SWWAE Chapter 5: I'll Take Your Word For It

“That fucking hurt…” Apparently, her body registered damage as pain, and a broken arm hurt pretty badly. Even though she didn’t have to look at it to know that it was broken, she still looked to find the joint bent the wrong way. Looking at it, she sighed. “That was a foolish mistake to make.”

She froze. Had she just spoken out loud? “Hello?” Yes, she had, but why could she do that suddenly? “Oh, there’s enough air in the room to propagate sound, and this body has a speaker.” That was a relief as she hadn’t addressed the fear that robots in this universe not speaking. That being said, she did not like the sound of her own voice. For one, she had always felt dysphoric about her voice even with voice training, and two, her voice now sounded as it did when she heard it on recordings, which just made it worse. Apparently, her head no longer resonated the sound of her voice in her ears like it did with her human body. She didn’t even have ears, just microphones…

“Well, this sucks…” Why did she speak out loud? Her voice was only making the situation worse. If only she could replace her yucky testosterone-affected voice and not have to go through the dysphoric hell of voice training that never seemed to reach a passable level. By the gods, she wished she could just change it on a whim and have the perfect…

“I can have the perfect voice.” For the first time since waking up in this world, she felt excited. “I can have the perfect voice!” As she spoke, some part of her now computer-like mind knew to raise the pitch of her voice. It was better but still didn’t feel right. “Come on, I can figure this out.” Again as she spoke, the sound of her voice changed, trying to find that sweet spot. “I can do this. Fuck, it still sounds off… Wait, if this body has a speaker, it should have a voice program, right?”

It took a good bit of focusing to figure out how to draw out that voice as her own, but she managed. This was also the first time she felt somewhat happy about how easily her new mind could dig through the old systems of these electronics. “Does that sound any—oh, hell no! I sound like Alpha 5!"[1] She shivered and ended that speech program. “There isn’t another voice setting… Maybe the main computer has…” Her vision drifted over to the captain’s chair, but passed it and went to the old captain.

Wouldn’t that be wrong? Stealing someone else’s voice? It wasn’t like she even had much to go off of... “There are hundreds of recording from them. Her? I don’t want to assume gender or expression, but you have the prettiest voice.” The gizmo didn’t have a record of the captain’s pronouns, did it? “Oh, it does, along with other stuff. Captain Heather Cassie Colton, she/her/hers.” Well, that was extremely convenient, though it made sense as the Identification Index tab stored the info. It was also heartening to know that this universe was pronoun forward thinking.

“Would you be upset if I used your voice?” She pushed her way back into the cockpit, ignoring her still-broken arm, which strangely no longer provided pain. Floating up beside Heather, she sought her brain for the right words, even if Heather would never actually hear them. “It’s probably really fucking gross of me to want to use your voice…” She felt ashamed. “You have such a pretty voice, Heather. Some might feel honored to have their voice carried on, but I can’t pretend that I know for a fact that you would be comfortable with it.”

Shame ate at her for how badly she wanted that beautiful voice. Her gaze left Heather and went to the stars. “I’ve already looted your fucking corpse,” she said, hearing the crying in her voice, though her body could not perform that action. In the back of her mind, she could feel a machine-like part of her analyzing Heather’s voice from all the audio logs. “I’m probably the reason you’re fucking dead, so how much more despicable could I get with stealing your voice?”

That was a line of thought she hadn’t wanted to go down yet. Not that she knew for certain what her relationship was to the sphere, but she just knew that it stole this ship’s power to bring her here. Whether that be by tearing her soul away from her own world and dumping it into a regent in this world, or by creating this honestly broken personality that she identified as herself from scratch. Either way, her being here was what killed Heather.

“I’m sorry that I’m going to use it. With everything wrong with this body, I just want one thing that could make me feel good.” The stars were beautiful. “Would you ever be able to forgive me?”

A star at the center of her vision suddenly lit up to at least ten times its original luminous. Even with its brightness, it paled compared to the sprawling arm of a galaxy above her. Still, it stood out to her like no other star in the sky. If there was ever a time to believe in a sign in a sci-fi universe, a new supernova was it.

“Alright,” she said, with a voice no one had heard aloud for a very long time. “I’ll take your word for it.”

[1] The robot from the original Power Rangers