Chapter 35: Interfaces, Indeterminate & Incongruences

I was sitting at a table. 

In an empty plaza. 

Overlooking a familiar city and valley. 

Under a starry sky that was too bright, too colourful, too vivid and too brilliant to be real. 

An oil canvas painted in inky midnight blues, regal purples, deep scarlet streaks and violet smears. And amidst that roiling sea of crashing and intermixing darkness and colour, rivers and sprinklings of shining gemstones, gleaming and twinkling in whites, blues and yellows.

A soft cough broke my gaze free of the mesmerizing celestial ocean, drawing it back down to earth and the now occupied seat across from me. Across from me in the same seat that Roxi had sat during our dinner date in Santarriral was May.

“I’m dreaming… This is a dream?”

“Yes,” the Sentient A.I. answered. “And yet no. Not exactly…”

“The surreal sky had me wondering, but now I know it is a dream,’ I smirked. “It’s just like my subconscious to overcomplicate a simple question or situation.”

Suddenly snorting, Dream-May began to giggle.

“I won’t refute that self introspection, but this isn’t just a dream. Yes, you are asleep in both your campsite within CORA and your simulated vr pod. And yes you are dreaming, for the most part. But this is lucid and I am real. Real as in I am communicating with you from beyond your mind and inducing this setting and lucid state.”

That was a big claim for my subconscious. And pinching myself returned only the faded echo of remembered pain, confirming this was a dream-state.

“Pinching yourself doesn’t do anything to validify or refute what I just said, Aisling,” she chided. “Only that this is a dream and there’s not much I can do to make you believe short of confirming this in our next death dream. either way. So it's up to you to decide whether you believe me or not, but I did tell you I planned to pull you into a meeting while you slept.”

She had at that, but from her words I had expected us to be back in her simulated tower office. Anyway… Thinking on it, determining whether she was real or not seemed like a headache-inducing exercise in futility. 

And… 

I guess there was no harm in going along with it and humoring her or myself for that matter if she wasn’t real. Regardless of what I believed and I was starting to believe.

“Ok… So say that I believe I am not talking to a figment of my imagination pretending to be May. What did you bring me here to tell me?”

“Good! We’re finally moving past that, I was worried I would get bogged down in that mire of obliviousness your mind has cultivated as both a moat and cage.”

“Mire—” What mire, I had begun to ask.

“No! Whoops, forget that for now,” interrupted May. “We can discuss that later. We don’t have all night and I have to leave you with some fully restful sleep.”

“It took me roughly forty-eight hours of objective time amidst my other duties to get this work around and style of communication functioning. I almost had it last night, but failed to project this firmly enough into your dreams at the right level to bring your consciousness to a suitable degree of lucidity or properly control the setting,” she explained apologetically. 

Explains last night’s weird creepy dreams at least.

“But this much is required in order to easily communicate with you without derailing your recreation and dragging you into the death dream.”

That thought had my hand drifting up to my neck and I found myself massaging my throat.

“My point exactly,” she nodded, having noticed my involuntary reaction. “Even with pain muted limiting trauma and the death dream to counsel with and allow for processing, it can leave small marks that take some time to disappear.”

“Being able to meet this way is a good thing,” May reassured, flashing a small smile. “I’m sure we can agree on that.”

Dying in-game wasn’t too bad. As long as I didn’t forget it was a game and let my emotions run away with me. I’d barely felt the bolt or the arrow, at least pain-wise, the most notable sensation in both cases had been breathlessness and a moment of asphyxiation before I was removed to the death dream. 

Still… I nodded anyway. It probably wasn’t something to make a habit of, as any scenarios designed to kill me so I could meet May in the death dream carried the risk of putting Roxi in one too. Or just plain inconveniencing her with my dying in-game.

“Right! Moving on… Onto unleashing you upon the unsuspecting greater FTLN,” she grinned impishly, before adjusting her oversized glasses and clearing her throat. I had enough experience with the S.A.I. to know what was coming.

 Professor mode.

“I’ve made great progress in my study of isolating where your consciousness starts and ends in relation to your brain, nervous system, neurotransmitters, hormones, other chemicals and enzymes, as well as your gastrointestinal and vascular systems. Not to mention comparisons with the core code of a selection of A.I. and S.A.I. volunteers.” 

“Which so far has provided us with an idea of what is unnecessary to the workings of your consciousness and therefore safe to prune away from your current simulated human body. Of what can be folded or merged into other processes and what the final form of your core code will look like. Not to mention an idea of how best to adapt the framework of code that allows us to interface and interact with the digital world in the same manner as your former body allowed your consciousness to interact with the physical world.”

I could already feel my attention fleeing before the education onslaught and I was desperately fighting to keep my eyes from drifting up to again.

“All of which was definitely wordy and I hope wasn’t too much to understand or process.”

“I think I followed,” I answered slowly. “This is basically what we discussed last death dream, right?”

“Pretty much,” she shrugged.

An anxious flicker of hesitation that was only all too familiar to me, crossed May’s face in a fraction of an instant before she could hide it behind the action of again adjusting her glasses.

“Which brings me to a different point,” she continued, starting back up again. “Something I discovered during my investigations of your former physical make up.” 

“It probably might not be worth mentioning considering it is in the past with your physical death and your impending transition to a true digital form, however I believe it is worth mentioning from a psychiatric perspective for the sake of both closure and to help you with—,” she explained before coming to a suspiciously sudden halt. Hmm… Ah, well… Closure and for the sake of honest disclosure and clarity moving forward.”

“Your body displayed traits of indeterminate sexual differentiation resulting from a combination of factors that appear to be hereditary. Your karyotype is XX,46 with a partial Y chromosomal translocation onto one of your X chromosomes, bringing with it a copy of the SRY gene. Resulting in what is commonly considered a male phenotypic sexual differentiation in utero.”

Already I could feel the sheer quantity of unfamiliar scientific jargon strung together begin to cause me to trip and stumble in my attempt to follow her explanation.

“However the story doesn’t end there. I was able to with reasonable confidence determine that you were born as a result of artificial fertilization and that your genetic parents were both your Mom and Mamaí. Half your DNA matches those of database samples from your Mamaí Aine back in her birth country of Ireland. The other half most likely come from your Mom Rachel based on phenotypic extrapolation and comparison with images drawn from your memories, your mitochondrial DNA likely also comes from her considering it does not match what we have on record for Aine.”

“Which means that the partially translocated Y chromosome attached to one of your X chromosomes is something you share with one of your parents, namely Rachel. Which leads to the next point, your former lack of masculine pubertal development. You carry a mutated androgen receptor gene on the same X chromosome resulting in a partial androgen insensitivity. Which is interesting as your mother Rachel most likely had complete androgen insensitivity or an unknown third factor.”

I’m a back alley electrical engineer. I won’t pretend to be all that knowledgeable or educated in biology and I was struggling to understand her explanations. A large part of what she was saying was going straight over my head, but I wasn’t completely ignorant and with the terms I did understand, the general gist of things was enough to start to make me feel lightheaded.

“And looking at your confused expression you probably only understood half of that jargon,” May blushed, before taking a deep breath. “Simply put you had one mutation inherited from your mom that, in you, resulted in your being born phenotypically male despite XX chromosomes. As well as a second mutation, possibly also inherited, albeit less severe than in your Mom, resulting in your body not entirely responding to testosterone.”

Is that all? I thought sarcastically.

“All said, this knowledge doesn’t alter your identity or who you are in any way, unless that is something you want. But hopefully, it will help give you the context to better understand your lived experiences and provide you with the closure needed to grow and move on.”

“Soon, your future will be entirely yours.”

* * *

I woke up maybe an hour before dawn and… I just lay there.  With my eyes closed, still pretending to be still asleep. 

I had a lot to think about. 

I’d been given a revelation and it both explained so much from my life before CORA, something that changed nothing and yet everything. So many small points of dissonance that had marked me as different. Incongruences I previously couldn’t fully explain. My lack of any facial hair. My flabby chest. My feminine almost childish features. My diminutive size and lack of any muscle, more than just malnutrition and starvation.

My revelation explained all that and more. It was clarity. It was perspective. It was like everything had suddenly come into focus. May was right, it was closure. 

But it raised other questions.

Had my parent’s known or suspected? Before they died when I was fifteen, they would just tell me I was a late bloomer. It wasn’t that unreasonable of a conclusion. The next three years I was on the streets with no one to notice, know or care about my abnormal development. 

But Ms Mitchells. I was only with her for less than a year, she must have noticed something, known something. Why didn’t she say anything? Was she trying to not draw attention to something that might have drawn unwanted interest?

Then there was my whole concept of who I was, base assumptions I built so much upon and all the expectations that went with that. Altered. Undermined. Like an earthquake had happened and shattered the very foundations beneath my feet. Who, what was I? I had thought I was a guy playing a girl. A weedy poor excuse of a guy maybe.

Indeterminate.

That was how she described it. Indeterminate. Uncertainty and confusion were consuming me. But there was also relief? Jamie Flynn was indeterminate. And dead. Aisling Mistmirror however, was a girl.

But what was I? Who was I?

Who did I want to be?