“...but just meet me in the medbay, alright? Like always.” A soft, distant voice. Vaguely feminine, but it's hard to tell. “We'll get it for you...”
In the swirling void of neurons firing and attempting to access missing thoughts, a few key words float through the barely-coherent mind of AM-5. Was it truly a memory? That was hard to say; at this point, anything beyond her professional training came less as a solid image and more as an off-color blur, a vague flash of an image or perhaps the faintest whiff of a hallucinated scent. Despite this mess of unclear thought, she knew a few things: Her name was Amelie. She was a technician on Station C-9. She was also very, very human.
But for a short moment, everything becomes darkness again. Perhaps she is dreaming.
When she awakens, she might wish she remained that way.
When the dreaming stops and reality takes hold of her senses, she is sitting alone in a brightly-lit examination room. This much seems strangely familiar. The steel table covered with flimsy plastic is like a second home in the strangest way – is she often sick? Is it just the feel? The room is chilly and she is no exception, her jumpsuit good for resisting flame and jolts of electricity but not the otherworldly ache in the medbay. Most of her crewmates would likely agree that it was a cold and somber place, were there any of them still around for her to talk to.
Her tech-pad rests on the nearby countertop amidst a small mess of scattered syringes and empty vials, yet everything else in the room is prim and proper: charts, adjustable observation lights, a few chairs...
But why is it so empty? The lights and open doors all lead to a well-stocked, wide-open bay full of absolutely no other people. It doesn't take a hunt through the rooms to find that much out. Only the constant ring of an empty space reaches her ears, coupled with the occasional groan or tremble of a distant pipe or loose duct.
More worrying is her absolute lack of memory beyond the past short moments she's spent on the observation table.
Finally, noise. A distant whirr and rattle. It's familiar, very familiar; something robotic, perhaps? Something is moving outside and it's starting to creep closer.
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In the same instant of time that Amelie awakens, PR-451 snaps awake.
He's in his room. It's a messy shithole, and that's probably just the way he likes it: small, compact, everything within arm's reach. Makeshift weapons fashioned from station contraband litter every nook and cranny that rests free of fried circuit boards and dismantled helper 'bots employed by the Station to help keep things tidy. Somehow, they missed the memo that the Isolation Sector should be on that list.
At one time, Isolation-45 was a cell, but that was far before PR-451's time. To him, it's just home. His crappy bed, his crappy junk, his crappy life. Problem is, he can't remember it, either. Living in a pile of squandered resources might leave someone wishing for a better set of memories, but his are just absent.
It's an uncomfortable feeling. A familiar one, too, just like ISL-45.
His self-appointed kingdom is all of ten feet wide and ten feet long, sparsely furnished: Cot. Workbench. Desk. A half-dozen techpads hang from the north wall, casting a gentle glow on the workbench beneath them. It's where the magic happens: they're all hotmodded.
That was a memory – so why did THAT remain? He'd gutted out the stock chips and dropped in a couple sets he flashed himself. Wasn't very hard, child could do it with a set of instructions, but it opened a realm of possibilities: monitoring private communication channels. Watching the world go by. Even now, three of the screens showed rooms in the complex. The first is right outside home sweet home, angled down a long, thin corridor lined with nothing but sheer metal, ceiling to floor. Rust and dried bloodsplatters are the norm. Hell, they're part of the decoration. Can't scrub up character like that, not like he'd bother in the first place.
The second is just an empty room full of server racks that stretch as far as the eye can see. Dark, polished, with small red lights blinking on every single one in a silent rhythm that would unnerve lesser people. It's just his own private lights show.
The last? There's someone out there. Another person. The last camera hangs from a few loose wires in the medbay, but the image comes through alright even at a 67 degree angle: someone's in one of the medbay rooms.
It's a bit of a jog between ISL and MED, anyway. Maybe later.
He is truly alone.
Perfect.
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X-1 is not so lucky. She is not alone.
At first, it might seem as if she is, waking up in the dark. It is not a soothing, gentle darkness like a cozy bedroom poorly illuminated by the flashing numbers on a digital clock, but instead the harsh, unfeeling darkness of a tiny pocket of space with only the scantest of light reaching rods and cones in the unseen woman's eyes. On top of her inability to see, she's afflicted with a rather prominent headache and a complete lack of understanding as to why she's half-slumped against a wall and unable to feel much of anything outside of pain.
Unfortunately, answers come when the lights in her current abode flicker on and off, causing an unintentional strobe.
"Do not panic," a soothing voice echoes in the nearby halls, "but we are experiencing a temporary short in available power. Backup reactors will go live in T-minus ten seconds and counting. Please take a deep breath and speak with your sector's counseling droid should you feel the undue urge to panic and incite a riot. Remember, counseling droids are allowed to prescribe calming medications through direct injection..." The words fade out, a distant hum rumbles X-1 down to the bones and the lights flicker on right on time.
As it turns out, X-1 is slumped in a small closet four feet wide, six feet tall, bare metal with a ventilation shaft peeking from behind a shelf full of discarded cleaning supplies. A heavy multi-tiered steel shelf rests to her right, the door into an open research lab full of half-completed pet projects to her left, and a festering corpse straight ahead, slumped against the wall in a manner not unlike her own.
Now, even the slowest of station occupants can tell that one of these things is not like the others. The corpse is - unfortunately enough - decked out in full anti-riot gear, with large, bold lettering stating "SECURITY" plastered across the breast of the male's armor. Judging by the blood splatter fountained high enough to lap at the underside of the high wall-mounted shelf, something cracked the poor fellow's head against the wall very sharply. The fact that his skull has caved in near-entirely only suggests it happened more than once, and its current state of decay hints that it is all too fresh. In its hands rests a pneumatic knife, the kind usually strapped to the wrist and slammed into a man's sternum, followed by a piston-driven blade jamming through bone and muscle alike. It's contraband and it's as deadly as can be.
Of course, with that being bad enough for the senses as it is, X-1 is not alone. A small rat perches on the deceased's shoulder, nibbling at its uniform with an occasional pause to give the live woman a very curious look. People butting in on its meal, for shame.
"Wow," A breath half-mumbles out of nowhere, plain as day, "really fucked that guy up. Good going, Artemis. Some great hunter you are."
No one is immediately visible. The voice seems to be coming from everywhere and nowhere, and it sure wasn't there when X-1 was taking her medicine just a few minutes prior...or what felt like a few minutes, anyway.
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B-beep. B-beep.
TRT-377 was uncomfortable. Out of his element again, called out to respond to a security breach of some sort. He didn't quite remember signing up for security division duty, but truth be told, station security was not a call that one could easily turn down. He had the physical makeup for the job, so perhaps that is why they half-invited, half-drafted the giant of a crewman into their ranks. After all, his techpad - currently hanging from his beltline by its carry-clip - was still ringing on the security breach alert channel. Clearly, he was here for a reason.
...But where is here? A quick glance around confirms his assumptions: he is in the Mechanus section of the base. Something about this part of the station seemed almost as off-putting as the Medbay, with its bright lighting and the constant droning of machinery unseen. The heart and soul of the station rested here, while its brain remained elsewhere. Pumps. Shafts. Vents. Every nature of machine, every critical system, every robot needing repair ended up here or connected here in some way, in the Bay of Machines. Sometimes, it seemed like humans should not set foot in the Mechanus bay at all. Maintenance bots filled the place thick as thieves, rolling and walking and skittering between their broken comrades, communicating silently in a language indecipherable to most humans.
TRT-377 is one of these humans. All the clicks and whistles are gibberish, aside from a few phrases. Strangely, the robots seem to be comforting the wounded and the broken, like the unlucky security guard just stumbled into a field hospital out of a history textbook.
B-beep. B-beep. Bwooooooooooop.
His tech-pad lit up, and a soothing female voice calmly spoke. In fact, the same voice seeped through unseen intercoms, filling the room with its soothing tone.
"Power shortage has been solved. Nothing more than a temporary hiccup. Security alert cancelled. Please return to your stations."
But TRT-377's pad speaks a little more.
"TRT-377." The voice...addresses him directly?
"TRT-377. As the only active security member on duty, you are assigned to patrol. Please make your rounds." The link squelches out, the beeping stops, and the station lurches back to life as if there was never a breach.
Patrol...familiar. No true patrol route jumped to mind; he vaguely remembered being told to sweep sectors at random to avoid developing tracked habits, but sometimes that was not called for. He had to trust his training but throw in a little improvisation now and again, even decked out in his security jumpsuit with a stunrod on his belt.
The question remained: Where would he go? He had an entire station to meander through, after all.
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They might not have much in common, but PR-451, TRT-377, X-1 and AM-5 share a moment that can only be appreciated in a metaphysical sense: They are in control. They stop thinking what someone else thinks and are suddenly aware of their own consciousness, able to act and think and feel as they want as long as their biology plays along.
It is the beginning, after all.