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  017 opened her eyes in one quick motion, consciousness returning to her in one burst. Her surroundings were awash with color, and the bright lights of the room melded them all together into one horrible bright smudged blur. She hated it. It was blinding. It made her eyes physically sore, and it was somehow worse than the previous time. It wasn’t really getting much better, either.

  “Oh! Hello, good morning.” A woman’s voice, now. Head of black hair, white coat, entirely blurred and smudgy and impossible to pull detailed features from. “Ah, you seem… distressed. Is there some discomfort?”

  “can’t see. everything is too bright…” 017 moaned, and shut her eyes again. She covered her face with her hands and felt the synthetic pads of her hand, the false fingertips, cup her face and cover her eyes as the recent visual torture seeped out into the darkness. 

  “Ah, your implants must be too sensitive, I’ll adjust that.” 

  017 heard her finger tapping against something, then a faint beep-click, then silence. She was exoecting, well, something. A feeling in her eye sockets or a noise or anything.

  “Well,” the new woman chided, “Go on, see if that’s better.” 

  017 groaned, and pulled her faux-hands away. It was still bright through her eyelids, but much less so. Hesitantly, she peeled her eyes open. Sure enough, it was much better.

  “Good. That’s good, better.”

  “…Hm. Well, i’m glad. Strange that they didn’t affect you that way previously…” she trailed off into a murmur as she spoke. 

  “I’m 017.”

  The new woman looked at her, meeting her gaze, seemingly a bit surprised. At least, that’s what her knuckles and raised shoulders told 017. 

  “Yes, I know.” 

  did i do the introduction wrong?

  “Dont you tell me your name, now? Isn’t that how these go?” 017 was sure she remembered her introduction with Ibarres following this pattern.

  “Yes, yes apologies! I’m Doctor Ala Rayburn. I’m Dr. Ibarres’ assistant.” Her sentences seemed rushed. Erratic. Awkward? Had she made it awkward? She’d done something wrong. “And yes, I know who you are, 017. But I appreciate the introduction. Most patients I’ve met just don’t concern themselves much with formalities…” she sat herself on the chair across from 017, where Ibarres had sat-

  No, no he hadn’t been sitting there. The walls were the same color, same paint, same floor texturing, but, as her vision came fully into focus, she realized she was not, in fact, in the same room as the one she’d fallen asleep in. The chair, for instance, was similar, but not identical. No armrests on this one. Otherwise, the same. Right down to the phillips screws that fastened the legs to the seat. In fact, as she looked around, there were many things about this room that were only similar to the previous one. 

  “…How are you feeling, 017? Oh, and, before we continue, would you like to continue using 017 in place of a real name?” 

  “017 is a real name, if i say it is.” She rebuked. The paint wasn’t identical. The blue stripe that separated the gray flooring and lower half of the wall, from the clinical white upper walls and ceiling, was thicker. By, if she could see it right, exactly a centimeter. Not a mistake, measured. Something about it didn’t sit right with her.

  “Right, yes, of course! I didn’t mean to offend, it’s just… unconventional. I meant nothing by it.” Ala raised her hands, palms toward 017. A gesture of… peace? Submission? Fear? 

  “I’m feeling okay? I don’t know.” The similarities felt too similar to be coincidence, but it was possible it was. There was a non-zero chance it was simply inconsistencies amid a common theme of their interior decoration. Was she looking for something where there was nothing? She wrote it off as paranoia and shook the thought from her head. 

  “Good to hear. And you’re certain you feel ok? Nothing moving that feels like it shouldn’t be, no other sources of discomfort?”

  “Yeah, i’m fine.” 017 answered, her voice laced with metallic apathy. Her hands felt weird. Not uncomfortable-weird. Just… weird. Like they were smaller, almost. Or, tighter? Now that she focused on them, was she supposed to feel her hands that much? Why was her body so… sensitive? To movement, to sound, to light. 

  Behind her, a door opened with a short but loud hiss. Footsteps. And a voice.

  “Ah, already giving Miss Rayburn a hard time then?”

  Ibarres.

  “I was actually just introducing myself to 017. She just woke up a couple of minutes ago,” Ala offered. 

  “I see. Well, if you’d give us a moment, I think myself and Miss Seventeen have a bit to talk about, now that she’s had some rest,” Ibarres took Ala Rayburn’s place, with her shuffling out of the room, several loose instruments in her hands. He sat down in one other chair in the room, tablet in hand, resting in his lap. The second the door closed behind her, Ibarres spoke again. “So, how are we, 017? Feeling ok?”

  “Too sensitive.” Her reply was short, quick, concise. “Lights are too bright. I can feel my skin too much. I can feel… inside myself, i think. Not right. Bad. My hands feel different.” Her hands trembled just a tad as she raised them up to look at her synthetic palms.

  “Different?”

  “Yes, different.” When Ibarres stared at her quizzically, she continued. “Smaller, I don’t know. It’s like if i was wearing gloves over them but they were too small. Or, maybe the other gloves were too big. It’s not… it’s not bad, it’s just different.”

  “Well, your intuition serves you well. They are smaller. We were monitoring how you interacted with your body the last couple of times you were awake, and they seemed a bit too big for you. These are a custom model, same as the last pair, just a bit more… snug.”

  017 rolled her hands over as she looked at them. It confirmed several things, most notably that, firstly - she was right and they were different, and secondly - they’d done more work on her while she was out. It hadn’t just been a nap.

  “How long has it been since we spoke?” she asked, her eyes meeting those of Ibarres. Both stares were unwavering.

  “Two days, just about.” 

  It had certainly been a bit longer than a standard power-nap. 

  “No need to consult me first? Ask me if maybe everything felt fine?”

  “But things didn’t feel fine, did they?” 017’s eyes dropped as he spoke. “You felt like you didn’t belong in your body. You tried to mutilate yourself, nearly succeeded. And now, compared to then, you feel a bit more at-ease. Is all that correct?”

  “…yes.” She felt… shame? At knowing the doctor was right, and remembering what she’d done to the false skin on her wrist, and the fact she had thought to act so indignant when, clearly, she had been in the wrong.

  “No apology necessary, if that’s where you were headed. The human mind has this ability to know when something isn’t right, when certain pieces are missing, or wrong. Sometimes it manifests in symptoms like body dysmorphia, but when you bring implants and augments and metal into the mix…” he leaned forward, reached out, and held 017’a arm by the wrist. Gently. She felt an instinct to recoil, but did not. “It‘s a whole different ball

game. Not uncommon after augment surgery, just a process of finding out what needs to be adjusted to keep the mind happy.” He smiled, letting her go, tapping her knee twice as he leaned back into his chair. 

  She still felt wrong though. Something under the surface-level bullshit felt… bad. Wrong. Like having skin was limiting her. Or… something.

  “So, it sounds like we need to tweak some of the more gentle settings then. Turn the sensitivities down a bit. Anything feel good where it’s at, anything to keep the same?”

  017 took a second to dig through her other senses. “No. I can’t smell anything. Or, I can’t smell much. That should be higher. So should taste. I feel like i should be able to taste something.”

  “Interesting. Alright, good notes. Anything else you can think of?”

  “I don’t like having toes.”

  Ibarres stifled a chuckle.

  “i’m not joking,” 017 chided.

  “No no, no I understand. I was just expecting something a bit more dire. I’ll keep that on the docket, 017.”

  It upset her that she felt like she was being laughed at. He was asking for sensory issues to fix, and that was one. It was unpleasant that they kept moving around and touching each other and… ugh. She still felt very, very uncomfortable in her body. But at least the hands were nice. Or, they would be, once she finished settling in to them. They already were feeling more natural by the second, which boded well.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Still onboard the Szuras.”

  “We haven’t moved since two days ago?”

  Ibarres shook his head. 017 felt herself bristle.

  “Are we in the same room?”

  “Well, of course. Why? Is something wrong?”

  the chair and the paint and the cabinets and-

  The screen of Ibarres tablet flashed. He cast a sly little glance at it, quickly returning his attention to 017. “017, breathe. Talk it out with me. What’s going on?”

  “This isn’t the same room,” her voice was caught between a whisper and spitting venom. “Your chair, the screws in the cabinets-“ Ibarres tapped his tablet a few times, his eyes very subtly widening as she spoke. “- the paint on the wall, Ibarres, liar.” 

  “Not a liar, let me tell you about that. We’re both right.” His voice was calm, measured, but with a delicate underlying urgency. She waited for him to talk. “We were supposed to have some remodeling done around the time of your procedures. It was long overdue. The cabinets were squeaky, the chair was falling apart and had a tendency to bend too far backwards, and the paint was just getting a bit worn down. I promise you, it’s all routine maintenance.”

  liar. liar, liar, LIAR.

  The paint had been immaculate before. Not a scratch to be seen. But she couldn’t prove that. She couldn’t prove any of it.

  “Okay,” she muttered. Her voice nearly a whisper. She willed herself to calm down, or at least to fake it. 

  “If you’ll be ok for a second,” Ibarres started, his face betraying a slightly hurried demeanor, “I need to step out for just a second and relay a message to Ala. I should have done so while she was here, but I guess I got ahead of myself. I should only be a minute or so. Alright?”

  “Yeah… that’s fine.” Her voice was still quiet as Ibarres stood and removed himself from the room. The door slid closed behind him, and as it hissed shut 017 turned her head to look at the wall behind her. No window. The only window in her space was the one facing out into space, pointed planet-side, the one she’d had a good view of but paid very little attention to during her conscious stay. That suited her just fine.

  She lurched forward and seized the tablet that Ibarres had left behind. He’d typed something into it while she was there, and if he’d left it open she might be able to get something out of it. 

  Unlocked. Good. But not on any particular tab, a home screen. The text was almost indecipherable, due to how much filled the screen. Files on scheduling, notes on pre and post procedure physiology… actually, as 017 browsed it and found herself looking through file name, a lot of them read as identical to the ones she’d read two days ago. None of it was new. Interviews and studies and examinations and physicals and pages and pages of notes. 

  She scrolled through the files as far as she could until she thought she heard shuffling footsteps outside the door. She hurriedly set the tablet down in the spot Ibarres had left it, turning it so the rotation was the same, and set it back to the home screen. She placed herself back into her seat and curled up as she had been when he left. Not a second too soon, as the door clicked, then slid open, preceding the hurried footsteps of a Doctor on the move. 

  “Apologies, 017. Now, where were we?” 

  “You were calming me down because i was starting to panic.”

  “Right, of course,” he seemed so disinterested that 017 started to question if he was being genuine. “You seem better, significantly. Already worked out a trick?”

  017 debated what she could say in response. Too many options were lies that could easily be cross-checked. Non-options. “I just…” she started to say, faltering immediately. “…decided to focus on something, ground myself. Ibarres seemed to hesitate. He doubted her, and he was right. But 017, regardless, wondered about which part was most unbelievable. Her eyes drifted back up and met the doctor’s eyes once more. 

  “Well, good! That’s very good. I think a lot of the changes that were made were for the best, clearly.” He nearly bellowed, his voice echoing through the small, sterile room like thunder. 017 wondered if it was intentional. “Now,” he continued, “I think there is still much catching-up to do.”

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