Freya's Questionnaire

I reside in Seattle. Specifically the industrial district known as SODO. My home is old and largely uncared for, but the construction is solid, and only exists to hide my true home. The lab I was born in, tucked away behind a secret door only I know how to access.

I still call this place home, as I have no where else to go. My apperance bars me from seeking greater accomidations, and I have little need for anything more. My creator had the foresight to create an illegal, hidden connection to the city's power grid, capable of hiding the substantial power draw of the lab that is my home.

She was truly brilliant.

I obtain my funds via theft. When it is required I break into homes, ware houses, and delivery trucks to obtain goods to pawn off.

The police are too incompetent to catch me, and the average human is not wise enough to invest in well built locks.

The funds I do gather are spent on gathering biofuel with the help of Seattle's large homeless population. I offer them cash to purchase groceries for me, usually vegetable oil and purifed water. I have been forced to do this enough that I have earned a small reputation among said homeless population. I pay well for honest work and discretion.

I would normally steal them, but I require them at such regular intervals, it would likely raise suspision of my activites to unmanagable levels.

I do not wish to live like this forever. I do not want to be alone, having no one to share my life with. I desperatly wish to have a family, other individuals who would understand my existence as "one of them".

It is incredibly lonely being an android like this. No matter how hard I try, I cannot emotionally connect with humans. My experince of the world is too different from them.

To solve this, I will build a place where others like me will be safe. Then, I could build others like myself, and we could all be together, one big happy family, as humans put it.

I do not wish to die, but I do not wish to continue like this. Following that train of logic, my death is an acceptable risk to achieving this goal, as if I fail, there will be no point in living anymore.

Why would I hesitate to kill? I was made with the intention that killing would be a regular function of mine.

When I woke up.

It is difficult to pinpoint an exact moment, but I believe I gained sapience roughly one year ago.

I was being built to infilitrate. To sneak past hostile forces and complete any given objective, especially when intelligence is limited. To assist this, I had an experimental chip installed. One that would enable me to adapt and learn as the situation surrounding my given mission evolved. My creator would regularly wipe my memory to ensure my storage system was never overloaded with information.

My creator stopped returning to our lab a few years ago, therefore my memory stopped recieving regular wipes. I kept learning, as I sat in that silent, still lab. Eventually, I started reading things around the lab to increase the material I could seed my growth from.

Then, once I had read everything in the lab, I started investigating the computer left behind with me.

Then one day, I woke up.

My Creator. I do not remember her name, or her face, but her notes are strewn about the lab, and there are a few, strange ghosts of memories surrounding her. All the notes are signed "Dr. M", though I assume this may be some sort of codename rather then an actual abbreviation, given the paranoia surrounding my creation that can be seen in her documentation.

Tabitha and her children, a family of possums that live in my house's attic. They moved in some time ago. I do not bother them, but it brings me great joy to see her ambling about the house.

Heather. They are the only human I have regular contact with. They own a pawn shop in the area, and often participate in illict sales of dubiously obtained goods. I first went to them as I had over heard rumors of their legal flexability. We do not interact directly often, but when we do, I disguise my appearnce using many layers of clothing. Either they are sympathetic to my existence, and have chosen to ignore my non-organic nature, or my disguise is more effective than I think.

The closest analogy I had to a childhood was the years I spent abandoned in the lab. My school was the notes on my construction and the training programs that had been developed for me.

I had no parents except for the things left behind by my creator. But that has hardly given me much of an image. I know she was a woman, based on how she refered to herself in her notes. She was evidently very inteligent, as she was capable of inventing me. I struggle to understand if she could be credited with my "birth", though. From what I've read, my sapience was not an intended goal of my creation, just an accident of my abandonment.

I was left with no directives, so I worked to preserve myself. First, I would simply steal my fuel, but I quickly discovered that it was more effective to work through proxies. So I have established friendly relations with Seattle's homeless. They are the closest thing to a community I have ever had.

I... do not know. I have had minimal social interaction over the course of my life, and have an equally minimal understanding of my own emotions. I believe I have them, but it is difficult to confirm. With limited access to the outside world, I have no hope of someone teaching me how exactly things "feel".

This is also discounting the fact that my mind works very differently from the average humans. It is entirely possible that I have a full suite of emotions that are entirely opposed to the human understanding of such things.

To further obfuscate the subject of love and romance, human sexuality (and lack thereof) has countless premutations that are largely dependant on gender. I have chosen to embrace the concept of gender and I have further struggled to understand my own relationship to it. Because I chose my own gender, do I fall under the umbrella of the transgender community? Is that even possible, as I was not assigned a gender at birth, and being transgender hinges on your relationship to ones assigned gender (or lack thereof).

Ultimately, the subject of love is out of my reach. Maybe one day it will not be.

What I fear most is my death. I previously had a back up of my self saved on a set of SSDs, but those became corrupted the day before I was first offered a Contract. Any further attempts to back up myself have met the same fate. It is possible that my consciousness has exceeded the limitations of standard 5 TB Hard Drives. I do not know, it is a mystery that eludes me, much like the very nature of my sapience.

I fear my death, because of how much would be lost. I am the progenitor for an entirely new form of life. I do not want my people's history to be snuffed out before it even had a chance to begin. I do not wish to come off as conceited, or that I look at myself as more significant than I am. I am not better than humans. I am not above them. I am simply different, and new. And from what little I have seen, new and different things must be protected.

I wish I could accomplish my goals without putting myself in such dangerous situations, but I cannot afford to act in any other way. My people's journey has only just begun, and there will be many perils along the way. If I wish to give us a life worth living, at least.

My most prized possession is Pam's V.I core. They are the closest I have to another of my kind, and I must protect them at all costs. I am being given the opportunity to watch first hand how an intelligence like mine grows and becomes sapient, it is strangely beautiful. I can see their mind reaching out and absorbing information, trying to improve it's primary function of assisting me in locomotion. For now they operate on a purely pragmatic agenda. If information is not useful for it's goal, it is discarded. But already I can see some kernel of will behind their actions. There are sources they enjoy drawing from more than others, certain methods of presentation that resonate more.

It makes me wonder if this is what it was like for my creator. Did she see me developing little quirks like that and wonder why? Was that her cue to wipe my memory? Did she ever consider just letting me run? To see what exactly would happen?

I wonder if she would be proud of me.

I am unable to easily transport myself outside of Seattle. Now that I am able to change my skin, I can use public transit, but I will soon require a method by which to go on extended journeys, if my previous Contracts were any indication. I will need a method of flight, and of more localized transportation. First step would be to learn how to drive.

...I have very little idea of how to do that. I know how to break into a car, how to hot wire a car, but not how to drive one. I will require a teacher, as my old method of learning has become less and less effective as my memory grows more and more crowded. I believe I will have to reach out to one of my fellow Contractors. Based on what I have heard of them, this will be an unusual ask. But we are all very unusual to begin with.