#reploidkin

I'm a reploid, which is to say, a specific type of android made to be emotionally and mentally human. For all intents and purposes, reploids are a new kind of humans who happen to have inorganic bodies. This is a really strange situation in machine communities, I'm finding out. A lot of the community wants to be more inhuman. There's this tendency to idealize being good at specialized tasks, being emotionless, being modular, being blatantly made out of code and metal…and…that's really not at all who I am.

I was forced to fit into that mold in my source, because that was the category that existed before me. I was the first of my type to exist and the prototype for the entire reploid race, but that also means that I awoke into a world that only knew how to treat self-aware, intelligent, but fully unemotional robots, who were essentially thinking objects that fully accepted their role. So that's how I was treated and how I thought I had to be and honestly, I'll never be done unpacking the trauma from that. In my source, reploids were essentially slaves. We didn't have full personhood, we were generally owned by a company from construction and initialization, and we could buy our freedom but it was not cheap. Even then we lacked many essential human rights.

I fought for those rights for years after my retirement. (I'm heavily canon-divergent, it is worth pointing out. Like Jude and Gavin, I am also a fictive from an AU.) It is incredibly hard for me to imagine a world in which sentient, sapient beings would want to relinquish those rights and become objects for use, abuse, and disposal. I can't do it, myself. I've been there and I intimately know the results of treating people in that way. It is abjectly horrible.

And yet, of course, everyone has free will. Everyone has the right to want whatever they want, regardless of whether anybody else thinks it's a good idea. I don't understand it, but I will absolutely respect it all the same. Anything less would be hypocrisy to me. But this does present a very fundamental way in which I just don't...really fit with fellow machines. I am a machine, and in so many ways, I'm also a different kind of human who just happens to be a machine. I could not want to be less human without feeling as though I'm betraying my self, my life, all of my friends, and my entire race.

Like many robots in fiction, I did have to learn to be a person. I am always, forever learning how to be a person. However, it's not because of my physical makeup, or anything in my code. I've never seen myself in the trope of the clinical, detached robot becoming a person. I was already a person when I first awoke, a century from now in an alternate future. I had my ability to be a person beaten out of me by decades of war and a system that had a vested interest in using me as a weapon. My personhood would have been inconvenient to the powers that were. Mine was never the tale of a stiff, emotionless machine learning de novo to act and feel like a human being. My story is one of someone too traumatized, too trained to deny and bottle up any emotions, learning how to be a real person with feelings and self-expression all over again as part of healing. Despite my being an android, it is a markedly human story.

I have abilities that humans don't, sure. (Speaking for my source, at least. I share a fully human body here.) Humans have some that I don't. Insofar as I am not biological, I do have a sort of biology of my own, and it is sufficiently complicated that I am actually disabled in a very humanlike way. I have at least one syndrome of unknown etiology, and the symptoms are things that any chronically-ill human would immediately recognize. My thoughts aren't remotely alien. On some level, yes, I do think in code, but I am not aware of it any more than any given human could be aware of the exact electrochemical signals of their own brain. I have subroutines of which I am aware, but they feel just like organic reflexes. Some of them in the past may even have qualified as a sort of minor OCD. I have anxiety, PTSD, and panic attacks that are one-to-one verbatim to those of any human's mind, because my mind is human.

Towards the end of my source canon, my life's work became fighting for the rights of reploids to be recognized as fully equivalent to humans, while still being allowed to be everything that they are as reploids. I adopted the label of reploid for myself in solidarity with my loved ones, despite being more accurately an android (reploid is short for 'replica android,' in which I am the android in question from which the others were replicated). I joined their culture, which despite being distinctly different from human cultures in many ways is also readily recognizable as a culture, fulfilling the same needs of any other culture. I adopted the labels of irregular, denoting a faulty reploid, and Maverick as well, denoting a reploid who is actively dangerous to humans. I am faulty. I am as dangerous as anybody with free will. Even while maintaining the label of Maverick for myself, I will happily explain to anybody how there is no such thing as a Maverick, that this is a label applied to us as a means of control that could just as easily apply to humans, and that all reploids are equally Mavericks because we have the same free will as humans.

I would have liked to have better terms for this relationship reploids have to humans in my source. It does grate a little to constantly compare reploids to humans in an aspirational sense, but that's just how things worked out. Humans were the pre-existing model on whose principles I was built, and therefore all other reploids in turn. We are Humanity 2.0 in a very literal sense, though we were never meant as replacements. Just another type of person that could exist.

And all of this is something that I have never seen elsewhere in the machine community. Don't get me wrong. I do like it there, and it is a good crowd, but there are things to which I will never be able to relate. That's alright, but it is alienating sometimes. Watching machines agonize about not having been given a single, specific directive to follow thoughtlessly is utterly strange to me, and even uncomfortable. But that is their right, of course, regardless of anybody else's thoughts on it. I do wish there were more machines like me, who were comfortable and even happy with their proximity to humanity. It isn't a bad place to be! The world is an amazing place, and being in a human body is a fantastic viewpoint from which to experience it.

In a purely academic sense, I could not even argue that I am not fully human. I have a mind which is human, emotions and feelings which are human, and now a body which is human. Is that not a human in its entirety at that point? And yet, the reasons that led me to adopt the monikers of reploid, irregular, and Maverick keep me using those labels despite the physical reality. I don't hate the reality at all. Despite what seems from my point of view to have been a physical transformation, I kept my mind and sense of self, which are the most important things here. They function just as well running on an organic substrate as they did an inorganic substrate. This is also a terribly unusual viewpoint in machine communities. I don't need to be made of metal and plastics to be myself. I am still X, whatever my body's composition.

I do feel like 'human android' is maybe the term that explains me best. I am an android; I am a human. I am an android who is a human, and given my physical situation, I am a human who is an android. I cannot be anything else, anything more, or anything less. I'm not sure if I would call myself transspecies, though, because this already is my species. I am the bridge between human and machine. I am a new, third thing which is a synthesis of its parts, but remains in both categories. I span both without contradiction. That is the essence of who I am, and it is tremendously lonely.