1 Prelude

What makes you human?

It is the existential question that has haunted me since I can remember. A question that squirms restlessly in the shadows of my mind as I navigate through this social pantomime they call "life."

I vividly recall the exact moment this doubt first took root within me, at the tender age of five. It was during Kenshin's birthday, the neighbor's kid, when I watched the other children interact joyfully, running and screaming amidst laughter, while I remained on the sidelines, unable to fully grasp that explosive display of joy that seemed to spontaneously emanate from their little bodies.

There I stood, stiff as a statue, coldly analyzing them, and that's when I first felt that impassable chasm that separated me from the rest. They seemed to have come into the world complete, filled with an effervescent substance that flowed freely through their veins, which I had been denied. I felt like an impostor in the midst of that orgy of genuine emotions, clumsily forced to play a role for which I wasn't cut out.

My parents, of course, suspected nothing. To them, I was simply the perfect child: polite, obedient, and academically brilliant. "Our little genius," they used to boast to their friends, parading me around like a trophy won thanks to their impeccable upbringing.

But within the immaculately white walls of our middle-class home, when there were no prying eyes before whom to keep up appearances, my mother sometimes caught me staring at her fixedly, with an unnatural intensity in my gaze that must have been disturbing to her.

She always quickly looked away when that happened, as if my empty eyes were two black holes that sucked her into an abject darkness. I think I must have shaken her on some primal, intuitive level, though she would never openly acknowledge it.

As the years went by, my internal lack only sharpened painfully. In school, I quickly outshone my peers, devouring knowledge from any subject with astonishing ease. My teachers lavished me with praise, and my parents were always proud.

But within me, desolation continued to expand, a black hole consuming everything. I watched my peers laugh, cry, get angry, hug, play, and I couldn't help feeling like an alien trying to decipher the rituals of an unknown tribe.

I then began to observe them with the meticulousness of an ethnographer, cataloging all their facial expressions, their jokes, their slang, the cadence of their voices... I eagerly absorbed all these details like a thirsty man in the desert suddenly stumbling upon an oasis. I began to imitate and replicate their behaviors like a chameleon, carefully constructing the perfect mask that would allow me to blend in among them without raising suspicions about my inner emptiness.

Thus, as a skilled reverse engineer, I dismantled piece by piece that strange device called "human." Laughter reduced to the contraction of fifteen facial muscles; crying, to the hypersecretion of tear glands. Even words could be dissected into minimal units of sound with arbitrary meanings. Everything was susceptible to being cataloged, replicated, hacked.

I then began to flourish socially, becoming the center of every party, the privileged advisor of my friends. Human relationships were just an elaborate system of inputs and outputs for me, a complex mechanism that I could manipulate at will once I deciphered its source code.

That's how I reached adolescence, with the mask of normality perfectly assembled and my social skills oiled to the point of being able to seduce and captivate any target I set my sights on. But inside, the desolation was as deep as ever, an icy abyss that no ray of light seemed able to penetrate.

According to the books, we humans were the most complex animals on the face of the Earth. But what did that supremacy really mean? Some anthropologists argued that our exceptional trait was our capacity for recursive language, for constructing ever-new ideas by nesting endless layers of meaning. Others highlighted our inner voice, that constant dialogue with ourselves, as the defining feature.

Theologians, meanwhile, claimed that humans possessed a transcendent soul that elevated us above the rest of the creatures. A divine spark that made us unique. Mine must have been flawed, I often thought bitterly. Some error in the celestial assembly line had left me empty inside, an impostor in a world I would never fully understand. An insect with a human face, like in Kafka's story.

Each morning, as I faced the stranger in the mirror while brushing my teeth, I felt I was staring at an usurper who looked back at me with eyes as inscrutably frigid as the Arctic. An intruder within my own skin.

Was this what it meant to be human? This insatiable emptiness, this eternal farce? The more I dug for answers, the wider the gap between that vibrant world of others and my own inner universe, as barren as a dead planet.

And yet, here I am. Moving unfazed by life's current, eagerly absorbing all the emotional manifestations that cross my path, dissecting and cataloging them in a desperate attempt to find the ingredient that has been denied to me. I collect identities like others collect trading cards, becoming the perfect friend, the ideal lover, the timely advisor. A galaxy of masks orbiting around emptiness.

What makes me human?

I continue to search for answers, fearing emptiness might be all I find.