Had something gone wrong in the memory lounger? Did part of his brain get left behind in the computer?
Okay, that was extreme, obviously, but things just didn’t look… right. Oh sure, the colors looked fine and he could still see but… his vision seemed a bit sharper waking up. And… his nose? Looked like it was the wrong shape?
There was a buzzer noise, like the noise when someone hit the abort button on a compacter, and Carlos’ memory pod suddenly opened. He was confused, but he just shrugged slightly and started to sit up… only to realize that he wasn’t wearing his own clothes.
He became aware that his body didn’t…. well it just didn’t feel right.
“What the hell…?” he asked aloud, and he was shaken when he didn’t hear his own voice come out of his throat.
It’s warm.
That’s the immediate first thought that crosses his mind, wincing at the sound of the memory lounger signifying a grievous error.
This whole thing had been Dr Amari’s idea, of course, two individuals to share the neural load, an experiment she was trying to perfect, but obviously something wasn’t working right here. It felt like Nick’s skin was buzzing, and when he ran a hand over his face to try to soothe the confusion, the resulting texture was overwhelming.
He looks down at the hand, frowning when he sees toffee colored skin. No. No, he doesn’t want this memory, whatever it is. He knows all of these memories, he’s seen them all intimately, and he doesn’t want to watch her die again he can’t, he won’t-
And just like that, Nick is gone and aRMA is blinking at the sudden, abrupt consciousness, blinking as if they’d been shaken awake. Their gaze fixes on the hand, turning it this way and that, admiring it.
“Whoa.” They jump at the sound of their own voice, leaning out of the comfortable little pod that keeps making angry noises, only to gaze upon a scientist and… DiMA? No, that can’t be right. That’s. Wait, that’s their body!
“What’d Nick fuck up this time…?”
Carlos realized, alarmingly, that some
sensations were missing: he wasn’t breathing, he couldn’t hear the blood
rushing in his ears, his mouth was so much dryer than it should have been, and
he couldn’t even really feel much
of anything on his skin!He was shocked again, hearing a voice that sounded like his
father’s. He looked around, and for a
second he thought he saw his brother in the memory lounger next to his. Except
it wasn’t his brother – it looked like… Oh god, it looked like him!“Oh my god…” he said in a voice that was gravelly and just
too rough-sounding for his liking. “Oh my god, what happened? D-Doctor?”Relatively unfazed by the current state of affairs, aRMA waves at the doctor person with the neat boots from their temporary body with a small smile.
Doctor Amari does not at all find this a satisfactory response to her experiment, and promptly panics, looking between the two of them and the screen in front of her with horror.
“I believe that I may hafe made a grave error. I hafe accidentally…mistyped one of zhe integers, and it rezhulted in an error that booted you both from the system…to the wrong bodies. I zhould have programmed markers for which conszchiousness goes where…”
Panicking, she scrutinizes her clipboard of notes and dashes out of the room for more paper to make more notes.
aRMA shrugs slightly, giving a sort of goofy embarassed smile with it, then strolls up to the person in their body, smooshing synthetic cheeks with both hands and marvelling at the almost gradient effect on their optics, white to yellow to blue fading together into a hazy sort of greenish color.
“Is this what I look like to other people? I’m so pretty. I didn’t even know my optics could glow that color! Cute!”
Carlos just… he just didn’t feel right. This
was so surreal and he didn’t like it. And then ‘he’ was walking up and reaching
out and touching him and just…
If Carlos had skin, it’d be crawling.
He made a really weird whirring noise from
inside of his chest and he reached up, grabbing his own hands and pulling them
away from his… or, Nick’s face.
“Please, just… don’t do that,” he gritted out
lowly.
The Perfect Scientist 