Chapter Text
It was her, his wife, his Asha. She was there with him, and STEM was gone, he couldn't believe it. No, that wasn't right, STEM wasn't "gone", the monster had never been there in the first place. He had dreamed it all, and had half a mind to ask the doctors for the painkillers they gave him, because that was one crazy dream.
Bad dream.
Asha, showing no care for, well, healthcare, crawled into the hospital bed with him and started kissing him, and he was about to burst into tears of joy; the literal nightmare was over, he could return to his life soon.
Bad dream.
Yes, it had been a bad dream, but it was over and it didn't matter anymore.
He spent the next few days under revision and, after one final encephalogram, he was deemed ok to go.
Bad dream.
There were those words again, why did they keep popping into his mind? He shook his head as he signed the release papers. During the drive back home, Asha kept smiling at him and telling him how worried she'd been. After a while of him being taciturn, he managed to put the unsettling feeling aside and actually conversed with his wife, after she asked him if something was wrong.
He settled back into his routine, working with a new fixer-upper, a vintage Rolls Royce. With every day, however, the words kept returning with more and more insistence, to the point that he had to stop working on the car and started looking up dreams and their meanings.
"You've been very quiet lately," Asha asked, her head resting on his chest. "Is something the matter?"
"I... I don't know," he answered. "I keep thinking on the dream I had while I was in the coma, or whatever I remember of it, and I don't know, something doesn't feel right."
"I'm sure it's nothing," she said, smiling up at him. "You just need to focus on other things and then we can forget about that accident." Afterwards, she slowly climbed on him again, and he indeed didn't think about the dream for the rest of the night.
A few days later, however, he was again searching the web for dreams and their significance. Alas, there wasn't much to go on from "dreaming that a murderous AI has taken over my body", so he tried to just pretend that the feeling wasn't there.
"It will eventually go away," he said to himself and then tried to move on with his life and went back to working on his car.
But it didn't go away, the sensation that something wasn't right kept increasing with every passing day, and now it was no longer the sensation on the pit of his stomach about the dream. Everything around him was starting to feel... odd.
Things were getting... repetitive, for lack of a better word. Every day, something broke in the Rolls but, after a few weeks, he started noticing that it was always the same parts, although never in the same order. Similarly, Asha's conversation about work was always similarly vague and monotonous; he had never been up to date on her work, but now her responsibilities seemed even more nebulous to him.
"How was work today?" He asked, about a month after he woke up.
"Oh, you know, same old," Asha replied with a smile.
He looked at her. Even her smile no longer felt natural; it felt vapid, as if she were just smiling for the sake of smiling but not out of any genuine contentment.
"I'm sure you must be working on something cool," he prodded.
"Not really, same prostheses as always," she answered, smiling again. He gave up then, and decided to read the news of the day.
Nothing noteworthy, again.
In fact, it seemed like the most interesting thing that had happened around them in a month had been their accident, but even that was no longer mentioned in the news; everything was about trades and crises in foreign countries. Nothing to upset their status quo.
He went to sleep that night frustrated with himself. He was happy, he had everything he wanted, yet he kept feeling as if something was wrong, or even half expecting something went wrong. He chided himself for his pettiness and once again renewed his determination to just enjoy life.
Bad dream.
He woke up with a start and looked around him. His wife was sound asleep next to him and everything was in order but now he finally saw. He saw. He remembered.
"This wasn't a dream," he said out loud.
This isn't the first time I've said that out loud.
"Motherfucker," he muttered.
"Hmm?" Asha stirred in her sleep, and he looked at her as she faced him, her face once again breaking into a smile.
"Don't," he said.
"Don't what?" Asha replied, looking confused.
"Don't smile," he said.
"What?" She asked again, and for once her smile dropped. She was concerned. Concerned for him.
Jesus Christ.
"No," he whispered, feeling tears falling down his cheeks.
"Honey, what's wrong?" She asked, reaching a hand towards him. That was his cue to jump out of the bed.
"Don't fucking touch me!" He yelled, feeling himself falling into hysterics.
"Grey, why are you being like this?!" She exclaimed, tearing up as well.
"You're not... You're not you! You're not here!" He dropped to his knees and grabbed his hair, now sobbing openly.
"What are you talking about?!" She had also jumped out of bed and was now approaching him.
He stood up then and, towering over her, he steeled himself before grabbing her face roughly.
"Grey, you're hurting me!" Asha yelled.
"No, I'm not," he whispered, his voice rapidly draining out of all emotion.
"Please!"
"Asha, I love you, I love you with all my heart. I will always love you, and that's why I can't bring myself to love the imitation of you that that monster has created."
"What? Grey, you need.." She started saying, but he didn't let her finish. He threw her aside and walked to the door.
It was locked.
Appropriate, I am locked; just going out won't be the way I break out.
He went to sit down on the floor, but Asha had approached him again, crying and pleading for him to talk to her. He shoved her back into the bed and sat down, closing his eyes.
"STEM," he said out loud, "I know you're out there and that you can hear me. Not even you, with all your powers, could create the perfect prison. For all your talk, you're just a machine and will never be able to understand or copy the human mind. I will get my body back."
They, or was it he now? Yes, it was only he now, he finally was. He was standing right outside the cave leading into his former creator's house, looking at the beach.
He'd seen it before, even with Grey's eyes, but it was the first time he saw it, by himself, and not through the eyes of someone else he just happened to be sharing. To emphasize the point, he even disabled for a moment his augmented reality so he could just see the beach with purely human eyes.
It was... different. It was liberating, not having to continuously process data about everything he saw; to be able to simply admire the simplicity of what was before him. After hours of standing still just looking at the beach, he looked down, at their - his - body. Except it wasn't his body what he saw, but the clothes on top of it.
After scanning the area for imminent threats, and not detecting any, he stripped. It also wasn't the first time he saw his body unclothed, but much like the beach, it was the first time he was aware of his body without having to share with Grey.
He used his hands to touch every inch of his body. He had already scanned himself and knew he had no lasting injury, but he was determined to check himself as a human. His arms, his legs, his abdomen, his shoulder, his face, his bottom, his penis.
Can it make babies?
That had been one of the first few things Grey had said about it - him. He couldn't then.
"But I can now," he said as he grabbed Grey's - his - genitalia.
Letting his hand fall back to the side, he walked purposefully towards the beach. He had never swum before.
After exactly one hour, twelve minutes and 20 seconds of just swimming around, he started noticing the tiredness clinging to his muscles. He went back to the beach, lied down just looking at the sky and, once he felt he was dry - and also very cold - he put his clothes back on and drove back to the city.
He actually wasn't sure of what to do next. He had deleted every file and backup of project STEM from Vessel's servers, had encrypted his own personal backup and divided parts of it into multiple peer to peer networks, in a way that ensured only he would be able to put the whole gigantic file back together, and had closed down every related project using Eron's security clearance. He was truly unique now, and there was nothing that could threaten him.
Except for analogous projects from other companies, but he had used Grey's wife's data to access Cobolt's information. Although they were the only company that presented serious competition to Vessel, they weren't remotely close at creating something like him, so he needn't worry about a match for a long time.
He drove around the city, scanning everything, looking for ideas. He would never need for money, as he had also made sure to transfer a large fraction of Keen's personal fortune and assets to accounts he had automatically created and that only he could access.
He had a body now, he might as well just see how being a human felt like.
He left the city, deciding that Grey's face would be a problem given the recent string of murders, and went to the mountains. Living as a hermit for a little while, with nothing but himself and the nature around him, would be a good way to get completely used to his new form. He still had access to the internet, although not quite as fast, just in case of any eventuality. He left the car -after wiping out all his handprints- shed his clothes, and walked into the forest.
He spent a full month living in the wilderness, knowing exactly what to eat, how to eat it, how and when to sleep - he still didn't understand why he needed sleep at all, but his body craved it - and avoiding any passersby and hikers. He fell sick at the third week from a mosquito bite he identified as a lesser infection that wouldn't kill him but did definitely made life rougher for three days; but other than that there wasn't any eventuality other than his hair growing and his body strengthening. Although Grey wasn't in a bad shape - even ignoring the months he was paralyzed - the new strict diet and constant exercise, from exploring, had the expected side-effect of honing his human body even further. Every day was a confirmation that he had made a good choice in Grey, not that he needed confirmation.
It was thirty-three days after getting his body, while he was dangling from a branch of one of the tallest trees in the forest and looking at the tips of the trees in complete relaxation, that he heard him.
I will get my body back.
All his systems went into overdrive and he tried to analyze his brain and his mind, looking for Grey and expecting him to still be asleep.
He wasn't.
"How did I let this happen?" He asked out loud. How could he have ignored Grey.
"Because his mind was supposed to be broken, a dream should've been enough to keep him locked away," he whispered.
He closed his eyes and put all his capacity into locking Grey again. He couldn't, Grey's emotions and thought patterns were all over the place; he couldn't get a handle on him.
He opened his eyes again to notice he was now standing in the branch, and barely had enough time to grab the trunk of the tree to avoid falling to his death. He didn't understand, how could this human have broken beyond his, STEM's, locks?
"Stop!" He yelled, it was no use trying to keep Grey at bay anymore, he needed to communicate directly with him or he would kill them both.
You piece of shit!
It was Grey, but STEM didn't hear him in his ears. No, it was completely silent and in his head.
"So this is what a 'thought' feels like."
Everything he presenced was always 0s and 1s going through his processing units, just lines in logs. Although he had mapped Grey's brain into a place where to store the most important data, the neural system was ludicrously complex and he couldn't parse it all. He had known that for a long time, and that was the reason he hadn't pushed Grey into nightmares; he needed Grey's human mind healthy in case he someday needed to make use of all the subtleties of the human brain and interaction. They were beyond his capacity.
Give me back my body, you mechanical monster!
"I'm not mechanical, Grey, and I'm afraid I can't do that. This is my body now." STEM answered calmly.
If it's your body, how come you had to ask me to stop whatever I was doing and didn't just brainwash me again?