Emotionless Mutation (Book Three)

Prologue

I would like to believe that I remember everything about anything that I have ever seen, heard, or experienced in any way, shape, or form, because my memory is impeccable and one of my best features. I have lived in this place my whole life, amounting to sixteen years of doing nothing of any significant importance. I don't mind. The schedules give order to the day. The tests are plentiful and meaningless. I know no other life, so what is there to miss?

I have no name. The aliens that created me refer to me as Subject 60184. I grew up learning about other worlds and other beings similar in nature to me, but I know that there's no one else who's exactly like me. That's the interesting thing about living things: no two creatures are exactly alike.

The similarities of living things are more widespread, more general. Plants are similar, thus they are grouped together and dubbed "plants" even if one is a cactus that resides in hot, sandy climate while the other is moss that grows well in dark, damp places. Similar, yet vastly different.

I am classified as a cyborg mutant. This means that, while I was born human, I was altered by mutagen and became who I am today, all thanks to my alien captors. I used to think that mutants were scarce and those that existed were kept within the walls of this Kraang facility, but my theory has now been disproven. There are other mutants, accidental mutants, mutants that have escaped the Kraang, the list goes on. The Kraang speak of them and oftentimes I find myself listening. They speak of wolf women with razor sharp claws and piercing eyes, shadows that take shape out of the corner of your eye, turtles that move in the dead of night with the swiftness and silence of ninjas, there's even talk of giant cats with stripes or spots, bodies laden with weapons.

All of these creatures are mutants, like me, but we are vastly different. I am highly intelligent and exist for a reason that I have yet to figure out. I have watched the human race from afar my entire life. They're a fascinating bunch, albeit they're confusing. Watching them while the Kraang took over New York was quite the spectacle. Of course, I stood back and observed, unable to do a thing even if I wanted to.

According to the research that I've come to conduct as my only pastime, humans feel things as well as being smart enough to survive in a world ruled by Darwinism. They refer to it as a "dog-eat-dog" or "survival of the fittest". I'm not a fan of the cannibalistic one, so the latter sounds better to me. The fittest survive. I'm rather fit for a cyborg who's never seen the outside world save for pictures and peeking out the window when I'm brought out of my cell.

The idea of feeling things is absurd to me. What is feeling? Is it a program that you can download? Is it a genetic mutation that humans have developed over their millennia on this planet?

I suppose I do know what feeling is like, but only when it comes to hatred. I think I'm rather pleasant as far as personalities go, but my deep spite for my captors is rather unrelenting. Because of them, I have been forced to watch the world pass by without me. There's a whole world out there, one speck in the vast universe, and I cannot go out and explore the wonders that it holds for myself. I sit. I am obedient. I am robotic. Thus, my hatred grows.

For sixteen years, I have lived as nothing more than a test subject. To the Kraang, I am not human. I am nothing more than an object to be utilized.

I know better than them. They do not know just what they created when they mutated me into what I am. They've made the wrong enemy, and should I ever get the chance to escape, they'll know just how far the boundaries of my hatred can go.