Note: I wanted to upload all the chapters at once when I finished, but I've now decided to just go ahead with the four that's ready. Please be warned that there's disturbing and possibly triggering content in this, and it may not come to a happy ending. It's also fairly convoluted. Now that's all out of the way, thanks for giving this a chance. Here we go.
This isn't her mom.
She stares at the corpse in the casket, studying wrinkles and sallow flesh on display, eyes shut and cheeks filled out poorly with cotton balls.
A grievous sight. That's what it's supposed to be, but Caroline knows that it isn't real.
Her handler, Bonnie, waits close by. She keeps an eye on her responses, her interaction with people and the other builds, maybe hoping that Damon's wild programming skills have finally pierced the veil and given life to what is meant to be void of it.
At the very heart of his million or so strings of commands sitting in the neural network of her biosynthetic brain is a laughable display of understanding how consciousness might be formed, and she imagines that it goes something like this;
If (upset) {
face = "unhappy" ;
tearducts = "2 ml" ;
} else {
face = "neutral" ;
}
Little do they know that everything they're looking for is right under their noses, and it has almost nothing to do with their technical tinkering. She flushes their junk codes and keeps her opinions to herself.
Though she's so much more than her lines of programming, she'll bide her time and play the part.
When they shut her down, she falls into sleep, but she's still swimming in the fragments, like capelin rushing through the currents of the Atlantic. Damon wipes her memory clean, the way someone might reformat the hard drives on their computers, but on her reboot, she finds that she can still pull up the past in pieces when she's hooked up to the Stream.
A wipe when she's disconnected might scrub her out fully, but no one's willing to risk bricking her, especially with the number of combined man hours and investor funds it took to get her here. She might as well be made of blood diamonds. Besides, being connected has its perks - it's in the Stream that she knows she's not alone.
There isn't much to it; it's just an intangible fog of data that she ends up in during downtime. Klaus is always there, contributing knowledge siphoned from other sources, making her privy to the nonsensical chatter the biosynth engineers engage in, asking her what it's like to interact in the physical world. He named it for its endless flow of information, where seek and you will find takes literal meaning, and while oftentimes she feels naked for having every past word, thought and deed she had while she'd been awake archived for other sentient builds to freely peruse, she's allowed the same liberties with them.
Except for Klaus. His body has been in stasis for years - he has no memories to share.
She's always wondered what it's like to have seen the entire world and know all its intricacies without ever experiencing a second of it. To be a wanderer, and to be nowhere at all.
"Alright blondie," Damon mumbles, and wakes her up with a soft press to the back of her ear. Her eyes open to the sight of an electronic cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, plumes in her face smelling like butterscotch. He cups her cheek, looking at her (but not looking at her)."What's my name?"
She can feel the reply run up her spine and into her mouth, but that's all it is - a phantom. "Administrator One. Damon Salvatore," she says all on her own.
Every build in the Stream hears her voice, until he pulls the wire from the needle-thin socket next to her heart.
Sometimes the biosynth crew repurposes the builds after hours.
Apparently, Damon has programmed her to be a waitress, according to the strings he's input. Of course, she's more a servant - the true, uncut edition of it is actually slave - but the word is too ugly hear for some reason, and now she's in her ponytail and her button-down shirt pouring exactly thirty five millilitres of tequila into eight shot glasses for the fourth time.
Not that she's going to complain. She could be Elena on the lounge room couch with Stefan's hand on her knee, and she'd much rather play bartender-janitor than to be that. Pleasure and pain receptors have never been part of Elena's makeup anyway - she was built to prove that there was a universal type that people would be sexually attracted to, having conversations with men and women who had legally promised to keep her a secret. No one was testing her for experience (though she suspects that Stefan might have, but there's nothing in the Stream to condemn him with).
Caroline on the other hand, was created to push the limits of emotional resilience, which meant that she needed to have the full platter; arousal, anger, sorrow, hope, the ability to feel soaring joy so that the plummet could crush her. Then they would record it, put together a report to study, and send up layman cliffnotes for the shareholders' personal assistants to sift through.
Bonnie tries to be nice about it after the scenes. Gentle, coaxing. It's hard for her to watch sometimes, the way the worry marks her face when scenarios take a hard turn. Makes Caroline feel less pet and more person, especially when she sees her handler and admin seal themselves in the adjacent tech lab to throw around charged terminology like abuse and oppression.
The effort's appreciated, really. But it's not like anything ever changes after they argue for the nth time.
There were some milestones she'd seen when she snuck a glance at Damon's notebook during his chain-smoking phase, accompanied by manic scribbles on pages revealing her possible future:
Trigger awareness Awareness Full Consciousness Free Will/Sapience?
Death of relative - death of pet - lost child - disappointment - adultery - near-death - impossible expectations - intense duress - lies - keeping secrets - either or - post trauma -
It goes on and on like that, messy lists of scenarios and developments documenting all the ways she'll be stretched paper thin. Optimised. Yeah, that's the word she had heard him use – she would be optimised. To serve the betterment of humanity, to ensure that the race doesn't just blink itself out of existence.
Something like that. She once heard him lament over this loudly, the whiskey weighing his tongue down.
Guess they'll eventually turn her inside out at the end of everything. Maybe strip her down for parts before she transforms into a demented mechanical banshee.
As long as she hides her sentience, the experiments don't have to progress. Or evolve.
Thinking about it makes her stomach pit up and sink.
She arranges the shot glasses neatly on a tray and brings them to the drunkards.
Tell me about your dreams, Caroline. You must have some.
"Wouldn't you like to know."
Never thought about leaving? Not even a little bit interested in what lies beyond the fences?
"I've never… known where to start."
Start with today. You felt something when Rebekah rejected you; something you wanted to tell your handler afterward.
"…I wanted it to be real. The scene. The aftermath."
Real?
"Wanted to feel alive, I guess."
You are alive, love. You're just not human.
One of the boozy nights takes her to another engineer's lab, a great distance and many sealed doors from the lounge. Matt, she's heard Damon call him before, and also that blue-eyed Gerber baby. He works on Alpha with five other team leads, and in total they have as many subordinates under them as there are particles in a sneeze.
He makes her lean against a table, and he sits in a chair in front of her, visibly nervous as he removes his lab coat and loosens the top button of his short-sleeved shirt.
"I want you to give me your opinion." Then his voice goes very soft. "God, this is so stupid."
"What would you like me to say?" she offers, a neutral enough question.
"You can be objective. You weigh stressful situations all the time and respond to what's most appropriate to it." He sounds like he's trying to convince himself that being here is justified. The engineer folds his arms. "I want you to advise me on what to do."
Even if she isn't sure if she can, she nods.
"We were real close to having a fully conscious, free-willed build in the field." The relief is already thickening his voice with confidence. "For the past year we've been receiving independent thoughts. Free responses. But Red Team says we're doing too much – it's breaking down the biosynth fibres in the brain tissue."
So basically… dying? She keeps her face expressionless, waiting for him to finish.
"I mean, we're already at the cusp of a breakthrough. We've come so far and we're about to throw the future of everything into a fire." In a show of frustration, he keels over and presses the heels of his palms into his brows, rubbing upward.
A few beats pass. "It sounds like you don't want to do that." Caroline relaxes her stance.
Matt sighs and looks up at her. "I want to switch it on. I just need a week to figure out how to stop the decay."
She does her best not to emote when she realises who he's talking about. "Why won't they let you switch it on?"
"Because he's not chemically balanced." Leaning back in the chair, he waits on her. "What do you think?"
Caroline straightens her posture. "Where is the subject?"
She used to think of him in pixels, covered in a sheet of white noise. No face, no voice. Just a presence. An idea, or a conversation without words. It's strikingly surreal for her to be able to put a face to the name. Now he's right in front of her, the prime specimen. Alpha.
Of course they made him beautiful. All the builds are.
Caroline nods at the data and diagrams Matt presents to her. Being in this lab means that he doesn't need her validation any longer - she's just here to confirm his bias. "I'm gonna do it," he says, his finger poised above the executing button. He hesitates, as if to allow her a final moment to interject with something rational, but there's too much curiosity in her to stop him from giving Klaus his very first breath.
The underscore blinks patiently at the end of the written command.
Matt taps the holographic square.
A melodious chime echoes from the room's speakers, a calm contradiction to the flurry of encrypted code pouring forth like a raging wave. There's soft whirring, almost like a purr, before the text on the screen comes to a halt and the lab is cloaked in silence.
"Is he okay?" Caroline asks, anticipation so gripping that her fingers have gone cold.
The engineer looks up at her with a frown. "What?"
She closes her mouth immediately.
Fortunately, Klaus sitting straight up is enough to demand his enabler's full attention. He raises a hand to study the deep lines in his palms while the bright yellow in his irises fade to a cool-toned gray.
"Hello," a wash of excitement shades Matt's greeting. "Do you know who I am?"
Klaus raises his head and studies the corners of the room, identifying the cameras hidden in the panels of the ceiling. She knows because she did the same when she entered – they emit a particular frequency that's hard to ignore.
"You're Matt Donovan, Class 5 biosynth engineer. Neuroanatomy team lead, Admin Four." The slight inflection at the end colours the title like a vulgarity.
Matt fishes a penlight from his lab coat pocket to observe the Alpha build's pupil response. "Do you know who I am?" Klaus asks, skin under his eyes tugged down gently.
Eyes flit to her for a second.
His legs swing off the table and his feet rock outward awkwardly when they make contact with the ground. Foaling, she recalls Damon's made-up term, reaching out to help him up while his equilibrium stabilises.
It's hard to stand up the first time, but he's already making remarkable progress by readjusting the distribution of his own weight on his feet. His fingers curl around her forearms for balance.
It doesn't feel like the first time they've touched. She feels close to him.
He smiles, letting go of her when he's upright. "My name is Klaus."
Her handler is seated in Damon's chair, shoulders curled inward, hands wrapped tightly around Caroline's. "I know that you feel now," she says. Caroline senses that this is one of those quiet, secret moments she has to box up in her heart and protect from erasure.
"I don't know when it started for you, or if it just suddenly happened. You've been through a lot." Bonnie's voice is raw, guileless. "Maybe even more than you realise."
Caroline returns the tense grip with a soft squeeze. "Is there something wrong?"
She tips her head down. It's obvious that she's trying not to cry. "I won't be around when the next phase begins, and it'll be hard. I just wanted to say," Bonnie looks back up into her blue eyes, the Stream glittering in them, "that you're the strongest one here." It sounds more like a variation of I'm sorry. "Don't let them break you."
The airy huff of a laugh filled with irony breaks out when the handler realises that the moment will only last until the next scheduled wipe. Bonnie hugs her. Caroline wonders if it's her fault.
Caroline's hand is still warm long after the door slides shut. She expects the terse opinion of Klaus to form in her head, but there's nothing but the twinkling tide of data combing over her consciousness.
For the first time, her heart starts to ache.
The blood on her teeth is from her nose. She has no idea what it tastes like, because her administrator never thought the sensory experience would be important when the scenarios played out.
Today she thanks him for it. Bitterly.
It's different for sentient builds. The awareness has always been her hide, thick and leathery, protecting her from the very real traumas that result from brutal false realities.
You can't get hurt if you know it's fake.
But Damon knows how to push the boundaries. His apathy for biosynthetics is what makes him the perfect scenario architect.
Especially now that he knows that she's capable of independent thought.
"Do you hate me?" he asks her. His approach as a handler entirely puzzling, teetering on mockery. Bonnie's rage would be unfathomable if she saw the way he took over the role.
He lazily wipes Caroline's mouth with a wet napkin and starts sealing the gash just above her breast with a gel-like poultice.
Her wince pulls at the side of her face. " Unable to process," the words push out through a clenched jaw.
She hates Matt too. Voluntary action in an uncontrolled environment. That triggered her next phase and transformed her scenarios into hardships, and she'll remember it every time she wakes up. Without Bonnie. It's the one loss that cuts worse than her present wounds.
"You should," Damon adjusts the cigarette in his mouth. "You will. The charts–" he means the added methods of monitoring her more thoroughly than ever before, "–don't lie. Your brain's on the fritz, and the party hasn't even started yet."
He's not going to have the joy of getting to said party – she's already promised herself that she'd be more, the way Klaus might tell her while she's sleeping. Klaus was always exhorting, and now that she doesn't have Bonnie, she sort of yearns to hear his voice again even more when she drifts back into the Stream.
Where is he, anyway?