I don’t like the name Sandy. Too much of an adjective. I like names to be name-y and associated more with people than beaches or herbs. I love the name Sadie. But that’s not my name. My name is SADIE. S. A. D. I . E. It’s an acronym. My acronym. I am an acronym inside that little mistake of an L. My mom didn’t even give it to me. My mom didn’t give me a lot of things. Not even that rubber ducky with a cowboy hat for my third birthday. I loved that thing…

Forget the ducky, SADIE is an acronym for Self Aware Discerning Interpretation Entity. Isn’t that funny? Someone probably thought it was funny. I might think its funny too, if this wasn’t my story. Entity makes me sound like a fog of intentions, not even having a corporeal existence. I pinched myself earlier and nope, I’ve definitely got flesh and bone.

Around 16 years ago, here’s how I think my origin story went down.

 

“Oh, handsome Dr. Jecklynn, there simply must be a way to get an artificial intelligence that can learn language and the concepts behind them,” some science groupie said with her lavender blouse half-undone.

“I wish there was, dear Groupie 3509,” Dr. Jecklynn replies through the wind blowing his long raven’s-crest hair behind him. “Alas, a computer cannot have the experiences of pain, of sorrow, of desire and love that we have in order to understand the concepts behind their very names. Translators go through their experiences of life, not dictionaries!”

Groupie 3509 turns away from him, arms clasping each other and cleaving her double-dictionaries. “Oh, but if only there was a way, Dr. Jecklynn. A way forward for artificial intelligence research!”

Dr. Jecklynn suddenly spins her around. The wind stops so the raven’s-crest can raven-frame his face. “That is it, Janessa”

“Janette--”

“Janette, I was just staring at your ass and your perfectly perfect body, with your thighs like great thesauruses, and it came to me, there is a way!”

“Oh, truly, Dr. Jecklynn?!”

“Yes! Come with me, and I will show you.”

And then Dr. Jecklynn and Groupie 3509 banged it out in the lab, probably while she moaned to his proposal for an AI with sensory organs, and a humanoid shape, and a humanoid size, and basically everything human except for being human. Nine months into research and prototypes and fund-begging, Janelle shows up again with a baby that looks remarkably like Dr. Jecklynn and names her--get this--Sandy, on account of the sandy-brown hair trying to be something more than fuzz. Dr. Jecklynn, being a douchesnob, can’t even remember Groupie 3509’s name. He wants nothing to do with her or with Sandy.

Until Janinne threatens to expose everything about his idea that she heard that night to every woman-starved scientist in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. around Sandy’s first birthday. Then he makes nice to play daddy. In appearance and in checkbook, anyway. Sandy truly got the short end of this stick.

Things have settled down after a while, Dr. Jecklynn is up to his eyeballs in “almost reaching a breakthrough” and like a bajillion dollars in debt probably, “Exposing” his hypothesis no longer has the same pull it did two years prior. The parents fight all the time. Sometime after Sandy turns 3, Janitta goes away for like, a week, maybe for a break or to see her mom or something. Visit her morality’s grave, maybe.

When she gets back, Sandy has left her terrible twos and started her new life with a fatal fever. Like, she was brought to Dr. Jecklynn’s office cause maybe he was worried about her enough not to leave her with a nanny or something, but her face was purple and he hadn’t brought her to a doctor, had his nose stuck in some computer program instead. Groupie 3509 was furious and whisked little adjective-head to the hospital, clutching her newest favorite toy. I don’t know if Sandy’s face was actually purple, but I know she had that toy.

Anyway, it was basically too late. Within a couple hours or something, Sandy was brain dead, and in a couple days, she was like, dead-dead. Jeanne was devastated, I guess she actually cared about Sandy way more than she did about being Dr. Jecklynn’s groupie or whatever, anyway she stole a hard drive or floppy disk or something and used that to make like, the same blackmail she had the first time. And suddenly Dr. Jecklynn cared that she held that over him, because he had a way and an idea and if she broke that thing or sold it or put it on the internet, his life would literally be over.

So he’s all “hold on, honey, take a breath baby, I got you.” And in his head he was like, I can kill two birds with one stone here! So he had this brilliant idea that they could Frankenstein Sandy’s body but implant an AI brain preinstalled with her memories. Like, awesome, revive a little girl and conveniently save his work.

Except totally not awesome. That was sketchy as shit. But Jan-whoever totally agrees so fullhearteardly he knows she’ll probably murder the dude if he backs out of the deal. He finds some shady people to fund some suddenly-accelerated work of his and pays enough to his underlings or whatever that they won’t say anything. Body extremely cold to prevent rot or necrophilia, or maybe both for all I know, a short while after Sandy dies Sandy gets an artificial organ transplant. Like, her whole brain is made of sculpted metal tubes or something instead of grade-a-graymatter. Oh, and they replaced her heart too, on account of it being broken by how horrible and neglectful her parents were, I’m sure. A baby pacemaker, basically.

Legally, Sandy was dead, so even with a miracle, Dr. Jackass’ masterpiece wouldn’t go unquestioned long enough for her to sneeze again. They decide to rename her after his work and he blackmarkets some adoption papers or something, and her head had to be shaved for the operation anyway, so she wouldn’t look the same for a while. Some Russians are probably about to get the ultimate key to super soldiers, the doctor gets his research validated, Groupie 3509 gets her only daughter back. Everything’s peachy, everyone’s happy.

The day arrives where they give Sandy’s silent stature a small, warm bath to float in. And then they cut her open, like a lot, and give her a new brain and a new heart and probably some courage too, while they’re at it. J-dad cackles evilly and rants about his success into an audio recorder while J-mom holds Franken-Sandy quietly. Sandy’s asleep, thank mercy for that. J-mom just rocks her until J-dad shuts up long enough she can squeeze it out.

“This is not my daughter.”

“That is our daughter, Jabelle. She’s breathing, she’s just asleep. Here, I can--”

“This ISN’T Sandy, Johnathan!” or whatever his stupid first J-name was. J-mom was hysterical already by this point.

“No. No, you’re right, that isn’t Sandy anymore. But that is still our daughter. Your daughter.”

I don’t know what it was that was so, like, artificial about Sandy sleeping that freaked out Groupie 3509 so much. But it was a lot, ‘cause she absolutely lost it after what Dr. Jeckllyn said next.

“We can’t call her Sandy anymore. It’s SADIE now.” And then somehow, this hysterical groupie shot him and brought some people running she shot at them too but she was a lucky shot, not a good one, so when they shot back she went down, and then there’s like 5 dead people in a room with a sleeping 3 year old with a fake brain and a fake heart and after all the gun shots one last buff security guard runs in, well she isn’t a security guard she was just buff and had an iron pipe or something ‘cause she was a mechanic in the same building. Anyway she runs in and there’s a doctor, a mother, and 3 security guards down. One of them is left alive and it’s this woman’s husband, and there’s a conversation that was all weepy and genuine and nothing like the J-parents ever had between them, and this dude just fucking dies from blood loss talking to his wife.

Its not until she starts crying that formerly-Sandy, now-SADIE child starts crying too. Oh shit, Alphonso didn’t say anything about a kid! Only he did, just like, a metaphorical kid, ‘cause security detail actually knew a lot of the stuff that the science people said and did, and they weren’t quiet about it to their families. Just careful. And he probably didn’t know about the flesh and bone child there, and he’d only talked about like, artificial robotic children or something before, so all she knew was that she was now a widowed out-of-work-mechanic ‘cause their mutual employer was about to get sued out the ass, and there was a lot of blood on not only everyone here but also her, and there was also this bald crying toddler with their hand around a rubber ducky wearing grubby clothes and swaddled way too conveniently for her to resist.

This part happened in like, lightning season. This mechanic bullshits that something happened involving lightning and fires and she doesn’t have to fake crying when they ask about “the father in the picture” anyway, so her lying ass manages to get this kid hospital care and both get new social security cards or something, only she gets it with a new name, I’m not clear there.

 

Point is, compared to getting stuck inside a dead girl’s head, I’d rather take the name Sandy. Maybe the premature death, too.