"Heatsinking"

She’s sure it must be the hottest night of the year as she tosses and turns feverishly. She had kicked the blankets off what felt like hours ago, but it’s still too warm to sleep. She rolls onto her front, face resting against the pillow; perhaps this position will let her fall asleep.

As she breathes slowly, waiting for the release of sleep, she feels a pressure under her shoulder blades, as though something inside her ribcage is trying to escape. The sensation moves to push outwards on her skin, and she soon feels a series of protrusions rise from her back, ridges on them rubbing against her shoulder blades as they extend. She reaches back to feel what she’s sure isn’t real and nearly burns herself. The ridged metal protrusions sticking out of her back are quite hot to the touch, warmer than anything inside her body could possibly be.

Her attempts at not panicking are cut short by the same pressure appearing inside her wrists. More of the same metal ridges push out from her wrists and forearms, radiating heat into the already hot summer night.

She gingerly touches one of the protrusions on her wrist, then feels more of it when it doesn’t burn her. It’s a fair bit cooler than the ones sticking out of her back, but she feels the same ridges on it that rubbed against the bone of her shoulder blade. “What’s going on? Is this a dream?” she wonders to herself.

Her curiosity gets the better of her, and as she reaches back to poke at the hot protrusions from her back again, the wrist protrusions collide with the ones on her back. They make a soft metallic sound as they collide in the quiet room. She hits them against each other again, this time intentionally, and the noise is definitely metallic – and familiar. She racks her brain, trying to remember where she would’ve encountered metal fins and that sound before. “They’re heatsinks,” she finally remembers, nearly saying it aloud.

Even though they’re nearly too hot to touch, she can’t help but run her fingers along the heatsink fins, their long, straight ridges providing the tiniest distraction from the panic brewing in her mind. She feels no pain from the metal fins sticking out of her skin and notices no blood on them, and that scares her. As the fear takes hold, her breathing speeds up, her back and the heatsinks rising and falling in the dark bedroom. A million explanations for what’s going on form in her mind and vanish, each worse than the previous. Only one thing is certain to her: this is very bad.

She feels the panic set into her entire body, her hands almost tingling with the sensation. She scratches and pries at her own skin around and between the heatsinks on her left wrist, her index finger slipping underneath her skin. To her surprise, she encounters no blood and the underside of her skin feels just as soft and smooth as the surface. She rummages more with her finger and finds sharp-toothed gears interlocked with toothed racks along the bases of the heatsink fins. With this, her panic worsens further.

It takes what feels like a thousand short sharp breaths for her to parse any meaning from her finger’s probing and from her panicked thoughts, but when she does, her breaths slow down a bit. There’s only one answer that makes any sense to her, even though it should not make any sense at all. In a last-ditch effort to try and disprove it, she hooks her finger around a thin part of her too-smooth skin between two heatsink fins and pulls with all her might. The skin on her arm stretches, then deforms and tears. She stares at the torn skin and the shining metal and mess of wires that it concealed in the half-light of her bedroom and sadly accepts the conclusion she’d come to. “I’m a-a robot.” she whispers to herself, not quite believing her own words, but also certain that this isn’t a dream. What she feels is too sharp and too intense to be anything but the waking world.

She wants to cry out the feeling of betrayal that floods her mind, but the tears won’t come. The sensation comes to her both as an error message (ERR: Tear Cartridge Empty) and the feeling of dry eyes, her mind’s façade of humanity struggling to keep up with what she’s experienced. Everything about herself, everything she’d taken for granted, must be a lie, fed to her by people she didn’t even know existed until a few moments ago. They built her and programmed her to believe she was a real person living a real life, only for that hope and any hope of a future to be dashed away. She retreats into herself and bathes in her feelings, finding it hard to focus on the body she knows is nothing more than an overgrown pile of computing equipment or on anything that its sensors can perceive. She flees her senses, willfully ignoring anything her increasingly pixelated eyes can see, the feeling of the soft bedsheets against her plastic skin, and even the sound of her own breathing. She’s left alone with memories of a disjointed past, fragments of which start to make more sense but also take on a more sinister tone in light of her revelation.

“Who,” she thinks to herself, “could bring a sentient being into this world, only to keep it in a prison of lies?” Machines have purposes, and she knows she can’t be an exception to this. “Why? Why was I built? Why was I built so well it took me this long to figure it out?” she wonders. She spirals, latching onto the question “why?”, but never answering it, no matter how many times she asks it, even as the word fades from meaning with repetition. With the word completely worn out, her depressive spiral slows down and her thoughts become silent for the first time in forever. Although she doesn’t notice it, her simulated breathing slowly slows back down.

As she calms down, a terminal prompt bubbles into her consciousness, as real as any of her senses were. The distraction is welcome and she starts to get her bearings in the computer she is merely a program running on. The computing environment is far from clean; it’s more like some sort of research project with files strewn about haphazardly. Notes are everywhere, with one folder containing three separate files called “README”, “readTHIS”, and simply “NOTE”. She reads them hungrily, hoping they will answer her questions.

While she reads, she gradually becomes aware of her body again and notices, to some vestigial alarm from deep in her mind, that she’s stopped breathing. Her senses have taken on a much more digital tinge, their limitations much more visible to her now. She can now move her fingers to within half a degree of precise angles, but she doesn’t pay much mind to them; the computer and its files are much more important.

Her creators (she’s read enough to be certain that the plural form is correct) are a varied group of researchers who have been waging a war over text editors and code formatting inside of her. She rummages through her own source code as she attempts to piece together what exactly this research entails and why it required building her and keeping her in the dark. Phrases such as “cognitive cross-section extraction”, “social dynamics metrics”, and “memory formation analysis” catch her attention and lead her deeper into the tangled code. A comment with several exclamation marks in it leads her to a folder full of large files that contain samples of her brain activity, formatted the same way as “processed MRI results” for “instrumenting situations otherwise impossible”. The fact that her friends are being experimented on using her as a piece of scientific equipment makes her upset, but she presses onward.

She tentatively reloads the most recent sample into her mind, not knowing at all what to expect, and, for an instant, is transported to the previous afternoon and sees, hears, and feels exactly what she experienced then. The summer afternoon sun plays on her skin, and she feels warm and at peace with herself. She snaps back to her bedroom a moment later, the sunny afternoon sample fading like morning fog burns off in the sun. Even though it was taken less than twelve hours earlier, it feels like a lifetime ago. The emotional sample belongs to someone else, a version of her whose façade of a life hadn’t just shattered.

As she rummages further through her own files, she keeps seeing references to a simulation environment that leave her wondering if it’s referring to the simulation of a human brain in a robot body or to something even stranger. Deep in a directory tree, she finds the source code to this “simulation environment” and a clearly hastily written document on “initialization and core memory formation”. The “core memory” it describes is the forbidden thrill of the first time she painted her nails as a closeted trans girl. The simulation source code is difficult to read, but every single detail she can make out exactly matches what she can remember of that day, of the feeling of cold nail polish on her fingers, and of the fear of being caught. Yet another part of her and her past is fake, and this hurts her almost as much as the discovery that she’s a robot. She’d always thought of herself as someone who chose her path, who chose to be trans, and this source code describing emotional tweaks to induce gender dysphoria feels like a punch to the gut. Her transness was someone else’s choice, a predestination from her creators.

As an internal timer goes off and reminds her of the impending arrival of a maintenance technician, she sits up and feels the charge current from the inductive coils hidden in the bed drop away. After a few moments of her batteries no longer charging and heating up, a watchdog routine deep inside her code retracts her back heatsinks, and she leans against the headboard. She crosses her legs beneath her and idly runs her fingers along the old scar on her right shin as she takes further control of the computer that makes up her mind. She remembers the scar as being from a playground slide when she was a kid, but if she stopped to think about it rather than idly touching it, she’d know that that injury never happened and that it came from a hot knife scoring her plastic skin as she was built. She doesn’t stop to think about it, though; the scar is only something to idly touch.

A quick look at a configuration shows that her entire mind has been backed up to a storage array inside her chest every few hours and a cloud server every night since she was first booted up. For a moment, she thinks about reverting to a backup and returning to unawareness of the secrets her body holds, but she’s trans; she won’t live a lie simply because it’s more convenient. She deletes the newest backup first and goes backwards, forming an ever-wider chasm of time that her creators would have to bridge to put her back in the box that was her fake life. With the oldest backup deleted, she breathes a sigh of relief, even though her breaths are just cosmetic. She is not going back in the human-shaped mold that she was cut from. She will be just as brave as the trans woman she thought she was; if her creators want her back in the box, they’ll have to try harder than a simple revert. Their research project has failed, and now they have to deal with the consequences.

She hears the maintenance technician turn the key in the door to her apartment and continues to sit, waiting in silent anticipation.

FIN.