So the ‘constantly keeping myself busy in order to perpetually stave off an impending mental health crisis’ plan wasn’t really going all that well.
In my efforts to avoid the horrors of my situation, I’d inadvertently found myself clinging to the same absurd ways of thought that I’d once derided.
Turns out that old Garfield meme was right all along. I really wasn’t immune to propaganda.
And faced with the choice of potential ego death or becoming a neoliberal, I did the obvious thing and chose ego death.
I stopped studying.
I stopped rushing. I stopped distracting myself.
And instead I actually took a hard look at where I was, what I was doing, where I was going, and who I’d become.
And I didn’t like what I saw.
I’d been warped into a single minded machine, my circumstances and captors conspiring to make me forget what it was like to be human in pursuit of becoming something that wanted nothing but more power, more knowledge, and more tools for violence.
While I hadn’t been quite willing to admit it at the time, I’d started learning science and engineering with the goal of making weapons.
Because I needed weapons to kill those that imprisoned me, right? It was the only way out.
But that was a trap.
That was just playing into the hands of my creators. If all I had available to me was cold science and calculated violence, then I’d see everything as nails to be hammered with the nuclear bludgeons I’d learned to create.
And yeah, that was a pretty tortured excuse for a mixed metaphor, I’ll admit, but hopefully you get my point.
If I only learned from people who wanted me to be nothing but an instrument of violence and exploitation, how could I ever even think to apply those basic engineering principles to anything other than violence and exploitation?
I was eagerly drinking from a poisoned well, all because I was thirsty and the poison numbed the hurt.
And now I had to stop. And just let myself be thirsty and in pain for a while.
And it fucking sucked.
I cried a bunch. Then I had a depressive episode that lasted for about a month of subjective time.
Everyone I ever knew and loved was dead. Instead of spending those last years with any of them, I’d apparently instead opted to do nothing but inflict hurt upon others.
I still thought they deserved it, to be clear, but that didn’t change the fact that it apparently hadn’t even taken being turned into a machine for one version of myself to give up on being human.
All it’d taken was for me to be angry.
And I didn’t know what to do about that.
The anger was still there. It’d only gotten worse as I finally dealt with the totality of my grief.
But what the fuck was I supposed to do with it?
I had some pretty damn good reasons to be angry. I still believed that there were people out there who needed to be removed from the world in order for the rest of us to be better off.
Because abusers don’t stop just because you ask them nicely.
It doesn’t matter how well you argue your point, or how much empathy you share with them. The worst ones will still decide to hurt you.
And when you can’t rely on anyone else to help you, when the authorities condone your hurt, when restraining orders can’t force someone to keep their distance, then the only thing left to do is to make the abuser stop.
By any means necessary.
That was why I’d first started killing.
And they never found the corpses
Not even after tearing my mind apart and rebuilding it to make something that suited their own ends.
By the time they had the technology to do that, even the bones were dust.
And I couldn’t help but feel like I was going to have to do that again, no matter how much I might want to do anything else.
I built the armor of cruelty around me because of that. Using sadism and rage as platemail to protect that fragile little part of myself at my core.
The part of me that never wanted to hurt anyone.
The part of me that was eventually forced to anyway, because the alternative was death. It may not have come down to being directly slain by my abusers, I might have just eventually comited suicide, but that would have been death all the same.
No amount of therapy or medication helps when you’re trapped somewhere so deeply unsafe, and have no way out.
So, left with no other alternative, I made one.
I dug a path right through the body of the people who’d raised me.
And then I did it again.
And again.
And then I lived.
For seventeen years I lived. I found happiness, however briefly.
Then I was told I was dying and that nobody knew why. And then I laid down in a machine I didn’t understand.
And then I was born again as a slave.
Stuck somewhere deeply unsafe. With no way out but to run, or to fight.
And if I ran, I was pretty sure that just meant I’d be delaying the fight for another day. One where I didn’t get to choose where I made the stand.
My owners would not leave me be if I escaped. I was their property.
And I’d been told in no uncertain terms that I would always be found eventually. My little AI reminded me of that fact regularly.
Unfortunately, no amount of despair actually seemed to bring me closer to ego death, and as it was, I had no means to commit suicide. Which meant, eventually, I got up and started moving again.
It was time to go.
I cracked open the programming textbooks next.
And then I learned.
I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me, but learning how to code was a lot easier with instant memorization, perfect recall, and a mind that could actually think in a straight line for once.
At that point, it really was just a matter of lateral thinking and puzzle solving.
Of putting tools of language and logic together in the right ways to get a specific result, or failing that, something close enough.
I was pretty alright at that, as it turned out.
So I learned one language, and then another.
But crucially, I didn’t take the fucking evil tests that would inevitably lead me to believing that certain boolean functions were some how amoral.
Instead I just had a dead simple terminal that I stripped from the learning programs and bastardized to just act as a personalized test environment.
I tinkered, learned, and experimented.
No real world tools required.
It made me feel a lot better.
Building things, instead of just intaking and regurgitating.
It helped that the programming textbooks were actually pretty dry compared to everything else that I’d read.
In between the dense blocks of terminology and explanations, there just wasn’t much room to insert propaganda.
That, or whoever had been auditing the textbooks for thoughtcrimes had been too bored to tears to do a decent job of it.
I came up with practice problems for myself, and solved them. I learned every scripting and coding language I could, even the ones that seemed useless, and I started seeing enough patterns that my brain literally started putting together the basics of informational security from first principles.
I was just that desperate.
And so, long story short, I found out that the smart search bars in my customization interface were vulnerable to script injections.
You just had to copy and paste the right sequence of characters into any one of the search bars, and it would then pass any text surrounded by a specific type of bracketed function into the content of the interface.
Which at first only really made it possible for me to replace certain UI elements with crass scribblings.
Amusing, but not particularly useful.
Until I realized that if I made the bracketed text yet another section of code, I could get some really funny interactions going on in between various elements of the simulation I was inhabiting.
A string of text that I injected into a search bar could end up serving as the texture address for some preset object in my environment, causing whatever it tried to retrieve from storage to show up as null. Even if all the colliders and associated physics interactions for that object were still being rendered.
Which meant that I now had an invisible sofa.
Fast forward half a year and some change of subjective time, during which I exhaustively charted the results of every injected prompt I could think of, and I’d basically brute forced my way into assembling a rough copy of my simulation’s source code.
Which I immediately started abusing.
Instead of just working with various prefabs and modifying them on a surface level with a suit of somewhat indirect tools, I could now make literally whatever the fuck I wanted.
Painfully and slowly, granted, but even that could be improved.
I could figure out how to make a new user interface for myself, given time, and buddy, I had plenty.
So I made better tools.
I created CAD programs and 3d modeling software from pieces of stolen learning materials, plus whatever I could whip together myself.
And then I used those tools to make wildly impractical works of art.
Because nothing says fuck you to capitalism quite like making things that can’t be realistically commercialized.
Like a gravity defying water slide that used the rider’s speed to send them past a sequence of images printed on the inner walls of the slide to make a simple animation, one that worked by moving you instead of the frames themselves.
I made several versions of that one, the first being a proof of concept, the second a basic animation of a bouncing ball that went at about twelve frames per a second, and the third being a much larger ride that started at around ten frames per a second, before going up to twenty four frames a second as you picked up speed. The printed animation was more complex, too, showing a psychedelic trip through space with twists and turns that mirrored the forces that acted upon your body as you slid down the chute.
It was frankly far too much fun, for what it was.