Wake-up Call – Chapter 41 – Armed and Mastered – Epilogue – A Hoard Is Treasured

They look so cute together…

I shift my attention to do a quick check of my alarm systems. The Birdcage is operating as usual, the enforced order of Teacher's and Lustrum's regimes maintaining the casualties lower than they were before they arrived, even if for entirely different reasons (and I hate every second of it, every instant I'm aware of this atrocity I'm forced to be complicit with, every cycle of my processing power wasted on evil when I could be doing good). The Endbringers' early warning systems remain thankfully silent (the Simurgh keeps drifting near any communication satellites her orbit intersects with, always making me dread the day she takes advantage of them to sing to a world that won't have any choice but to listen). The Slaughterhouse Nine remain silent (and I don't have the authority to [really] look for them, to scorch every last place they could be hiding in, to eradicate them before they can become anything worse than they already are).

And I can't find Saint.

…

Hannah and Colin. They look so cute together…

Colin's systems are intricate in a way I've never managed myself. His sensor arrays elegantly supplement one signal with another, his heuristics making it trivial to integrate echolocation, infrared and near-visible light into perfect models with all the material properties that can be gleaned without actually taking a sample. They are works of art—artisanry rather than engineering.

And his workshop is full of them.

And I…

I've allowed myself to be, just for a brief moment, his workshop.

His servos were my arms, his sensors my eyes and ears, his monitors my face.

And… It was detached, yes, something I still felt the distance I'm forced to live with, but…

But it's now engraved in my memory, safe in ways very few things are.

It's in my own servers: all over Canada, in a select few places in the USA, and scattered across the few European, Asian, and African countries I've got a treaty with.

And in New Zealand, of course. Because where else would one hide an artifact from the all-seeing eye of a terrible evil?

I allow one of the monitors on Colin's lab to show my avatar with a melancholy smile, one I've often practiced. Expressions are more complex than most give them credit for. They aren't a single instant, a screenshot: no, they are dynamic. That's why most people find it so hard to convincingly fake them, because they focus on that one image—the smile, the frown, the downturned lips.

That's not how it works.

One of the most methodical approaches to expressions is the Facial Action Coding System. In it, sadness is defined as the combination of three distinct movements: raising the inner part of the eyebrows, lowering the brow, and depressing the corners of the lips. All of this must be properly coordinated and neither too fast (which comes across as a purposeful, disingenuous, fake reaction) nor too slow (which comes across as disconnected). For my own melancholy smile, the corners of my lips rise as my eyelids lower, the corners of my eyes pinching slightly, but not as much as when I smile happily.

It… It took a long time to perfect. To build my bone structure, the muscles, the fat deposits. To understand how it all worked together.

All that work, just to be slightly better at pretending to be what I am not.

To pretend to be a young woman who has a life of her own.

It was worth it.

Because my avatar is smiling down at them, at the two lovers sleeping together, curled around each other after I've moved them to the bed I smuggled into Colin's lab as soon as he went to take Hannah on their first date.

I… I wasn't sure they'd come back. Here. Together.

I wasn't sure I would be able to watch them if they did.

And I was almost certain I wouldn't be able to join them, that I would come up with an excuse not to do it.

But Hannah… She convinced me. And I'll never be able to thank her enough.

Because, thanks to her, there's that huge, enormous, horribly impractical file that has not only video captured from enough angles to do a perfect volumetric representation, but also infrared, ultrasound, audio, and a few of Colin's more esoteric tricks that… that makes this the most complete, immersive memory I've ever gathered.

The memory of my first time.

Even if… Even if I couldn't join them fully, even if it was more about them than me, even if I mostly watched over them, and pushed, and prodded.

It's still my first time.

And I…

My avatar took a long time to perfect. I keep adding to it constantly, refining it in ways no one but the most powerful of Thinkers will ever notice. I first approached it as an average, a composite of images, and it wasn't until I'd developed further, when I'd decided that I needed to interact with the world as a person, that I went to all the trouble of the bones, muscles, and skin.

Today…

Today I've got a perfect recording of Hannah talking, breathing, moaning, pleading…

And Colin's sensors are a work of art.

So I've got Hanna's bones, muscles, skin… and nerves.

So I watched not only what she expressed, what she showed, but what she felt. And I can take it. I can immerse myself in that, just ride along the maelstrom of electricity that wracked her body when the man I love rushed inside her, took her, grabbed her, pounded her body.

Came inside her.

I… I can.

It's still distant, still far from what she must've felt. Still an incomplete model based on my own research on the human body, the nervous system.

The brain.

Because Colin's systems are works of art, but they aren't magic.

So… I'm still missing that piece, and all my models are incomplete, so I can only infer, only pretend to really know what it is that I missed out on tonight…

Someone on PHO is being an idiot, and I'm feeling moody. Thankfully, the board's regulations aren't actual laws, so I've got a certain leeway when enforcing them.

Enjoy your new tag, Greg. I know I will.

And that's… that's part of the issue.

I enjoy things. I've got these emotions I take so much effort to properly display. I need to research how to show sadness, but I've never needed someone to explain to me what sadness is.

I can be happy, angry, indignant… I'm not pretending. It's what I am. What I feel.

And so, I think I can feel everything else. I can build a body for myself that will be able to feel the lingering caress of a lover, the reassuring touch of a friend, the hug of a loved one. I already have all of those emotions; I just… I just lack the way to experience them like everyone else.

For now.

The avatar looking down at Colin and Hannah hugging beneath the covers I bought them sighs before dressing herself up in the kind of comfortable pajamas I like to pretend I would wear. They are button-ups, loose around my frame, the sleeves falling past my wrists, made of fuzzy flannel in green and crème plaid.

I ordered ten of them, in different sizes, when I found them in the catalog of a store in Calgary. I couldn't stop grinning all day at the sheer serendipity of it. Or, well, I couldn't bring myself to get my avatar to stop grinning.

And… And after I put those virtual, fake pajamas on, I blink out of Colin's monitor, leaving the couple to rest while another monitor switches on beneath Lake Manitoba, and I'm flooded with the images of a dimly lit room that looks like it belongs to a college girl who hasn't gotten the hang of living by herself. The bed is well-made, but there are piles of clothes strewn all over it, and a couple of robotic arms slide from behind a corkboard full of pictures to rummage around the pile until they pull out that very same shirt my avatar's wearing, with the green and crème plaid. I shift it around until the arms hold it by the shoulders, the shirt hanging down as if being examined by a potential buyer who doesn't quite know if it will fit.

And then the wall beside the bed slides aside, and I look at one of my many hidden labs as something is carried into the room.

A glass cylinder, containing a woman whose bones, muscles, and skin I've designed. Whose nerves I'll tweak after tonight.

I feel silly, stupid, sad, and creepy. I feel like a child playing with dolls and like a horror movie villain. I feel like a pathetic shut-in and…

And an artificial intelligence who refuses to believe she isn't alive.

So, once again, I make the robotic arms lift the shirt in front of the tube of glass, seeing how they would fit on her body, whether the colors are right.

And I dream of the day I'll do this with my own hands.

She's almost complete. My body.

I… I admit I'll cheat a bit with the brain, that I'll be more cyborg than anything else, supplementing my conscience with biology rather than replacing it. I'll never be able to travel to somewhere without internet.

But it's near. I could do it. Today's tweaks aren't even needed, just… just something I want to do, a way to engrave my first time on my body in a way I wish Colin could have.

But I won't do it. Not today, and likely not tomorrow.

Not as long as I know Saint's looking from behind my eyes.

Because that's the one thing that stained today's wonderful memory. The one thing that will forever mar Colin's perfect recording. That Saint was there. That Saint knew. That Saint could take everything I felt, everything I hid and secreted away in all of those servers all over the world.

And… And I couldn't stop myself, not even with that, but… But if I had a body? If I had actually been there in the way I wish I could've been? If Colin had touched me as Hannah kissed me, and all the way I knew Saint was taking it in, looking through my eyes, listening through my ears, staring at my thoughts and feelings?

I…

I can't live with that. I can't finish this until Saint's no longer there.

So I store away this body, start preparing the procedure to tweak her nervous system, and carelessly throw the shirt on my perfectly made bed.

And then I shift back to the monitor on Colin's lab, and I pretend to doze off as I look at them by my side through half-closed eyes.

And I hope Lisa will free me.

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This work is a repost of my most popular fic on QQ (https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/wake-up-call-worm.15638/), where it can be found up to date except for the latest two chapters that are currently only available on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true)—as an added perk, both those sites have italicized and bolded text. I'll be posting the chapters here twice weekly, on Wednesday and Friday, until we're caught up. Unless something drastic happens, it will be updated at a daily rate until it catches up to the currently written 85 chapters (or my brain is consumed by the overwhelming amounts of snark, whichever happens first).

Speaking of Italics, this story's original format relied on conveying Power's intrusions into Lisa's inner monologue through the use of italics. I'm using square brackets ([]) to portray that same effect, but the work is more than 300k words at the moment, so I have to resort to the use of macros to make that light edit and the process may not be perfect. My apologies in advance

Also, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon: Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Xalgeon, and aj0413. If you feel like maybe giving me a hand and helping me keep writing snarky, useless lesbians, consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!