More old stuff found on an old drive:
A bit of a sledghammer, but still deeper than ScarJo.
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When I was biomodded - it wasn't a 'woman' as such that the 'wave created. It created a Knight Saber. It created what I'd trained it to think a Knight Saber was - a female-appearing hardsuit with a human face on it. I'm everything that Priss, Sylia, Nene and Linna are, in one single package. Sylia's mind. Priss' voice. Linna's athleticism and Nene's spark of pink hair - and more. Priss' Gung-ho nature, Linna's love of conspicuous spending, Nene's love of things sweet and subversively punk and Sylia's appreciation of the female form.
Which reminds me. There was one thing all the Knight Sabers are, and I wasn't.
So there's always been that tension there, a little dissonance in myself. It's around these little concentrations that fractures in the mind can happen, a split in personality. My training helped to hold it together. I made it a part of me, by allowing it a quiet voice through a puppet body.
I suppose though, maybe the 'wave thought it's job had been left unfinished for all these years.
I had been playing around with replacing a shipmind with a DNI. Instead of just interfacing, the computer decided to boot itself from my actual mind. It was a total and literal surprise meatfuck that'd be a crime if I did it to someone else. I've seen people get prison time for it. It left me dazed and confused and wodering why my brother was inside a computer.
I didn't notice anything was wrong with myself until I saw the 'M' on my ID card, and people started asking me why I'd suddenly started using female personal pronouns.
When I first launched to space, and met with AC, the first thing we did was a thorough quiz - establishing both who I was, and who I remembered being. It's a backstop - a way to detect memory damage or interference, either contamination from hardware or malice. The answers I gave, are a matter of medical record. I took the same quiz again, and gave the exact answers I rememebered giving a seven years earlier. I was certain I was fine, right up until they showed me the comparison
The very first line told me I was wrong.
The first reaction is disbelief. The one thing we never doubt is our own mind. Even though I knew better - even though I'd seen just how malleable and unreliable memory is. Take something out, and the brain naturally plasters over the cracks, and you never even noticed it's gone until you poke the plaster and it crumbles away. It forces you to ask that horrible question;
Am I really myself anymore?
Who we are in any one instant is a function of that instantaneous experience, and a recollection of every other instant leading up to that point. And if something changes that recollection - in a real way it changes who I am. Anything that damages that, or mutilates that, is an attack on the self. It's a violation of a person's fundamental being.
Mackie was created from me - he was created from the man I used to be, seperating that part of my mind from my self, removing it and then slathering over the holes with cheap wallpaper and poster-flashes from each of the Knight Sabers. From a distance, it looks normal. But when you get up close, you can see right through the holes
I don't think a 13 year old girl from Megatokyo would use the boy's locker room at her school, for a start. And if she did, I don't think she'dve been ignored week-in-week out.
I still remember growing up. I remember school. I remember college. I remember my first girlfriend in much the same way. The basic events are mostly the same. And then, my brother being born the same year Jurassic Park came out - twenty years later, he's ten years too young for that. My father died in a lab accident when I was young. But I helped organise his 50th Birthday party when I was 22. I even bought him a bottle of whiskey.
I remember joining the anime society that created the Ciara, and building the control systems for that ship's engines and generators. I remember cosplaying as Yuri of the Dirty Pair at a con, the same year there's a photo of me taken in a TF-2 Engineer costume. I stayed behind when the ship left, because I hated being cooped up in the thing. An archived post on AFBGC shows my original Skyknight-inspired hardsuit drawings, even as I remember forming the moulds to fit my chest. The promise to make a purple variant once I got the technique down was still unfulfilled.
I made test-castings to be certain, then fired them in a kiln fired by an old gas boiler. It was trial and error to get it right. In my mind's eye, it was Mackie who really built the railgun I used to test the prototype panels for my armour.
I cast the armour from a solid mix of handavium, steel wool strands and powdered ceramics with a glaze on top. In total, it must've weighed nearly two tons wet. Compression, weeks of careful drying and then being fired in the kiln dropped the weight to a small fraction. No matter what, my first attempt is always a failure. I remember the first result being a horrible bodge of Sylia and Skyknight, warped and mutated and unusable. I tried again, and got the suit that became my body.
The truth is, the opposite happened. This was the first armour. My attempt to correct the mistake was the second. I can see the posts on the Newsgroup.
I worked for Wright Stuff Mechatronics as an engineer. I saved up to buy an Rx8 - with a handwaved Tachikoma on the dash that acted as a speed camera detector. The first thing I ever waved was the ignition coils on that car - and a little in the engine oil.
I looked at the sky and longed for the party I was missing. And then one night I had friends over, got drunk, drank some left over handwavium, and somehow put on the suit. Next morning, the surprise remains the same.
Mackie falls out of the picture until he returns in a starship computer. I become a minor nuisance - my newfound ability to fly granting me the sort of freedom from consequences most humans only dream of, adopting my nom-du-guerre to keep Mackie safe. I bother the AD Police into doing something about me and I boost to orbit, and that's where I finally meet AC. We go through the usual 'new cyber, how the fuck'd you do that/welcome to the club routine', step one of which is asking my real name.
Sylia Stingray, I told her. It's clear as a bell in my mind.
But that's not the name I really gave twelve years ago.
And that leaves me right back at the start. Am I still myself?
In a real way I split into two people. Me. And Mackie. But, while the detail of my early memories is drastically different, the substance and feelings behind them remain the same. It's a different route, to arrive at the same endpoint. On the one hand, different, on the other - effectively the same.
I still love Ford. I still like doing the things I have loved all my life. I'm still woken by the same Boskone nightmares on those nights I choose to sleep. The basics are the same. the core stuff of me is still the same. I'm still recongiseable.
And then I'm reminded that I took the Oath of Venus, willingly. It changed my core self image from male to female. Sometimes when I'm bored, I doodle lingerie sketches - I've three whole sketchbooks filled with women I know, drawn in lingerie of my own design. Nobody's ever seen them. And I've gained a brother, who's the single most important thing in the world to me. Even if the memories are false, the feelings behind them are real. I can't ignore them.
Who we are in any one instant is a function of that instantaneous experience, and a recollection of every other instant leading up to that point. So, who we are changes from moment to moment... a small delta in the function of self giving a smooth, progressive change. There can be deviations - some life events having more effect than others - but the core remains the same. It's still recogniseable
My own mind has this monstrous discontinuity in the self - a sudden verticle jump in my mental makeup that breaks the whole metaphor apart. But I'm still recongniseably me after its over. I'm not trying to pretend I'm the same person, I'm not working at a charade. Because all those things before 2012, they're just a prelude. The last 12 years has done more to define who I am, than anything before it.
It's impossible to know how different I would've been had Mackie never happened - how I'd have continued thinking of myself as 'male', what projects I would've taken on or what friends I would've made, and the different influences they would've had. I don't really know what person I should've been, so I can't say how different I am now.
Ultimately, the question has to be.
Do I still feel like me?
I do.
I'm Jet Jaguar. Sister. Partner. Martial Artist. Combat Cyborg, Spacecraft and Engineer.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
