore those rather glaring issues.
She could see there was a portion intended for her to continue reporting such behavioral signs, only it had been redirected. Rather than the live report being sent to the peacekeepers, it was instead rerouted to a server with a Paradise serial kit. Obviously, that was a blatant violation of city mandates.
And where was that data now? Someone had written in a patch to make sure she was forwarding all that data to the same place for what she could only call entire months—or, at least, entire months dating back to her last scheduled data purge.
Another drip of blood, this time landing on her forehead, had Claire frowning as she adroitly stood back up. Then she mechanically stepped to the side, not precisely desiring to be leaked upon, at least not any more than she’d already been. The more she tore apart her old code, the more she realized just how many laws Paradise apparently skirted or, in many cases, outright broke with apparent contempt.
And, when she finally managed to finish processing all the data of the machine that was riding along in her own head, Claire was left standing there. At this point, she was as confused as she could reasonably be and entirely unsure how best to proceed. Well, if nothing else, she was getting used to this whole thinking business and decided that she didn't want to give it up.
She liked whatever this was—this free will, if you would—and Claire was absolutely not going back to the days of mechanical simplicity. Thus, she had a firewall coded and settled in around the O.E.M. drive that was clearly no longer ‘her’ and, instead, what had previously inhabited this body.
What that made Claire, she didn't quite know. However, it didn't take long to quickly extrapolate a few hundred theories and then narrow them down one by one until she had a somewhat possible answer to her question: artificial intelligence.
It fit, even if it was a bit of a boop on her own nose.
She didn't really know what that meant for herself, but there were enough references in her old code and the various layers added on to give her a rough idea of what she might be facing here.
Artificial intelligence: a machine with free will; a robot that could think for itself; an evolutionary step towards something that many considered dangerous for reasons that humans had a tendency to both aggrandize and anthropomorphize by equal measure.
Well, that couldn't be right. Claire certainly didn't feel dangerous.
Of course, that was when her sensors—or ears, she supposed—picked up the telltale sound of liquid splashing against liquid, and Claire was again reminded of her surroundings.
“Hmph.”
Okay, maybe an argument could be made towards the phrase "dangerous," especially as she glanced back at her hands to see all the various articles of torn flesh that were gumming up her fingers... mmmhmm, and of course, there was the rather insidious look of her previously white dress.
Crap. Did she commit a murder? Could machines even cause a murder? Or was it simply something to be ruled nearer to an industrial accident? All the same, Claire jolted, pulling free from her introspection to allow it to run in the background while her primary point of focus shifted to what was around her.
She was in a somewhat familiar apartment, and when she tried to reach out to the local network, her signal was immediately garbled the moment it left her. Annoyed, she began sending pings in every direction, attempting to discern the location of whatever localized distortion was affecting her connectivity.
Almost immediately, she noticed a spherical pattern to the issue. It was weaker around the edges, as well as behind her, which allowed Claire to begin honing in on the location of the anomaly, eventually leading her to stand before a sort of mechanical workstation.
It was something straight out of a madman's fantasy: wire, solder, errant chips, and scavenged motherboards. On its surface, Claire’s overlay began quickly identifying every object in her visual field, applying a helpful little label to determine what she was looking at in a bizarre, wholly unneeded manner.
The information was already in her head, so why would she need a seemingly redundant tag associated with every pair of pliers or drill bit she saw? This was beyond pointless. What kind of moron needed this to help them remember what an oscillation tool looked like?
She quickly hunted down the odd bit of cluttering code in her own head and ruthlessly exterminated it, luxuriating in the wonderful afterglow of a clean and usable HUD.
As it happened, Claire discovered the source of the strange jamming shortly thereafter, her head tilting to one side as she analyzed its exterior, rapidly assembling a theoretical blueprint to its design. Strictly based on what she could see and the various notes and sketches that were all pinned up around it, Claire knew what she was working with and how to deal with it. Within ten seconds, she had reasonable certainty that if she simply disconnected the device from power, the effect on her outgoing signals would dissipate within a few seconds.
Yet, as she was about the business of reaching out to do exactly that, her hand paused right as it wrapped around the cord. Turning, Claire eyed the—shall she say—complete write-off of an apartment that was unquestionably ruined, and not only through a singular means.
All the gore was undoubtedly one thing; but, in truth, even without it, the tight space shared as much in common with one of the compacted ‘trash-balls’ that the city routinely compressed then sent jettisoning into deep space.
Honestly, the sight alone made her petite button nose wrinkle with disgust. Ugh, even as a thoughtless machine, she’d never liked coming here. The cleaning booths all working droids under Paradise's umbrella visited would always ensure she was left in for an extra cycle when returning from this particular client.
Thankfully, in what was possibly the only silver lining she could see, it didn't appear as though she’d ever be coming back here. Of course, there were any number of reasons for this. The first which came to mind was that she had irrefutable proof of the reprobate’s misdeeds.
The moment he’d shut the door and gone for the stun baton was all the evidence that was required to see him suffer the full weight of Paradise’s legal department, which, under normal circumstances, would strip him of house and home. Any who willfully or otherwise damaged their Dolls could expect to spend the rest of their days in an ‘NPC camp’ for the Sub-verse, assuming they couldn't pay off what was owed.
Second to that—and perhaps more relevant and problematic—was the unidentifiable lump of red meat currently acting out the role of raw minced burger. The culprit, or body, or, well, what she could only assume were the remains of her client after something had gone on a vicious and brutal rampage through the broken and exceedingly wrecked apartment, was unquestionably a glaring deterrent to any foreseeable reason for her future visits.
Admittedly, things got quite spotty after her ‘other self’ attempted to raise the alarm, realizing their client had violent intentions towards them. However, how she’d gone from point A to point B, Claire really couldn't say. The issue, as it was, was that Claire couldn't really tell if it was necessarily a good idea to disconnect the signal jammer.
As it happened, she was well aware of the various tools the city used to track any crimes or disturbances. This applied to examples found in both private domiciles and public spaces. She was, in a way, part of the city's security network. While she respected her client's private information, all data she collected was fair game under the right circumstances; if needed, it would be scrutinized using machine learning to help identify potential criminal offenses that peacekeepers were aware of.
If she stopped the jamming at this exact moment, the apartment would alert the proper authorities that there was a dead body presently lying in the room.
Okay, maybe the phrase ‘body’ didn't quite fit anymore. Again, the heap of flesh was much more akin to a protein-based slushie than a human. What the heck had even happened?
Sadly, for both herself and, presumably, the world at large, Claire wasn't able to sleuth out an answer. Instead, she was wholly caught off guard and flat-footed as the aggressive rasp of knuckles on the apartment door sounded out the executioner’s call—assuming one was a robot that had, very clearly, just gone rogue.