As I mentioned before, birthdays weren't exactly a thing for me. At the time, I barely knew what a birthday was. Of course, I knew that the age of a person was important for tracking milestones, but celebrating a birthday and giving and receiving gifts wasn't exactly a part of my curriculum. I wasn't sure people still tracked their age much after leaving Earth. And even if I did celebrate my birthdays, I wasn't sure when I was born in the first place, and I'm pretty sure even Kane didn't know.
Nevertheless, one day, instead of breakfast, the only thing I found next to the food slot was a two-hundred-millimeter shard of plasteel-edged carbon fiber perfectly molded to fit my hand. It was a perfect replication of the combat knife I preferred in VR training. I didn't believe it at first, assuming it might be some AR trick or something, but when I realized it was real, I couldn't help but feel like I had been given a gift.
It was only when I realized that I was no longer being given food that it felt less like a gift, and more like a test. Not long after I had been given the knife, I noticed that I no longer had access to Pixa, or the rest of my BSI.
The prospect of dying of starvation or dehydration crossed my mind very quickly. I couldn't even be sure whether the air was still recycling, and if it wasn't, I may have only had another day or so of breathable air. But I also couldn't be certain that I wasn't still being watched.
All of this consideration was done as I did some close combat drills with my new knife. I made sure not to let on that I was worried, or had even noticed that I was given no food. I continued with my normal routine until nightfall and began my next night cycle.
