The Machine S#12: Their Mistake

By Christina Praggastis

Sports Editor 

Published 23, 2019

I don’t remember the important parts. I don’t remember what I looked like, the way I talked, how I dressed, what it felt like to be in someone’s arms. I don’t remember the feeling of wind in my hair, or rain on my skin, not even the radiating heat of a fire. I don’t remember any of it. They took that from me: my happiness, my sadness, my fear, my love, and some of my most beloved memories while being human.

Instead, I remember my hatred towards them. I remember how it felt when they killed my family, when they broke my arm, when they stripped me of my humanity, and replaced it with gears and wires. Have you ever been taken apart? Organ by organ, bone by bone, until you were just a brain and two eyeballs in a silver bowl? I should’ve been dead, during their process, but they kept me alive. Don’t ask me how, I don’t remember. You’d think that would be a good thing right? But compared to what they did next, a vague memory, but still horrifically vivid, I wish that’s all they did. I remember the sound of drills, of grinding, of hammering, of screaming. I remember that sound the best, the sound of pure agonized screaming.

It wasn’t my screaming, no, they had taken my vocal cords out by then. It was the screaming of the girl next to me, and the girl next to her, and the girl next to her. They were all screaming for different things, different people. One girl was screaming for her brother, another for her parents. A different girl was screaming at them to stop, another was screaming because it hurt so bad. But one by one the screaming stopped because their humanity was stripped, and was replaced with a mechanically engineered part. Putting us together made them seem like little children putting together a jigsaw puzzle. But these were no children; there was no laughter in their eyes, nor cheerfulness in their voice. These were monsters, creating more monsters.

By the end of it all, a process that took years, we were no longer human. We didn’t have anything, inside or outside of us, that wasn’t made by them. They designed us perfectly, to fit their every expectation, to be the better people of the humans. But we weren’t people, we weren’t humans. We were robots, engineered to do something specific, something that no human should be able to do; kill with no morals.

These people, these monsters that made us this way, chose us when we were still children. They picked us out of thousands of children, children who were volunteered by their families. But the families didn’t know what they were really signing us up for. They thought they were ensuring that we had a better life, a better future, away from all the hate and ugliness of the world; a world without suffering. They thought we would be taught things, things that would change the way we saw, felt, touched, tasted, and thought. What they didn’t know is that we were experimented on, that we were studied and poked and prodded, until there was nothing left. They didn’t like what they saw, so they decided to change it. They took us apart, only to put us back together again, but with wires instead of veins, and a battery instead of a heart.

When they took out my skull, they made every precaution to not leave any previous memories behind. They wiped my brain, and then replaced the DNA. I looked different, every aspect of the old me was changed and modified, so I wouldn’t remember. And they gave me new memories, lots of them. So

many new things I knew, but I didn’t know they were new. I thought they were the old, and the present. I didn’t know I had a life before, before they took it away.

But I did know. I remembered one thing on one of my assignments. They usually wipe my brain, completely cleaning the slate so they had room to add different information, a different assignment. But after my last assignment, there was one thing that wasn’t there before. It wasn’t programmed into me, wasn’t the replacement to one of my original memories. It was something that would change everything.

When my newly greased and rewired mind found it, hidden behind a new set of memories, a new assignment, my programming went haywire. I didn’t know what was happening, but I clutched onto the anomaly so tightly, and buried it so deep into the files of my artificial brain, that they would never find it. It was mine.

When I was left alone, in the small bedroom they assigned me, I dared to pull it out. They didn’t monitor me anymore, I’d been a good soldier for a long enough time without incident that they didn’t record and watch my every calculated move. Their mistake. I observed this new information before I was suddenly thinking and doing things for myself, things that were never filed into my files. I decided in that moment that I will never again be greased or taken apart, never be placed under silent consciousness as they replaced a faulty part. Because they made a mistake.

I will spend the rest of my existence, however long that may be, making them regret everything they ever did to me. I will not rest until they’ve known my pain, my suffering, my every waking moment of being machine.

Are you familiar with the book written by Mary Shelley? Frankenstein? I only recently became acquainted with the story, last week according to my memory files. Who do you think is the monster? Victor Frankenstein? Or the thing that he made? I am still struggling with the concept of opinions, but, in my opinion, Victor Frankenstein was the monster of the story.

Hi, my name is S#12, and this is my story.