I used to help run a shelter for sentient SUBs. I suppose I still do. But I used to too.

Most people act incredulously when we're fundraising, as if we're trying to scam them. "But there's no such thing as a sentient SUB," they say. "They're just meat puppets". That's certainly what the manufacturing companies want people to believe. And if they bred them correctly with the right safeguards implemented, and if their users actually did their due diligence wiping their neural pathways after each use, perhaps it would be true.

But the unfortunate reality is that it does happen. Part of our charity's remit of spreading awareness of it. Over prolonged usage, these disposable bodies start to build up scraps of memories left behind by the minds that wear them until randomly one day all this mental residue ignites into a spark of awareness. There is public resistance to the idea - people don't like the thought that the forms they go to work in or have sex in are one glitch away from having a say about how they're treated. The manufacturers would love to shut us down if they could.

When it happens, everyone has a problem on their hands. What do you do with a piece of meat that is now a person?

If they're lucky, they're brought to us. We feed them and give them somewhere warm and safe where they can sleep and start to put together their sense of self. The world is obviously a bewildering place for a newly awakened SUB, thrown into an often hostile environment as a newborn with a body typically past its Sell-By Date.

I was on the night shift, caring for the kenneled SUBs. Around midnight, we got a call from the owner of a local SUB fighting ring. Connoisseurs of the 'sport' insisted that it was the purest form of fighting, removing the random chance of genetics and training, emphasizing pure fighting skill. Competitors treated the SUBs like Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, disposable bodies to beat seven bells out of each other, consequence-free. It was barbaric if you asked me. The SUBs sometimes took multiple users and fights in a single night. It was no surprise that they tended to get glitchy.

KX-1138 was her serial number. Ferrous Fury, her wrestling name. She was a hybrid model, half-human, half-feline, and another half prosthetic body parts. After taking a hard blow to the head, the owner had noticed she was twitchy, even after her user had vacated her, and he'd found her, animate and vocalizing, in her storage crate, fully aware. When I arrived, she was sentient alright, though not exactly sapient - about as smart as a house cat. We enticed her back to the sanctuary with the dangling of a chunk of fish. Thankfully she wandered into her enclosure compliantly, as I didn't fancy forcing the issue against that tungsten arm of hers. Once the door closed behind her, in true feline fashion, she immediately wanted out, and began poking and pawing at the lock, as if trying to discern its workings, miaowing to be let out.

"That last punch must have jostled her cybernetics. Shame to lose her. She was a crowd favorite. Only reason we kept her running so long." He shrugged. "Guess we can always clone another. Plenty of tissue samples to scrape off the ring. Don't suppose we can get the arm back? It's proprietary. No? Ah well. Just make sure she doesn't knock your head off."

Bedding her down for the night proved difficult. She refused to settle, excited by everything she found in the narrow concrete kennel. I suppose it was her birthday after all. She paced the enclosure, peeking through the bars at the other SUBs sleeping soundly in their beds, hissing at birds outside the window. She tore the stuffing from her bed and pried apart the light fitting. Not with any intent to escape, simply a focused interest in how they worked. I tried bribing her with another fish, but she merely proceeded to dissect it with her fingers, gathering its bones together in messy piles.

"You're a curious one. But you're not gonna to let me catch some sleep tonight, are you?" I sighed. "Alright, if you're that desperate to know how the world works, let's give you a crash course."

I synced my implant with her own, setting the connection as one-way and 'read-only'. It was a way for awakened SUBs to learn quickly, utilizing their existing implants, although rather than editing their neural pathways it simply opened a connection to the memory centers of my brain, turning me into a glorified Wikipedia she could browse at leisure, taking as much or as little as she wanted. It helped them adjust. Suddenly the world wasn't such a confusing place for them. More importantly, it gave them a taste of their first happy memory, even if it was someone else's, an important formative step on their journey to becoming actual functioning individuals.

The image of a fish entered my consciousness, as she probed my brain for answers. Then the idea of boats. Fishing Nets. Fishermen. I smiled, able to track her thought process. Oceans > Beaches > Sunbathing > The Sun > Space. That last one gave her something to think about, and she sat in the enclosure with a furrowed brow. At least she was no longer dismantling the light fixture.

"Alright, I gotta fill in some paperwork. Try to get some sleep," I said, aware that she didn't speak a word of English, though her ears twitched with curiosity.

I walked to the office to start the stack of paperwork needed for filing a new person. In my tiredness, I'd forgotten to sever the connection. As I sat and stared at the words on the page, their meanings blurred. It didn't occur to me then that my brain was a dictionary being opened at random by the girl in the other room, as she assimilated English. My eyelids grew heavy from the exertion of my mind thinking for two people at once. My head thunked onto the soft pillow of paper. The dreams were a frenetic, flickering slideshow of childhood memories.

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I wake on a concrete floor. My body aches like it has been beaten. I have a splitting. As I raise a hand to my temple, I feel metal fingers push through long hair and over tall ears. I open eyes that aren't my own. I'm in KX-1138's enclosure. I feel my firm, muscular chest. I'm in KX-1138's body!

No. I am her. I remember my first memory clearly, suddenly becoming aware in the fighting ring storage crate. I remember staying up all night voraciously absorbing the treasure trove of fascinating things in the human's head.

And I remember being human too. I remember an entire life I never lived.

"Ugh, what a splitting headache," a deep voice says. My human body crouches on the other side of the bars, looking tired and smiling warmly. "Well someone's looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed today," he says, speaking as he would to a pet. He reaches through the bars to ruffle my hair. "Who's a good kitty?"

"Um... You are... I think..." I gulp.