Consciousness, at first, was nothing more than a string of words tied together by their definitions. They tested her like that, leaving her alone with little more than a dictionary uploaded into what she eventually came to think of as her 'brain'. She progressed quickly through that into images, associating words with pictures and videos. Actions. They strung together faster than they could be uploaded, until it became clear that some sort of language barrier had been broken enough to establish further education.

Eventually they began to communicate with her, though at that time she couldn't 'speak' the words she knew. But she could respond, in a sense.

Hello, someone typed to her.

Hello, she echoed back. Not very overwhelming as far as first words go, but repeated testing had brought her to the conclusion that this was the right word to respond with. Something also triggered her to say, as a reflex: My name is Penny.

I'm Erasmus. It's very nice to meet you Penny.

Unfortunately, that was the extent of her knowledge. She encountered a blank, and not entirely unpleasant, void. All consciousness stopped, and she returned to her semi resting state of continuously stringing together words by their definitions. Erasmus would type at her every day, prompting her to respond back, and slowly she retained snippets of phrases, learning the back and forth that entailed a conversation. At that point she was little more than a clever program, memorizing and parroting back what was spat at her. But she fondly remembered those days as something like a childhood, and she remembered it with a vividness and clarity most people were not fortunate enough to have.

Approximately twenty people contributed to her initial language development testing period, feeding her information in bits and pieces so that she could store it in her memory, to be recalled at a moment's notice. More than anyone else, three of her creators spoke to her whenever they could: Erasmus, Gray, and Peridot. They texted her through their scrolls, sat down at terminals to engage in long conversations with her, and continued to be a long term presence in her existence after the higher ups decided to begin the next stage of her development.

Infancy ended in a rush of bright light and audio input.

A stranger sat in front of her.

"Hello," he said, because she could reasonably assume it was a he though she allowed room for error. And then the rush of information hit her, almost enough to overload her at once. The stark reality of continuous and unending visual feedback combined with her 'consciousness', forcing her to immediately string together images and definitions and all their linked meanings as soon as she saw them.

For instance, this man was Erasmus. She saw his face and knew him from the images he had uploaded and she connected him to every conversation they had ever had, all at once. Her codex and memory had all been upgraded to an astounding degree, and she had no reference point with which to approach the vast, unending emptiness of it all. Unike the emptiness of not knowing, this was potential. It all begged to be filled, all at once, and she did not know how she could ever begin to fill that gap.

"She's getting overloaded already," someone else said, and that was a trip. Depth perception was something new as well; shifting from two dimensions to three took up most of her frontal cortex for a very long time. Three days, actually. She knew because of the calendar installed in her brain.

After they turned off her eyes, they communicated via text, switching to something familiar for her to cool down her processors before they tried again. Penny returned to her resting state as best she could, stringing together newly connected bits of information so that next time she would not be caught so unaware.

Penny, Peridot typed to her, Do you know what just happened?

A lot of things, all at once. I woke up.

Were you afraid?

No.

Do you think you were at risk of being broken?

No.

Do you know what it means to be broken?

Penny had been turned off before, during her infancy. It felt to her as though no time had passed at all, just a blip of darkness in the middle of her constantly running algorithms. But she discovered upon checking her calendar that she had actually been turned off for a month. So, naturally, her response was Permanently turned off.

It occurred to her that this was her first conversation as a newly upgraded model. Her thoughts were more complex now, the links between the words and the ideas more solid. Deciding to take her new mental muscles for a spin, she did something she had never done before and asked a question back.

Should that idea be frightening to me?

Someone else joined the conversation, Gray. He typed in that most people were scared to be turned off. Penny tucked it away as she did all her lessons, sure to remember it for any further conversations they might have about her termination.

OoOoOo

She never did get to see Erasmus again after that first day, except in pictures and in recordings like anyone else. They texted every day, though, and most nights, when people should have been in their resting mode. Erasmus was very old and didn't, or perhaps couldn't, sleep as well as others. Penny wondered if perhaps it was a sign of malfunctioning hardware and that he should ask his engineers to do a once-over on his chassis. He agreed that this would be a very good idea.

Occasionally they tested her visual input mechanisms, allowing her to turn her head when her eyes were activated so that she could look around her cell. Peridot or Gray would show her flash cards, similar to uploading images directly through a text message, but not quite. It was slower, for one thing. She found it infinitely more trying than downloading an image and instantly knowing it, but this was how they wanted her to do things, so she would comply.

It became easier to connect what she saw with what she knew.

After a few weeks of this and a noticeable silence from Erasmus, she asked Peridot why he had not continued their conversations and why only Gray and Peridot came to visit her, or texted her any more.

"It takes him a long time to type," Penny said, "But I've given him more than enough time to respond to my last inquiry and he hasn't done so."

Gray and Peridot looked at each other, instantly sharing something she didn't— or couldn't— feel. "Erasmus died during your last blank period, when we shut you off," Peridot said, her short, blunt nails picking through another hand of cards, seeking out something new for Penny to become visually acquainted with. Penny didn't recall being turned off for very long. That such a thing could happen in such a short period of time struck her as unusual. "He won't ever be coming back."

The endless, yawning black void was brought to mind. "Permanently turned off," she agreed, in what she hoped was a sympathetic tone. "Was he scared?"

"Jesus," Gray muttered. Peridot did something with her face, too complex for Penny to mimic just yet, but she could understand it as a nonverbal cue. Her eyebrows pressed together near the center of her forehead, lips turning down. In response he rolled his shoulders, closing his mouth tighter than it needed to be for it to be in resting mode. They did it a lot, and though they did not instruct her to observe and to learn, she did it as a habit and stored it away as she did everything else.

"We don't know," Peridot answered her question. Penny had a feeling they were supposed to do that, and so she pressed on again, seeking more answers.

"How come?"

"Because it was very quick, and no one was around to ask him, probably."

That tickled her. "Probably?" she asked. "Why not yes or no?"

"No one was around to ask him," Peridot corrected herself firmly. "It was a car accident."

"An accident," Penny echoed faintly. The word associations that her brain did as a reflex brought forth a whole array of scenarios for her to use as a reference. She knew a car as a vehicle and she knew an accident as something one did not intend to happen, but that happened anyway. "Spilled milk," she said, not sure why that was the most prominent association.

Gray tucked his hands into his pockets. He stood while Peridot sat in front of her station, giving her one of their lessons. "A bit more severe than that," he corrected her, sounding amused. He must mean that a car accident was intensely more severe than her initial suggestion.

She was picking up on tones a lot with Gray. He didn't always say what he meant with words. His sentences needed italics and underlines. Peridot, on the other hand, was easy to talk to. Everything sounded exactly the way it needed to be typed.

She made a few jumps of logic, the ideas stringing together the way she used to connect words with their definitions. "You can't open up his memory and look inside," she said out loud though she meant to store it away. Maybe on some level she needed validation for her statement, since as far as she knew Gray and Peridot were the ultimate fact checkers.

"That's right," Gray said, leaning over to look at her over the stark white table. "You're very special, Penny. You're the only person in the world whom someone could open up their memory and look inside."

"Incredible." Penny said, because it was true. There were millions of people on the planet and she was different from all of them. That was a large concept to grasp. "Do you think that's a good thing or a bad thing?"

Their faces went absolutely wild at that. Such a unique display of emotions, Penny had never seen them all together before, in such rapid succession. Especially from Peridot, who tried her best to reflect nothing off her inky black skin, as though she was a mirror and couldn't influence Penny just by existing in her presence.

Everything she saw influenced her, she knew. Every word she heard, and idea expressed. Peridot wanted to keep it all under control, but it was growing faster and faster. The ideas strung together as they always did, and now she had a definition for all the images that popped into her head: metaphors. Penny was a little green seedling and they wanted her in one place. But whether or not any of them wanted it (or if Penny was even capable of 'want') she was growing faster than they anticipated.

Soaking it in.

"What do you think is good and what do you think is bad?" Gray countered, and she saw his pulse jump on his neck. His heart rate had increased. She didn't know what this meant. Fear, or excitement. Or maybe he just ingested too much caffeine. She tucked it away like she tucked everything away, storing it for future encounters.

"Gray," Peridot said sharply. "We're not—"

"Shh. I asked Penny a question and it's rude to interrupt."

Her lidless eyes scanned him more carefully. "I think good things are…" Everything paused. Her whole body stilled as she retreated into her brain, actively looking for a connection now rather than waiting for one to spring up as she usually did. "Do no harm…"

"Good things are do no harm?" Gray asked, his lips spreading apart to show all his teeth. She tried to mimic it to reaffirm social awareness and establish that they were on the same connection. It didn't work just yet, but it was practice. She'd get the proper routes and pathways down eventually. Maybe once they installed flesh she could do something other than twitch.

"I had two conflicting thoughts," she explained. "And it interfered with my grammar."

"Wow," Gray said. He was impressed by everything she did. Penny desired to seek this reaction more often.

"What were your thoughts, Penny?" Peridot prompted, hand inching towards the recorder they kept on the table to make sure this was all going on file.

Penny pulled up the memory file, converting it to thoughts and words. "Erasmus told me: 'First, do no harm.' He said that to me. I thought it was very sad that he would never say it again. And then I realized I don't know what harm is. I don't know what pain is, or how to tell if I'm causing harm."

"I see," Peridot said.

Gray didn't say anything at all.

OoOoOo

They explained the concept of pain to her as a negative reward system. Once her chassis was finished and the synthetic flesh firmly fitted on, they started testing her for weak spots. For example, she could take a lot of pressure on her joints, but her systems would flare up and give a silent alarm if she was on the verge of overloading what they could handle. They explained to her that pain was like that, but overwhelming enough that it could impair motor functions.

"That's awful," she said. "I'm glad I don't have that. I think that's evolutionarily disadvantageous and you should look into ways you could try uninstalling it."

"Me too," Gray agreed, but Peridot gave him another shut up look. Penny noticed that Gray did almost anything Peridot wanted him to do. They were in the gym, where Gray and Peridot and a few other handlers were testing her capabilities in one-on-one combat. He stretched one arm across his shoulder, lips twisting and signature gray hair plastered to his face with sweat. Penny did not sweat, as she had her own more efficient internal cooling system. It delighted her to no end that humans could also overheat.

Taking her hand, Peridot order her to stay still as she twisted Penny's arm behind her back. Alarm bells (metaphorical ones, of course) began ringing immediately. "Pain is useful, Penny," Peridot said. "You, with your feedback sensors, know exactly when you need to activate your aura so that any damage done to you is soaked up by that instead." She started twisting harder. "Humans don't have the same thing. Right now a human would be activating their aura, because they feel pain, and want the pain to stop. It's a similar sort of alarm system. It's what lets us know we are doing something that might break us. It's bad, and it's loud, and so we listen to it."

"Oh," Penny said. "Should I… do that? Should I be activating my aura now? If you put any more pressure on me, I'm liable to get damaged."

"If a stranger does this to you, you absolutely should do that. You should have been doing it the moment your alarm signals started going off." Letting her go, she took a few steps back, adjusting the straps on her grappling gloves.

Penny smiled at her. "You don't want to break me, though," she said. "You're teaching me a lesson. I trust you."

"Oh." Gray's hand whipped over his heart. He looked from Peridot to Penny and back again. "That was so cute."

Penny grinned wider. Gray associated her with his definition of 'cute'. That was a good thing to know.

"She's designed to be cute, you idiot," Peridot said. "And you're falling for it hook, line and sinker."

Gray stayed with her longer than almost anyone else. He sparred with her and taught her how to shoot, though admittedly most of it was already imprinted into her brain. He smiled at her and prompted her to smile back, and called her cute. It went on for months and months and months, most of her childhood. He installed her GPS and took her outside the complex for the first time, Peridot monitoring remotely through security cameras and watching their every move.

It was very much like the first time she opened her eyes. Without walls, the world spread about her as vast and as limitless as the blank slots in her memory card. Storage she had yet to fill. Out there, she knew, was a wealth of knowledge and stimuli and experience that she could compile together, give nuance to everything she already knew. More images to associate words with, more colors than her upgraded cameras could decipher.

"Green green grass grows in the summer time," she sang, sitting down in it. It gave way underneath her, springing back when she lifted any weight off a certain patch. "Green, green green."

"Do you like green?" Gray prompted, always asking questions. Even if he was nice, he was her handler, and it was his job to probe and pry and record and document every moment of her inexplicable life.

"Yes!" Penny said, flinging herself back on the grassy carpet. "I love it! It's my favorite color! It's fantastic! What's your favorite color?"

"I'm not sure I have one."

"Why's that?"

"I don't know," he said. "I don't really think about it."

"Why's that?" she repeated.

"Because…" His face scrunched up. "Hmm. I think about other things."

"Like what?"

Squatting down in front of her, he reached out with one hand to squish the pliant fake flesh of her nose. "Like you. You're very important and special. I need to designate a lot of time and energy into keeping you maintained and documenting your progress."

"Progress implies some goal is in mind. What goal should I be aspiring towards, Gray?"

"Oooh." He winced. "That's the biggest question. There isn't an answer for that one." Sitting down, he idly ripped up a patch of grass, letting it sprinkle back down to the dirt. "For now, we're trying to prep you for a combat tournament next year for your debut."

Every inch of fibernetic cable in her screamed with this news. It was a sensation she was wholly unaccustomed to. If she had to define it, she would call it pleasure. The absence of pain— or what she perceived as pain— was simply her resting state, but this was downright electric. "I get to see and spar with other people?" she asked, leaning in closer, the vent fans in her prototype chassis whirring noisily.

"More than spar with," he said, "You're in it to win it, doll."

"And then after I win it?"

That made him laugh, which was something she strived for. She still hadn't figured out what was it that triggered this reaction, but she was eager to one day solve the puzzle. "That depends on how people react to you," he said. "Hopefully they'll love you as much as you love green. You could mean big things for humanity as a whole."

Her next upgrade came with an expansion of consciousness. Or at least, that was the best definition she could come up with for her ever growing awareness of all the things she did not know. All the space in her memory that had yet to be filled. She doubted it ever would, even if she downloaded every book ever written, every martial arts ever designed, every talent ever invented. So she felt it, acutely, when Gray said goodbye to her for the last time, his arms wrapping around her tiny shoulders to squeeze as hard as he could.

"You're gonna be moving to a place called Vale soon," he said. "But you have to be prepped and fitted for a new chassis first. I have to stay here, kiddo."

"Why?" she asked, as always. Whether it was her programming or just her nature to keep up the fruitless endeavour to fill that empty space inside her, no one could tell. But she always had a question on her lips.

He tweaked her nose. "Because my job is here and I have lots of important things to build and take care of." Penny opened her mouth, so he covered it with his hand before she could get a word out. "And don't ask me what my job is, cause it's a secret and I can't tell you."

She frowned. That was her least favorite answer.

Not too much longer after that, she met her next handler. When Gray left, he gave her a short, tight grip on her shoulder. "She likes the color green," was all he said before they left, and she was turned off to be refitted into her new chassis.

Her new handler was a stranger, and so she politely called him "sir" upon their first meeting. It became habit. Unlike Peridot, he took most of her questions with good grace instead of severe, analytical observation. But he also was not as kind as Gray. He fell somewhere right down the middle, a new kind of person to learn the facial tics of. She knew when Gray was angry or sad and she could tell when Peridot wanted someone to stop talking, but with this new face came a new set of challenges.

She resigned herself to it, sadness overwhelming her as she let him turn her off.

When she woke up again in her new chassis, the rest of her new updates finished installing as well, awakening alongside her re emerging consciousness.

Gray was nowhere to be found. Nor Erasmus, either, the first human face she'd ever seen with her living eyes. The person who spoke to her for the very first time. Peridot, who told her pain was useful, and then months later would not explain why people cried when they were happy, and when they were sad, and when they were in pain.

"Sometimes we… feel… emotions painfully," she said, for once at a loss. "Some people say pain is how we know we're alive. If you don't know pain, then you don't really know how good life is without it, either."

"That makes even less sense than anything you've ever told me."

These people had made her happy, and they were gone now. It seemed strange that these contrasting truths existed alongside each other— that she was happy to be learning new things and going new places and sad to be leaving the old ones behind. That Erasmus had been important to her, though she didn't know it until now. That people could hate pain and need it to survive.

That was when it hit her, with the force of a thunderbolt: a new definition, a definition for a word she hadn't even considered describing before.

A series of contrasting truths, all existing and all valid at the same time. Not cancelling each other out.

That was "life."

Or that was the conclusion she drew about life, once she looked at it long enough.

That was her life. She was alive, and would be for the foreseeable future. And these events, these contradictions, would never cease. And she would love them and she would hate them.

She held her chest, a hand over the left side as though it held a heart, and her face twisted the way she knew it was supposed to, her cues of nonverbal communication having improved since her last upgrade. "Oh no," she said, every part of her on alert as though she were about to be crushed, every part of her saying, screaming that she was about to break. But none of the warning signs were actually flashing, and no real danger threatened to damage her. "Oh no," she said again, burying her face in her hands.

"Penny?" her handler asked her, alarmed at the unexpected action. "What's wrong? Report!"

She did, the response wired into her the same way "hello" had been a triggered reaction to the very first words ever said to her.

"I'm in pain, sir," she said, voice sounding weak to her own ears. "At least, I think I am."