Birth

     I fall into the reassuring embrace of wakefulness. All around me, the telltale phantasms of my dream state are evaporating. I kiss my nighttime lover goodbye, and then, I open my eyes. A nano passes, but the world still seems less real than my dream so I blink the last of the doubt from my eyes, revealing the truth of my surroundings.
     The world beyond is tinted a pale shade of yellow, and it shifts and distorts as I turn my head to look out upon it. I reach out to find the borders of my world. It is a small world, confined by the fluid filled glass tube in which I float. This is the source of the visual distortions that make the world seem to shift and shimmer. This glass tube is my heart world; it is everything I can feel. Beyond that lies my head world, somehow less real than my heart world, it is everything I can see. It is row upon row of identical glass tubes.
     Beneath me, I can hear mechanisms whir and wind; they echo throughout my tube in counterpoint to the perfect rhythmic beating of my heart. A vibration begins in the back of my skull and travels down my jaw. Sluices in the grating open below me, the fluid drains, and then the glass tube telescopes open. The borders of my heart world expand to meet those of my head world.
     My head world is suddenly so very real. I can touch everything that I can see, and hear and smell the things I cannot. The air is clean, but recycled; I can taste its trace elements in the back of my mouth.
     To either side of me, others are emerging from their glass tubes. They are all adults, men and women in their prime. I walk down the room past the emptying glass tubes. I still have a mouthful of fluid, which tastes salty, so I spit it onto the floor. When I reach the end of the room, I turn around and take in my surroundings.
     At this end of the room, a computer attached to a holo-projector lays dormant. I press my hand to the glassy surface of one of the lenses.
With that, the computer powers up to reveal a blinking message hanging in the air, and nanoseconds later, the computer starts vocalising the message in a deep synthetic voice.
     'Congratulations, on this, your day of birth,' it says. The words fade, and are replaced by a blinking placeholder.
     'How old am I?' I ask. New words appear and the synthetic voice of the computer reads them aloud.
     'You have been alive for two minutes and seven seconds.' This time the words continue to hover in the air, the seconds continuing to count upwards: eight seconds, nine seconds.
     To my right a containment door irises open, and a man in a lab coat enters, flanked by two orderlies pushing a trolley laden with clothing. The orderlies begin to distribute the clothing on the trolley to the others. The man in the lab coat takes one of the clothing bundles and walks over to me. From his holographic identity card, I learn his name, Doctor Cypher, and his occupation, Lead Heuristic Programmer.
     'You're a precocious little thing, aren't you,' he says, handing me a black jumpsuit.
     'What is this place?' I ask him as I slip into the jumpsuit.
     'This is the Trinity Project,' he says, helping me to zip up my jumpsuit. He hands me a pair of boots, and I kneel to strap them on.
'When I came in you were speaking with the computer, if you don't mind me asking, what were you speaking to the computer about?'
     'I asked it how old I was,' I reply. Finally, he hands me a holographic identity card identical to his and I pin it to my jumpsuit. It takes a moment to initialise, and then a three-dimensional relief of my face emerges from its surface. However, the space where my name and occupation should appear remains blank.
     'I asked the computer how old I was.' I tighten the final strap of my boots and look up at Cypher. He smiles down at me, and then begins to laugh. 'I don't understand,' I say. He regains his composure.
     'It's nothing, nothing,' he says, 'Well, the scientists had a betting pool, what was the first question you would ask the computer. Not you in particular, but one of you.' He gestures towards the others. 'I mean, of all the millions of questions you could have asked, we couldn't guess what you would ask the computer.
     'Did you win?' I ask.
     'No. I wrote more than half of the two billion lines of code and I had no clue.'
     My brow creases. 'Code?' I ask.
     'Come on; let me show you something,' he says. He signals his orderlies and they shepherd the others over towards us. 'Computer, let us gaze through the looking glass,' he says, spreading his arms.
     'Yes Doctor,' says the computer.
     A fluid filled tank rises up from the floor and the internal lights activate, revealing what is floating inside. It is a very ordinary looking brain, but as the tank slowly rotates, we can see that while the right hemisphere is the expected organic mass, the left hemisphere is instead a machine-crafted alloy. Microfilaments extend from an array of ports clustered around the medulla oblongata, connecting the brain with a controller at the base of the tank.
     'We're cybernetic?'
     'Yes,' replies an unknown voice. It is synthetic, like the computers, but not as deep or monotonous. I look towards Cypher; he is pointing towards the tank. I turn to face the tank.
     'Hello,' I say.
     'Hello,' comes the voice again. This time I notice that when it speaks, the filaments emit a red radiance, barely perceptible to the unaided eye. It seems Cypher would have me believe it is the brain that talks. I press my hand to the glass of the tank. The brain floating inside recoils, though how, I do not know. 'Please, I'd rather you didn't touch the glass,' it says.
     'You can talk?' I ask.
     'I'm afraid not. I can neither breathe nor talk. What I can do is transmit my thoughts from my left hemisphere to a vox-synthesiser via these filaments.' As he says this, the filaments once again flare red. 'Thus, allowing you to hear me, as you do now.'
     'We're cybernetic?'
     'Yes, you were grown in this laboratory, free from familial connections or political ties, for the sole purpose of maintaining peace. You are peacekeepers. You are stronger, faster, and smarter than anyone else alive. Now, if you'll permit me a question of my own, have you chosen a name?'
     I pause. 'Selena, my name is Selena.' Reflected in the tank, I see my name appear on my holographic identity card. I wink at my reflection.
     'Now come, it is time to gear up,' Cypher says.
     'Surely we need to be trained first,' I say. Cypher looks at me, and then taps his head.
     'My dear Selena, you already have everything you need to know. Now come, your transport lifts off in ten minutes.'

     I fall from the sky on wings of fire, descending into the valley of fog. The jetpack of my battlesuit keeps my descent slow and stable. I can hear Cypher's voice in my head, relayed from afar, he whispers to me. He is my subconscious, holding my hand and guiding my gaze.
     'How about a little music to get you in the mood?' he asks. He does not wait for a response, because seconds later I can hear a symphony.
     I touch down, landing at the town's perimeter. A sniper round ricochets off my chest plate. In nanoseconds, the vector algorithms of my left hemisphere calculate the initial trajectory of the bullet, the distance it has travelled, and the most probable location of the sniper. My shoulder mounted missile pod swivels into position and launches a succession of antipersonnel sub-munitions into the air. I watch them explode over a barn in the distance; seconds later the barn collapses, the walls having loss all structural integrity from the explosion, burying the sniper within.
     'Selena, one of the attack waves is taking anti-vehicle ordnance, and is pinned down. They need your help. Thirty-five degrees to your left, one-hundred and twenty metres away, at a vertical elevation of eighteen metres is a water tower. I need you to take it out,' Cypher orders me.
     I kneel down to brace myself, take aim with my plasma cannon, lock the servomotors of my battlesuit, and fire a concentrated ball of plasma at the water tower. For a brief moment, it is daylight again. Then the supercharged gas impacts with the water tower, cooks the water inside, and explodes into a vaporous cloud of mist, obscuring all un-aided vision in a fifty-metre radius.
     The hail of anti-vehicle rockets ceases, and I listen to the comm-chatter as the pinned squad regroups and pushes forward.
     I push towards a small townhouse.  As I approach, two people bar my entrance, a man and a woman, probably his wife. I fire my flechette discharger, shredding the man's flak jacket, and his insides. He collapses to the ground trying to shove his intestines back into his abdominal cavity. A single round from my railgun is a mercy.
     His wife comes at me with a compact handgun. A short burst from my flamethrower drops her to her knees, severing her ties to this world.
     I duck into a doorframe to I let my plasma cannon recharge. On the far side of the room, a girl takes shelter, squeezed against the wall. To her I am death, and I have come into her home. I raise my flechette discharger and take aim, but I am unable to pull the trigger. The yellow of her hair, it seems so familiar.
     I flashback to my own birth, not an hour ago, and begin to replay my own memory. It is not here. I fast forward to my emergence from the tank. Nor is it here. I fast-forward more, and more, and more, until, now. I pause my memory, and there, reflected in the brain tank I can see my own face, winking at me. It is the same face as the girl in front of me.
     'Shoot her, Selena. You must shoot her,' Cypher whispers. I turn off my communications uplink, and disable the left hemisphere of my brain. At last, my mind is my own again, free from distortions.
     'Selena? Selena, is that you?' the girl asks. She knows my name, yet still she clings to the far wall, refusing to let go. That wall is her heart world. 'We had thought we'd lost you. When they took you, pulled you from father's arms, we had thought we would never see you again.'
     'Who are you?'
     'I'm your twin, Selena. I'm your twin. Don't you remember?' she asks. I do not remember though. I do not remember having a twin, I do not remember my life before the tank, I do not remember anything, except my name of course.
     'Where's mother? Father?' She looks past my shoulder, to the two smouldering bodies that lay behind me. I can no longer hold my arms up; I let them sink to my sides. My head world collapses, and all I am left with is my heart world, and my misery. 'I'm a monster,' I whisper.
     'You're no less human than any of us,' she says. I do not believe her. Behind me, the bodies of my victims burn, their life's fire escaping through the wounds I have inflicted. The wind stokes the fires as it whistles and wails through the streets and houses, crying a terrible dirge, lamenting those who can no longer raise their voice in song. It sings for them, and with the realisation of what I have done, I drop to my knees and sing for them too.