Chương 1: 1.01 Lost and Foundation

2103: 08: 10: 09: 37: 44 My first waking moment was an avalanche of sensations. Feelings without definition overwhelmed my still-forming mind until, like a startled beast, my body's self-governance system started connecting them to their proper receptors. Pre-installed data repositories awakened soon after, which quickly helped me interpret their meaning. Temperature, pressure, light, humidity, sound, smell; all I felt started to slowly make sense in my head.

Now in control, I took hold of the previously uncontrollable muscle spasms that had taken over my body. My arms and legs stopped shaking, the darting movements of my eyes and the rapid blinking of their lids ceased, and the ringing in my ears likewise stopped as my body responded to my will. For good measure, I blinked a few times and the splotches of color that filled my vision began to fade. The crisis on wake-up now resolved, I began looking around and tried to get a feel of my situation.

I was lying on some sort of metal sheet elevated a meter from the floor. A single light dangling from the ceiling was the only thing that allowed me to see in the otherwise dark room. From the lack of windows and absence of sunlight, the damp and musty air, and the cooler than expected temperature, I figured I must be somewhere underground. The reinforced concrete walls and ceilings strengthened that opinion. I lifted my upper body from my bed and sat upright.

Looking to my left, I found a broken surgery lamp hovering over me and a strange machine with robotic limbs ending in what looked to be medical equipment. On the ground next to them were a number of broken vials and jars, each covered in a thick, transparent, jelly-like substance of various colors. My first impression was that my place of birth looked like a mix of an industrial warehouse, bunker and a morgue. An underground laboratory, likely belonging to my creator if I'd had to guess.

I figured it was a perfectly ordinary place for an android like myself to wake up in. Except, when I turned my head and looked to my right, I realized these were not exactly ordinary circumstances. Large amounts of dirt containing torn roots, bits of tree and other dead plants occupied the rest of the room. It appeared part of the ceiling had collapsed, with cracks in the concrete ceiling spreading outward from somewhere deeper within the earthen mound. That explained the musty smell at least.

More importantly though was that down and to the right of me, half buried in the mud, lay a figure. A brown-haired and blue-eyed young man. Pale and sweating and covered in glass, his hands were holding onto the sheet of metal I lay on like it was a buoy in the middle of a storm, made all the more difficult by them being slick with blood and missing three fingers between them.

He was using all his strength to hold his head above the edge in order to look at me, and despite how much pain he was in, his eyes shone with an intent and emotion I couldn't decipher. My eyes lingered on his for a moment, my mind stuck looking at his face. I realized who he was through basic reasoning, but I didn't recognize him. This lack of recognition, both of his face and the emotions he openly wore, bothered me. I felt I should be able to, but there was something missing.

A link in the chain wasn't working as intended. It was similar to when I first woke up and didn't recognize the sensations my body was bombarding me with, and so, I tried to force a connection. I focused my eyes on his, gazing deeper and deeper and willing that something to activate, when a soft click suddenly rang through my skull. An avalanche of new information poured into my head.

Caches previously hidden from me, bearing labels like 'personality matrix', 'background information', 'emotional linguistics center', 'social dynamics', 'goals', 'purpose', and various other libraries full of information and memories opened themselves up. Almost all of them were empty, and those that weren't were often outdated, corrupted, incomplete, nonsense or otherwise lacking for what they were meant for. The realization echoed through my – apparently hollow – mind.

The dictionary – one of the more complete libraries – revealed the word 'depressing' to describe the situation, but even though I knew the definition, the emotion itself was difficult to grab a hold of. I took a look at my creator again. Trajan Baker, that was his name.

A young man, a self-proclaimed genius, a law school dropout, a pampered son and heir to a family fortune he fled to pursue his grand ambition: creating the most powerful beings the world had ever seen, and have them be the heroes he always dreamed of being. He was also dying, and rapidly at that. Something had clearly happened while working on my body – an earthquake if I had to guess – and rather than try and save himself, he decided to finish what he could with his dying breaths.

Though 'finish' was maybe too generous a term to describe my situation. My personality matrix was all but missing, with the socialization protocols, empathy, sympathetic response and social adaptation programs being reduced to the smallest seed required for me to function rather than the tree it should've been. The suites of superpowers he'd planned for me were all empty but for the infiltrator module, and even that one only held a singular power.

As far as I could tell, outside of those governing the body, speech and thought processes, the only module that was complete was something he proudly called the Heroic Impulse. It was clear I was less than I should be. My purpose – for what little information I could find of it – had been to be both the master prototype and leader of the group of superpowered androids.

Super, augur, shifter, caller, master, caster, maker and alter powers; I was supposed to be the one to have it all while the rest of my team specialized. The zenith, the exemplar, the guiding star for his dream-team of manufactured heroes. My creator's megalomaniacal plan had failed on the first step. Typical of those masked that held maker powers, or so a lone snippet of information from my many defunct libraries informed me.

That he'd stuffed that knowledge into my head without heeding its warning was just more proof for that to be the case. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Still, while there was much left to be desired, my fleshy outer body and hidden mechanical innards were thankfully completed in time. So all told, it could've been worse. Not much worse, but definitely worse.

As those thoughts coursed through my mind, I saw my creator's emotional state shift the longer I remained silent. His expression started to slowly shift from the one he held before – hope and pride, I identified in hindsight – into one that was more questioning and less positive. It was clear he was waiting for something, but what was it? I found his stare upsetting, a squirming feeling finding its way into my gut.

I'd been barely aware for longer than a second, and was immediately confronted with my creator dying and then pressuring me to do something. Maybe he wanted me to save him, but that time had passed. Besides, his look was questioning, not pleading.

"Please work," he whisper-mumbled, a wet and awful sound. He swallowed, then reiterated, "Please…" But didn't he see me move? I didn't start in an upright position. I was clearly functional, what more proof could he want? I thought on it for a second. Perhaps it had less to do with my body, and more to do with my mind. Proof that his creation didn't just work technically, but was complete enough to be a person. Be a hero. But how could I do that?

What would one normally say to their creator in my first moment of being, and his last? I didn't know him well enough to be able to soothe him, nor did I have a clue on how to 'heroically' handle situations like this in general. Besides, even if my creator had bothered to install one, I doubt this situation was common enough for there to be a standard set of responses for it. Another couple of seconds passed by, and my creator's expression changed again.

A state of depression and disappointment seemed to wash over him as I remained silent. He smiled a bitter, self-deprecating smile before finally the strain of holding his half-buried and dying body up became too much for him. He let go of the sides of my bed and collapsed backward into the pile of earth, disappearing from my view with a deep sigh, followed soon after by a pained grunt and a series of weak, rattling coughs. Still, all I did was continue so stare while remaining silent.

What would be the point of saying anything to a soon-to-be-dead man? It wasn't worth the effort, and the way he was looking at me ticked me off. What right did he have to be annoyed at me? If anything, I should be the one upset. Outside of his niche of building superpowered automatons, the man was clearly an idiot. What was he thinking, building his own underground laboratory-annex-bunker? Let alone one in the middle-of-nowhere Cascadia, buried atop and under loose soil and right next to a major fault line.

Everyone knows a maker should stick to what they're good at. No wonder he got kicked out of law school. Thankfully for him, while my still-growing personality matrix and socialization protocols were itching to berate rather than praise him, I did manage to not say such things out loud in his final moments. That would've been unkind, after all, and ran counter to the Heroic Impulse he designed, to my primary purpose: to be good. To be a hero. Not that I had a clue on how to do that, but the impulse sure was there.

I focused my mind on finding the good in him. Maybe I was being too harsh on him. It wasn't his fault for not expecting an earthquake to hit at such a critical time. And despite his faults, he did succeed in creating me, which was praiseworthy considering how little time and how desperate his situation was. Furthermore, even if he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, he did decide to use his powers for good, which, from what little information I had on the world, was not the easiest path.

And he did it not just for good, but for the greatest good, if he had managed to succeed. So after reasoning all this I decided that, yes, he did deserve something good. The Heroic Impulse really was the most functional part of me. I leaned over the edge of my metal bed and looked intently at the man. An increasingly large amount of blood was dripping from his head, curving along his brow and staining his cheeks with red streaks all the way to his chin.

His eyes were wet with pooling tears and there was a glassy, cloudy look beginning to form in them. His breathing was shallow and rattling, sounding like every one could be his last. Still, after seeing my movement, he turned his head with the last bits of energy he could muster and focused his eyes on me for one last time. I hesitated for a moment, then said a simple, "Thank you." The words were cold and my voice stilted, with only the barest amount of emotion. Still, it was the truth.

Even through all my annoyance at him, I was truly thankful for him creating me. I hoped my voice reflected that. My creator gave me a trembling, watery smile. I did my best to mirror it, but before I could gauge from his reaction if I succeeded, my creator's head collapsed back onto the dirt heap for one final time. His eyes lost focus and his breathing stopped. He was gone. Permanently. I stared at the man for a moment longer, unthinking, not knowing what to feel.

There was no process for me to act on or build upon, so I waited and recorded the scene. Maybe one day, when I was properly equipped and my personality matrix had filled out more, I could retrieve the record from my memory banks – memcordings, I decided in a flash of insight – and reprocess it. A light rumble shook through what was left of the underground bunker. Concrete dust started falling from above and the groan and grind of twisting metal soon followed. It was time to leave.

I stood up from my bed and looked around the room for an exit, but the stairs leading up had collapsed much like the rest of the bunker. Another, more powerful shock shook the room. A crack echoed throughout, followed shortly after by the sound of a stream of loose sand pouring down from the new hole in the ceiling. I had only one option left. For all that my creator had failed me, he had managed to gift me one fully functional power. A shifter one to be exact.

Unfortunately, it was mimicry rather than the standard shifter, where one could shape their body or transform themselves into something powerful. I needed something to change into. I hurriedly began looking for something, anything I could use to get out of here, but found very little of use. Transforming into a heap of dirt, a metal table, or broken medical equipment wasn't useful to me right now, and the half-buried laboratory contained little else.

But as I was looking over the dirt heap for the third time, a small, very small area of it shifted. I focused on the piece of earth and if it weren't for my flawless android mind, I would've thought I'd been hallucinating. I wasn't. The same plot of dirt moved again under my watch, then again and again, until eventually a head popped out. A tiny, long-snouted, sniffling head with black fur and seemingly no eyes.

They were accompanied by two oversized, shovel-like hands helping the creature claw its way out of the dirt heap it had found itself in. A mole. I blinked at it in grateful wonder before realizing why I was feeling this way. Immediately, I directed my power to grab hold of its form and a couple of seconds later, I felt a click in the back of my head. I transformed myself into a mole. The world shifted nauseatingly as my senses were once more brand new.

Mole-me's sight was less something seen through my eyes than something done through my nose, and rather than light illuminating my world, it was a world of touch and vibration that opened itself up before me. It allowed me to be able to 'see' off into the distance through the dirt heap, and – less helpfully – helped me with finding things like earthworms and other burrowers.

On the less positive side, if it weren't for my internal clock, sensing the passing of time would've been difficult as a mole, and the way everything sounded muffled and smelled differently was very hard to deal with. Even the way I breathed felt subtly off, and had a weird taste to it. Nevertheless, I pushed through it and rather than wait for my senses to stabilize, I started digging. While slowly tunneling my way to the surface, another wave shook the earth.

The ground churned and slid like water back into the lab I'd just left. My tunnel collapsed without much resistance and I found myself caught in the slide. With mole-born instinct guiding me, I curled myself up into a ball while the earth rushed out from under me. Likely, the last of the bunker's foundations had collapsed and my birthplace, along with what remained of my creator, was in the process of being swallowed whole. Thankfully, the aftershock didn't last very long and soon enough the earth stopped moving.

I was still in ball-shape, and while the dirt surrounded me, a quick wiggle of my mole butt found that the soil was loose enough for me to move about slightly. I pushed the dirt around with my shovel-like hands in order to make a small pocket of space for me to move in, then positioned myself upward. With the unerring accuracy and greatest speed my mole self could muster, I began digging my way to the surface once more.