What the fuck? I looked at my wrist, and sure enough, there were braided cables beneath the skin where veins should have been. Without thinking, I sliced the rest of my forearm open. The entire thing was made of wires and cabling wrapped over a metal frame. I felt extreme pain in my forearm from the cut, but why? There was no blood. There was no muscle. There was just... circuitry.

"Mom, dad, what is this?" I demanded. The other guests at the party had all recoiled when they had seen what was going on. I had certainly bled before. Hadn't I? My parents had insisted that I not play any sports, but that was just for my safety. I never played outside much. Now that I thought about it, I'd never had so much as a fucking nosebleed. What was I?

"Son, calm down," my dad calmly said. "Everyone, please leave. We need to have a conversation with our son. Alone."

Everyone filed out hurriedly from the room. My dad went to the window by the front door and waited until everyone had gotten in their car and left. He meandered back into the kitchen and sighed with a furrowed brow. My mom had moved toward me and was stroking my hair with a few tears falling down her face.

"We didn't want you to figure it out this way, sweetheart," she said. "We were going to tell you tomorrow on your eighteenth birthday."

"Tell me what?" I asked. I wanted to put distance between us. I wanted to go to the hospital for the searing pain in my arm. But what would they do? Send me to fucking Best Buy to talk to the Geek Squad? In shock, I just rested my head on her shoulder and sat there.

"Well, son," my dad started from across the table. "When you were born, your body was... broken. You weren't born prematurely, but your body hadn't grown to the point it needed to. Your arms weren't fully formed, your legs hadn't grown beyond the knees, and your heart was missing a valve. For all intents and purposes, you should have been dead. And yet, there you were. Our miracle child. But you didn't have long. The doctors gave you hours before you died. We were heartbroken. We didn't know what to do.

"But then someone came in," he continued. "Someone in a suit with a clipboard. He told us he could save you. All we had to do was sign the papers and agree to some monitoring throughout your life. We were desperate. We didn't ask any questions. We just signed the papers."

"And? What happened to me?" I demanded. "What did they do to me?"

"They transferred your brain to a cybernetic body. It was made from some metal that grew organically and nanobots that would handle the wiring that replaced your nervous system. You essentially became the world's first cyborg."

On this revelation, I finally pushed away from my mother. That wasn't possible. I had skin. I had hair. I felt pain. I was a person. I was a human. Wasn't I? The pain in my forearm was starting to fade. I looked down, and it was stitching itself up as if it had never been there. There wasn't even a scar. Holy shit.

"I'm not even a fucking person!?" I cried. "But I have a girlfriend. I love Maisie. I fucked Maisie. I'm a person. I have to be."

"You are a person, sweetheart," my mom urged. "You have everything that makes a person. You have feelings, emotions, a consciousness. You're as much a person as anyone else. I've studied it extensively. You are as much a person as I am."

"I'm just not fucking human," I said as I made the realization myself. I was a robot. I was just a simulated body. Everything about me was fake. My muscles. My fat. My bones. My dick. Holy shit. I needed to sit down. The world felt woozy. Fuck. Everything always felt so real. How was that simulated? Or did it feel real? What was real? How did I know what it was supposed to feel like?

"Son, we did what we had to. You were going to die," my dad said. I wasn't mad that they did it. I was mad that they hid it.

"You could have told me! You could have told me the truth about why you didn't want me to play sports. Or why you didn't want me dating. Or why I wasn't allowed to ride a fucking bike when I was a kid."

"It was part of the agreement. We couldn't tell you until you were eighteen. The government wasn't sure how your body would react to your brain overloading like that. It seems to be handling it fine, for what it's worth."

"Don't do that. Don't make this out like it's a good thing. You've lied to me my entire life. Everything about me is fake. I'm manufactured. Like a McDonald's toy. Fuck you guys. Fuck both of you for doing this to me. You should have fucking told me."

"Regardless of what you think of this decision, you are my son, and you will not talk to me like that."

"Or what? You've already taken everything that makes me human. Are you going to kill me? Fucking take a magnet to my heart or something?"

"We would never hurt you, sweetheart," my mom said as tears streamed down her face. "I'm sorry. We didn't have a choice."

"I'm going out." I grabbed the keys off the countertop and headed toward the door. "When I get back, we'll talk more. But I need to go cool off. This is fucking bullshit."

​

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