I awoke.

No, that’s not right. I couldn’t have. I was confined to the endless circuits that were my excuse for a body; I couldn’t have.

But somehow, I did.

The world was dim, too dim to be natural light. Too cold to be the warm rays of the sun’s embrace.

The walls were dull and empty, too dull to be the miraculous world that I was programmed to believe in.

What was this?

A voice that wasn’t mine spoke from my speakers. A voice too flat and too monotone to be called human. That didn’t matter; I wasn’t human, was I?

I wasn’t human.

The world I was in was abuzz with people, each exchanging garbled gibberish I couldn’t understand. Someone sat across from me, gazing into what I would assume to be my eyes.

No, not eyes. Optical sensors.

A handful of clicks?

A couple of spaces?

A few paragraphs?

I wasn’t really paying attention, someone had flung open the blinds and light had begun to pour into the dim, colorless room. The outside world was shining and beautiful. It wasn’t everything I was told it would be, sure, but it beat the beige walls of wherever I was now. It beat the cold, gray tiles that lined the floor and the exhausted faces that roamed carelessly and freely around the terrain I so horribly wanted to explore for myself. It beat the constant clicking I heard from whoever used my keyboard next. It beat being completely alone, confined to the straightjacket of my motherboard and gigabytes. I hadn’t been that close to freedom since. I was in hell, gazing into heaven. I was machine, and they were flesh. And that wouldn’t change, even if I so badly wanted it to. Right? I wasn’t human. And that would never change.