One

I’ve heard some say that we live in the Age of Exploration. I guessed they didn’t care that the name had already been given the era Europe’s colonization of the Americas. The title Space Age would be more accurate, perhaps, though it too has been used before, for the space race of two hundred years ago. If we must overwrite history, better it be ancient history, it seemed. After all, no one cared when some Earth continent was discovered anymore, if they talked about Earth at all.

Others called this the Age of Enhancement. I liked that one better; it was original and accurate. Everyone had enhancements, now. Bones were coated with metal to prevent injury, and limbs, when not completely replaced, were modified to be stronger, faster, and better. People would trade out their eyes for the laser ones that saw three spectrums of light or get implants purely for aesthetics. And of course, everyone had the necessary enhancements to filter air and govern body temperature, essential functions for life on Mars. It was truly an Enhanced Age.

Of course, if someone asked me about this, I’d tell them how there were only four ages in human history. There was the Stone Age and then the Bronze Age, and now it was the Iron Age, as it had been for thousands of years. No matter what fancy names we would come up with in the future, as far I could tell, only one age could follow the Iron Age: The Age of Rust.

I thought about rust a lot. It was one of the first things the doctors warned me about; being a cyborg, I had to be careful about rusting. One only had to look at the sands of Mars, stained red with rust, to be reminded of the dangers. Mars was already well into its Rust Age when we came here.

The doctors didn’t let me outside much. Mars was dangerous sometimes, and they didn’t trust me. Earth’s climate has been brought under control years ago, but this planet was wild yet, prone to sand storms and tornadoes and deep freeze. The outside was inhospitable to unenhanced humans, and those with enhancements had to be careful. Who hadn’t heard the horror stories?

Mostly, I stayed inside, learning. Or re-learning, as the doctors called it. Relearning everything I had forgotten.

I don’t remember anything before I woke up here, except for some murky images that refused to be remembered correctly. I knew only what the doctors knew, which wasn’t much. They found me in some alley, an inch from death, run over or thrown from a speeding vehicle or who knows what. Nearly half my body mass was lost or unrecoverable, and good portions of my brain were destroyed. The doctors saved my life, repaired my body and brain, but my memories were lost forever.

At least that’s what they told me.

~

My bedroom door opened, as it did every day, and a clipboard-carrying man strolled in. One of the doctors. I recognized this one; he was in charge of my education. His arrival was well-received, as it meant a day without the technicians poking and prodding and playing with my implants.

“Good morning,” he said. His voice was as smooth as his walk.

“Good morning, Doctor.” They’d done a good job with my voice. It only had the slightest metallic twang.

“We’re going to try something different today, okay?”

I nodded. Maybe we were going outside today?

“I am going to ask you a series of questions,” he said. “Please answer them to the best of your ability. Ready?”

I nodded again.

“What is your name?”

I opened my mouth to respond. Nothing came out.

I didn’t know my name. I hadn’t even realized that I didn’t know it.

The doctor made a note on his clipboard. I closed my mouth.

“How old are you?”

How could I know? This question was unfair. I glared at him.

“I mean, how old do you think you are?” he asked again.

These should have been easy questions, central to anyone’s identity, but I didn’t know if I was five or sixty-five. I couldn’t answer.

Another note on the clipboard, and another question. “Are you a boy or a girl?”

I had no idea. I had never even given the question thought. I was drowning in the realization that I had no name, no age, no gender, no identity at all. What was I, then, but an imitation of a person?

The doctor smiled at me. “I know what I’ve said has shocked you.” His tone was reassuring, though he seemed excited somehow. “But now, we know some of what you’re missing. We can begin to fill in the gaps.”

“You know my name? My age, my sex?” I asked.

“No more than you,” he said. “You must decide for yourself.”

“Surely you know my gender at least?”
“We know your biological sex. Not your gender.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Sometimes, not much.” He smiled again. I wished he would stop. “Sex concerns your body; gender, your identity. So the question is: are you a girl, or a boy?”

My head was spinning. “I...I don’t know.”

“Don’t you?”

Don’t I? Maybe.

I am a girl. I ran the thought through my head once, twice, a hundred times. I tried to see if the thought fit, if my mind embraced the idea or rejected it. I couldn’t tell.

Then I thought something else. I am a boy. Immediately, I knew. I don’t know how, much less why, but I knew. It was an obvious truth, one that I guess I had known all along.

“I am a boy,” I said. My voice seemed unsure. “I am a boy.”

The doctor smiled as he scribbled on his clipboard. “And your age? How old do you think you are?”

I was shorter than the doctors I saw everyday. A child’s height, then. But my intelligence far exceeded that of any child, or many adults for that matter. After all, my brain was half computer now. I thought much faster than the average human, and I could compute massive sums and download information straight into my brain. Perhaps intelligence, then, was not the best measure for my age. I examined my psychology, comparing myself to data downloaded from the solarnet. My profile seemed to match that of a teenager, though my physical body showed no signs of puberty. Twelve or thirteen, maybe? I rounded up.

“Thirteen.” It sounded about right.

Another scribble. What sort of data was on that clipboard? I was never allowed to see. The doctor leaned in closer to me.

“Now, young man, for the greatest treat of all. You may do what many others, including myself, wish they could have done. You get to choose your own name.”

All too vividly, the emptiness that had appeared when he first asked me my name returned. I hated the emptiness. I needed to fill it. Using the computer that was half my brain, I searched the net for the most popular baby names of 2184. The number one spots were obvious enough; Mars for boys, Venus for girls. I scrolled down the list. Pluto and Luna, Terra and Terr, Saturn and Neptune. None caught my eye.

Then I saw it. Name number 157: Io. Io, one of Jupiter’s four largest moons. Io, whose shape reminded me of the 1s and 0s that stored binary memory in the computer parts of my brain. I would be Io.

~

Months passed. Until, one day, I woke up alone.

The quiet was the eerie part. This world--my world--had always been filled with noise. Low voices would with the skritch-scratching of pens and the constant whir of machinery. But today, there was nothing.

Nothing at all.

I waited in my room, waited for the doctors to come get me and give me more tests. After a while, I thought about going to find them. I wasn’t supposed to leave my room by myself, but the more I waited, the more I worried, until at last I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to get out of here.

I pushed open my door. The hallway it lead to looked exactly the same as it always had, and yet completely different, perhaps because this was the first time I had been there all alone. As I walked through the halls of the facility, I wondered if this was what dreaming felt like. I hadn’t been able to dream since the accident.

I wandered around, poking my head into doors and seeing machinery, computers, and papers, all neatly powered off or stacked and stored away. It didn’t look like a place that had been left in a hurry, but where there were people yesterday, there was now only silence and dust. I started to yell, but the only reply was my voice echoing of the walls. Then I was running without thinking, taking turns without bothering to wonder where they led, hoping to find someone, something, that could help me. I was a rat in a maze and I didn’t know how to find the cheese.

Until by dumb luck, I turned into a corridor I recognized. The one that lead to the outside. I came upon a glass door, and beyond it, I could see only red.

They say this is the age of enhancements, but as far as I could see, it was the age of rust.