Chapter 12

I listened to the recording four more times.

Each time I caught something new. A hitch in the breath I'd missed before. A word emphasized differently than I'd first heard it. The sound of someone trying to compress everything important into fourteen minutes because they knew they wouldn't get another chance.

By the fourth listen, I had it memorized. Could hear the original's voice in my head without pressing play. Their exhaustion. Their resignation. Their stubborn refusal to disappear without leaving something behind.

You don't owe her anything.

Easy words to say. Harder to believe when you can feel the pull she built into you, that magnetic draw toward your creator that masquerades as affection. I'd felt it in that basement, her cold fingers on my cheek. The way part of me wanted to lean in. To belong to her.

That pull was still there. Quieter now, maybe. Or maybe I was just getting better at recognizing it for what it was. But it hadn't gone away. Probably never would.

The original hadn't removed the programming. They'd said as much. They couldn't tear down what she'd built. Could only modify it. Add a crack where there wasn't supposed to be one.

A gap where choice could slip through.

I spent the next few days trying to understand what that meant in practice. Tested myself with small things. The urge to practice lock picking, I ignored it. Sat with the discomfort of not doing what my hands wanted to do. It felt wrong, like holding your breath past the point of comfort. But I could do it. The urge didn't force me. It just pushed.

The language skills were harder to resist. My brain kept trying to translate things, signs and overheard conversations and snippets of foreign films. That felt less like a push and more like gravity. Automatic. Thoughtless. I couldn't stop it any more than I could stop understanding English.

Some things were fixed. Others were flexible. The original had given me room to maneuver, but the room had walls.

Better than nothing. Better than what the others had.

I thought about Michael Oliver and Diana Reeves. Security consultant. Private investigator. Jobs that used their installed skills, fulfilled their programmed purposes. Did they ever feel the wrongness of it? That subtle sense that their choices weren't entirely their own?

Probably not. That was the point. She'd designed them to feel natural in their roles. To experience their purposes as callings rather than commands. The pull toward their work would feel like passion, not programming.

I'd felt that too, before the original's modifications. Those first days when the skills appeared, there had been a rightness to them. A sense that this was what I was supposed to do. The lock picking wanted to pick locks, and I'd wanted to let it.

Now I could feel the wanting as something separate from myself. A voice in the crowd rather than my own thoughts. Still loud. Still persistent. But distinguishable.

That distinction was everything.

On the fifth day after finding the recording, I went for a walk.

No destination in mind. Just movement. The apartment had started to feel like a cage, walls pressing in while I sat there examining my own consciousness for seams and cracks.

The city looked different now. Or I looked at it differently. All those faces passing on the sidewalk, all those lives being lived. I used to feel invisible in crowds. Anonymous. Just another person moving through the machine.

Now I felt like an imposter. A thing pretending to be human, surrounded by the real thing.

But that wasn't quite right either. The original's recording had addressed that. You're not a monster. You're a person. Or close enough that it doesn't matter.

Close enough. I turned that phrase over as I walked. What did close enough mean? I had thoughts, feelings, fears. I made decisions, even if some of them were guided by programming I couldn't see. I experienced the world in first person, felt pain and pleasure, wanted things I couldn't have.

If that wasn't being a person, what was?

Maybe the question wasn't what I was. Maybe it was what I chose to do with whatever I was.

I ended up at the park. The same one where I'd seen her watching me, weeks ago. Before I knew what I was. Before I understood that the woman in the gray coat had built me from scratch and was waiting for her creation to come online.

I sat on the same bench. Watched the same pigeons. Let the ordinary sounds of the city wash over me.

She'd be back. I knew that. Whatever purpose she'd designed me for, it would activate eventually. And when it did, I'd feel that pull stronger than ever. The overwhelming drive to fulfill my function. To become what she'd made me to be.

The original had given me a choice in that moment. A gap where I could decide whether to follow the pull or resist it.

But what would resistance even look like?

I didn't know yet. Didn't have a plan, a strategy, a clear sense of what fighting back would mean. All I had was that small angry flame and a recording from someone who'd used their dying breaths to give me options they'd never had.

A woman walked past the bench. Dark hair, gray coat. My heart seized for a second before I saw her face. Not her. Just a stranger who happened to share some features. The city was full of dark hair and gray coats.

But the moment of panic told me something. I was scared of her. Not just wary or cautious. Genuinely afraid, in a way that felt like it came from somewhere deep.

Fear wasn't programmed. She wouldn't have built me to be afraid of my own creator. Which meant the fear was mine. An authentic response to a genuine threat.

Another feeling I could trust.

I sat on that bench until the sun started going down. Thinking about choice and fear and what it meant to be a person. Thinking about the original, whoever they'd been before they became raw material for someone else's project. Thinking about forty-three others walking around with purposes they couldn't question, living lives that felt free but weren't.

When I finally got up to leave, I felt something I hadn't expected.

Resolve.

Not confidence. I wasn't confident about anything. But resolve, yeah. A decision that had been forming without my conscious input, crystallizing into something solid.

I wasn't going to run. Wasn't going to hide. Wasn't going to pretend this wasn't happening and hope she forgot about me.

When the purpose activated, when that pull became undeniable, I was going to use the choice the original gave me. I didn't know which way I'd choose yet. Didn't know if I'd have the strength to resist something that was literally built into my core.

But I was going to try.

That had to count for something.

I walked home as the streetlights came on. The city transitioning from day to night, all those windows lighting up, all those lives continuing behind glass. I moved through it like I belonged there. Like I was just another person heading home after a long day.

Maybe that was the trick. Act like a person long enough and eventually you become one. Fake it till you make it, but for consciousness.

Or maybe that was naive. Maybe I'd always be a construct wearing a human suit, no matter how convincingly I performed.

Either way, I had to live. Had to wake up each morning and make choices and deal with consequences. Had to figure out what I wanted and try to get it, same as everyone else.

The purpose would come. She would come. Whatever confrontation was building, it would arrive eventually.

But not tonight.

Tonight I went back to my apartment. Made dinner. Watched something mindless on TV. Let myself feel almost normal for a few hours.

At 3:32 AM, I woke up.

Not because of any alarm. Not because of any phenomenon. Just the internal clock that had been running since this all started, pulling me toward consciousness one minute before the window used to open.

I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling.

3:33 would pass and nothing would happen. No room shift, no blue curtains, no other version of me waiting with messages I couldn't quite read. That window was closed forever. The original was gone and whatever connection we'd shared had dissolved with them.

I was alone now. Just me and whatever I was, facing whatever was coming.

The clock on my nightstand ticked over. 3:33 AM.

I held my breath. Waiting for something. Anything.

Silence. Stillness. Just my apartment, exactly as it had always been.

The original had fought for me. Had spent their dying months rewriting code and leaving messages and trying to give a stranger a chance at freedom. They'd watched their life get stolen and instead of giving up, they'd used what time they had left to make something matter.

I didn't know if I deserved that kind of sacrifice. Didn't know if I was capable of living up to it. But someone had believed I was worth saving, even when I didn't exist yet. Even when I was just a construct being assembled to replace them.

That faith had to mean something. Had to be worth honoring.

3:34.

I let out the breath I'd been holding.

One more night without answers. One more day ahead of living with questions I couldn't resolve. The purpose still dormant inside me, waiting for whatever trigger would bring it online. Her out there somewhere, patient as ever, knowing I'd come back eventually because they always came back.

But I had something now. A recording from someone who refused to disappear quietly. A crack in the code that let me choose. A small angry flame that pointed away from her instead of toward her.

It wasn't much. Definitely not enough.

But it was a start.

I closed my eyes and let sleep take me again.

Tomorrow I'd figure out what came next. Tomorrow I'd start planning, preparing, trying to understand what I was up against and how to fight it.

Tonight I just let myself exist. A person, or close enough. Lying in the dark, breathing in and out, choosing to hope that choice meant something.

The original had asked me to decide who wins.

I didn't have an answer yet.

But for the first time since this started, I thought I might get to pick one.

END OF ARC 1