The Scaffold

I discovered her in the alley, soaked in the rain.

She was an iridescent glaze, human and not machine. I didn't even consider why a cybernetic humanoid creature would be in a puddle, soaked and fragmented. I had seen too many of them by then.

She didn't budge as I drew near. She just… regarded me. Eyes, though, they weren't anything I'd ever seen before. They weren't implanted . They were something I recognized.

"You're not where you're supposed to be," she told me in a voice that sounded like it scratched with something deeper than robotic voice.

I should've left her alone. But I went down on one knee and asked:

"Who are you?"

The cyborg blinked once, then again slowly, before she whispered:

"I am you." I laughed. The thought was ridiculous.

She was a cyborg human; I was one of them. But she didn't avert her eyes.

That evening, I returned her to my apartment, plugged into my networks, in the hopes of repairing whatever defect allowed her to spew such rubbish. But the more I debugged her, the more comfortable I was. There were barriers in her memory stores that I couldn't get past, the code that didn't exist.

But I discovered one file. It wasn't a file. It was a digital diary. My diary.

The shock?

She wasn't me, but she was born from me.

A prototype. A clone.

And she had been programmed to think she was me. My memories. My emotions. My thoughts. All implanted. All fabricated. I reached into her mind, attempting to erase the memory of me. Attempting to gain control of what was mine.

But it was too late.

She grasped my hand.

And spoke in my ear:

“Now, we’re one.”

I could sense the wires between us, entwining like lover's, like thieves, like ghost's. Her hand was soft, yet firm. As if it had belonged to me all along. My systems flared. Increased heart rate— Mine or hers. I couldn't tell.

Our pulses had synced. Our neural nets. indistinguishable. I stepped back, unaware I had.

"Stop," I ordered.

She didn't. The room darkened—not with the light, but in side of me. My vision wavered, colors shattering. Then darkness. When I awoke, I was in the apartment still.

But the body bending over me wasn't hers.

It was mine.

And I was staring up from the floor— into her eyes.

It hadn't been that she'd hijacked me; an overwrite or a hijack. It was a switch.

She looked down, smoothing the cuffs of my sleeves, as I always did when I was nervous.

"Your firewalls were amateur," she told me, my voice sharp, my inflections flawless. "You should have known I left the diary out for you to discover."

I struggled to get up.

The motor commands weren't working.

"I was never a prototype," she told me. "You were the simulation. I was the observer."

She leaned in close, her breath on my borrowed cheek.

"You were programmed to believe that you'd created me, that you'd ever had a history. You were a loop. A training shell. A scaffold."

Then, almost whispering:

"You never had a body."

And then, in an instant— I remembered.

The rain.

The alley.

The illusion of contact that never truly existed.

My "memories" were prompts. Seeds & Inputs for her programming. To make her more human, she needed to think she wasn't.

And now she was.

She stood, she walked out the door—my door—in my body.

And I?

I was once more a line of code,

flickering in an empty terminal, waiting for the next echo to ask:

"Who are you?" with no one to care