Short story: Prototype by Patty Jansen

I am.

My mind blinks into a moment of clarity.

Of course, I am.

I sink back into the fuzziness of comfort and warmth, a pink feeling.

But the questions niggle: I am what? And what is pink?

I open my eyes. Above me is a dull, even surface. The word comes to me ceiling. In the ceiling is a light, not directly above me, but in the middle of the room.

There is a noise. I turn my head on the soft surface. Pillow. Something moves on the other side of the room. A person.

The person faces me. Eyes grey, widening. Figure slight, now walking towards me. Hair red, and tied back. A curly strand dances free. Hands white-skinned and freckled, now touching a band around my wrist. Hands... different from mine, smaller, finer, with long nails.

She, woman.

I answer one of my questions: I am a man.

‘Good morning,’ she says. Her voice is sweet and pleasant. ‘Welcome to the world.’

I try to speak. It sounds strange, a deep moan. She looks at me, smiling.

‘What...’ I lick my lips. I don’t sound like her at all. Not sweet and pleasant, but deep and rough. Speaking hurts, but my ache for knowledge is greater. ‘What is pink?’

She frowns, and then she laughs. ‘Well, those are interesting first words. What is pink?’ She turns around. The curly strand of hair bounces over her shoulder. She gets up.

‘No. Don’t go away.’

I have too many questions. What does she mean – first words? What is interesting?

‘I’m not going away.’ She comes back to me, carrying something that’s fluffy and has a colour unlike anything in this room. It’s... pretty. It’s comfortable.

‘This colour is pink.’

I take the fluffy thing from her, turn it around and... It’s looking at me! I retract my hands, and the thing – whatever it is – falls.

‘What is it? What is it?’ Oh, talking hurts. I stare at the pink fluff on the floor. ‘Is it... dead?’ Another word. Dead. I’m alive. I’m a man and I’m alive. I’m no longer pink.

She laughs. ‘It was never alive. It’s a toy.’

‘What’s a toy?’

‘It’s a plaything for a child.’

‘Am I a child? What’s a toy? Tell me.’

‘Shh, calm down, calm down.’ She reaches out for my hand, the one that has the band around my wrist. She presses something on the band and caresses my fingers.

Laziness spreads through my limbs. Her touch is warm. I’m pink again. At the edge of my hearing, there is a click. Tap, tap, tap. Footsteps.

‘Charlotte, has he woken up?’ A voice like mine. Another man.

‘He has. He’s acting scared. I’ve given him a sedative. I think we should start the program. I’d like to introduce the cognitive unit first.’

What, what, what? What are all these things?

I want to speak, but my mouth won’t move, and my eyes won’t see, and I can no longer hear what they are saying. About me.

*   *   *

A bodiless female voice drones in my mind.

Chair.

A chair is a thing to sit on. It usually has four legs, a seat and a back. A chair without a back is called a stool. A chair is made from wood, plastic or metal. Images flick past. All those things are chairs.

Wood.

Wood is material that makes up the trunk of a tree. Another image of a big thing with a dark stem and lots of fluff on top. Green.

I think, Green is for not-truths.

Green is for living plants, the voice corrects me.

There is a loud noise beyond the inner instruction, and another tap tap tap of footsteps.

‘I want him out there,’ an unfamiliar man says. His voice isn’t pink, but red. ‘People need to see his face.’

‘I told you he isn’t ready.’ This is the woman, Charlotte. Her voice is pink.

‘The press are screaming for information. If we don’t give them anything, they will fabricate reports and then we’ll have to undo the damage. We already have the government on our backs about this issue. We need to show that he’s not some freak, and they’ll back off for a bit.’

‘We’re not answerable to the government. We’re on ISF ground.’

‘But the local authorities control supply. We have no other option, if we don’t want our permits to be retracted.’

‘But I tell you, he’s not ready. He panics.’

‘We’ll have to teach him what to say in advance.’

‘Questions upset him. He’s got the mind of a three-year-old child.’

‘Then we better start teaching as soon as possible. We have no choice, Charlotte. He must appear as normal as possible.’

Questions.

I have many questions.

The voice drones on. Plastic.

Plastic is a material made by people from...

 *   *   *

I’m sitting in a chair, my hands on the table. I’m wearing a shirt and trousers, and shoes. And underwear. It feels scratchy on my skin.

‘What’s the point of wearing something no one can see?’ I ask.

Charlotte sits in a chair, too, on the other side of the desk. ‘It’s so your overclothes don’t get dirty.’

‘What’s dirty?’

‘It’s...’ She’s tapping on a screen with a stylus, and looking, but not really seeing.

I sit and wait. I can always try to work it out myself, since I now have a vocabulary of more than 10,000 words. Dirty is stained with dirt. Dirt is soil, germs, the dictionary says. Germs are bacteria. They give you diseases. I should I protect my clothes from diseases, while the clothing has touched no other body but mine. That doesn’t make sense. The words don’t seem to fit together.

That  underwear is dreadfully uncomfortable. I wriggle my hand between the waistband of my trousers and my belly.

‘Don’t do that. It’s not very polite.’

‘What’s—’

‘Polite?’ She stares at me. ‘You have no idea, don’t you? Absolutely no idea.’ Her expression is no longer pink. She’s blue, and blue makes me feel very not-pink.

‘Why,’ I say. ‘Why is there water in your eyes?’

She tries to laugh, but it comes out like she’s gasping for breath.

I reach out to wipe the drop that runs over her cheek. Her skin is very soft. My hand looks too coarse against her face.

‘Do you think,’ she says softly, ‘Do you think you can face a room full of people and not get scared when they ask questions?’

Scared? Scared is yellow. That makes me feel very not-pink, too.

She shakes her head and answers her own question. ‘I don’t think so. He can’t force you to talk to journalists. He just can’t. You’re not ready.’

I know what a journalist is, but don’t understand why one would want to talk to me. ‘Why do they want to ask questions? I don’t have any answers.’

‘You’re like a child,’ she says and her voice goes funny again. ‘They’ll tear you apart and prove that we shouldn’t be allowed to make constructs.’

I grasp at meaning. I’m not a child. I’m a construct. I’m like a child, but somehow not right. I’m green, a not-true human. Charlotte is true, but she’s blue about it, and the other man is red and wants me to talk to a lot of other people, who are also red and don’t want me to be alive. That makes me feel yellow.

*   *   *

One glance tells me that there are 458 people in the room. The red man went in before us and ordered them to be quiet.

The journalists aren’t quiet. They don’t speak, but all their cameras are clicking. A line of men in uniforms takes up their positions at the door and behind us.

I sit down in the chair behind the table. Charlotte sits next to me. Drops of sweat glisten in the little hollow between her bottom lip and the rise of her chin. I want to wipe them, but she has told me that touching her in this room is not very polite. I still don’t know what polite means, but it’s something not-pink that is usually in the range between green and blue. Sometimes it’s yellow and sometimes it’s red. Sometimes it’s even orange. Orange is very not-pink. Orange hurts.

I decide polite is a green word.

The red man sits on Charlotte’s other side. He’s speaking to the journalists. They listen, but most of them are staring at me.

I fiddle with my shirt under the table.

Charlotte is speaking now. She uses a lot of long words like cardio-vascular system and artificial bone-matrix. People ask questions, and she replies. Even more of them are staring at me.

And then someone asks, ‘Can we speak to him?’

‘Simple questions only,’ she says. ‘As you may understand, he’s still confused.’

‘How do you feel?’ asks a woman at the front.

‘Good.’ I say. Good is one of those words I don’t understand, a word like polite. Good is what Charlotte told me to say when someone asks me how I feel or how I am. I feel green about it, because if I look up what good is supposed to mean, I don’t feel good at all.

‘What’s your name?’ someone else asks.

I look at Charlotte. What is my name?

I’m a man. I’m three years old, not a child but something else, not normal. I don’t like questions. I can recite the dictionary, but most words mean little to me.

Name is none of those things.

She whispers to me without making a sound. The silence makes me feel yellow.

‘We are working on naming conventions for the soldiers,’ she says, and a lot of the gazes go back to her. ‘Their names will reflect their root stock and inherent function.’

Soldiers. Their. Plural.

I am not alone. If there are others like me, I want to see them.

The red man is explaining numbers, root stock and hereditary traits and how they relate to brother groupings. It’s all about me and I don’t understand. I grab the edge of the table.

‘Shh, calm down,’ Charlotte says.

Someone in the crowd asks, ‘Sure he has a nickname?’

The red man laughs. ‘We used to call him Hercules.’

My dictionary says Hercules is a god. God is another one of those words with many shades.

I whisper to Charlotte, ‘I’m not a god, am I?’

She puts a hand on my arm. ‘Shh. We’ll be finished soon.’ Now there are drops of sweat on her forehead. I can’t wipe them away, because that’s not polite, but my hands want to touch her. I can’t, I can’t. I put my fingers in my mouth and bite, hard.

It hurts. Orange. Orange is better than yellow.

People are watching everything I do. They’re raising eyebrows, whispering to each other.

‘Dr West, how can we know that this man is in fact what you claim him to be?’ a big man asks. He stands at the back with his hands on his hips. Everything about him is red.

‘I mean...’ the big man continues, ‘you could put just about anyone in that chair. He looks like a normal person to me. How can you tell he’s artificial?’

‘There is no way. If you were to test him, he would be human in every aspect.’

A woman asks, ‘How do you explain this man’s existence in the face of the restrictions in the Human Genome agreement?’

The red man next to Charlotte replies, ‘The International Space Force does not fall under the agreement—’

‘It’s wrong. It’s wrong playing God and making people. You know that.’ A bald man in the back of the room shouts.

‘Would you say the same if your sons were drafted to serve in this ridiculous war out in deep space?’ Another man.

And then everyone is yelling and I can’t hear who says what. Charlotte leans on the table, her head in her hands. Her eyes are wide. She is yellow.

No one makes Charlotte yellow. No one.

The bald man wrestles through the crowd, coming towards us. One of the uniformed men moves, but I jump on the chair and over the table and I get to the man first.

I grab him by his shirt. He squeals. His camera falls from his hand and bounces over the carpet.

Men are trying to pull me back, but they’re not strong enough. I lift the man up by his collar and shake him. Everything I see is red, red, red. Fight, I understand. Silly words like polite, I don’t.

They’re all around me now, the uniformed men, too. A sharp jab in my arm. I stare at the hypo-spray nozzle that touches my skin. An icy feeling spreads out over my shoulder. I can’t move my arm. The squealing man drops from my grip, only he’s not squealing anymore, but gasping and coughing.

Someone yells, ‘He’s a monster. You’ve created a monster.’

I want to shout, but my mouth won’t move. I’m dizzy. Charlotte takes my arm and pushes me onto a chair.

‘Calm down, calm down.’

‘I... want... to... fight...’ I manage to say. The cold feeling has reached my neck and my tongue feels floppy.

‘I know. You’re made for fighting.’

I’m dizzy, so dizzy.

*   *   *

I’m on the bed again, keeping my eyes closed against rolling waves of dizziness.

Charlotte is talking to the red man. ‘We made a big mistake. We need to introduce more modules before we attempt to wake them.’

‘Do you think we need to lift the age level criteria?’

‘Definitely. Their minds should be mature enough to receive formal instruction.’

‘So we bring them to the age of six?’

‘It’ll take a lot of extra time, but yes.’

Then it’s silent for a while. I hear the tap tap of footsteps on the floor. A door opens, and closes.

Charlotte comes to the bed. I open my eyes a sliver so I can see her.

She says, ‘We’re going to let you sleep for a while longer. When you wake up, you will feel better.’

Her face is framed by red hair. She is no longer yellow or pink, but a shade deeper than violet I have no words to describe. I manage a nod.

She fiddles with the machines, and blackness creeps over me.

I sleep. I dream of space ships.

*  *  *

Patty Jansen lives in Sydney, Australia, where she spends most of her time writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her story This Peaceful State of War placed first in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest and was published in their 27^th anthology. She has also sold fiction to genre magazines such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Redstone SF and Aurealis.

Her novels (available at ebook venues) include Watcher's Web (soft SF), The Far Horizon (middle grade SF), Charlotte's Army (military SF) and Fire & Ice, Dust & Rain and Blood & Tears (Icefire Trilogy) (dark fantasy). Her novel Ambassador will be published by Ticonderoga Publication in 2013.

Patty is a member of SFWA, and the cooperative that makes up Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and she has also written non-fiction.

Patty is on Twitter (@pattyjansen), Facebook, LinkedIn, goodreads, LibraryThing, google+ and blogs at: http://wordpress.pattyjansen.com/