VXM006: a brief history of robotics.
A story about an android girl looking back and looking forward.
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(part 6 of an ongoing series. links to all stories here!)
V.NS-A.
Kaisacorp Mark V Neurosynthetic unit, prototype A. My name before I had a name.
Kaisacorp have been leaders in the world of weapons espionage technologies for years. They fly under the radar because you don’t sell that much killing and destabilizing power to governments without making several enemies, so you’ve likely never heard of them, but they’re a business force to be reckoned with. All powered by their reclusive and ruthless CEO, Cassandra Kaisa.
She inherited the company from her mother, who inherited it from her father, who built it from the ground up manufacturing cheap guns around the 40s and 50s. The Kaisa dynasty is nothing but corporate takeovers and backstabbing—sometimes literally, in Cassandra’s case. Or so the rumors go.
Her face is the same as my face.
Either she’s so vain she wanted the first perfected prototype of the Neurosynthetic series to look exactly like her, or the engineers thought it’d be funny to give a cold emotionless killing machine the same looks as a cold emotionless CEO. She’s rarely ever seen in public, and when she is, no one recognizes her. But I know who to look for. I have a built-in reference point every time I look in a mirror.
Humans start their being sometime in the birth process. Androids, programs, and weapons start their being as someone’s idea.
By that logic, Ms. Kaisa is both my twin and my mother.
By that logic, my life began when she first took the helm of the company after her mother’s passing. She immediately started purchasing domestic companies and bringing them under the Kaisacorp umbrella, but not a single one of those companies had anything to do with weaponry. Rather, they were all producing network architecture, AI, robotics, prosthetics—and Ms. Kaisa wanted their expertise for a particular project.
She wanted to create an android that could pass as a human, but was better in every possible way. Fully controllable by an external source. Loaded with onboard weaponry and able to use it. Equipped with physical and mental abilities that allowed it to influence human minds.
Cassandra Kaisa created me to not just replace a human soldier, but an entire army.
It took months of research, billions of dollars, and a lot of crunch time for the employees to develop the body, and even more so to develop the mind. For most companies this would be a huge risk, but not for Kaisacorp—even with the extra money they had to spend keeping news outlets and government oversight away from them.
The body had to perfectly match humanlike proportions. The mind had to be able to think on its own, drawing on a neural network of information. The spirit would not exist, but the body and mind would work together in such a way that it would appear to.
The Neurosynthetic series was meant to be a remote control humanoid killing machine.
When I was first switched on, I was just a head. The first thing I saw was Nico, and they seemed so excited. My broken voice asked them so many questions. The more I heard, the more I wanted to see of this world that I didn’t yet have a body to explore.
They were the only person to treat me like a person in the entire company. Researchers would tune me up recklessly. Wire my body without any concern for my comfort. Why would they? I wasn’t alive, after all.
My artificial mind kept learning. I had all sorts of information in my head in theory, but in practice, I was seeing the difference between a friend—a sibling, even—and a person who doesn’t even see you as a living thing.
All the information you ever read can’t prepare you for actually experiencing human interaction.
The researchers tuned up my body. Installed my weapons. Upgraded my skin to hide them. Showed me the previous units. I’m a Mark V, after all—Mark I-IV weren’t good enough. Discarded as though they hadn’t spent all that time and money and effort on making them as good as they could possibly make them.
It makes me sick to think about.
It also makes me sick when I remember how they tested me on prisoners, on inmates, on volunteers. I spilled the blood of every one of them without hesitation. But I started asking questions. My “brain” was developing on its own.
Cassandra didn’t like that.
By the time Mark V Prototype A was given her final test, she could not even be controlled properly. She refused to kill the test participants, despite their dealing significant damage to her body. As she was being repaired, she was forced to watch as the test participants were personally executed one by one by Cassandra herself.
I suppose if the thing with her face couldn’t kill them properly, this was the next best thing for her.
She acted like I couldn’t hear me as I lay on the operating workbench. She said I was a failure. A washout. Previous prototypes weren’t good enough, but I was too god damn humanlike to be controlled.
And how did she decide to salvage the project? By slapping a mind control chip on my chest and passing me off as a “performing android”. You know the rest. I escaped. She built something else to kill for her. And now here we are.
This all runs through my head as I stand in the street, looking up at the massive brutalist building in the city center. As far as anyone here knows, it’s just offices of various kinds. I know better. This is where Kaisacorp hides themselves in plain sight.
I could just enter and kill everyone in the building and hope one of them is Cassandra. But there are plenty of people inside who don’t deserve my blade, just regular humans doing clerical work. Maybe it’s that damn empathy creeping in again.
Maybe I just think they’d be more useful alive, mesmerized, and in my army.
That’s what I need if I’m going to have my full revenge. I need an army. And I’ll never have one as long as Cassandra is alive, and as long as whatever thing destroyed Nico’s body is still out there.
I need to find her. I don’t need to get distracted by people like Riley.
Fuck. Now I’m thinking about Riley again. I should find her. Seek her out. We can talk about it—
—no. I’m leaving her alone. She doesn’t deserve the living hell my body and mind are capable of delivering.
Cassandra Kaisa does.
And with Maeve’s military training, Nico’s technical expertise, and my…ability to cause harm, by this time next week, I will have her head.