LOCATIOROV STATION

  SYSTEM: GLIESE 667

  DATE: UNKNOWN

  Alexander focused on the lights and soon another image fshed by. He aally started ting the seds. He wasn’t sure if his sense of time was accurate in this pce, but he got to the t of tehe image fshed by.

  It was the same t as the previous one and the one before that. There it was again. It seemed there eating patteren seds where an image fshed by. He couldn’t quite make the images out as they were there and gone almost in the same instant. But he could tell it was an image. If you blinked, you would miss it. Thankfully it didn’t seem he o blink, or maybe he didn’t have eyelids? That thought made him a bit unfortable until he remembered he wasn’t feeling any pain. He wasn’t feeling anything, to be ho. Perhaps this was all some weird dream.

  Although, if this was some strange dream, he didn’t feel like he was in trol of it at all.

  There was just him and the stream of light. He k was a stream now because the images always fshed in from above and vanished below. The oime he tried to look away from the stream, he found it surrounded him. All except for a dark se that felt like his mind had been shoved into an old CRT television that was dispying only static. It made his mind feel weird so he avoided looking at that se.

  Time was also weird in this pd he sometimes found himself bnking out for an uermined amount of time before ing back. The only reason he khis was happening was because of the lights. They weren’t uniform. When he bnked out and came back, they teo jerk suddenly like someone had hit the skip ahead button on a video.

  Oime he came bad the entire field of light was repced by an angry red. The red was swept away before he could even pte what that meant.

  Red was usually bad though. It only happehat oime and it never repeated itself so he figured it wasn’t something he o worry about. Instead, he ehe rather pastel color field made up of blues, pinks, yellows, greens, and purples that streamed through the darkness.

  It might have even beey if he wasn’t stuck staring at it since he had awoken. The appeal of the pretty colors had quickly faded. Now that he thought about it, had he awokehought that was what clued him into the colors, but his mind was so full of holes and hazy areas, that he couldn’t even say if he was awake or still dreaming at this point.

  After a bit of thinking, he decided that what he was experieng was real. Mostly because it was to to be a dream. Even a lucid one. And why the hell did he remember what a lucid dream was when he couldn’t even say for certain this was a dream?

  Alexander could only hope the holes would repair themselves given time. He could already feel the feathery bits at the edge of his awareness firming up. If those could fix themselves, certainly the rest would follow.

  ***

  “I’m a robot!”

  The realization came as quite a shock to Alexander when he finally figured out how to turn the slow slideshow of images into something more coherent.

  With the ck of external stimuli, it was impossible to tell for sure if what he was seeing was himself moving about or some remote camera view.

  He retty sure the curtain of light was some straa stream. But that epiphany only brought on more questions.

  He remembered growing up, at least bits and pieces of it. Most of those had e back from the feathery edges of his mind. The only problem was the holes remained and he could now tell at least a month had gone by since he awoke in this strange pce. With no further improvement to his dition, he couldn’t rely on his missing memories to help him out.

  What he could do was stare at the video as his ‘body’ moved heavy maery about. He saw other humans occasionally, but the video quality wasn’t the greatest. Although it was improving slightly as the weeks wore on. Maybe it was less him figuring out the image issue as it was the body fixing itself?

  That was just another question to add to the pile of questions he already had. Like where the hell was he? As far as he could see, everything was metal. Maybe some strange warehouse or b. It might expin why his mind was trapped in this body.

  But why him? Nothing in his memory led him to believe he was anyone of importance or intellect. Had he had some tragic act? Maybe someone sold his atose body for sce?

  He did vaguely recall people doing that and their loved ones ending up as testing dummies for the military.

  That didn’t feel quite right though. If Alexander had been stuffed in some sort of military robot project, why was he stuck moving hunks of scrap metal around?

  He sighed, there was no poiing his thoughts tumble down an endless well of questions. Especially when he had no answers and no way to get them. He o focus on what mattered right naining, etting trol of his body. Once he did that, then he could figure out what was going on.

  ***

  Time seemed to whip by as Alexander paid attention to every detail. Slowly his vision of the world expanded as the curtain of light became a -around view of the world. All except the dark void that cut across what he thought of as his front.

  It was strahough. Alexander could see everything at onot like having to turn around or focus on a certain point. It was like his mind erfectly capable of taking iirety of his visual space without issue.

  Whehought about it, his mind seemed to go fuzzy though, so he tried not to focus on why he could see everything at the same time.

  He also found out what he looked like thanks to a mirrored piece of junk he was hauling about. Or at least what the body he was in looked like. It was an ugly robot. Something straight out of some alien horror film. There was no head, because why have a head on a robot? The arms were long and articuted, looking like some sort of segmented bug carapace. They moved more like a shan any robotic arm he had any memory of. The legs were much the same way, ending in wide ical feet. The body looked a bit like a misformed egg, it tapered at the hips where the legs attached to the sides but then ballooned out toward the top where the arms attached along where the shoulders would be.

  The only thing that stood out from the dark grey exterior of the mae was a long gash that ran from the upper left to the bottht of the torso. It looked like something very violent had melted its way through his body. The damage also cided with the bcked-out area in his vision. Although he didn’t see any cameras or other protruding sensors on the robot, so he had no idea how he was able to see at all.

  Oh, there was o thing. A box. It looked to have been jammed into the jagged rent in the body and haphazardly glued into pce. It was different from the robot, but it was something he could almost uand. It had blinking lights on it, beat-up old paint, and some unknown words that could have been Cyrillic but were too distorted in the refle to read. That was good.

  When he first saw the refle, he had nearly freaked out. As freaked out as his apathetid could get anyway. The reason for his was simple. He thought maybe he had been abducted by aliens and stuffed into this body to work as a mindless sve.

  Knowing that humans were involved really didn’t make his situation aer, but at least he uood the motivations of humans.

  The hing he learned was that he was in spaore accurately, on a space station.

  It was an eye-opening experieo watch the massive bay doors open while bei in an airless chamber while a massive ship came in to dock. The ship wasn’t like anything he had ever seen ba Earth. So either humanity had been hiding this teology, or a whole lot of time had passed since he was a self-ambutory human.

  But not so much that he couldn’t reize certain desigs of the ship. It used some form of projected thrust ehat produced a bright blue fme. There were also stabilizis around the ship that burped out little es of fire or pressed gas. They were too small and too far away for him to get a clear view.

  There was also artificial gravity, which blew his mind when he first realized that. But not shields. Or he hadn’t seen any indication of shields. To be fair, he hadn’t spent a whole lot of time studying the ship. As soon as it he belly cmps released two tainers and his job was to empty the things. Or at least that’s what his body did. Alexaill didn’t have any audio so he couldn’t tell what the old man who owned him had ordered him to do.

  It retty clear that nobody treated him like a person, so he assumed they thought he was just a robot. Alexander had to hope that was the case, because if they knew he was a human trapped in this body and still treated him like this… well, that would suck.

  ***

  More time went by. At least he could hear things now. Although the sounds were garbled most of the time.

  It was just to be stu this soundless void watg the wo by. He finally learhe name of the old man that owned him. It was Yuri, Yuri Sokolov. Although that st part should have been self-evident by the big sign above the door to his salvage yard that read ‘Sokolov Repair and Salvage’. To be fair, Alexander had a lot on his mind and it was an easy thing to overlook.

  It also didn’t help that Yuri had activated the holo emitter that was glued onto his body as some weird trol unit. The stupid thing projected a cartoonish face a few inches in front of him that covered most of his torso. He could still see through it but it did make viewing things a lot harder.

  The old man hadn’t actually wao turhing on, but Alexander’s form was frightening people and the station cil told him to do so.

  He didn’t think it made him look any less intimidating. If anything it reminded Alexander of an evil or demonic toy. Or like a mask that a rht wear. But the cil seemed fih the ge so who was he tue? Not that he could argue or anything. He may have regained hearing to some degree but he still had no trol over his movements or any ability to speak.

  ***

  Dear diary… Just kidding. What would be the point? He noticed he didn’t really fet things so that was one upside to his situation. Plus who would read a mental diary?

  However, something iing happeoday. Something iing enough that if he had a diary he may have beeed to put this in it. He was moving scrap around like he did every day. Except this time, some idiot manning a small mobile e smashed into him.

  Not a good way to start your day, especially when you lost. The e, being about three times his size a sent him careening across the bay they were w in. It’s not a fun experience. But something in his mind or from the impact seemed to slot into pd he reached out and mao stop himself.

  Fbergasted at having trol, Alexander fot anything else. Unfortunately, the trol vanished shortly after as his view of the world went dark.

  When it returned again, it was to a cursing and grumbling Yuri. The man was fumbling about in the dead area in his vision.

  Alexander had long wondered about that box. It seemed to perform multiple funs. One was obviously a trol interface for the old man, it also acted as a projector. Alexander figured that was its inal purpose. But now… Now he was his interface to the outside world. Which roblem.

  If that box acted as both an interfad trol point, could he eve trol of his body back while it was still attached? There was no way he was removing it, not if diseg it meant being plunged into the dark silence again.

  Alexander waited for Yuri to fix him and leave before he tested something out. With a signifit effort, he willed one of his fio move. It felt like pressing through a thick wall of mud and his mind was growing fuzzy but he saw one of the digits twitch.

  He released the pressure and rexed his mind as he gave himself a mental high five. He could do this, he could regain trol of his body, it was only a matter of time and willpower.

  ***

  A little clo the upper er of Alexander’s vision di him. ‘Has it been a year already?’

  The clock was one of the many little tricks he had picked up since gaining his mobility back. He still preteo be the dutiful robot and he couldn’t speak anyway. So expining he was a man trapped in this body would have to wait. Not that he wao go about doing that.

  Alexander had realized a few things over this st year. First off, he was unique. And not just unique as in a human trapped in a robot body. That was a given. No, the body itself was unique. He had seen enough human tech from this era to determihat. There hadn’t been a sihing that eveely resembled what he was or what he was made out of.

  Either old man Sokolov didn’t realize this or didn’t care. And Alexander wasn’t about to wave a huge fg in his face stating ‘I’m u me up and study me!’

  Nope, he wanted answers, but he was going to have to find them himself. Thankfully the old scrapper left him to his own devices most of the time. It had taken a bit of effort, study, and pnning, but he had learned how the terminals worked around the yard.

  There was an i, but it wasly like the i from ba his day. Most of the information seemed to be locked behind paywalls, but he had learned some stuff. The first thing he looked up was the actual date. It was 2395. He knew a signifit amount of time had passed from his memories of Earth to now, but he wasn’t quite ready for just how much.

  His st memory was from the mid-2050s. Nearly four hundred years gone, just like that.

  If he had any strong feelings one way or another perhaps he would have been upset that everyone he cared for and loved was long dead. But he couldn’t even remember anyone from his past, let alone feel anything for their loss. Whehought about his situation, he realized if his mind hadn’t been trapped ihis body, he would have died long ago as well. So that was a minor fort.

  The sed thing he learned was where he was. Alexander had inally figured he was in some station orbitih or the Moon. Maybe even Mars. But nope again. He was irov station, located somewhere in Gliese 667, wherever the hell that was. Maybe that was something he k oime but was now lost to the voids in his memory. He would likely never know the truth of that.

  It seemed like eaew answer just geed more questions. He had to put those aside as he had more pressing s.

  Sing his surroundings, he found himself alone. Alexander made his way over to a terminal and began typing. Ohing good about being a robot, he was quid precise. The pages fshed by as he siphoned out a tiny amount of money from Yuri’s at and into his own under a fake name.

  This was Alexander’s great pn to finally get out from under Yuri. The man was fi wasn’t like he abused him or anything. It was just Alexander didn’t want to be a funal sve forever. So he o work for himself. Even if this new him was a fake persona he had purchased. Turns out you could buy just about anything if you knew who to talk to. Of course, Alexander didn’t know anyone. Anyone except Yuri. But after a year of doing Yuri’s work, he had learhe man wasn’t as upstanding as he presented himself to be. And some of the people he worked with were fine w around the w.

  Alexander did derive a little joy from using Yuri’s own moo purchase this fake identity. He didn’t feel bad about doing so, he just thought of it as his long overdue paycheck. But setting up the identity and siphoning off small amounts of money was only the first step, as well as the easiest.