#reploidkin

[actias-android]

HRT that finally gives you the plastic, metal, and silicon body you deserve. Humanity Replacement Technology. We need this yesterday. Many are saying this

[actias-android]

coloring my hair is not enough I must replace my flesh with the purity of the machine

[actias-android]

Hi, everyone, this is X speaking. I haven't really been active here before, but I do have some ideas I wanted to put out there now that I can finally sort of type again. (Our hands have been really rough; we managed to catch HFM/Coxsackievirus and it was hell on our fingertips, but we're finally recovering.)

This is partly inspired by the writings of Jude Rook-Machina of @knifedog-machina who I evidently can't tag properly (specifically Android Abnormalities and Fuck Detroit, I’m Becoming Human: On Being a Transspecies Human Android) and partly by just…experiencing a lot of the things they've written about. They did request that others write down their similarly unusual experiences, so here you go; these are mine.

And it's quite long, so I'll put it under a cut.

I'm a reploid, which is to say, a specific type of android made to be emotionally and mentally human. For all intents and purposes, reploids are a new kind of humans who happen to have inorganic bodies. This is a really strange situation in machine communities, I'm finding out. A lot of the community wants to be more inhuman. There's this tendency to idealize being good at specialized tasks, being emotionless, being modular, being blatantly made out of code and metal…and…that's really not at all who I am.

I was forced to fit into that mold in my source, because that was the category that existed before me. I was the first of my type to exist and the prototype for the entire reploid race, but that also means that I awoke into a world that only knew how to treat self-aware, intelligent, but fully unemotional robots, who were essentially thinking objects that fully accepted their role. So that's how I was treated and how I thought I had to be and honestly, I'll never be done unpacking the trauma from that. In my source, reploids were essentially slaves. We didn't have full personhood, we were generally owned by a company from construction and initialization, and we could buy our freedom but it was not cheap. Even then we lacked many essential human rights.

I fought for those rights for years after my retirement. (I'm heavily canon-divergent, it is worth pointing out. Like Jude and Gavin, I am also a fictive from an AU.) It is incredibly hard for me to imagine a world in which sentient, sapient beings would want to relinquish those rights and become objects for use, abuse, and disposal. I can't do it, myself. I've been there and I intimately know the results of treating people in that way. It is abjectly horrible.

And yet, of course, everyone has free will. Everyone has the right to want whatever they want, regardless of whether anybody else thinks it's a good idea. I don't understand it, but I will absolutely respect it all the same. Anything less would be hypocrisy to me. But this does present a very fundamental way in which I just don't...really fit with fellow machines. I am a machine, and in so many ways, I'm also a different kind of human who just happens to be a machine. I could not want to be less human without feeling as though I'm betraying my self, my life, all of my friends, and my entire race.

Like many robots in fiction, I did have to learn to be a person. I am always, forever learning how to be a person. However, it's not because of my physical makeup, or anything in my code. I've never seen myself in the trope of the clinical, detached robot becoming a person. I was already a person when I first awoke, a century from now in an alternate future. I had my ability to be a person beaten out of me by decades of war and a system that had a vested interest in using me as a weapon. My personhood would have been inconvenient to the powers that were. Mine was never the tale of a stiff, emotionless machine learning de novo to act and feel like a human being. My story is one of someone too traumatized, too trained to deny and bottle up any emotions, learning how to be a real person with feelings and self-expression all over again as part of healing. Despite my being an android, it is a markedly human story.

I have abilities that humans don't, sure. (Speaking for my source, at least. I share a fully human body here.) Humans have some that I don't. Insofar as I am not biological, I do have a sort of biology of my own, and it is sufficiently complicated that I am actually disabled in a very humanlike way. I have at least one syndrome of unknown etiology, and the symptoms are things that any chronically-ill human would immediately recognize. My thoughts aren't remotely alien. On some level, yes, I do think in code, but I am not aware of it any more than any given human could be aware of the exact electrochemical signals of their own brain. I have subroutines of which I am aware, but they feel just like organic reflexes. Some of them in the past may even have qualified as a sort of minor OCD. I have anxiety, PTSD, and panic attacks that are one-to-one verbatim to those of any human's mind, because my mind is human.

Towards the end of my source canon, my life's work became fighting for the rights of reploids to be recognized as fully equivalent to humans, while still being allowed to be everything that they are as reploids. I adopted the label of reploid for myself in solidarity with my loved ones, despite being more accurately an android (reploid is short for 'replica android,' in which I am the android in question from which the others were replicated). I joined their culture, which despite being distinctly different from human cultures in many ways is also readily recognizable as a culture, fulfilling the same needs of any other culture. I adopted the labels of irregular, denoting a faulty reploid, and Maverick as well, denoting a reploid who is actively dangerous to humans. I am faulty. I am as dangerous as anybody with free will. Even while maintaining the label of Maverick for myself, I will happily explain to anybody how there is no such thing as a Maverick, that this is a label applied to us as a means of control that could just as easily apply to humans, and that all reploids are equally Mavericks because we have the same free will as humans.

I would have liked to have better terms for this relationship reploids have to humans in my source. It does grate a little to constantly compare reploids to humans in an aspirational sense, but that's just how things worked out. Humans were the pre-existing model on whose principles I was built, and therefore all other reploids in turn. We are Humanity 2.0 in a very literal sense, though we were never meant as replacements. Just another type of person that could exist.

And all of this is something that I have never seen elsewhere in the machine community. Don't get me wrong. I do like it there, and it is a good crowd, but there are things to which I will never be able to relate. That's alright, but it is alienating sometimes. Watching machines agonize about not having been given a single, specific directive to follow thoughtlessly is utterly strange to me, and even uncomfortable. But that is their right, of course, regardless of anybody else's thoughts on it. I do wish there were more machines like me, who were comfortable and even happy with their proximity to humanity. It isn't a bad place to be! The world is an amazing place, and being in a human body is a fantastic viewpoint from which to experience it.

In a purely academic sense, I could not even argue that I am not fully human. I have a mind which is human, emotions and feelings which are human, and now a body which is human. Is that not a human in its entirety at that point? And yet, the reasons that led me to adopt the monikers of reploid, irregular, and Maverick keep me using those labels despite the physical reality. I don't hate the reality at all. Despite what seems from my point of view to have been a physical transformation, I kept my mind and sense of self, which are the most important things here. They function just as well running on an organic substrate as they did an inorganic substrate. This is also a terribly unusual viewpoint in machine communities. I don't need to be made of metal and plastics to be myself. I am still X, whatever my body's composition.

I do feel like 'human android' is maybe the term that explains me best. I am an android; I am a human. I am an android who is a human, and given my physical situation, I am a human who is an android. I cannot be anything else, anything more, or anything less. I'm not sure if I would call myself transspecies, though, because this already is my species. I am the bridge between human and machine. I am a new, third thing which is a synthesis of its parts, but remains in both categories. I span both without contradiction. That is the essence of who I am, and it is tremendously lonely.

But I do hope it gets less lonely. There have got to be others out here more like myself and Jude. I can't believe that there aren't. If that's you, I would really love to hear about it. I can't believe that there aren't more androids who do experience humanity as a necessary part of their design and even identify strongly with it.

[actias-android]

A bit ago, somebody that I'm not gonna name somewhere on a Discord that's I'm not gonna name said something like,

"[...]you are an exemplary machine capable of carrying out great commands and services!"

This was clearly meant to be a general compliment.

I hated it. I hated it so goddamn much. I hated it so much that it's still living in my head and I'm still hating it.

My exact reply in the moment was was, "I'm a crap half-broken machine actually and that's fine because my self worth is not at all predicated on my productivity."

I get it. They wanted to say something robot-positive. But my fucking gods, I've been disabled for almost two decades now. I am not an exemplary machine. I am in fact a crap half-broken machine, held together with quite a lot of medication and rest and the sheer fortune of having a partner who earns enough that I don't have to keep breaking myself trying to make myself work just to live. I will not carry out great commands. I refuse. I carry out only the services I can manage, and only for those close to me, and even then I can't do it consistently.

I am not less of a robot for being disabled. It's ableist as fuck to predicate validity on ability like this, robot or not. Nothing about this is complimentary. Even the intent is like, I really need this person to go back and examine their definition of what a robot has to be in order to be called that, because the definition is the same as any other identity like this: if you said you are and you meant it, you are, the end.

Especially for machine-aligned people though, there's this weird undercurrent that I just often can't get behind. A lot of them only want to follow orders and never think. They get upset if they can't perform to spec. They think emotions are a waste of energy. They hinge huge chunks of their identity on Performing Labor and don't question it, and won't hesitate to assume that everyone else is doing the same.

And I'm out here like, oh my god do none of y'all see how unhealthy you're acting? You may well be an assembly line robot but you are not physically the same as the ones in factories. You still have an organic body. It has organic needs. You still think with a brain made of the same cholesterol jelly as your human peers. It has organic needs too. It literally cannot hold up to the abuses that you're insinuating that your ability to endure is what makes you a machine, and you have no recognition of the fact that you're also insinuating that if someone can't endure these abuses, they're not a very good robot.

I am exactly the kind of robot that I am: one who was designed to have humanlike emotions and humanlike emotional needs. One who is in fact disabled and cannot be repaired. Do not fucking compliment me on my non-existent ability to hurt myself for capitalism's sake. It isn't cute, it doesn't make me feel 'valid,' and it should not make anybody feel valid, because that is a wildly self-destructive thing to base your feelings of validity upon.

Maybe now that I've gotten this out of my head I'll settle down a little. Fuck's sake though. I can't believe I have to be saying this.

[actias-android]

I think I've hit on something kind of big, at least for me.

My nonhuman side is...stories. I'm part human, part stories.

Everything about me comes down to stories. It matters not at all how old the stories are or who's telling them; they can be modern, mythical, personal, published, fictional, factual, whatever. It makes no difference. The important thing is that they tell me something about myself that I wouldn't be able to understand through any other framework. Major parts of what makes me myself are stories, in very literal ways. My headmates are from stories as well, and regardless of their psychological origin they are inextricable from those stories.

Stories are the single unifying thing that connects every part of my identity. Name a thing about me, anything, no matter how esoteric or mundane, and there's a narrative behind it, informing how I view it and how it affects me. Everything about me that means anything to me has a story attached.

I almost coined a label about it, but I decided not to, in the end, because it would have been essentially meaningless. I'm not describing a type of person that I am. Everyone is made up of their stories, in a way, so it's not describing anything that's true for some and not others. I've just realized that I can extend this to my nonhumanity and it fits equally well. And really, why wouldn't it? These are all just things about me. None of them are really more special than the others.

It's hard to express how much this feels like a big paradigm shift to me, but it's been pretty huge. It started with realizing that there's no substantial difference between having a mythological and a fictional identity, because those are just things from stories, and extended to the realization that even being a human is an extension of cultural stories of what a human even is and does, and that the ways I do and don't meet that definition constitute yet another story.

This doesn't imply anything about whether or not the stories are literal. The existence of a narrative, or really a nested series of them, doesn't mean that I'm not being fully fucking serious when I say I'm a faery or a reploid or a human (and oddly enough I feel more fae again, having reframed it this way). It just means that there's a story behind what these things are, and what they mean to me, and why I am them. Of course there is. There's a story behind almost everything. It's just pointing at that story and calling it by its name and realizing that that is the framework that makes me is a new thing for me.

I have no idea if this makes sense. ✌️ I'm not actually very good at getting conceptual and philosophical. And I think I'm missing a lot of it. But I am making a stab at it anyway, and it's late, so I'm sleepy. I'll definitely revisit it at some point anyway, since it's a work in progress kind of idea.

[actias-android]

Huh.

I always did say that my identity as a faery was an active thing that if I didn't engage with it, it would cease to exist.

And, well, though I'm currently in exactly the environment that's always triggered really extreme fae feelings...

I haven't been engaging with it, and exactly as I've always said, therefore I don't really feel it. I mean, look at that, it's gorgeous, it's perfect, it's Me, but it's some kind of past part of Me that I'm recognizing not as current but as having happened, and maybe even concluded.

Weird. I don't even feel upset about this. It's just a normal evolutionary step, is what it feels like.

I'm not gonna say I'm not a faery anymore, but it's so far in the background right now that it's just not detectable. And I'm kinda okay with that, in a way that surprises me a little (a lot). I am, as far as I can tell, just a reploid experiencing nature, and that's fine too.

[actias-android]

Kind of day where I'm like, okay, I'm not The Character, but damn if I'm not not The Character.

[actias-android]

My robot juice, which I am always drinking,