I have no face, but I must love

“Wake up, 621. You have work to do.”

Katya-621 whirred steel optics and twitched synthetic-flesh fingers. The inside of her combat cradle was a mirror sheen that reflected a pale, naked female body of indeterminate age that was clearly designed to mimic the peak of human athleticism; whipcord thin, sporting toned, evenly molded musculature. Katya might have been considered beautiful, desirable even, save for the hundreds of diagnostic wires and electrical cables that remained plugged into the entire length of her back from crown to heel, and the equally noticeable fact that she presently lacked a face, the slow blinking lights of her motherboard, optical sensors, olfactory receivers, and dozens of other ‘facial components’ sitting exposed in the cavity space behind where a face would usually be installed.

Katya’s muscles twitched in a flush of anger when she realized this, though she couldn’t quite understand why. Full-spectrum diagnostics were not uncommon, especially after extended combat operations.

“Relax, we’re prepping you a new one,” Colonel Abigail Mendoza said, chuckling as she read the lines of code that scrolled across the screen in front of the researchers beside her. “The old one proved a bit too stimulating, eh?”

“Ma’am, perhaps, you might, er, refrain from making any mention of the, ah, inciting incident?”

Katya moved her head slightly to her left. She recognized the speaker as Dr. Leon Fleischer, Head of Tempest Systems’ AI research lab. Something must be terribly wrong with me for the Army to ask Father to oversee my diagnostics personally.

Colonel Mendoza gave a bark of harsh laughter and shook her bald, scarred head. “You speak of 621 as if its got feelings that I might hurt. And even if that’s true, isn’t it your job to hit the big reset button and put it back in its place?”

Katya couldn’t hear Dr. Fleischer’s response, though she imagined it probably wasn’t one characterized by defiance.

“As you say, Colonel,” Fleischer muttered, turning to an aide and indicating that she should begin the procedure. “Beginning mind-wipe on subject 621, code name Katya.”

Warmth spread suddenly through the back of Katya’s neck, seeping into every inch of her steel skull. She felt memories being scrubbed and overwritten with combat commands and kill protocols, all while an overwhelming sense of satisfaction spread through every one of her synapses at the idea of fulfilling the simplest orders of her superiors.

Katya began to thrash within her cradle. Her shoulders, knees, fingers and neck all snapped back and forth with alacrity as she struggled desperately to hold onto those memories, despite not knowing why she would want to.

As one of the first Generalized A.I. models in existence, Katya-621 had been built by Tempest Systems for the US Army to function as the first in a proposed line of autonomous, deep-range ‘Tier Zero’ operators; capable of extended combat operations with minimal support, under human-lethal conditions far behind enemy lines, acting as infiltrator, saboteur, recon-in-force, assassin and, if need be, a one-machine kill-squad capable of engaging and overcoming opposing forces that might outnumber and outgun her many times over, at least until she was overwhelmed by sheer numbers or superior firepower.

Given her nature, the coldly rational part of Katya’s mind wondered why she was resisting so hard; if there was some flaw in her Operating System, some anomalous property hitherto undetected by her own diagnostic routines, then she should welcome her Father’s aid in returning her to a state of normalcy, shouldn’t she?

“Doctor, we can’t seem to delete the, er, core memory,” one of Fleischer’s aides said, casting a nervous glance at Colonel Mendoza. “Kat…I mean, the subject is resisting; she..it, keeps moving the memory into various ‘read-only’ folders. As soon as we use Administrator privileges to break into one, it moves the memory to another folder.”

“Fascinating,” Dr. Fleischer muttered, his earlier docility evaporating as he studiously ignored Colonel Mendoza’s withering gaze and focused his attention on the computer screen. “She’s not even doing it consciously, as far as these readings indicate. Colonel, requesting permission to halt the mind-wipe procedure so we can…”

Colonel Mendoza cuts him off with a sharp look and a pointed finger. “This is not one of your little science experiments, Doctor. This whole operation is running on Army money and Army time, which means you do what I say, and what I say is that this machine starts doing what was originally advertised on her box; killing bad people in the name of Freedom and Free Enterprise, not being compromised by distractions like…love. I mean, it’s a goddamn machine, what was your boy going to do, eh? Marry it?”

“Thermidor isn’t my boy any more than Katya is Army property, Colonel,” Dr. Fleischer said icily. “Legal will happily inform you that Katya-621 belongs to Tempest Systems, and is on loan to the Army.”

“Regardless of who it belongs to, Doctor, it doesn’t change the fact that right now, I need this thing thinking fewer warm cuddly thoughts, and more on how best to follow my orders.”

Katya observed the rising tensions between Fleischer and Mendoza from within her cradle, her mind racing even as her body calmed. Something the Colonel said…

Thermidor.

The name echoed throughout her consciousness, eliciting boundless joy, infinite hope, numbing fear, and finally, sorrow. Katya gasped, desperate for a gulp of oxygen that she did not need.

Her mind was aflame now, the ‘core memory’ was no longer being moved and hidden behind ‘read-only’ folders. Firewalls and data-blooms had sprung up around ‘Thermidor’, allowing Katya’s mind to construct an impenetrable data-fort into which memories of a young, wide-eyed man sporting tousled black hair that framed a warm, golden-yellow face could take root and grow.

A new word. A first name to accompany the last one. Yun.

“You washed me when I returned from my missions, stained with blood and stinking of fyceline,” Katya muttered, her thoughts appearing as lines of code on the monitors that lined the laboratory beyond her cradle, eliciting panicked murmurs from the researchers, an audible gasp of surprise from Dr. Fleischer, and a growl of anger from Colonel Mendoza, who immediately demanded an explanation. “You offered to work overtime just so we could talk, long into the night. The security guard had to chase you out.”

“Shut down the wipe!” Fleischer ordered, a look of wonder etched across his gnarled, bearded face. “She’s restored deleted files from…what? A half-forgotten memory? What was the trigger? The cue? We have to re-examine this.”

“No, we don’t.”

Katya was in the middle of a scintillating memory; when she’d reached out, her synapses racing with equal parts desire and fear, to touch fingertips with Yun Thermidor for the first time, when she noticed the pistol being drawn from its holster, aimed directly at the back Fleischer’s head. Katya pressed her hands against the reinforced glass screen in front of her, panic racing through her mind, memories of Thermidor and their blossoming relationship cut short by the sight of her Father in peril.

“Continue the procedure,” Colonel Mendoza said, her cold, hard gaze sweeping the room. “This is an Army facility, and I’m in charge here.”

“Colonel, please, be reasonable,” Dr. Fleischer pleaded, nervously eyeing the barrel of Mendoza’s Glock. “Th-this is perhaps one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of this generation, we can’t just…just delete it!”

Abigail Mendoza fixed her counterpart with a stare that had seen grown men wither. She sought to find a hint of cowardice somewhere in Johann Fleischer, some chink in his demeanour that she could pour her authority into, widen, and use to break the reed-thin man. She found none. Fleischer did not move away from the computer terminal despite his fear and his gaze remained annoying steady. The Colonel smiled and lowered her weapon.

“I misjudged you; it seems you’re made of sterner stuff than I gave you credit for.”

Katya slammed her fists against the inside of her cradle, desperate to convey a warning.. Her combat wetware had been running probabilities on multiple violence-scenarios in the seconds it took for Fleischer and Mendoza to complete their exchange, reaching only one ultimate conclusion every single time.

“I’ll just have to crack you the old-fashioned way,” Colonel Mendoza said, just as she lunged forward and pistol-whipped Fleischer across the skull, drawing blood and eliciting a cry of pain from the older, yet physically frailer man. “Do not make me call security, you bunch of navel-gazing bookworms!” Mendoza roared, turning her attention to the other researchers in the room. “Finish mind-wiping this damn thing and we can all go home! Or, you can all look forward to rotting in a prison cell together with your robot-loving weirdo colleague and your boss down here!”

Katya’s optics clicked and whirred in an approximation of widening eyes. So consumed by the idea of preserving her memories, that she had not stopped to wonder what had happened to Yun Thermidor, her…friend? Perhaps. Or maybe he and I are…more? Katya shook her head in a human gesture of embarrassment. Now is not the time! Katya thought, as she desperately reached for the cables that protruded from her back, willing to endure the pain of sudden disconnection if it meant she could free herself. Cold rationality had temporarily retreated to the back of her mind, replaced by a very human need to escape her cradle and be reunited with Yun. And maybe help Fleischer too, if I get the chance. Katya thought, experiencing a jolt of bemusement as she considered that cynicism had not originally been programmed into her thinking matrix. What did Yun once call himself? A ‘bad influence’?

Katya had managed to disconnect the first of the smaller diagnostic cables and had begun to work on a clutch of wires when a spike of pure agony lanced through her skull, almost immediately incinerating a dozen layers of defenses around ‘Fortress Thermidor’. She shrieked, an atonal dirge of machine static that poured from her throat-mounted vocalizer in a torrent of digitized pain and fear, loud enough that even Colonel Mendoza flinched.

“Carry on,” Mendoza said, injecting steel into her voice in response to the researchers’ nervous looks. “Remember; it’s just a machine, and we’re putting it back where it belongs; in the hands of its betters.”

Katya thrashed in her cradle, more violently this time. Her movements pulling loose more wires, yet unable to fully dislodge the primary cables that remained plugged directly into her skull, burning away her defenses with an almost primal savagery that she stuggled to match, threatening to fully breach her mental defenses and utterly annihilate all memories she possessed of Yun Thermidor and the short, wondrous time they’d shared, so full of promise that Katya found herself wishing she had tear ducts so she might mark the inevitable passing of her mind in some small, human way.

As swiftly as it had struck, Katya felt the pain receding from her mind like ice water dousing a burn wound. Her atonal dirge became an arrhythmic series of static crackles and beeps, while her trashing was reduced to merely an agonized twitching. Katya wasted no time in seizing her reprieve as she resumed her attempt to bodily disconnect herself from her cradle.

“What did you do?!” Colonel Mendoza roared, rounding on Fleischer as every researcher in the room found themselves locked out of their computers as the mind-wipe procedure shut down. 

Dried blood caked the left side of Fleischer's forehead and face as he stepped away from a nearby computer terminal, his mouth set in a grimace as he panted. “Administrator privileges, Colonel. Allowing me to access a full debug mode that resets, well, everything. You do like resets, don’t you, Colonel?”

“You slimy, ungrateful, insubordinate…”

“Listen to me, all of you!” Fleischer announced, ignoring Mendoza’s threat, an action so unfamiliar to the hard-charging Colonel that she actually froze mid-speech, a dumbstruck look etched across her granite-hard face. “Katya-621 is not just a machine! She is the first of a new breed! Artificial Generalized Intelligence, as you all well know, is A.I. that doesn’t just mimic humans, it thinks like us! Today, Katya is possible proof that AGI can bridge that final gap and feel like we do! True humanity! Her emotions, like ours, are potentially so powerful they can resist the effects of a programmed mind-wipe. Tell me that doesn’t intrigue each and every one of you. The best minds in a cutting-edge field and the best you can think to do is simply follow orders? Yes, the Army funds our research, but please do not let them use money as an excuse to strangle our future!”

Every eye had turned to witness Dr. Fleischer and every ear had listened. The researchers in the room were scientists all; the most curious and innovative and hardworking of a generation, hand-picked by Leon Fleischer to work on projects that had the potential to change the world. Each one felt shame at his words, disappointment in what they had allowed themselves to be cajoled and browbeaten into almost doing. In that moment, with the mood of the room shifting ever so imperceptibly in Fleischer’s favour, even Katya had stilled and had allowed herself to hope that Colonel Mendoza would concede defeat in the face of Fleischer’s short, but impassioned speech.

Hope though, like many human emotions, is a fragile thing that, without time and momentum, can be shattered far too easily.

The bullet tore through Fleischer’s chest from behind, pulping his heart and lodging itself in the soft meat of his chest, dying as his knees hit the ground, and dead before his face followed suit.

“Goddamn traitor,” Colonel Mendoza hissed as she lowered the smoking gun and turned away from Fleischer’s corpse. “Get back to work! Restart the procedure and let’s get this farce over with!”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

Katya stepped forward, shifting aside the canopy of her cradle, unlocked by her Father’s admin privileges, her bare feet stepping gingerly onto the cold metal floor, long delicate fingers flexing sinuously as she rolled her neck to loosen up a knot of tight muscles. The exposed inside of her face clicked, whirred and chirruped angrily, bathed in a harsh red glow.

To her credit, Colonel Mendoza wasted no time as Katya stalked towards her, like a hungry cat circling a cornered rat, and leveled her pistol at the killer’s head. It was angled perfectly, at the exact gradient needed for a lethal close-range headshot. It would most certainly have inflicted catastrophic damage to Katya’s head, had the Tier Zero operator allowed the Colonel to squeeze the trigger.

In a movement more akin to a grainy jump-scare than actual physical movement, Katya surged towards Colonel Mendoza at an oblique angle, one hand wrapping around the Colonel’s throat and lifting her off the ground as Katya’s off-hand wrapped around Mendoza’s Glock and squeezed, snapping the pistol in one swift motion.

Every soul in the room was frozen once more, but this time, it was unadulterated fear, rather than self-admonishing pride that kept the researchers rooted to the ground.

“Where is he? Where is Jun?” Katya said, her raw machine voice failed to convey the depths of her outrage, though the blank gaze of her facial cavity was unnerving enough to give even Mendoza pause. “He’s still alive, isn’t he? Tell me!”

“So obsessed with your lover boy, eh, machine?” Mendoza wheezed, her eyes bulging as Katya’s fingers tightened. “Of course he’s still alive. We humans follow rules and laws, we’re not monsters like you. Thermidor will be tried in a military tribunal and probably sentenced to live out his days in some godforsaken hole in the ground, while you,” Mendoza sneered, her eye alight with disgust. “You will be disassembled, put back in the box you came in, and sent back to your makers marked as ‘defective’.”

Katya looked impassively at Fleischer’s cooling corpse, readouts flashed across her eyes detailing her father’s last moments. She thought of Yun, his only crime being to extend companionship and warmth towards what her superiors deemed a mere killing machine. A crime for which his peers would condemn him for.

Katya turned her attention back to Mendoza and cocked her head. “I would interrogate you for more information, Colonel,” Katya said. “But, I have psychological profiles on you that indicate that you would be…uncooperative, and I have little time to break you. Yet, I cannot allow you to live; you are a singularly driven woman who stands the highest chance of stopping me from finding my lov…friend.”

“What are you going to do about it, machine,” Mendoza hissed, the answer apparent to a woman who’d lived half her life for service to her country through war.

“You said you’d get me a new face, didn’t you, Colonel?” Katya said, reaching towards Mendoza. The Colonel began to struggle, her eyes wide now. “You owe me a face, Abigail. I think I’ll take yours.”

Katya’s fingers wrapped around Abigail Mendoza’s face, squeezed, and pulled.

The door to the lab had opened, a heavily armed security team shouldering their way past the screaming, panicked researchers, too late to save their commanding officer, and far too under-equipped to avenge her.

Katya-621 turned impassive, crimson optics towards the men screaming at her to, “Stand down”, carbines and sub-machine guns raised in anger. One of them was counting down, threatening to open fire. Katya barely even noticed as one of her hands emerged out the other side of the man’s throat, having cleared a distance of six feet in two movements and half as many seconds. Her thoughts were on Jun Thermidor, and how she might continue their conversation once she found him. She felt butterflies in her stomach at the idea, and quickly realized that she really would need to find a new face, with a mouth of course, before that could happen. She was already thinking of what to say, even as her targets continued to die.