The Unremarkable Super Zero
Chapter 1: Sweet Child of Mine
Companions aren't supposed to be heroes or tell their own compelling stories. We generally fade into the background and support the main character in their endeavours when they need a positive word or two, maybe give them a hand to help pick them up when they fall. I always assumed that was my destiny, seeing myself as the fairly unremarkable type who stays out of trouble and tries to keep quiet. Fate had something different in mind for me though, starting with the night I woke up in the dark.
That in itself wasn't unusual, I always slept with the lights off or under the stars. However, the smell in the room was strong like disinfectant and there was a small electronic buzz humming somewhere in the room. I tried to remember when I fell asleep, but as I lied there straining my eyes to make out the room I couldn't remember anything about going to bed. Actually, the last thing I was able to recall was walking along the path in daylight to the Cerulean gym to see Misty and Daisy.
The answer was obvious, I had been abducted by aliens.
At the time there was no other evidence to suggest otherwise, I felt around my shoulders for a second head or ears sprouting on my collar bone to support my theory but found nothing, not even a darn third eyeball. Aliens or not, I needed to figure out what was going on. My whole body felt immensely heavy but I managed to pull myself up into a sitting position and swing my legs over the edge. The floor was cold on my toes, I put weight on my feet gingerly. My legs felt weak and combined with the sensation of feeling super heavy that was not an ideal situation.
After landing flat on my face as the result of trying to take a few steps I decided that crawling was a much better option that wouldn't end up flattening my face, however average it was. Feeling around on the cold floor in the dark I managed to make my way to a door that was thankfully unlocked and pushed it opened.
A dim yellow light burst from the darkness and I edged myself in a hospital hallway. That explained the smell and possibly the buzzing sound as a piece of equipment, but I had to question what I was doing there. Also the hallway was oddly vacant of any human activity or sounds, it felt like I was the only one there. Another observation I made was a lack of any hospital evidence on my own body. No bandages or marks from needles and IV's, no hospital clothes or even a bracelet on my wrist.
Just me alone in a hallway on a cold floor in nothing but shorts and a t-shirt. Not even a pair of shoes or that damned headband I practically never took off, some bastard must have mugged me and made off with my stuff. That was the only logical explanation if aliens proved to be incorrect and this wasn't some elaborate illusion they were feeding into my brain while the rest of my lied open on an operating table for their cruel experiments. The more down to earth explanation was that someone had robbed me on the path to Cerulean and I ended up on the hospital. Yes. Totally plausible if not for the lack of injuries and medical staff.
What worried me more than my material possessions being gone were the whereabouts of my pokemon. My pockets were empty and that would definitely be the first place a mugger would look when rifling around for valuables. Still, fretting about it on the floor wasn't going to help. I had to get out of there and find them.
"Helloooo?" I called out, slightly startled at my own voice. It sounded…unnatural, deeper than what I was used to hearing echo in my skull. Thinking about it, that wasn't the only difference. My hair was longer, falling off my shoulders, and there was something different about my limbs. Exactly how long had I been down for the count? Before I was able to put much more thought into it a set of double doors at the end of the hall burst open and two frantic looking women in light blue scrubs were walking hurriedly towards me.
I greeted them both about as friendly as one could in my plight and attempted to talk to them but they were not interested in that kind of conversation I presented. They asked if I was alright and why I was out of bed before sticking me in a wheel chair and whisking me away back through the doors. I ended up in another room where a man in a lab coat started immediately flashing a light in my eyes and asking me the same questions as the ladies in the scrubs. How repetitive, that wasn't going to get me anywhere.
"Woah, woah! Slow down please." I growled yet tried to remain polite as I shoved the light away, the irritated glare he shot me didn't phase me. "Look, I just woke up in an unfamiliar place with all my stuff and pokemon gone and I have no idea how I got here. I should be asking YOU the questions before anyone starts poking around or sticking lights in my face! I'm still trying to figure out if this is a drug induced hallucination at the hands of aliens!"
Lab coat guy made the most curious face at the last part of my statement before shutting the pocket light off and taking a seat on a stool. The women in scrubs had left making us the only people in the bright room. "You're right, " he replied with a tired drawl. "Thing is, I don't know if you'll believe what I have to tell you."
"It's aliens, isn't it. Crap."
"Not exactly, but it's still pretty unusual. Well, if you don't work here..." Lab coat guy continued, I could tell he was baffled by my fixation on the alien theory.
Narrowing my eyes at him I tried to relax, mind you that was rather difficult considering I still had no idea what the heck was going on. "I dunno, I've seen some pretty remarkable things. Try me, I'm already seated." I was hoping he would have found humour in that last bit, he did not.
Lab coat got up and walked over to a table on the other side of the room, which had stark white walls and strange blue-print like diagrams decorating the space above a messy table overflowing with papers and small metal components. Lab coat came back over with a folder and tossed it on my lap, he made a gesture like he wanted me to open it.
Admittedly curious I looked the folder over before peeking inside, it was just a plain manilla folder with messy hand-writing on it I couldn't make out properly. Inside were some typed documents. The more I flipped through though, the more my eyes grew wide in shock and horror. These lists and statements were all pertaining to me (I mean my name was clearly printed on most of the pages in the top corner, otherwise I was referred to as 'the subject'), so I assumed the series of photographs and schematics that followed were also related. The brief paragraphs talked about repairs and upgrades, the photos were hard to made out but one looked like an open chest cavity. Not a normal one though, it was something inhuman I wasn't at all familiar with.
Everything contained in the folder looked more like it belonged in a sic-fi movie, and at first I tried to rationalize everything by telling myself it was a prank or a dream. However I knew deep down that it wasn't the case, there were too many questions and unusual circumstances from my childhood that could be answered by what the man in the lab coat had just presented to me. My hands shook as I closed the folder and just let it drop on my lap again, I knew what I had just read but wanted to keep believing I was still asleep. If the documents and photos were in fact real they were suggesting a very scary reality for me. "I don't…I don't feel so good all of a sudden."
"An emotional and physical response, at least something is working." Lab coat guy muttered.
"W-what? Hey, don't talk like that!" I was getting really upset with this guy and his attitude, here he was mocking me while I was trying to understand the weight of my situation. God, this revelation was going down about a smooth as swallowing a handful of nails mixed with broken glass. I knew what it all meant, but I didn't want to say it. Not out loud, not to myself. The longer the words remained silent on my lips the longer they would remain untrue.
The word, that horrible word.
Cyborg.
I sat there in silence for the next hour while the man in the white coat went about his work. He did things a typical doctor would do like check for a heartbeat and more unusual things like hook up a cord to the back of my head and run some kind of diagnostic while I sat there in shock. I could feel the machine going through my mind as it ran a systems check, I didn't like it one bit and started to cry. There was heaving and choking, but not a single tear.
Needless to say I did not have any friendly goodbyes with lab coat guy, I didn't even care that he introduced himself as Doctor Wolf. I didn't want him to have a name or acknowledge his existence, I wanted to pretend that this was all just some awful nightmare for as long as I could. Of course that all came to a crashing halt when I was fetched again by one of the ladies in scrubs, only this time I was feeling more able on my feet and insisted that I be allowed to walk however slow and dependant on the walls I was. She walked alongside me slowly and wordlessly, taking me to yet another unfamiliar room. This one was more homey with couches and a little less of the hospital smell but the walls still screamed institution. I didn't ask why I was taken there, didn't even say goodbye when the lady left but I could feel her eyes looking at me with pity.
I wanted to know why I didn't have any tears, why I never noticed a port in the back of my head. I wanted to know why no one had told me the truth, that I was some creation created in a laboratory. How much of me was human and how much of me was machine? Maybe I was all machine, but I was so scared and frustrated I couldn't recall all the minute details I had read in the document in the short time it was in my possession.
That's when the door opened and a woman with a familiar face strode in. She smiled warmly and bent down to scoop me into a hug, I didn't hug her back. As she broke away from me I noticed she appeared less put together than usual. Her mossy green hair was swept up in a messy bun, her face lacked the usual candy apple red lips and smoky eyes, the dress she wore was wrinkled and her nails were unpainted and chewed up. Obviously she was also experiencing some form of distress, she normally took much better care of herself and would never even leave the house if a hair was out of place.
She sat down on one of the couches anxiously fiddling with the hem of her dress, her eyes darted between myself and the floor. I couldn't make myself angry at her, I didn't even know her role in all of this. She was my mother after all. Joplin Sketchit, not capable of having an evil bone in her body.
"…mom? Are you okay?" I noticed that her eyes were red, probably from crying.
She sniffled and grabbed a tissue from the coffee table, dabbing the corners of her eyes with it. "We have a lot to talk about, sweetheart."
I won't bore you with the details of our emotional exchange but mom did have a lot to tell me (talk about an understatement), all starting back when I was born. According to her I had not only been born premature but my chances of living what one might classify as a 'normal' life were drastically reduced. The doctors basically determined that while my mind may have been perfectly average, my body would make me a prisoner. Blind, deaf and in a condition that would leave me unable to walk if I ever grew…my parents were devastated at the news. Not because they had a child with severe disabilities but because they did not know if they could be good parents to such a child.
My siblings had all been born perfectly healthy, why I was different was a mystery. My mother never drank or took drugs while she was pregnant with me and didn't experience any illnesses, the cause of my condition was unknown. While my family was trying to figure out how to best deal with the situation word of what was going on had caught the attention of some people on the mainland by word of some of the hospital staff who should have kept their mouths shut. Representatives from a place called The Facility promptly took transport to the island to meet with my parents and discuss a unique proposition with them.
The idea the strangers from the mainland proposed was call the Cyborg Project. In exchange for collecting data and being allowed to integrate machinery into me The Facility would build a brand new body for me to exist in, putting whatever functioning human parts they could salvage on the inside. My parents needed some time to think about it, but after my condition did not appear to be improving they contacted the Facility again and agreed to offer me up as their little experiment. They didn't view it as such though, they saw it a a chance to give me the fullest life possible. And that's all any parent ever wants for their child, wether it means life saving surgery or giving them up to a crew of secretive scientists with questionable morals.
So the procedures began, by the end of it all a person on the outside would never be able to tell the difference (I knew, I'd seen the pictures). According to my mother my outer shell felt and looked so much like a real infant it was hard to believe that the skin was purely synthetic and the bright eyes were robotic. Things were not perfect however, thinking back on it now I don't know why growing up I never questioned anything out of the ordinary.
I had to speak with my hands and walk with leg braces until I was 8 until an upgrade finally enabled me to speak with a simulated voice and gave better mobility to my legs. Skinning my knees never brought blood, the clicks I heard in my head as I tried to sleep at night were not something natural that everyone heard. Mom explained that I never knew about the upgrades was because of implanted memories, the facility would program false memories into my brain augmentation to fill in the month long gaps when I was getting refitted into new bodies as my remaining organs grew.
This had been going on for years and I never suspected a thing, I was so trusting I never questioned why my sweat never smelled or why I didn't visibly grow like everyone else around me. My outer shell was all an elaborate illusion, I was basically a brain controlling a human sized robot. I had no idea what I really looked like, but mom explained that they based a lot of my appearance and my voice on my uncle Perry, specifically photos and videos of his younger self. What my face would have looked like had I not been so heavily altered was a complete mystery.
After hearing her tale and watching her cry there was no way I could be upset with my mother, her intentions were nobel however they may have turned out. Besides, I was kind of stuck in this reality. No pinching myself to wake up or stepping out of my fake body, I had to live with it. That was another thing though, how long could I go on like this? Without a real body and very few real organs who knew how long I could go on living, the potential was limitless. The day could come eventually come where my mind was just a program in an artificial brain, living on long after my organic parts had died off. I could live forever and that scared me more than the thought of death, I didn't want to live alone.
Of course I asked where my pokemon had gone too, and the rest of my stuff for that matter. At the time I didn't even have a pair of shoes to speak of. She told me that right after my initial arrival at The Facility she went to the closest comm unit and called up the Professor. I was horrified to hear this, he knew. He knew I wasn't completely human. Turns out mom had my little monsters sent back to the lab to be taken care of while I was what The Facility dubbed 'non-operational'. They were safe and being taken care of, that's all that mattered. If I had somehow not made it through the upgrade they were in a good place. And while I knew she was trying to make things easy for myself and everyone else I didn't like the idea of the professor knowing about my status as a cyborg. Oak was a scientist, scientists use machines as tools and I was mostly machine. How could he look at me without seeing me as an object instead of his willing assistant? No, I was still the same person, I had been a cyborg pretty much my whole life without knowing it. There was really no reason to think different of me.
One existential crisis, a tweaking session and chick flick movie marathon later, I had the ability to cry again and was allowed to freely leave The Facility. It had taken me a day or so to get used to the size of my new body which was much taller than my previous one, so were other aspects of my appearance. My face was far more adult, gone were the googly eyes and blocky face. My nose was straighter and didn't upturn anymore, my cheekbones were more prominent and I swear they gave me more freckles and widened the gap in my front teeth. I may have been mostly machine, but having flaws was one of those details that made me seem more human on the outside.
Before mom and I left The Facility I was allowed to look around the building, considering I was their 'product' they didn't mind that much as long as I stayed out of the way of delicate procedures. Turns out The Facility was just a code name for a building owned by a much larger technology company that has started dabbling in robotics 30 years back. I learned that what I was part of was a much larger project involving about 6 other candidates, the first one being a volunteer from the facility himself. He was pointed out to me on our little walkabout but seeing as he was behind a glass wall in a mask at the time I didn't feel like bothering him. The woman guiding my mother and I around explained that he also wasn't as heavily altered as I was, just an arm and some brain augmentation. It was nice to know I wasn't totally unique though, not that being unique is a bad thing. It was just nice knowing I wasn't completely alone in my shell.
There is one thing I have never told anyone else though. I went wandering the night before I left, I wanted to look around without feeling like a tourist and let it all sink in. The sounds, the smells, the way the white in the sterile room was so bright it almost seemed to glow blue. I found a room that was unlocked, obviously that meant it was okay to enter. So I did. Flicking the light on was probably one of the worst mistakes I'd ever made, I thought I'd walked into a morgue. Lifeless bodies were sprawled everywhere, thrown to the ground like they were trash. There were small children and adults crammed on shelves with eyes missing and limbs barely hanging.
A set of eyes were starring straight at me from the floor and made me jump because they were my own, the ones I'd had for the last few years at least. I guess when my most recent upgrade had been performed mostly new parts were used because crumpled on the floor partially wrapped in a tarp was my old body with a giant tear in the face. Why they discarded the bodies the way they did and why my other body was so damaged were a mystery but I was too horrified to investigate with all the other bodies lying around. I knew they were not real people, but they had once housed them just like my own. I left with those images burned into my brain and returned to my room as soon as possible, needless to say I didn't sleep much that night.
When we left the next morning I asked mom if she could fill me in on some missing gaps in my memory, but she told me Misty and Daisy would be the best ones to do that. I assumed this meant I had actually made it to the gym that day, but what happened between the pathway and waking up was drawing a blank in my mind. Before my mother left we had to go and get my trainer registration picture retaken and my identification updated, it had been so long since I first received the ID my face no longer seemed related to the one in the original. What really didn't sit well with me was the status update, now clearly labeled on my identification along with my place of origin was the word 'cyborg'. Mom explained it was for my own safety, just in case something happened again in the future and I needed help but couldn't speak for myself. Sure, it made sense but I didn't feel comfortable with it being public knowledge. The whole thing made me feel like I might as well have been walking around with a neon sign that glared "CYBORG FREAK!"
Still, I didn't have much of a choice. I was a traveller and like anyone else with a special condition laws stated that it must be included in the identification no matter how strange it was.
With everything taken care of Mom finally had to go, she'd been away from home and work for too long and needed to return. Dad was probably a mess trying to take care of my little sister and the house, Mom needed to swoop in and save them. She was great at that, walking in and fixing everything. Saying my goodbyes to mom from the platform at the station she was on her way to the coastline where she would catch a boat and return to save the family from calamity and no doubt assure them I was still intact.
I caught my own ride 15 minutes later and started the trip back to Cerulean, there were some burning questions I needed answered.