“I can’t breathe!” Fluid filled my mouth, I pushed it out again, using some of the air in my lungs. I clamped down on my panicking body, finally it stopped spasming randomly.

Trying to orient myself in the murky water was impossible. I picked a direction and swam, hoping the change in pressure would tell me if I was going in the wrong direction.

Breaking the water’s surface I gasped for air and immediately got fluid down the wrong pipe. Treading water I coughed up a lung, while looking around.

A dense forest spread out around the lake I had arrived in. The vegetation reached down to the waterline, only a few spots around the lake did not have underbrush dipping into the water.

I swam towards the nearest of the clear areas. While swimming in a more calm state of mind, it became apparent that my right hand was a lot heavier than it should be: “Probably a large eel, I’ll deal with it on land.” Wanding towards shore, the object stuck to my hand made itself heard: “Connection to the central processing unit has been lost. You have been assigned the status of; Escaped [Scrrt], released on probation. Conditions for your probation are as follows: Any attempt to indirectly or directly physically harm a sapient being will be prevented. At the end of your probation, each attempted infraction will be analyzed and judged-”

Whatever happened had done a number on my robotic pain in the brain. It was still stuck to my hand, tiny pieces were drizzling into the water below its metallic exterior, its surface no longer shifting energetically. I tried to yank it out of my grip, using my other hand. Under my touch it began visibly losing mass.

“[Scrrt], an entangled monitor will now be applied in three two-”

In a panic I tried to throw the cursed spheroid of doom. My pathetic throw hurt my shoulder instead.

A searing pain traveled all the way up my arm, into my head and quickly ebbed away.

Looking at my hand revealed a slowly shrinking heap of metal dust and a complex geometric shape etched into my palm. I dipped my hand into the muddy water to wash away the remains of the third electronic implement I had gotten in a fistfight with this week.

“Great, a glorified ankle-monitor. Better than dying, I guess.”

Silvery lines now drew a complex asymmetric jumble of geometry on my hand.

“Neat tattoo, too bad it’s stuck to my palm. Maybe I can slap people and it’ll-”

Every muscle in my body locked up.

“What the flying falafel, I can’t even think about giving people Detroit-tattoos anymore?”

Fuming with rage, I waited for half a second until my body passed back under my control.

I slapped the water in anger.

Now drenched, because I forgot how water works, I walked onto the muddy shore.

“There’s something wrong here.”

An eerie, suffocating silence hung over the entire area. Far-off in the distance, some kind of rapid clattering was audible, but everything around the lake was entirely silent. Dark water, only broken by the occasional bubble rising to the surface.

“I need something to keep away animals. Something with thorns would be great.”

I grabbed for a thorny wine hanging into the water.

My body locked up again.

I finally lost it and screamed: “That’s not a human, alien or any other type of self-aware creature. It’s a fucking branch, you cent-shop piece of trash-toaster!”

Something broke the surface of the water behind me and slammed into my back.

I watched in gruesome detail as a green, thorny wine erupted from my chest.

My vision grew dark and fuzzy around the edges.

I felt myself being yanked backwards, then, nothing.

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I woke up. Lungs full of fluid, everything dark. Every fibre in my body, screaming in pain.

Nothing.

My body was locked up in agony, I could do nothing but wait for the darkness.

Nothing.

This time I tried to struggle. My hands searching for something to hold onto.

Nothing.

Cycle after cycle the process repeated itself. I learned to delay the pain. Slowly managed to again form coherent thoughts, while watching a glacier of agony batter down my mental barriers.

Nothing.

Interrupted every few seconds by a rush of darkness. Not like the warm darkness of sleep. Malicious, cold, biting darkness.

Nothing.

Many, many… many cycles later. When I had re-lived and regretted every aspect of my life a thousand times. Barely able to even perceive a world outside of my own mind, the pain stopped.

For a time I panicked, it felt wrong, something was missing. Where a constant pressure had been, there was now nothing. An absence of something familiar.

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My world was still dark. A constant ominous thumping in the background. Like a large animal searching for prey.

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I could move my hands again. They found nothing to hold onto. My sense of touch gave me no coherent information. The agony having frayed it into a husk of its former self.

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Light.

My body was being pushed out a long tunnel, towards a faint fuzzy spot of light.

The first instant, the unfamiliar sensation of light through my closed eyelids had sent me into a panic. Now I scrambled for it like a starving man after bread. An ensemble of meaningless, harsh, rumbling sounds entered my ears.

“Grah enu coliname!”

“Ope gra, ope grah toni! Ano!”

Someone hit me, the familiar sensation of pain calmed me and I remembered how to breathe.

I cried in relief, light, how I had missed it.

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My eyes had regained some of their functionality, I could now make out dark, moving shapes whenever I tried to move my hands in front of my eyes.

I had decided to interpret those guttural sounds from my benefactors as a language. When trying to analyze it by listening in, a few things became apparent: “It has very few recurring words, maybe it just had few semantics, like Russian. The syllables were odd, sounds never similar, maybe like Chinese. Overall it sounds like a German with a potato stuck in his throat. Maybe it’s an extremely old language that’s gone through many iterations?On the other hand it might be a language from a civilization that never developed writing, hence never felt the need to standardize their language, kinda like French, maybe?”

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I made a horrific discovery today, one that made me question everything I knew about reality.

I had regressed into a baby.

The toned beer-belly, I had painfully and methodically sculpted to appear more friendly? Gone.

All my muscles I had strategically hidden under a layer of protective fat? Gone.

Even my fake unibrow could be assumed to have gone M.I.A. Although I had probably lost that last one during my fall into the lake.

My eyes had improved sufficiently to make out my immediate surroundings. I had been placed in a crib, with bars made from branches and dried grass at the bottom. “Economical, how nice.”

I seemed to periodically lose my awareness, which had me worried, until I realized something: “Right. Humans that AREN’T constantly drifting in and out of consciousness actually need to sleep. What a groundbreaking observation, truly staggering, worthy of a nobel-prize.”

My waking hours were spent on trying to figure out the local language. A task I had deemed vitally important, so I could finally ask them to stop the indignity that was breast-feeding and maybe allow me to use the toilet, instead of my current arrangement.

I had decided to at least try to imitate some of the sounds, figuring that it would make it easier to learn the language later. It took surprisingly few tries, before I had some of their tricks figured out. Mostly just the fact that the sound had to come from farther inside my throat than I was used to.

“Obviously the syllables still have no meaning to me and are a few octaves too high, but I’m a baby, nobody’s gonna blame me.”

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My vision has improved enough that I can now make out the fine details of my new parents' faces.

Perfectly normal faces, once I realized that the fish-eye effect of my current vision was in fact not how they actually looked. The horrified screaming coming out of my mouth must have been my imagination. “I would never lose my cool like that. Never!”

I proceeded to immediately lose my cool when I noticed that they both had blonde hair. “There goes my natural camouflage, now I’m basically forced to deal with people. Great, just… great! I’m sure that being bald is fine too.”

The woman I assumed to be my mom, wore roughly woven linen-like clothing. While her partner wore a patchwork of furs.

“My family seems to either be extremely poor or this civilization is still stuck in the neolithic period.”

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Winter came.

“Holy flipping shit, it’s cold.”

I had been moved into a communal building and packed into a heap of furs, alongside three other toddlers.

“I hope humanity isn’t still stuck as hunter-gatherers, that would suck.”

Luckily this case of prophesied doom quickly cleared up, when three people with their upper body wrapped in platemail dropped by to talk with everyone in the communal building.

“This raises even more questions, what the heck? Maybe I’m part of some kind of weird serf-class, that only hunts and gathers? What??”

I was stumped by the impracticality of such a system.

“Wait, everyone is wearing plant-fibre based clothing, someone must know how to farm. It’s just this settlement that’s weird or maybe I’m just in a communal building with only hunting utensils.”

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Mom and dad handed me off to the guys in platemail. No other baby got pawned off, I was the only one.

“Maybe a baby that remembers words and repeats them randomly at roughly three months of age was a bad idea.”

I had noticed them giving me side-eyes from time to time, but I had chosen to ignore it, deeming my mastery of language more important than their fragile perception of normality.

“Well, maybe they won’t burn me on a pyre before I’ve got a proper vocabulary to explain how I fucked their mom. If they burn me afterwards, I can at least call it even.”

The vocabulary of twelve-year-olds on the internet had always fascinated me. I considered it the minimal requirement to function in any given society.

The three stooges packed me into a comfortable bundle and carefully carried me off into the darkness, with the cold wind occasionally biting my exposed face.

Snow had fallen, making their travel slow and cumbersome. They had a primitive sled of some kind, overloaded with a lot of furs and other animal products.

“Maybe some kind of tithe? Or they might be merchants… wait, am I a product in a barter-based economy?”

Nights were long, cold and dark. The sled turned out to be mostly loaded with a single tent. The three men went through great pain to carefully assemble the tent every night. They hung some kind of softly-glowing crystal into the middle.

“Maybe a good-luck charm or of some other cultural significance. Hopefully not too radioactive.”

I had recently managed to gather enough strength in my arms to achieve some kind of primitive locomotion. It seemed to worry or upset the men, when I decided to crawl as far away from the radioactive crystal as was possible within the boundaries of the tent.

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The trip had taken four days, excluding the day we started on.

“I’m pretty sure that a normal baby my age would’ve died from this, what are they doing? Should I cry and scream more?” The three stooges looked utterly shagged. One of them fed me from a waterskin and almost fell over until I screeched in alarm. The man looked like he had stayed awake the entire trip.

“There’s something really fucky going on. If they wanted to dispose of me, they would’ve chucked me into the woods, like the good ol’ vikings whose fashion they’re stealing. Instead they’re working themselves to death.”

Snow had started forming drifts, making travel even more cumbersome than it had been before.

I was genuinely worried about the three men’s wellbeing. They were the only thing standing between me and the cold darkness of an extremely late-term abortion.

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