Sneak Peek: Meet Kikah.

Dear Cyber-Friends,

Two posts in one day! You’d think I was trying to make up for those long periods of silence or something…

I’m currently at the library thanks to some passing hale showers, and decided I wanted to work on my sci-fi novel. Unfortunately, I’m at a point in the writing where I desperately need my notes to continue, and of course I don’t actually have those notes with me right now. So instead, I ended up writing a brief introduction to one of the two main characters, set before the story of the novel actually starts. I thought it was pretty cool, and I decided to share it with you! Let me know what you think, either on Twitter or here in the comments (or you can email me, if you’re one of the people who has my email).

Without further ado, here it is:

She’s called Kikah, but she knows she doesn’t really have a name. She could just as easily have been called Meta, for instance, but at some point someone decided she should be given a name separate from the Project which created her. It gives the illusion she’s an autonomous person. She’s never been fooled by it, though. Being raised in a bio-lab can have that effect; she’s never forgotten she’s property, not a person. She doesn’t resent it. She wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the Project.

Zan is the closest thing she has to a friend, and to a parent. She isn’t sure what a real parent would be like to have; she’s never experienced it, and no one has talked to her about their lives outside Triad. For that matter, she isn’t sure what having a friend would be like, either. She can look up the definitions of the words, but it doesn’t convey the experience, the feelings and emotions. All she has is literate translations and scientific explainations; those things aren’t particularly helpful in understanding nuance.

When the Project is terminated, Zan convinces Triad to keep her. She’s grateful for that; she enjoys being aware and alive. Without Zan’s intervention, company policy dictates she would have been terminated along with the Project, or perhaps put into long-term storage for future use. Instead, she’s put to work. For the first time in her life, she’s allowed out of the bio-labs and into the rest of the Triad building. She’s allowed to observe — and later participate — in several different types of Projects. Her contributions and reactions are evaluated, and Zan informs her Triad has declared her stable enough to consider an employee.

Of course, she knows that calling her an employee is just like giving her a name; it’s an illusion to make everyone else feel better about the truth. She’s still property, not a person. Her world has expanded, but she’s still never been beyond the walls of the company, isn’t allowed to interact with someone who doesn’t have clearance, doesn’t exist outside of Triad. It still doesn’t bother her; working on Projects means constant new stimulus, new challenges and problems, new ideas. She’s assigned a partner, a woman named Sirian, and they work well together. Sirian treats her like a person, and listens to her input. The experiment called Kikah thinks perhaps this is how the emotion “contentment” feels.

Hope you enjoyed that little sneak peek into the world I’m creating! Remember, let me know what you thought, and if it leaves you wanting to know more…

Love,

GeGi.