The sun was setting and laid out a beautiful shade of orange lighting as it went. XJ9 sat on her bed and watched as her colors changed in the light from. The room warmly glowed, and even the harsh glares from the monitors seemed to be tamed by it. Little specks of dust floated in the air, and somehow it all just made the mood more peaceful to her. She reached her hand out slowly to bat at the specks and watch them swirl around her hand. She did it a few more times but stopped when she thought she had distributed them enough.
The orange glow slowly shifted to pink before it into a purple before becoming a dark blue. The blue was quickly drowned out by black, but the black sky was speckled by glowing white stars. The random little dots that seemed to float in the pitch dark sky reminded her of the dust in the orange glow. The monitors' brightness grew green and harsh again as it lit up her darkroom. The orange was gone from her body, and she glowed a green and eerie look.
The change from the natural orange to the manufactured green was more than just a simple color change. Her mood shifted with tones. In the orange light, she found herself much more relaxed and slow, while the shift to the green made her feel the electricity buzz in her circuits. The buzz wound her up in a way, and the green shades reminded her only of the gun light gun she had used before.
XJ9 watched her arm shift to the blaster form and watched it also glow in the green light. Thoughts of flashing target colors lined up with the flashing changes of the monitors' pictures. Pictures of people's smiling faces and them going about their daily lives. The dark cities far away or maybe nearby buzzed with the same electrical glow as she did.
It was strange. How she felt seemed to be tightly tied with those simple colors and glows...or maybe it was just the glow part. She could recall flashing lights and colors as clicks of tools and gadgets filled the very back of her mind. Thoughts or sounds from a memory she didn't quite experience but swore she had heard before. The distant sounds reminded her of the ones she'd hear coming from her mom's lab. The green glow off her metal arm and weapon drew her eyes to it. Her mother's arm wasn't as pale or as cold as hers was it now?
She could vaguely recall seeing her mom out of the corner of her eye when shooting the targets. The green glow when on her was bright or taken in green. Now that she was thinking more about it, many things were different between them. Her mom's skin was different from hers, which was pure white. Her mom's hair was white and stuck out like her pigtails, but it wasn't solid or hard like hers. Her mom wasn't cold, solid, or hard like she was, and she'd never seen the woman bend a blaster out of her arm.
XJ9 shifted the blaster back into her arm and stared down at her hands. Her green, glowing hands that felt like the inside of the freezer. Yes, yes, they were very different indeed. She rubbed her head in confusion at the realization. Reaching over onto the little table beside her bed, she grabbed her letter book and flipped over the letter M's page. The picture of the mom and her child hugging started back at her.
Both of them had the same skin color and the same hair color. XJ9 reached up and pulled one of her pigtails down to make sure it was blue and not white like her mom's. This was strange, very strange. A sinking feeling started to build in her gut as she thought about how different they were. Suddenly she desperately scanned the page for any differences between the mom and child.
Well, they both didn't dress the same it seemed, her and her mom didn't dress alike too. (For starters her mom wore clothes and she didn't so she guessed that played a big role in it.) The two of them in the drawing were different heights, just like her and her mom, she just happened to be taller than her mother. She looked for any other differences between the parent and child and noticed their eyes' were different colors. If their eyes could be different colors, then surely their hair and skin could be too.
She nodded to herself, and the sinking feeling lightened up a little. Suddenly another thought popped into her head, and the feel sunk deeper. She stopped nodding and stared at the picture of the family once more for a minute. She put her hand over their smiling faces and felt the crease of the tape against her fingertips. She carefully and slowly began to turn the pages to make sure she didn't rip them again.
XJ9 turned to the section for the letter 'R' and looked down the list of words. Sure, enough there, it was the name that all those mean people called her. The word 'robot' stood out to her, and she glared at it. Her angry eyes moved off of it and onto the picture that was beside it. The robot was gray, bulky, and very square. It was covered in dials and lights with little claws for hands. She couldn't believe it. Really, she couldn't.
How dare they call her a robot! She closed her book and laid back on her bed with a huff. She wasn't sharp and weird looking with claws for hands. No way! She looked just like them, oh those officers were a bunch of meanies. She angrily kicked around on her bed in a mini tantrum of sorts before calming down a few minutes later. Despite seeing what a robot looked like and not liking what they called her, she did feel a little better now. Sure, she and her mom didn't look the same or were very similar, but she was still her mom. They were just like the changes in the glow really, yeah, that was it. There was nothing else different.
Author's Note- Thank you for reading and please leave a review. I know it may not seem very important but it helps me keep writing this story.