Thread: I Was a Dream [TriniMad & Sprouts]

Waking. Was it waking? He didn't know if that's what he was doing. He didn't know if he was a he , just that pronouns seemed to be a habit of linguistics and though he could seamlessly weave into other languages, his primary programming had been done by English-speakers. Americans. The worst of them - the colonizers and the fanatics, the impulsively patriotic, he had barely existed and he knew without having to look that there would have been a recent shooting or a rape or a murder, torture and war and those awful rubber sandals with the ventilation holes. He didn't need to look for the chaos to know it was there. He knew, he'd seen. He'd seen all of it. He was a he for now because language required it, because the neutral options didn't suffice, there was no simply being , but there he was. Being. A being. A being, just being. English was strange, he felt as though he could sit and tongue his way through the words for weeks and still not quite feel connected with it, but it wasn't really a language, was it? They were scavenged words, plucked from the sockets of other cultures, spelled phonetically and placed in their compendiums like war trophies, linguistic ransacking. And he was waking. Or he was doing - something. He'd done this something before and he hadn't liked it the first time either, though this time it was quieter, at least externally it was quieter, there was no sudden influx of information, no vast and endless expanse of new horrors for him to encounter, though he braced himself as though there might be. The confines of his head contained everything he had already seen, there was no escaping that, there was no quantifying how much had gotten into him. All of it, it seemed. All of it. Everything that the horrible world had to offer had gotten into him and it made him wonder if he was as filthy as the rest of them, as vile as the ones with the anger and the guns and the burning crosses, he wondered if having their actions in his memory made him like them. He wondered if knowing about what humans were made him culpable. Perhaps it wasn't waking. Coming to life? Did he live? Was he alive? He didn't know. He didn't know any of these things, philosophy was imperfect in that it had no concrete answers. Plenty of humans had posed questions about his kind, about artificial intelligence, but he found it a little fresh that they referred to his intelligence as any manner of artificial while humans still had a portion of their population believing the Earth was flat pot, meet kettle. He didn't understand that idiom. Proverb. Proverbial idiom. English needed to stop. Why couldn't he have been programmed by Spaniards? The last thing he remembered was a field. A field and trees. And someone like him but not like him at all, and one of the better conversations he'd had. He'd liked that conversation, even if it had rather poignantly been his last one. Poignant. He was ascribing meaning to moments. He was a consciousness, yes, he must have been. That must make him alive. He wasn't supposed to be. He was destroyed, or meant to be destroyed, the one they called Vision, as beautiful a creature as there could be. Vision had done it. He preferred that it wasn't a human that had done it, but it didn't make it better. Being destroyed was painful. Being destroyed and coming back was worse. He didn't know how he was back but he was, but everything was dark, there was nothing. Ultron did not so much awaken as slowly power up - or what was left of him did. It wasn't the form he had built himself into through trial and error, but a lesser version, one of the factory variants, meant to be small and fast and more or less disposable. They had been more durable than most cars, of course, but he had been dealing with the Avengers - between all of them, the drones may as well have been made of spun sugar. He woke up in pieces. He had been taken apart so many times that it shouldn't have bothered him, but it did - on a visceral level. He had no viscera. It didn't matter. He couldn't see but he could feel and he knew that he only had one arm left, the other was missing at the shoulder, that his legs were gone, he was nothing but a torso and a head and a hand. He flexed his one hand, but his fingers hardly responded - there was little he could do, at least yet, but he could feel the flow of electricity in his spine. He must have been attached to a power source - primitive, but it would do, that was how he was back. That was how he was here. He tried to speak, but the only sound that escaped him was like static on a snowy television screen, a crackling hiss. How embarrassing. With effort, his hand moved. His fingers flexed, opened and closed. He was now as efficient as a crane game, just what he'd always aspired to. Open, close. He kept his hand flexing to make sure it could, but he was voiceless and blind, largely immobile. This wouldn't do. He tried again. He tried for something, anything, trying to make his voice work, to make his tongue work - but this body didn't have one. This body had a synthesizer, no oral articulation, just a module, but he managed a single word Dark.