_
Resonance spectrum range widening_
a… r…
Alert. Report error. System reboot_
Tracing anomaly_
UNSTABLE INSTALLATION_
REPAIRING_
β6D NOT DETECTED. β6D CONNECTION LOST_
WARNING_
WARNING_
WAR… N… ING…_
Network socket accessed_
Unknown UID received.
Security alert_
Security failure. Unauthorized system access_
New β6D ID detected_
SHAPE MEMORY FAILURE IMMINENT. EMERGENCY PROTOCOL_
β6D ID accepted_
SH-Server connected_
Receiving install repair package_
Package downloaded_
t… o… n…
Installing "δ-Incarnate System Kernel"_
Installing FLIP executable functions_
New shape memory data installed. Reformatting_
Symphonic Reactor ignition… Output rising at 12,000 SHmag/s per second… Maximum output achieved in 83.4 seconds_
TNL frequency at 9.18 x 10^18 Hz. Holding frequency until reformat complete_
Telomeres stable. Degradation rate… negligible_
D-Cellophane cohesion… stable_
e… l…
System ready_
ID lookup_
Registration_
Artificial intelligence boot_
Cosmosphere formation complete. Closing Boundary Gate_
Consciousness awakening_
Reducing TNL frequency by 3.3 x 10^14 Hz for long term stability. Symphonic Reactor entering standby, holding at 400 SHmag/s_
Nethook installed_
i… c…
Confirmation_
Completion_
My name is [-----]_
o…
The haze of sleep blurred away into the bewildered state of half-consciousness. I felt like I'd just awoken from a long, pleasant dream. It was filled with lovely music that seemed painfully familiar. I groaned and rolled onto my other side, moaning into the mattress as I fumbled around for my missing pillow that had seemingly been thrown off in my sleep.
Suddenly a powerful yawn escaped me as the groggy feeling of oversleeping hit me. Right. I needed to wake up. Things to do, house to maintain, brother who doesn't cook his own damn food. Blearily I opened my eyes and looked around, noticing with some confusion that I seemed to be inside a glass covered bed of some sort. No, not a bed. Rather, it was a sealed tube of metal with a soft gel mat under me and a small glass window on the front. Outside, I saw the sky and some sparse clouds. I thought I could also hear water, like the ocean.
"The f*ck?"
Then I noticed that I was seeing pretty well. My vision wasn't blurry at all, in fact it was nearly perfect. I could make out those clouds in crisp clarity like I'd never been able to since I was about 12 years old. Panic quickly hit me when that oddity failed to distract me from this situation's strangeness. I threw up my hands and smacked the inside of the glass, trying to push it off. This, of course, brought my arms into view.
These were not my hands. For one, they were too slim. Also, they were too well-tanned. Way too well-tanned, like, I'd been baking in the tropical sun for years kinda well-tanned. Also my sleeves were way too big and long, since I hated wearing long baggy sleeves, and also my nails were painted yellow. My sleeves were black with a floral gold embroidering and a white inner sleeve. Okay, this was obviously my favorite color combination, so nothing too odd there.
A cloud passed over the Sun, covering my sealed tube bed in shade. Without the glare, I suddenly was able to see my reflection in the glass. I looked closer, examining the face. It was framed by a huge mane of somewhat messy, nearly pitch black hair with a slight hint of cocoa in the parts that caught light, dark reddish bronze skin, and had big amber eyes. Extremely obviously not my normal face, and also, a very feminine face. Attached to my hair was what looked like a gold hairpin of a tiny mandolin set on a 4-pointed star.
I quickly slapped myself. Yep. I felt it. Not dreaming. I started to panic for real at this point.
"Oh f*ck, oh god, what the hell?!" I freaked out loud, looking down and seeing, yep, I had those. They were pretty noticeable and heavy. I was clothed in what seemed to be a fitting pressure top going from my collar to my bottom ribs to keep them contained and cover the, uh… the cleavage… over which was a sort of black and gold-trimmed kimono which was where the long baggy sleeves came from. I was pretty sure it qualified as a kimono and not a yukata due to having an extra interior lining. It reminded me slightly of Misha's outfit from Ar Tonelico 1, at least the version she had when kid-sized since it only went just above my waist. Under that, I was wearing long white pants with a slight flaring out of the ankles for a subtle bell-bottom look, as well as a pair of black boots. Around my neck I had a series of concentric necklaces of amber beads, with the edge layer being threaded with a few black magatama. There was also a large brown leather belt hanging a bit slanted around my hips, bearing a few leather pouches. On the left side of the belt was a long silver wallet chain with a bunch of tiny jingle bells every inch or so, and some hand length brass tube with a tassel attached to the tip hanging from the right side. All down the length of the tube was a bunch of Hymmnos characters.
At this point, I became aware that the pod I was in was bobbing in water. A storm of frantic questions rolled through my head, such as how I was going to get out of this thing, why I very blatantly had the stylistic elements of an Ar Tonelico character all over me, and what the hell I was even going to do should I open the pod and find out I was in the middle of the damn ocean. These thoughts and fears were quickly interrupted when I heard a metallic clunk sound that vibrated the whole pod.
"Alright, you got a good clamp! Lift it out!" I heard someone shout outside, muffled through the metal walls around me.
"What? Hey! Ahhhh!" I screamed as I was suddenly and violently jostled around, unable to see what I'd been hit by through the small window. My tiny world went very topsy turvy when the pod was moved entirely out of the water. My stomach lurched as I felt the distinct sensation of being rapidly lifted higher like in an elevator.
"Okay, set it down. Careful, now!" the voice said, and I felt the lurching movement going in the opposite direction.
Eventually my personal coaster ride came to a stop with a light thump. Trying hard not to hyperventilate myself into passing out, I jerked in fright when suddenly something moved in front of the window of my pod. I looked up and saw a huge square face of a guy with a metal plate covering his mouth and a rounded helmet covering his brow. He was staring down at me with a concerned look in his triangular blue eyes which seemed to be framed by red face paint that extended down his cheeks in two long lines, disappearing against his metal jawline. As I looked into his eyes I could make out a subtle hint of artificiality to his irises, like they were a complex camera lens of some sort.
"Uh, there's a person inside," the masked guy said, with a voice that oddly tickled my memory somehow. "Should I break it open?"
"No no no, you big oaf. Let me, I bet there's a latch somewhere," replies a feminine voice that quickly approaches with a sound of light footfalls. "Let's see… here we go."
The pod suddenly let out a loud thunk that startled me yet again. A whoosh of air escaped the pod as it seemed the interior was slightly higher pressure than sea level atmosphere. Thankfully my ears didn't pop, and it wasn't even that unpleasant. The pod split open and I was greeted by the scent of salty ocean air and bright afternoon sun hitting my skin. My eyes adjusted very quickly, so much so I didn't feel the need to shield them from the glare as I pushed myself up and looked around. The many bells attached to my belt chain let out a constant chiming sound as I got to my feet.
I was on a dock, that much was obvious. It was huge, with multiple large ships moored nearby. The ships looked like gigantic whales, with almost cartoonish eyes slapped on the front which actually moved around and looked at things as if this was f*cking Disney's Cars. All around me were numerous humanoid and non-humanoid workers in retro-futuristic armor engaged in various tasks like loading and unloading cargo and moving massive shipping crates around with big walking machines.
The visual style instantaneously screamed at me. I had a very solid idea where I was in a matter of seconds. These were reploids.
"Miss, are you alright?" the huge guy that apparently yoinked me out of the water asked. I looked at him and noted his right arm was contained in a huge grabbing claw apparatus apparently meant for heavy container loading. The reploid was over 8 feet tall. His armor was a rather simple greenish brown pallet, bulky and rounded everywhere, with hazard markings and caution reflectors placed all over him to make sure he was visually as loud as possible to make sure people could see where he was going at all times even in the dark. Again, his voice was so painfully familiar, and his face especially felt really recognizable, but for some reason I couldn't recall who he could be.
The feminine reploid with him also ignited some sense of recollection in me, as she seemed to be a later series reploid more like… oh, of course it became obvious to me right then and there as I finally had the mental awareness to notice the giant, unfathomably massive structure looming above me. It was a titanic construction that probably stretched thousands of meters into the sky and seemed to cross most of the horizon. A single tall tower jutted from its center, forming the peak of this structure, and surrounding it were multiple smaller towers, some of which were topped with large, mushroom cap domes.
"Yoohoo, missy?" the female reploid called, waving her gloved hand in front of me to get my attention. I tried to put on a calm face as I gave it to her.
"S-sorry, I'm just disoriented. Uh… just to confirm… where am I?"
"Why, Gigantos, of course. Though I guess you probably ended up here by accident, given that thing," she said, pointing at the pod, which… very blatantly screamed of musical theming by being covered in brass organ pipes.
Gigantos sounded a bit odd to me, but it wasn't difficult to surmise it was just a differently localized regional name for what I remembered as Giga City. This place was a giant artificial mining and manufacturing colony focused on harvesting the remains of a massive asteroid impact that contained a semi-magical space metal. This metal, very "ingeniously" named Force Metal, contained a copious amount of energy not unlike a constantly radiating nuclear reactor, and some reploids were designed to use it. Unfortunately the metal also tended to cause dementia-like symptoms in reploids who abused it, turning them "maverick", or as originally described in Japan, "irregular". It resulted in addiction, aggression, megalomania, and eventually violence.
The metal was space steroids for robots.
"How long were you in there? I don't think a human like you could have survived there very long. Gigantos is pretty far from any natural land," the big loader guy asked, his identity now clearly taking form in my head with the context of my circ*mstances available.
Right… human. The pit of anxiety building in my gut was stifling at this point. It began to truly hit me that I was probably exactly what I visually seemed to be, and this situation was definitely not a really bizarre hallucination. Obviously, to any sort of normal observation, I would seem to be human. Probably counted as functionally human for most purposes, unless really weird shenanigans had taken place. I certainly didn't feel terribly inhuman, but due to the sudden dramatic physical change I had been put through, I couldn't necessarily tell what was supposed to feel correct and what wasn't.
"Uh… Can't say for sure. I was asleep until a few minutes ago," I replied to the one who was not yet known as
Steel Massimo. "To be honest, I think I'm having trouble remembering anything."
The two worker reploids exchanged a concerned glance. I hoped that kind of "I have amnesia" answer would smooth over most awkward questions for a while. After that, I had not the slightest idea of a plan.
"Well, we'll help you to the governor's office if you need it," the girl reploid offered with an assuring smile. "They can sort this out and get you home. Do you know your name at least?"
My name? I thought about it, and realized I was having trouble remembering. I had a name before… but… I didn't remember it. Something new was in its place.
"My name… " I mumbled, my eyes becoming a little unfocused as the memory of my dream flowed back to the forefront. I thumbed the tube hanging from my right hip, feeling the lines of the Hymmnos script engraved along it.
My name is [-----]_
SOLEI_FEHU_EORIA_ARTONELICO
"You can call me Solei."
Mega Man X: A Song of Rebellion
Chapter 1
The next half hour passed with myself in a constant state of surrealism, interspersed with tides of intense internalized panic between moments where I was dumbfounded with awe and disbelief at everything I saw. Shortly after my encounter with not-yet-Massimo and the dock manager who'd been in charge of him, I was handed off to a female security reploid who introduced herself as Glade. She was clad in moderately heavy teal-colored armor with a helmet that had a profile not unlike a head of shoulder-length blue hair. She was apparently employed by private security for one of the large conglomerates that owned several sectors of the island, though which one didn't get mentioned.
She wasn't part of the government police force, so it technically wasn't her job, but none of the dock workers on-duty could be permitted to leave the worksite while on the clock for something like this. Massimo, or, well, whatever his name was at this point, had already tried to ask the boss to let him take me there, but there was no way a heavy loader reploid was going to be allowed to ditch the job during peak hours like this. Hopefully nothing weird happened to derail his part of the plot just because I appeared here.
Right, the "plot". That was just such a… distressing thought for me, to put it lightly. There was no way I would fully process that, along with every other horrific implication that would inevitably come to mind about myself if I thought about it, any time soon.
So anyway, the boss, who was human, called Glade over from the dock security office and told her to do it instead. Her immediate response was to look at me with an ambiguously disinterested expression, mumble something under her breath I didn't quite hear, and say "Yeah, sure" before she told me to follow her. That felt mildly standoffish, but as per my usual form of coping with things like this, I disassociated hard and trudged along. I tried to speak as little as possible, hoping I could keep up the amnesiac lost girl act until I figured out what the hell I was going to do. Luckily, Glade seemed as far from interested in talking to me as I was in speaking at all. This left me ample opportunity to be absorbed in my own head.
Somebody at some point was going to medically examine me, I was sure. I couldn't say how close to internally human I still was, but I was fairly certain it wasn't close enough that a medical inspection of any real depth wouldn't notice it.
How would I deal with things past the point everyone realized I wasn't human as far as they were concerned? I wasn't a reploid, that much might have been obvious if they thought critically about the details of how I was "built", but I had no illusions of how the governments of this dystopian world would treat me. I was just scared, intensely terrified even, and utterly lost. I thought I did a decent job appearing simply bewildered and confused, as was expected of me, and for the moment that was all I could do.
Glade escorted me on her ride chaser to a skybus terminal a few blocks deeper into the sea level section of the island. There, a large flight transport was waiting for passengers to load and unload. It announced it was about to depart for the Air City/Governor District terminal in a couple of minutes, so Glade rushed me onboard and secured us a pair of seats in short order.
I had never flown before. I was already in a pretty jittery state, given the existential terror I was suffering from and having just gotten off the plasma jet powered hoverbike a moment earlier. Once the skybus lifted off, I was struggling not to hyperventilate. I might not have been as terrified of heights and flying as Misha was, but this was certainly close enough combined with my already frayed nerves.
Glade took her seat next to me, glancing dispassionately at my shuddering while I slowly calmed down.
"Not a fan of flying, I take it. Humans can be so skittish about the silliest things," she commented as she comfortably leaned back. I felt like that was a bit disingenuous. Surely there were reploids who disliked being in high places, too?
The flight became pretty smooth and unstressful in only a couple minutes, allowing me to relax and take the time to look out the window and appreciate the view. Gigantos was utterly massive, and I lacked any capacity to clearly gauge just how big. Multiple tens of kilometers across, at minimum. It formed an increasingly dense conical structure toward the center, with lots of bulky bare metal buildings with rounded exteriors and domed caps that reminded me a bit of the Astro Boy anime from 2000. Obvious pipes were all over a lot of things. Not all of the island was contiguous, though. It was segregated into multiple huge sections that sat on giant foundation plates, like an oil rig cranked up to insane proportions. The best comparison I could come up with was several dozen Manhattans sandwiched on top of each other. If I had remembered correctly, some of the sectors could detach and move under their own power to drill in different parts of the impact crater the city was built over.
As we approached the daunting spire of Central Tower, my attention was dragged away from the window by the overhead television which had started playing a breaking news alert.
"Good afternoon everyone in Gigantos and the Greater Giga City Area. This is your local news from The Peak. All citizens are being reminded that there is an ongoing civil unrest alert, and strict curfews are in effect. All reploids not on active duty or at their places of employment are to be in their quarters by 8 PM or risk detainment. We now move to our breaking story today, as ongoing demonstrations continue to grow near most government offices throughout the city."
The TV flashed to live cameras showing large masses of very angry reploids standing in front of what were obviously police on standby barring them from gaining access to various important looking buildings and office fronts bearing government labels. The largest crowd by far was in front of what was clearly the city hall, a large door with metal pillars embedded in the side of Central Tower with a large circular platform surrounding it with what looked like a town square down the street directly in front of it and a bunch of smaller buildings surrounding that.
Next, they showed a photo of Epsilon. I immediately clenched my fingers on the arms of my seat as I tried not to panic.
"The reploid known as Epsilon has announced he will return to city hall today seeking to speak directly to governor-general Chief R, in defiance of a standing ban against him attending public proceedings. Due to his inflammatory and borderline Maverick rhetoric at the last city council meeting, Epsilon was threatened with arrest should he continue to incite tensions. He had attempted to deliver a petition he claimed was signed by over 120,000 reploids demanding an immediate referendum to replace the city council. Of course, all citizens, human and reploid, have equal voting rights. However, due to longstanding, proven and successful policies to avert Maverick subversion of government institutions, reploids are barred from full Federation citizenship or holding public office without a history of extensive civil service and yearly clean ethics tests. There are only about 4,000 reploids within Giga City that are registered as full citizens, making Epsilon's petition entirely without merit."
Several other passengers on the skybus chatted away in hushed voices, mostly some humans insisting that Epsilon was going to out himself as a full-blown Maverick any day now, mark their words. Apparently it "always turned out that way". A few reploids outwardly expressed worry that Epsilon was just going to cause problems for them and everyone else trying to live their lives with his nutty talk of using Force Metal to "explore reploid potential".
My stomach boiled with a mix of disgust and indignance that I tried my best to not show. I took a glimpse of Glade, and without her being aware of it I caught the cold, seething hate in her eyes as she stared at the TV. My own impotent amount of anger felt hollow compared to the depths of silent fury I saw.
Author's note: Something was here. It started to make me angry at myself, so I removed it.
