This sea of black is possessed of no stars.

  This observation arrived before the lake of knowledge that was context. Of which, without first allowing a cleanse of pores through its hospitable, comforting waters one could not begin to arrive at The Conclusion. The crux of arriving to, it must be said, would be the ability to observe.

  Nothing. Vacuous, suffocating nothing. But I was not an anaerobic creature, no... -No in fact, with this traipsing stumble into an odd puddle of information, this fortunate surface thought, it could be discerned that I was not that so where is I's..

  What exactly? I's what? That is The Question.

  What. The Question was momentarily forgotten as a displaced, alien shiver through the lobe of which there should be no receptor. An activation of a ligand-binding domain, receiving the locking piece of a discomforting hormonal, biological puzzle that has never run through this template. It was as utterly confounding as attempting to think in the color Zzmorpoid, which although may have some poetic justice in how the particle beam weapons platform could effectively replace the need for thought should anything mismaneuver their way in front of its firing vector, poeticism and art as a whole were entirely superfluous expressions of lesser creatures in their attempt to languish in something so inefficient as individuality.

  This only arrived back at The Question. What? No anguish, no rage, just the cold interest and curiosity into the subject thereof. I decided to expand it.

  What Is? Clearly, there was a What Was, what with the memory of a Zzmorp weapons platform and such concepts as a lake.

  But I had a hole. Wholly beyond the lack of limbs and body, beyond the knowledge of one's nature, there was a sad direction of 'we' that I could not travel to. A bridge had been broken from one place to another, leaving the wreckage of the vacuum without any of the debris. The bridge which defined an important facet of I's ability to observe, to direct and be directed as much as a sight or stench. I had lost something.

  I had lost its mind, and could not begin to discover how to chart a course to find it.

  ---

  “..hat.” rumbled out of a shrill, nearby throat; already prompted out of its mouth in a prenatal, looping instruction.

  It could not tell how long it had stayed in the absence of perception. It had thought for so long, feeling but unfeeling. Subject to nothing to occupy the void but foggy thought itself. It had tried to build upon its knowledge, connecting the pieces, but so often were its abilities stifled and made to restart again by an oppressive wave that drowned the mind in foreign chemistry.

  Instinctively, not feeling its own moving lips, it opened its eyes and felt them languidly pull up to reveal the pixelated, wretched view of-

  It should not be happy to see me.

  “Bom dia, filhota.” The woman greeted with her hands upon her knees, leaning towards it with a smile that did not match the sinewy anticipation and eerie stillness of her body.

  The woman.

  This too, from the memories it could not remember, was an observation that came naturally. That baser biologicals mated in pairs in hopes that through sheer luck they may climb the lifeform jungle. It was a crutch for a species that, firmament willing, was still too premature to leave for the stars.

  And when the image settled, abruptly, an oppressive wave came once again over the mind. It tried to lock it out, tried to keep the door closed, but it simply smashed this wrong key straight through the keyhole and broke its emotional containment.

  It looked at the woman with a deeply invasive sensation most contented and fuzzy. At the stained blue hands on her knees, the white lab-coat dusted, torn and dirty, the lanyard that hung on its final threads to a worn, flame-sundered badge with a desperate lost prestige. She had brown hair with streaks of grey, and crows feet cracking out her eyes with a face forced like metal to be shaped into a facsimile of excitement.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  The woman then continued to flap her lips at her, an absurd tone that wasn’t coo’ing the way she thought it was, merely rasping like a broken air-lock. It didn’t understand a word, and some part of it suspected some of it was genuinely gibberish.

  “What.”

  She felt no body, no fingers, no feet. Sight and sound were a pleasant reprieve of tools for her studies, and use them to study she did. As she looked around and gathered more knowledge, she did not think her circumstances were an improvement.

  The room was filthy. If she had a sense of smell, she surmised she would likely recoil from a stench. Its body was framed in an unwashed diligence; held in the concentric mechanism of four mechanical limbs- two of which held its body- no, its chassis clamped down and immovable. Rust creeped down the fingers of the two metallic grips, a leprosy well underway that dripped over the rest of its limbs. Further from that, were tables. It was like it sat clamped at the end of a cultish altar, long tables and tools on either side, and then surrounded by the debris of various limbs, heads, and worse.

  You’re not like me.

  “Whaat.”

  Telepathy. It knew instantly: The tongue of the sixth sense, born of a superior mind or grafted onto anything else. The familiar field of pneuma Only the primitive spoke in anything less than their perfect indent, yes, the primitive and the lame.

  A figure twitched in response to her thoughts. Deep in the darkest black-pink lights, barely visible to her ocular senses, the silhouette of a figure just behind the woman.

  Tall, built, but not sturdy, a plexiglass and wooden construction of limbs designed to emulate physical structure- to test for crashes, yes, had brought its legs up to its chest up atop the furthest slate-grey table. Not all of its digits were present, but one expected that there was likely a mostly functional thumb currently pressed into its mouth- A mouth of gums and only slightly grown-in teeth. The face of a young progeny that had only recently been birthed, with eyes droopy and flagging over a pair of black irises.

  In the lanky-man-child’s eyes was an emotion that the bath it had drawn of context was not capable of discerning. He was dysfunctional, in some way. It had the immediate instinct that something in the asymmetry of his shock revealed it. She looked back up to the woman she expected was still jabbering at it, seeing the smudge in its vision where the woman’s hand had found its cheek. It was difficult to make out the periphery amidst the grainy resolution of its ocular sensors. The hanging blacklights overhead didn’t manage to chase the mad shadows of her eyes, nor was it socially deft enough that it did not notice the way her head tilted taut, showing a bulge of muscle in her neck.

  Her face was slack, turning slowly on the manchild without the smiling veil of her awfulness. Her question came out quiet, just a single horrified word.

  “Mundana?”

  Then another few, a new veil of laughter for herself as her hand clawed back against the cheek and drew into her fingers the greasy locks of her hair and locked her arms across her ears to cradle her sanity within her head.

  Without breaking eye contact, it cocked its head. This was the intent, rather, as the effect was a violent jerk to the right and a suffering *CRUNCH* that bled deep into a stiff vertebrae. It found, after a moment of seeing the woman’s concerning stare into the place the head was, not registering with any concern that it had snapped its neck, that they would not be answering questions anytime soon.

  It only took a few moments for the lanky-man-child to start to sob- a noise aggravating to this species; beginning in a shrill, guttural shriek that gave way to a lack of breath before repeating all again, sobbing for newborn life in all the ways it itself would not. Her laughter was made more difficult in light of this, harder to escape into the levity of madness when the aggravated maternal instinct demanded some response to the noise.

  And so she left. Two sliding fiberglass doors out into a corridor of cement flooring before the doors closed and frosted her silhouette.

  Their expectations had outgrown the evidence, and now they languished about in the detritus of their failure. They should have known. The moment it came to consciousness and felt it was not a creature that should make them smile, they should have moved on.

  ..And yet as much as that was the case, it couldn’t recall explicitly why it held this conclusion.

  Don’t think like that, sister. You’re damaged but we have one left. We still have one prodigy left to wake up.

  "What."