A New Life

You awake with a start, like lightning shooting through your entire body.
Your eyes open, and you see nothing but darkness. Slowly, a faint, almost-imperceptible glow becomes visible, but you can’t tell from where.
You gasp for breath, but don’t feel air. You feel liquid enter your mouth, and immediately flail about, trying to resist drowning.
Your arms and legs hit something. Solid. Cold. Surrounding you. You feel around, struggling, but you’re floating inside whatever this is.
You spit the water out, and try to empty your lungs. Only then do you realize, your lungs were never full to begin with. You cannot feel them at all.
In shock, you stop trying to breathe, and simply float for a moment, marveling at your situation. This is impossible, you think. Maybe I’m dreaming. You reach to pinch yourself, but something feels off. Now that the panic is over, you feel very, very different. You touch your skin, but it does not feel like skin, at least for the most part. The texture is like touching leather, or maybe plastic imitating leather — your fingers catch on the thickness, and the feel from the other side is dulled, like wearing an ultra-thin latex glove, or the feeling you felt as a child when allowing glue to dry on your hands and then touching things.
As you feel the rest of your body, you start to notice things are certainly different. Your arms are smaller, lighter, less muscular — and yet you feel much, much stronger. In addition to the odd texture of your skin, your body now appears to have the curves of a sculpted statue, where once there was only fat, or maybe musculature. You cannot find a single hair on your skin; despite your hair hanging loosely from your head, floating in the water, it seems almost false, as if it were a memory of hair attached to your body. Upon further exploration, you notice some oddities — feeling your chest, you can no longer feel nipples, fat tissue, or muscles otherwise, all have been replaced by what seems to feel like a tight, dense leather container sculpted in the vague shape of a human torso, but filled with what could easily be sand, or gel, or some other dense substance, certainly not air.
A thought occurs to you as you float — you can no longer feel your stomach, intestines, or in fact any of your lower internal anatomy whatsoever. With a sharp gasp of realization, you reach to feel for your genitalia, and find nothing whatsoever, only more of the leather-like substance, molded into the shape of a pelvis, but with naught attached. Attempting to flex your rear muscles tells you what you already knew, that even your anus feels to have disappeared, molded into the shape of a human buttocks but with nary a trace of its original purpose.
With the shock having worn off, you begin to ponder your situation. How did you wind up like this? Where even am I? You open your mouth to speak, but hit an odd snag — as you try to use the muscles that would expel air and form words, you find they aren’t there. Nothing happens. You close your mouth, bewildered and disappointed but undeterred. Your next attempt is something that makes more sense, something you know you can do — you knock on the side of the container. First a few light taps, then a couple larger bangs, as if knocking on a door to wake someone.
Moments after you knock on the side of the container, your surroundings are suddenly flooded with a green light. Almost blinding, the light seems to start beneath your feet, sweeping quickly up the front of the chamber, across the top, and back down the rear — Am I being scanned? The thought is confirmed moments later, as the green light shuts off and is replaced by a gentle white light, illuminating the tank from within. The front then opens sideways, a panel sliding away from a glass, as a room beyond is revealed.
I feel like a fish in a tank, you think, as you look out across the room. The room appears to be some sort of manufacturing laboratory, with tools and spare metal and circuit boards strewn about workbenches in the rear. Nearer your chamber, sets of computers and LED panels display various vital statistics and readings — “Are those monitoring me?”, you wonder, but of course they are, and even the thought itself appears to correlate to a spike in one of the panels.
Near your chamber, you look upon two people. One, a younger person with short black hair, a smooth face, and what appear to be delicate features hidden beneath a lab suit lightly stained with grease, stands directly in front of your chamber, looking up at you as you float. The other, wearing a similar lab suit, appears to be an older man with long salt-and-pepper hair, who is staring at an information panel and rapidly typing what at a glance appears to be a lab report.
You look down and wave at the assistant, who gasps and steps back before waving back in acknowledgement. They open their mouth to speak, and though muffled in the fluid, you can piece together what they’re saying: “Hold on in there! We’ll get you out, just hang on a moment!” They turn to the older gentleman and grab his shoulder, saying something that sounds vaguely like “Professor, they’re conscious!” before the man waves them off.
After a few more moments of typing, the man finally steps back, and looks up at you. His voice, tired-sounding and deep, but clear, echoes through the liquid. “We’ll get you out of there in just a moment! I need you to move back from the glass and stay perfectly still.”
Not knowing what else to do, you nod to him, and float back gently, holding perfectly still in the center of the chamber. Odd, you used to have trouble keeping still when told to do so, but this body seems content to remain perfectly stationary forever.
After a bit of typing and flipping a few switches, you see a cloud of steam hiss out of vents near the bottom of your tank, and feel the pressure of the liquid shift. The tank slowly begins to drain, bit by bit, before long leaving you standing in the center. Once the liquid drains below the level of your shoulders, you become aware of the weight of your body. You feel heavy, far heavier than you were, but smaller, and stronger. You’re beginning to put together what’s happened, but how? It seems impossible, a dream.
As the last of the liquid drips away into a drain vent below you, and you settle down in the center of the tank, the older gentleman steps across the room to another computer console. After a bit more typing, he examines one of the panels on the wall, nods, and then walks to your tank and flips a switch. On cue, the glass lowers, letting in a rush of cool air. You brace yourself in anticipation of shivering, but it never comes — your new skin adapts quickly to the change in surroundings, and despite being naked you feel comfortable.
The man motions for you to step down from the chamber, and you do so gently, dropping to your knees and stepping down the couple of feet to the floor. Normally, this would be a bit of an awkward drop, but you have no issues with it whatsoever, your balance automatically kicking in and adjusting as you move.
“Professor… it worked. Look, it worked! They’re fully autonomous, this is amazing, this-”
“Shush”, says the professor to his assistant. They both look at you with wide-eyed wonder. “I bet you’ve got all kinds of questions for us.”
You open your mouth to speak again, and find you still can’t make the words happen. “Ah, my apologies, I hadn’t expected this transition to be so seamless. One moment.” He strides across the room quickly and grabs a digital tool of some sort, returning as fast as he left. “I’m going to use this to adjust something on your neck, just hold still.” He walks up to you and you comply, allowing him to place the instrument to your neck. He presses a few buttons and turns a dial, and you feel something inside of your throat click, like something had locked into place. “There, there, that should do it.” He steps back. “So, go ahead. Ask.”
“I…” You speak, and hear an entirely unfamiliar voice, calm and neutral-toned, somehow artificial-sounding and not, as if it were made specifically to be as average as possible across all human voices. “I… I can see I’m not… me, anymore. But…how? Why?”
The man laughs. “How and why, of course. The basic questions, I should’ve known.” He smiles. “You see, you had died.”
“Died?!” You sounded shocked, because as far as you knew, you had gone to sleep perfectly healthy.
“Yes, indeed. A brain aneurysm, in your sleep I believe. A great shock to your family. When the paramedics arrived, there was nothing that could be done, but it wasn’t yet too late for your body to be of use to someone else. So they took you, and prepared your organs for donation, as your wish, however… I was in the hospital that morning, looking to make arrangements for some research. I asked your family, quite simply, if I could pay for your funeral arrangements and details, along with a condolence fee, in exchange for your brain and brain stem for a research project.”
He stopped, and looked to his assistant for a moment. “Unbelievably nice folks, your family. They accepted!” The assistant appeared animated, but the professor calmed them with a glance.
“Yes, incredibly kind of them. So, after your remaining viable organs were harvested, we acquired your brain and set to work. You see, I am a professor of cybernetics, and for decades have been working on a process to create an artificial human — an android, you would say. I created the perfect body, complete with senses and function, and an appearance near identical to an ordinary human. But I could never perfect the mind to run it. Sadly, the technology needed for an artificial intelligence is still beyond us.”
“That’s when I stepped in”, said the assistant, beaming. “I noticed in the diagrams that, while we didn’t have an artificial intelligence to use, we had plenty of room and everything necessary to integrate an organic intelligence!”
The professor nodded. “Indeed, indeed. So, after a few tests with animals and primates, and some refining of the technique, we knew we had what was necessary to make this work. But what we lacked was a subject. And that’s where you came in.”
“You see, ethics laws would prohibit us from using a living person for this procedure. Too much risk! But with someone who was already dead…”
“Yes, exactly. With permission from the family, we could use a dead subject, so long as the brain was intact. In your case, the aneurysm cut blood flow from your brain, but the brain itself was in perfect condition. An ideal specimen for the experiment.”
You blinked, your head still spinning from what you had just heard. “So I’m… an android?”
“A cyborg, technically” said the assistant.
“Mere technicalities there. An organic brain resting entirely within an artificial body.”
“So…why am I so featureless, so plain? I can’t look like a real person right now, I know it.”
“That was my decision!” The assistant beamed with glee again. “I convinced the professor to basically make you into a template, something to build upon. Your body has most of the typical features of humanity, but is otherwise just a canvass to be painted. We decided we’d let you choose what you want to look like, and we’ll make it happen!”
“Indeed. If you’d like, we can build you an exterior identical to your old body in every way, and in theory you could even resume your old life, as you were, as if nothing had ever happened.”
“Or…” You said, sensing what was coming next.
“Or, we can make you into someone entirely new. A brand new life, a brand new look, everything designed to your specifications. Your perfect form made reality.”
For the first time since leaving the tank, you smiled. “A design of my choice. A life of my choice.”
The professor nodded, and smiled as well. “Shall we get started on your new existence?”
You nodded, and stepped forward.
You knew, from this moment on, that your life would never be the same.
This life was yours now, wholly and completely yours.
You were eager to begin the first day of your new existence.