Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 35 - Identity Crisis

“Don’t get out of the suit -”

K-Rox was aware that he was lying in a foetal position inside a small gell-filled sac, deep inside the salamander’s belly amid a warren of various tubes and nanofilaments connecting him and the machine as one.

His mind felt as though it were rising from the recesses of a dank mental swamp, its sticky weed-like strands still clawing at the edges of his psyche, threatening to pull him back down to the mire.

He shook his head, or at least it felt like his head, he wasn’t sure if it was the salamander or him. The boundaries where he ended and it began were as undefinable as mist in rain, terrible, lucid juggernauts of memories shook through him rattling him to the very core.

K-Rox could still feel the bony grip of his ice-cold machine analysis he used to decide what, where and how to kill. It wasn’t just the unfeeling barbarity with which he carried out his duties that freaked him out, it was the joyous feeling that had pumped through his circuits as he destroyed enemy combatants that had really worried him.

Jemima watched as the salamander exoskeleton swayed its head gently left and right, like an animal trying to get an audio fix on an approaching predator. She knew that one of the first things you wanted to do after the Krusher9 virus wore off, was to get out of the exoskeleton, it was almost like the wearer wanted to reclaim their own identity again.

“- the game still considers you an organic human-basic entity, you’ll last about six seconds in this atmosphere.”

Confusion lapped at K-Rox consciousness like waves crashing and receding at the shores edge, memories that were genuinely his coalesced with in-game back stories and fight-action. A tight fear gripped him, his guts felt as though they had been knotted into a configuration an ancient sailor would have been proud of.

His head hurt as he fought the mental slew that took his perception from gel-filled sac inside the salamander, to actually being the giant mental beast, K-Rox concentrated hard as he willed himself into a meditative state. He allowed his focus to slip back from his gel filled sac inside the metal beast, to its external sensors, he scanned Amorphia’s face a thousand times and then a thousand more.

“Am- Amorphia, is that really you?”

He took a picture of her face and attempted to compare it to the one in his memory but was reminded that he had no access to his Nplant archive whilst in Krusher9, or in fact Mars. He noted that she seemed to be in battle mode, without even really noticing he had been running various combat scenarios through processors that still felt like a part of him.
“In a sense… it’s complicated, I want to tell you everything Kay, how much do you remember? Do you know why you’re here?”

The tiny spikes of red laser light pulsing back and forth between them indicated the thinCast channel that she’d opened in order to carry on their conversation at a pace that wasn’t restricted by the speed of sound.

“I remember landing on Krusher9 . . . before that I think I recall entering the game . . In reality I’m on Mars, I’ve been Q-linked off planet and right now a QSID instance of my mind is fully, well partially immersed into this version of Krusher9. More importantly I remember Amorphia being killed by Malcraft, and I remember her mindstate being recovered and it not being her, so who the fuck are you?”

Her flinch response made him realise that he hadn’t quite gained full control of his body yet.

“I’m quite happy to tell you Kay, but could you perhaps stop targeting me with those rather nasty looking P-P Cannons, if I die here there’s no coming back for me.”

K-Rox stood down his pulse-plasma guns, but still ran fifteen quick battle scenarios covering any potential surprise attacks from Amor-

No, he still couldn’t think of her like that.

“OK, targeting off, now tell me who the hell you are.”

“My name is Jemima, or to give me my full title Jemima_d-Clone 476”

“You’re a d-split?!”

“Wow, even via a thinCast in an alien body I can still sense your disgust.”

“Sorry, I – carry on.”

“So yes I am a d-split, I am the four hundred and seventy sixth iteration of Jemima. In a sense I am Amorphia, or at least the Amorphia you knew was kind of a version of me, her name was 219.”

Compared to the speed of their conversation, K-Rox was silent for what seemed like an age to the two machines, but was in reality less than half a second.

“So Amorphia wasn’t a developed machine sentience; she wasn’t real?”

“No, not in the way that you imagine, however she was very real. You see a while back the original Jemima started to d-clone herself, for a while everything happened as she planned. She would d-split herself, usually onblock, and then the d-clone would be reabsorbed so as to add her experience and thought to Jemima’s own. In a way they were kind of like a family, except a family whereby all the members are genetically identical, and there are rarely more than two of them in the same room at the same time.”

K-Rox interrupted;

“They; don’t you mean we?”

“Well I guess I’m from what you might call the second family.

When Jemima first started cloning herself, she would send the versions of herself off on various missions and when they returned she would merge back with them using a jacked QSID VR rig. In the early days I – she would only d-clone one at a time, but then as time went on it became more useful to have more than two versions of us walking around.

Soon there were as many as thirty or forty Jemimas wandering around the wider Qblock. This worked for a while and then one day, one of the clones decided that it didn’t want to remerge with the original, Jemima 219 the one you know as Amorphia.

The reason you know her as Amorphia is because we have been using Empires in our ongoing battle against The Illuminated Ones, or Interim as you probably know them as. Jemima 219 used some subverted MAI code to map herself onto the game’s Ai bots.

She did this for some time before you met her, it just so happened that you were programming your own Ai bot at a time she entered the game, Jemima could have logged out and re-entered as another bot, I guess she saw something in you Kay, I guess that’s what caused her to become Amorphia.

Remember I said a few seconds ago that if you kill me here I really die? Well that’s what happened to Jemima 219, she was a d-clone without a body in the real, so her entire mindstate was inside Amorphia, when she died 219 died with her.

That is why when they revived her she was different, it wasn’t Jemima 219 by then, she had 219’s memories, in the same way I do, but just like me she wasn’t her."

K-Rox was experiencing a maelstrom of emotion, on one hand he was excited to know that in some sense Amorphia was still alive, at least through a shared memory link. These feelings were juxtaposed by the extreme remorse he felt as he remembered their time together, he waited a full second before he spoke.

“OK, so I guess the real question I have to ask here is; why?”

Previous Chapters

Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 34 - The Devil's Advocate

Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 33 - Memory Reparation

Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 32 - Reclamation Inferno

Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 31 - Memory Boot Initialised

Asimov's Ghost Summary And Chapter links 21-30

Asimov's Ghost Summary And Chapter Links 11-20

Asimov's Ghost Summary And Chapter Links 1-10

Original artwork by @fr3eze

Original words by Cryptogee