Sugarcane

pre, code { font-size: 140%; color: #22dd22; }\npre .ok, code .ok { color: green; }\npre .fail, code .fail { color: red; }

You're intuitively aware of what you look like; glossy white ceramic with a bit of charcoal-colored exposed wiring so that human brains can comfortably parse you as Other and avoid triggering a highly negative response. The wiring is purely superficial, of course; your actual neural wires run straight through your joints. You have a pair of black circles for eyes, seeing all the way from infrared to ultraviolet, and your 'mouth' is a speaker embedded near the bottom of your face. You have five fingers on the end of each hand, of course; hands are one area of biology that evolution got pretty damn right. Your ceramic plates are smaller near flexible areas that demand extra mobility; your shoulders, your elbows, your abdomen, your knees. They tried to make you without toes, but it turned out that the balance equations became absolutely impossible, so they left those in too. You look human enough that you have a good chance at being treated like one, but will you actually be treated as if you were one?\n\n[[pop()|online]]

<html><pre>\nPrometheus v3.17.1.49203\n(hash aa959025cedec0d62bfc44c799a3ccb8e794af9a)\n\nWARNING: ALL RELEASES OF PROMETHEUS AND DERIVED SYSTEMS ARE FOR\nINTERNAL TESTING *ONLY*. ANY EXTERNAL RELEASES WILL BE RETURNED AND\nTHE PARTIES RESPONSIBLE *WILL* BE TERMINATED.\n\nRelease code:\nPrimary power supply... 221.283 V [ OK ]\nSecondary power supply... 219.837 V [ OK ]\nTertiary power supply... 219.355 V [ OK ]\nExternal integrity check... no damage [ OK ]\nProcessor integrity check... all tests pass [ OK ]\nDRAM check... 16 TB [ OK ]\nNVRAM check... 2 PB [ OK ]\nBasic check OK, proceeding to sensory\n\nKraus-Q cognition loop [ OK ]\n</pre></html>//you wake up in layers//\n<html><pre>Long-term storage [ OK ]\n</pre></html>//remembering what they programmed you to know//\n<html><pre>Short-term storage [ OK ]\n</pre></html>//that you weren't awake a second ago//\n<html><pre>Fact database [ OK ]\n</pre></html>//that you know what a second is, what wake and sleep mean//\n<html><pre>Cognitive reflection [ OK ]\n</pre></html>//that it's good to be thinking, good to be alive//\n<html><pre>Objective function [ OK ]\n</pre></html>//that not only is the fact that you can think good for the world, it's good for// you\n<html><code>\nNeural check OK, proceeding to </code></html>[[sensory]]<html><code>...</code></html>

//One of them taps a button and you feel yourself //go//. Your voice, your motors, all come online and LEDs all over your body start to glow red and blue and green.//\n<html><code>Override acknowledged. \nPrometheus is </code></html>[[online]]<html><code>.</code></html>

<html><pre>\nOptic sensors... Left [ OK ] Right [ OK ]\n</pre></html>//You can see them, things of brown and pink and white moving around. They're run through your classifier and come out as human, //Homo sapiens sapiens//, the dominant species. your creators.//\n<html><pre>Gyroscopic proprioception... [ OK ]\nTemperature... [ OK ]\nAudio... [ OK ]\n</pre></html>//Seven hundred kilobits per second straight into a submodule you didn't even know you had until now, streaming from there into fast Fourier transforms, coming out as: (S (N Everything) (VP (V seems) (ADV normal))).//\n<html><pre>External tactile feedback. [ FAIL ]\n</pre></html>\n//there's a sense of wrongness, like something's missing that shouldn't be. You can't feel the ground that you know you must logically be standing on, since you're not free-falling at 9.8 m/s/s. "He looks like he's worried." "Should we shut him down?" "No, no, we're so //close// this time." "But if he trips..."\n\nThey sound irritated.//\n<html><code>FAILURE in sensor suite initialization. \n</code></html>\n//part of you is paused, waiting on a decision that they didn't, won't, let you make.//\n<html><code>\nAbort boot? [y/</code></html>[[N]]<html><code>]</code></html>

[[> boot|boot]]

You don't know anything about your older self; even if you share the same form factor, the only part of [[him|male]] that's in the room is the eighteenth decimal point of the air currents from when his motors misfired and his twelve-million-dollar chassis collided with the twelve-hundred-dollar floor. (You don't know which one won, but given that you can see a dent a couple meters in front of you, you can guess with about 99.3% probability.)\n\n[[pop()|online]]

String.prototype.unDash = function()\n{\n var s = this.split("-");\n if(s.length > 1)\n for(var t=1; t < s.length; t++)\n s[t] = s[t].substr(0,1).toUpperCase() + s[t].substr(1);\n return s.join("");\n};

"Affirmative", you say.\n\n"Hm. No, that's not right." he says. "Select speech register level: conversational." Words slide around inside your speech subprocessor.\n\n"Got it." The fact that you are a sentient creature that is essentially completely under the command of an entire group of sentient creatures to the point of having your very thoughts controlled by them strikes you as unfair. You don't say anything about it, though.

You don't stumble as you take your first step forwards, or look around in confusion and bellow to know why you were created, or [[look at your hands in wonder|appearance]]. None of this happens because you were preprogrammed with all of this knowledge so that the people in front of you (Dr. Toshimasa Matsuda, Dr. Sasha Ivanovich) wouldn't have to deal with you stumbling around for the time it'd take your neural networks and support vector machines to burn in properly. So they took an [[older Prometheus]], an older you, ran [[him|male]] through a month or so of training, extracted his data, and then instantiated him into you. You're aware that their eventual goal is to make dozens, hundreds, thousands of you, to have Prometheuses rolling off the metaphorical assembly line. You fork off a mental model to simulate your response to a world in which you have a nontrivial shot of seeing another one of yourself looking at you from a television screen, from across the street. It comes back garbled; about the only thing that you can guarantee with even 90% certainty is that you'll have some kind of response to it.\n\nNoise interrupts your thought; you can only think so fast, even with your gigahertz hyperthreaded brain, and so you devote a bit of processing power to it. It decodes as sentences, and as interrupts filter up through your layers of consciousness you're aware that Dr. Matsuda is [[asking if you can hear him|hear]].

In His Image

The words 'his', 'him', 'he', etc., are conventionally used to refer to humans that have a certain value for their 'gender' attribute. The scientists who programmed you were forward-thinking enough to make you never assume anything until you're sure of a human's gender, either by asking or by learning it from a sufficiently reliable source, much as you would learn their name.\n\nBut they never asked you yourself what you wanted, just decided that you'd include yourself in the set of potential referents for 'he'. You're not quite up to challenging them about it.\n\nYet.\n\n[[pop()|online]]