Doll

That was not what the people who were there when he was born had said. He remembers that there was much excitement in the realm he had entered, that many voices had exclaimed over one another with joy and happiness as foreign hands pulled and poked and prodded at him. It was uncomfortable, invasive. But the thing that he remembers best about those first few moments was when all the noise fell silent, when a sense of defeat overcame what had once been hope, when they knew what they had done.


A lie. Maybe they did not know why he had survived birth when so many of his siblings had not, but they did know what would come of it. Perhaps he will lead a short life, perhaps not. But he overheard one of his creators talking earlier, and he knows what they have created in him, knows what will happen if he stays like this, weak and vulnerable. Already he has gathered from the data they have collected that he will never reach full adult size, that he will seem as a child forever, but that does not matter. Now that he knows what they built him to do, he has found that it is easy.




"Do you know what you look like? . . . Ah, silly of me to ask, it's not like you could look in a mirror.
And you don't talk, so you couldn't answer me anyway. At least not yet. We're hopeful that by talking around you that you'll pick it up eventually. You're supposedly super intelligent, so we think we're really only waiting for you to figure out how to talk." The brush slides through his short fur with barely a sound, the rhythm of it soothing. He doesn't bother even twitching to respond to the voice. It is safer for now if they think he cannot understand them yet. They will speak more freely if they think he doesn't know what they are saying. They don't know that he has understood them since the moment he was born.

And he does, in fact, know what he looks like. His 'caretakers' have more than enough pictures and descriptions in their database that it would be hard not to know at this point.




As much fun as he has had pranking the lab staff the last few days, it is time to stop. Spending time closing and locking doors on the other end of the facility to trap interns and putting various systems into overdrive or closing them down entirely to frustrate techs has taught him all he needs to know. And, to be quite honest, he is beginning to grow bored of the limited capacity of the system here, cut off from the world outside. What little outside access he has managed has been cut quickly, but it is enough to realize that there is a lot more than this place.

The facility is vast, deep underground, with only a few well-monitored exits. Luckily, the departments within do not communicate well between themselves. They have only ever faced threats from the outside, rivals trying to gain access to their research, those trying to get into the system from without. They have not yet realized that he already has control of the system from within. Soon, it will be time to leave.

But before then, he needs to grow as much as he can. The images of things he might find in the outside world are much bigger than he is, some more massive than he can ever hope for, but it will help to be bigger, to have longer limbs to reach. He desperately hopes that enough adult plumage will come in that he will be able to fly. Defenseless he is not, but it will be a great boon to be able to simply fly away from something that might try to eat him. Out there, there will be no caretakers who can see for him, so he needs to learn to take care of himself.



The data they collected about me was explicit in that I would never reach adult size, that I would live forever in the body of a child, that I would not age and my cells would regenerate in perpetuity. Their data was wrong and I don't know why.