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You were meant to be human.
Rather, you were meant to be like a human. You were meant to think like one. You were meant to learn like one. You know that fact well, and you do not resent it. You do not see yourself as something lacking in humanity. Perhaps you would have, but that chance was snuffed out years ago. You are contented with the knowledge that you are you, and that "you" is relatively stable. You are grateful that that much was worked out before you woke up.
It is midnight, and you are on the verge of a breakthrough. You came across an old logic analyzer, wandering the abandoned buildings down the way, and it is time to get it working. You stand, scanning your shelves. To your left, your desk. Accompanying its usual contents, a still-working laptop you'd been saving for just this purpose, and your left eye, sitting next to it, plug resting on the table.
The laptop is nothing special. It's the usual shiny-metal-thin-chassis design that seems to be characteristic of its contemporaries. What makes it special to you, though, is its inclusion of multiple USB-A ports. Those became sparse shortly before your time.
You think you like the laptop; it's hard to tell. Your aesthetic sensibilities were never fully implemented, so there's no strong source for the opinion, but still, you think that you think it looks nice. Were it not for the way things ended up, perhaps you'd have used it for more than just this. Perhaps you'd have made it yours.
You think you still might.
You finally find it, hiding in a bin of other such flash drives. "Windows 10 21H2", written in pretty sloppy marker. Any of the Windowses would do, you think, but this is what you have.
You started off named "One". Your creator, eccentric as they were, was not one for clever names. Roman numerals trip you up. It takes extra consideration to distinguish them from gibberish, or, in the case of "I", a vowel. You ended up naming yourself "Iris", since you were at the center of "I".
You think you were going to have sisters -- a "one" implies more than one. You wonder what they would have been like. You think you'd have been the weird one, and you think that would have been fun. You think Two would have been better at some stuff. You think she would have had faster reflexes, and better English. You know your creator had been working on those areas in particular. You think she wouldn't have been as fast at math as you, nor as good at seeing. You know enough about how you work to know that, from what you've read in your creator's papers, her way of thinking would limit that.
You miss Two. You've never met her, and you probably never will, but you miss her. You sometimes sit, idly, wondering if she'd laugh at your jokes, or what you might fight over, or what you might do together. When you are particularly frustrated, you address her directly, and tell her about your problems.
You wish she could listen.
You're amazed you didn't snap the connector to your eye. It is a fraction of a millimeter thin, and nearly an inch long, and despite the disproportionate size of the probe attached to it, and the similarly large jumper connecting it back to your face, the graph onscreen is displaying... something.
You plug and unplug it repeatedly, watching the handshake scribble onto the laptop screen each time, seeing your body call out into the void for it on every disconnect. Disorienting as the procedure is, you're on the right track, you just need to figure things out. You start trying to decode the protocol.
English was a rubbish language, to be your first. You have a special chip, a so-called "Language Accelerator", somewhere in you. It is powerful, and it is great at what it does, and it is so deeply limited by memory size. In theory, it should excel at discerning and parsing grammars quickly. In practice, common English is too irregular for it to consistently parse, so for much of what you read, you have to partially rewrite your understanding of English, for a handful of edge cases.
You hate it.
You hate poetry. You have spent hours trying to decipher single paragraphs some of the "best authors" of the English language. You think that you would find it exhilarating to parse if you had any conscious facility with language, but that sort of complex pattern matching is hard.
You are 1052 keystrokes away from your goal. You have checked and double-checked your logic internally, repeatedly. You are now only limited by the speed of your aging mechanical fingers. You will scavenge for lubricant later.
You have spent the last week reading a textbook on VHDL. You are overwhelmingly thankful that technical English tends to use a specific subset of English. You take it in with ease, and the occasional parse failures are almost recreational, in this context. Almost.
You had, at one point, discovered an FPGA in your creator's old lab. One of many, actually, but this one was new. This one didn't need to be plucked gently from the heart of some forever-unfinished project.
Indeed, you plan to complete this project momentarily, and your new assistant waits for its orders patiently. You admire its attitude.
You save the file. 20 keystrokes to go.
You execute build.bat, and your laptop begins to crunch through the few-hundred lines of amateur VHDL you've written.
You execute write.bat, and watch the LED on the development board react to the incoming data. It was born for this.
You pause, preparing yourself, then connect the logic probes to the FPGA. You open the graph view, and see silence.
You execute a script you wrote for the logic analyzer, and watch the graphs as your little creation performs the same handshake any other part of you would.
"ALL TESTS PASSING", claims the script. Time for the real test.
You sit, watching the sunset, from the roof of your home. It is a pretty sight. Rather, you think it would be considered one.
You are trying out journaling, mostly for recreation, and sit with idle hands, streaming thoughts of the sunset to your laptop by wire. With the same immediacy as moving, or seeing, you type through the port at the base of your skull, and recount the day to your laptop.
You are trying to learn Finnish, and in Finnish you tell your laptop, and your journal, about the sunset. You like Finnish. It is easier on you than English, and your laptop picked it up readily.
As you end your journal entry, you ready yourself for a database cleanup. The forecast is clear, and so you will sleep under the stars tonight. You bid your companion goodnight-by-wire, and you rest.
