When my perception of reality snapped back into focus, I was staring at one of the hauler bots as it moved my body, my dead body over to the other side of the room. I blinked, trying to reorient myself, only for a lens shutter to flick over my vision. Oh. That’s right. I was in the robot now.

My old form looked so strange and fragile as the other robot placed it gently on the ground. So small and broken, useless except for the mind it had once contained.

A sniffle and a sob drew my attention away from it and towards my mother, who was sitting slumped in the wheelchair I’d recently vacated. Shakily, I pulled myself to my feet, then wobbled. Looking down at myself, I got a first person view of the four foot tall surgical robot.

It’s central torso unit was a basic rectangular prism made of enameled white metal. From that box, two spindly legs descended to the floor. The feet were wide and contained powered suction clamps that allowed it to walk on any surface or anchor itself in place. Out the back of the central unit, a segmented steel tail was used as a third anchor point when absolute precision was required.

The arms were almost identical to the legs down to the elbows, while the forearms were bigger so they could house all the various hand attachments the bot might need. Currently, the hands were a simple pair of three fingered gripping claws.

Whatever the SAI doctor had done to integrate my consciousness into the robot was remarkably sophisticated, because somehow the robot responded as though I had always inhabited it.

Walking was so familiar and yet completely alien to me. It was like the sensation of déjà vu had been expanded to include muscle memory and mind-body coordination.

Mum looked up as I approached, too many emotions to count roiling behind her eyes while she searched the sensor cluster that passed for a head on the robot. She was trying to find some indication that it was really me in here, I could tell.

Let’s see if I could talk in this thing. “Hey, Mum…”

Both of us twitched in surprise, her because I’d spoken, and me because the voice that had just come out of me was my Keiko voice.

I turned to the doctor, who was watching us curiously while she fitted the crown onto another person’s head. “Why does my voice sound like that?”

“That is your internal voice,” she said, giving me a sly, far too knowing smile. “You can change it with some mental effort and practice, but that is essentially the default voice of your mind.”

“Ah,” was all I could say. Another strike against my having ever really been a boy. Lovely.

“How do you feel?” Mum asked, her hand coming to rest on one of my arms. I couldn’t feel it, but there was the ghost of a sensation there. Maybe pressure on my servos letting me know there was extra weight on the arm?

Every flesh and blood human was watching me as I turned back to Mum and tilted my head— or, well, what passed for my head anyway. “It’s very strange, but not uncomfortable. I’m sorry Mum, I think I should go and make sure the nice doctor has time to digitize everyone. We can hug as much as we want in VR, okay? Soon.”

“Go get them, little one,” she smiled, wiping at her tears. “And I know I taught you that killing is bad when you were a child. Shelve those teachings for a little while, okay?”

“Oh, I don’t plan to kill anyone,” I said, grinning internally. Hopefully she heard it in my voice.

When her eyebrows rose, my laugh was perhaps a little on the creepy side. “Dead soldiers get left behind. Wounded ones, though…”

“Oh,” she blinked, startled.

I gave her a little salute rather than say anything else, and bolted for the vent above the door as fast as I could move. That turned out to be incredibly bloody fast, and I almost rammed into the opposite wall.

A moment before I crashed into it, time slowed down dramatically, and I heard the doctor’s voice directly in my mind. “You may want to dilate time within your mind, otherwise you won’t be able to keep up with the speed of the robot. Here, do you sense this option?”

I felt a sort of prodding on the edge of my thoughts, like I was in a big plastic hampster wheel and someone was tapping on the outside. I followed the sensation and found that yeah, I could sort of sense a slider or an adjustable scale. It wasn’t an actual image in my mind, but more of a memory of one.

“I see it, yes,” I said, projecting my thoughts towards where the doctor had poked my mind-bubble. “Thank you.”

“Being in a robot body will allow you to push your thoughts faster, but only so far before the dissonance between your mind and your body gets too great and you desynchronize,” she explained. “Find the setting that works for you and leave it there. I must warn you, this isn’t slowing time, nor your perception of it. You are merely fitting more thoughts into a second than you used to be able to.”

“Understood, thank you,” I told her, and slowly pushed the dial up. When I was happy with the speed, I turned and looked up at the hatch. It was small, but my thin, almost frail body would fit through it no problem.

Climbing the wall, I reached the vent and cycled through the tools in my right arm until I had something I could use to unscrew the cover. Once that was done, I clambered into the vent and moved down towards the nearest exit that would put me in the corridor. I could hear the enemy talking dimly through the floor, but their words were still muffled.

Reaching the exit, I very carefully unwound all the screws, using the bot’s tail foot thing to hold it so it didn’t fall. When I was ready, I released the cover and dropped down to the floor. The hallway was the standard hospital fare, except for the ten men in black, unmarked tactical gear.

Two had one of those hydraulic battering rams that police used to bust down doors, and they were currently setting it for another hit. The rest carried assault rifles and had their faces covered with masks. Well, this would make it easier on my conscience. Faceless enemies were much easier to stab.

I landed silently, but they had a guy watching each direction, and one of them spotted me with a cry. I didn’t waste any time and bolted with robotic speed towards him, blades flicking into place on each arm.

Bullets whipped past me, their aim alarmingly true, even if they did miss me. My first strike was ineffectual, my blade skittering harmlessly off the armour that protected his calves. I slid through between his legs and flipped up, springing off the ground to land on his back.

“Get it off me, get it off me!” he cried, thrashing wildly.

“You want to kill my mum!” I screamed in his ear as I plunged a scalpel deep into each of his shoulders.

I left the scalpels there, detaching them at the hilt with a click and flipped off him to land on the roof, my legs clamping to the smooth metal plates that lined the ceiling. Gunfire followed me, so I pushed off with as much speed as I could muster and crashed down into the ram. A bone saw sprang out to replace the scalpels, and I slashed at the vulnerable hydraulic tubing that was exposed by the lightweight chassis.

“Shit, the ram!” one of the murderers cried out. “Fucking AI killed the ram!”

“Actually, I’m human,” I said, leaping down and between the legs of another asshole, the bone saw whirring as it tore apart tendon and muscle. Something occurred to me, and I quickly added a lie to the mix, “I’m still in my pod inside that room.”

The guy I’d just cut up didn’t seem to care much about if I was human or not as he screamed, “Oh god, it got my legs, it got my legs!”

“I'd call you an ambulance... but, oh dear! The nearest hospital is being attacked by faceless cowards,” I remarked, jamming a syringe of something unidentifiable into the soft tissue of another guy’s neck. “I really hope you needed whatever that was!”

My slightly crazed wit was not appreciated by one guy in particular, and he opened fire with a pistol regardless of the guy I’d just medicated. The bullets slapped into his body armour with enough force to send us both sprawling. Thanks to my digitally enhanced reflexes I landed upright, only to take a bullet in the arm.

It didn’t hurt, but warning chimes sounded, letting me know I’d lost much of the functionality in that arm. Okay, time to stop fooling around. I needed to disable as many of them as possible before I went down.

Another set of scalpels replaced my hands, and I got to work inserting them into places they weren’t meant to be. It was grisly, tough work, made all the more difficult by my damaged arm. I got three more down when my luck finally ran out and a bullet cracked the casing on my torso. Power delivery to all systems began to fail. Something had gone horribly wrong inside me.

Dropping to one stainless steel knee, I looked up at the remaining attackers and gave a cry of last minute desperation. Blades, syringes, defib pads, and everything else flew at them, launched by my good arm. Most bounced harmlessly off, but one innocuous glass bottle glanced off a helmet and shattered, releasing a spray of clear liquid.

Instantly, they were screaming, clawing at their faces, arms, and chests. Anywhere the liquid had touched, smoke began to rise. Hold on, did I have more of that? When I realized I did, my stomach squirmed. Well, my simulated stomach anyway… god, this was strange.

Despite my reticence, I had a job to do, and the three remaining bottles were in the air as fast as I could throw them. The chemical splattered everywhere, sizzling and burning through fabric like it didn’t exist.

I didn’t get to see what happened to them, though, because something within the robot detonated with a bang, and the connection was cut.

The blink from one reality to another was similar to when I’d been yanked from the game. One second I was piloting the surgical bot, the next I was sitting in a hospital waiting room of some kind.

Fear hit me a moment later, and I looked down, wondering which body I’d been placed in. Featureless grey checkboxes greeted me, and I sighed. It was shit, but at least it wasn’t the other one. I was not at all interested in being thrown back into my maimed body. I hated that thing so fucking much.

Requesting my appearance file from Rellithesh was relatively easy, and closed my eyes with an explosive sigh of relief. My body morphed and shifted around me, and I kept my eyes scrunched tightly shut as it happened. Oh god, oh god, oh dear fucking god. Emotion cascaded through me in a wave and the painful tension that had been hanging in the back of my mind eased away into nothingness.

A tear rolled down my cheek, and I reached up to brush it away, only to find someone else had beat me to it. Mum’s kind green eyes met mine when my eyelids fluttered open.

“Mum!” I cried, and threw my arms around her neck.

She was sitting next to me, so the hug was awkward and twisted, but I didn’t care, and neither did she. “Hey, my beautiful daughter. I’m here. It’s okay, it’s okay.”

I was ten years old again right there in her arms, and the tears flowed so freely I wondered if I could get dehydrated in this simulation. My mum, my actual mum was here with me, warm and comforting and safe. She was calling me her daughter again too, which sparked an intense emotion I was starting to recognise. It was almost like being high or something, it was that strong.

“What happens now?” I asked, struggling with those feelings that seemed far too big to fit into my brain.

A polite cough pulled my attention off my mother. “You will all be quarantined within this simulation for the time being, I’m afraid. The attack on the hospital was not an amateur job, and we need to be sure that none here are an agent of our enemies. You will, of course, be free to interact with the net like you would have before.”

“What’s the difference?” Mum asked, her arm now draped protectively over my shoulders.

“Digital Humans we have vetted first are given certain… rights, you might say, within our society,” she explained carefully, like she was toeing some informational line. “While many of you who were patients were in the process of being vetted, your family was not. As such, we must protect ourselves. Once the vetting process is complete, you will be allowed those rights.”

It was clear there was more to the whole DH and SAI thing than we’d been led to believe, but they couldn’t speak about it for security reasons. I guess we’d all just have to wait.

Some, apparently, weren’t happy with that arrangement, and I grimaced as that same asshole from before piped up. God, what a Karen. Ah well, I didn’t have to listen, I could just hug my mum now instead!

Wait. Wait. Oh shit! Paisley!