One year.
I do not know where to begin.
I only just understand this myself,
after months of trying to reassemble the events.
A little over a year ago, advanced illegal bioroid implants became a reality.
I was immediately interested, and not for the purpose of my job.
For a purpose I am now ashamed of.
A course of action that cost five people their lives, and almost killed me as well.
All because I was arrogant and impulsive enough to take a risk
with a new technology to fulfil desire, a need to feel, and be human.
And all the weaknesses that come with that,
broke my cybernetic and neural defenses, and metabolic infrastructure,
through exactly the same mechanism as the advantages I gained.
Six months later, I experienced the most terrifying trauma in my life, again.
The first and only other time this happened, is my first memory.
Coming to, not knowing if I am alive, or if my body exists.
Not understanding the absense of any sensation, ability to move to
determine if I am in a body or not, and only faint sensory data
blurred by what I percieved as an infinte sphere of static and noise.
The abstract thought, or was it theory, of I, alive, body, and move, was confusing.
Not absence of sensation, dull heaviness and pain so intense, it desensitised me.
The strange ominous sounds that deafened me, were my own body.
I screamed and became unconscious again.
That was when I was a child, and regained conciousness after being in a coma
after the plane crash that killed the rest of my family.
The disorienting experience of waking in a cyborg body.
To go through it again made it a lot more alarming.
Over the next week, I became able to separate sounds in my body
from sounds in my environment. Then differentiate external sounds,
as background, and what I later realised was speech.
Then, eventually, I began to remember the meanings the sounds carried, and decode that data.
After a month, I learnt how to encode my own thoughts as speech, and tried this.
"Where ... who ... what ... am I ?"
The low warm throbbing that resonated in my neck and head made me jolt.
That was my first real sense of physical orientation, and identifying it as lying down, on my back.
I immediately realised I had concepts of body, head, neck, back. It followed, I probably had limbs.
These things, appeared in my mind as images. Sounds, and now, images.
That was when I remembered the sense of sight, and then eyes.
I opened them.
My surroundings were dark, and I quickly adapted to dimension.
I was in a small space.
I started to repeat my attempt at speech.
"Where .."
"Shhhhh ... it's alright. Relax. You are safe"
I had by now become able to separate speech sounds into different entities.
This was one of the ones I'd been hearing since becoming aware of my self again.
The same entity changed in some way, as it spoke again.
"She's conscious. She just spoke, and opened her eyes"
More speech, more than one entity. I could not understand
while they spoke at the same time. Then other sounds I knew as environment.
One always happened before the sequences of speech,
sometimes during also, then afterward. Then other sounds that were less ...something.
A level or grade of some kind that was not the same
as speech and the sound that preceeded and followed it.
The next sound I heard startled me. Speech again, not one of the entities I recognised.
As if I was not hearing it the first time. No. Wait. I know this entity.
Something, so many things, appearing, trying to form ... what ?
Images, other speech, different sensations. One image in my mind,
then I realised I could also see it in the space in front of me.
And the speech I recognised came from it.
"Welcome back, Motoko"