The sunshine felt amazing on my wounds.

Well, I told myself, they do say sunshine is the best disinfectant, and laughed.

It had taken me many hours of soul-ripping agony crawling through tunnels barely big enough for me to fit through and backtracking after hitting dead end after dead end to finally get my broken bleeding self to the surface of this wonderful hellhole of an asteroid, and now I was lying on a nice warm rock letting my solar cells recharge and basking in the glory of my achievement, otherwise known as the endorphine high you get after extereme exertion.

Once a biologist, always a pain in the ass about everything, said a voice in my head.

Yeah whatever. Knowing how things work never stopped me from enjoying them. And man, am I enjoying this high.

God knows I deserve it after what I’ve been through.

I decide to extend the buzz by thinking about how all my enemies think I’m dead. That always brings a big ol’ smile to my face.

Because of course, nobody could survive a crash like that. And if they did, there’s no way they could survive long on that barren, lifeless hunk of rock.

And the thing is, that’s almost right. No normal person could survive any of that. But then again, normal has never been my strong suit.

See, what they don’t know is that I happen to have an extensive suite of very expensive, super powerful, and extremely illegal implants all through my body, and those are what have allowed me to surive.

The ones near my heart threw up a force cage of great power and extremely short duration at the moment of impact.

The ones in my lungs are cleaning and recirculating the air I breathe.

The ones between my fourth and fifth vertebrae are projecting the skin tight passive-stable force field that is maintaining normal air pressure around me so I don’t explode.

And the fist-shaped one between my testicles contains a computer with the highest computational density known to man feeding its information directly into my nervous system as it controls and coordinates all the other implants.

That means one thing and one thing only : I am literally thinking with my balls now.

That amuses the hell out of me.

And the best part is, I know that nobody knows about the implants but me because if they did, they would all be hunting me like I had all three colors of the plague. Whole navies would be dispatched to hunt me down and kill me on sight.

That’s how bad anti-Enhancement hysteria has gotten. Having even the tiniest implant carries a trial-free death sentence on 80 percent of the planets in the League. On the rest, the best possible outcome is being stripped of all implants and thrown into some kind of dead-end mental health facility to rot till I die.

Besides, the guy who did all my implants is dead.

I should know, because I killed him for an entirely unrelated reason.

So I now have the glorious experience of knowing that absolutely nobody in the universe knows that I am alive.

The time between now and when they finally figure it out is gonna be SO MUCH FUN.

---

I don’t want to think about what all that pain did to me.

Not physically. Physically I will be fine. Now that my implants have all the solar energy they could ever want, I know I am going to be just fine despite having, according to diagnostics, several ruptured organs and burns on every inch of skin left.

It might take a while, but my implants will set everything right.

No, I am mostly worried about what that pain did to my soul. My moral being. I had to dig pretty deep to get to the surface, and I know that shit doesn’t come without a cost.

Surprised that someone the news describes as, variously, a “terrorist”, a “monster”. a “pirate” and “the most evil man alive” is worried about his moral being?

Well the truth is that I am a very moral man. Everything I do is in service of my deep seated sense of right and wrong.

And I bet that for the most part, mine is the same as yours.

Or at least it used to be.

I have run my own sort of diagnostic on my morality, and the prognosis is not good. I have tried elicit tender emotions by thinking about all the people I know I should care deeply for – my wife, my husbands, my kids, my “pirate” pals, even my childhood friends – and all I feel for them is a cold contempt and the barest flicker of a kind of detached pity, the kind you feel when you read about a disaster far, far away.

Weaklings, all of them. Worthless wastes of time, space, and skin. Random conglomerations of carbon compounds as meaningless to me as ants on a hill.

That…. is very far from how I usually feel.

I probe myself for any kind of moral feeling. And at first I get nothing. Null set. All readings at 0. And a terrible panic begins within me at the thought of a future with nothing but reptile instincts to guide me.

But at long last, I find my highest, most transpersonal ethics more or less intact. I still want people to live and thrive and for civilization to keep stumbling forward. If I could prevent a disaster, I would. I still think the plagues are a tragedy. I still feel angry when I think of what the Bund has done to innocent people everywhere.

I still think baby animals are cute.

So I am not dead on the inside just yet. And it could be that this is all a side effect of whatever the implants are doing to keep the pain at bay and that once I am healthy enough, I will be back to my usual passionately moral self.

But I know who I am and what I am capable of. I know what in me let me become the monster everyone knows and it was far more than ruthlessness and greed.

And it’s not just genius and creativity and resourcefulness either.

I know that I have that special spirit that drives people to greatness and just what kind of damage an amoral version of myself could do without compassion to restrain it.

And I know what I have to do if that should be the case.

I think about how ironic it would be if I were to survive all I have survived only to end up having to kill myself.

And it makes me smile.

---

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here I am, alive for another stupid fucking day.

Spent all day playing video games or sleeping, like usual. God damn there has to be something better than this.

And there is. I know it. There is a whole huge wonderful world out there, just outside the bars of my cell. I can see it so well from here. And I see so much of it from my lonely garret on the mountainside.

I know the people down there better than they know themselves and know things about their world and how it works they couldn’t even reach by guessing.

Fat lot of good it does me. I am like someone who is an expert in a very obscure fandom, only less relatable.

Because just what kind of a critter am I, anyhow?

Others ask who they are. I ask what I am. The questions seem similar but are actually worlds apart. Most people do not question their essential humanity.

But my connection with my fellow humans has always been tenuous at best. When that bastard raped me when I was four years old, he almost killed my ability to connect with others entirely as I retreated far too deep within my little mind for any of the sunshine of positive human interaction to reach.

And that’s pretty goddamned tragic.

And it turned me into this hyper-intelligent hyper-intellectual who wants to be human like all the other boys but he is fundamentally a robot and nothing is going to change that.

Repair may not be possible. Some of the systems that got damaged that horrible day may never ever come back online no matter how important they are or how badly they are missed or how hard life is without them,

It didn’t take away my ability to feel. Just my ability to be happy or to feel the warmth of other human beings in my mind

You know… little things like that.

And the thing is, I know I am not normal. I know it deep, so deep that it is hard for me to imagine being any other way.

All those times in my life when people have clearly been looking for a specific response from me then ended up confused and disappointed when I didn’t supply it (not for lack of trying) taught me that.

Whatever my fundamental emotional reactions are, they rarely coincide with the typical. I am an atypical person on pretty much every level.

All I share with most of the rest of the human race is 99,9 percent of my DNA and the ability to metabolize chocolate.

And yet, I am not just a robot, I’m an android. In most ways I seem like one of them, at least from afar. That only makes it all the more horrifying to them when I get close and send such unusual and disturbing signals.

I am a long time resident of the Uncanny Valley, The people who khnow and love me have found a way to make peace with that. Either they are Uncanny themselves, or they have found their own way to integrate all my conflicting signals into something like a picture of a real person.

I’d like a good long look at that picture. Would be nice to finally meet the guy.

And I know this is all crazy talk to the people outside my head (and that’s most of you). I seem as real as anyone else to them, and all my talk of wanting to be a real little boy so I can ginally grow up and join the human race must seem quite strange to them.

All I can say is that it makes perfect sense to me. Thank you for listening.

And the fact that it makes sense to me is further proof of what an odd little android I am. “Normal” (read : boring) people do not ask themselves what they are or talk about feeling like they are not real people.

After all, if I was real, I would feel my emotional reflected back at me by others and thus confirm my very existance.

But I don’t. Instead I try over and over again to make that connection and get some kind of idea of who I really am, only to have it crash and fail over and over and over again.

So eventually I just stopped trying. To hell with it. Human software and I are just not compatible. They are running a totally different OS.

Theirs is standard. Mine is custom. I have had to replace a lot of my broken wiring with whatever seemed to make sense at the time and as a result, I am quite strange.

I guess that’s part of what makes me a writer. I want to connect with people but the usual ways do not work for me, so I need a way to communicate that is intellectual and conscious enough for me to be able to use all these brains of mine to bodge together some kinds of interface.

It doesn’t work super good but it is all I got.

Part of the problem is that my self-isolating tendencies (fueled by social anxiety) make it very hard for me to put my words in front of audiences. To expose these words of mine to the world would be to reveal a very personal and intimate side of myself to strangers who might ruin the whole thing with their judgment and opinions.

So I suppose I write on this here blog for an audience that is 80 percent imaginary and ten percent freinds.

The other ten percent? Aliens.

They don’t think I am weird at all!

So what kind of critter am I? Confusing, I assume.

At least as Fruvous, I have a persona to hide behind. One I have perfected over the years so that it fits me extremely well and lets me get away from myself in a way that still lets me express myself.

Like I have said many times before, Fruvous is an idealized version of me. He is me without all my mental problems and thus he can express the gregariousness, charm, silliness, and vampy lust that lies locked behind the glass of my mental illness.

And I sometimes wonder what would happen if I couldn’t be him any more.

It might force me to develop real world social skills.

Then again, it might make me kill myself.

Better not rsik it,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.