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limitedrevolverworks · 6 years

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My Mother 2.0 [2]

[Chapter 1]

Above all else, it’s the silence that that he cannot comprehend.

A deep quiet fills his ears, flooding with a silence so paradoxically deafening. Mere instinct reaches out as best it can, grasping for the slightest vibration it could feed to eardrums sorely starving for that hint of familiarity, but all it can scoop out of the stale air is an utter anomaly it doesn’t know what to make of. The frightening shadow of an indecipherable unknown looms over him, daring his powerless, broken shell to do something, anything about it that he obviously cannot. He could chalk it up to the numbness that seems to envelop his entire being, from the smallest atom to the very thoughts produced by his half-comatose brain, but even in his stupor, the boy knows better. And of all the interrogatives pressing down on him, this one feels the most daunting precisely because he can blame it on himself, rather than some factor outside the scope of his perceptions. It’s a minuscule, vibrant spark of audacity that the very mind culpable for its creation regards it with cautious hesitation, unable to fathom its own ability to birth it. For a time that his diluted consciousness desperately stretches into a seeming eternity, the child refuses to acknowledge the one truth he could process, choosing instead to wallow in an uncertain oblivion that is at least partially of his own making. It’s a long, drawn out, tiresome battle, a silent war fought without weapons, a peaceful, stubborn conflict where nothing happens aside from waiting, waiting.

Waiting.

He doesn’t realize the gradually shifting tide of his struggle until his sole serviceable eye timidly spreads open to brave the unknown sight that has been waiting all along for his acceptance.

Now, the boy finally admits it: that the very unknown he should fear, he very much welcomes far more than anything he’s ever been acquainted with.

And so…

At last…

Time begins to flow anew.

“Hey now, awake alread-D-D-D-D-D-y? Go figure.”

The rapidfire barrage of glitchy reverb is interspersed between words that sound like they’re rattling within a box made of thin metallic sheets. The auditory concoction stampedes its way through the child’s hearing with all the grace of a bombardment and hurting twice as much.

It’s odd, though.

Common sense etched deep inside tells him that the optimal response should involve either lots of thrashing and screaming, or curling into a ball and quietly begging for it to end. There’s the fact that the neural pathways in charge of his muscles are currently fueled with a thick, uncrossable gel paste-like form of paralysis, but that’s not the whole of it. The pain is far from pleasant, yet it conveys a clear message - that he is alive, and not anywhere he would recognize. One of these two conclusions fills him with something akin to relief; the other, not so much.

It’s hard for the boy to decide which corresponds to which. He decides that, for the time being, a better way to keep busy what few of his brain cells are awake would be deciphering exactly what it is that he’s staring at.

Through the fog blanketing his vision, the child sees grey lips, framed by a shade of dull blue well on its way to fading into the latter color. The plated shape gives him the impression that it must be a helmet covering the rest of the stranger’s face, but the two halves hug each other so harmoniously to form a solid mass that he questions this interpretation, despite any other making little sense. He seeks answers in the single black strip cutting into the superior portion: the bright red dot swimming inside it, however, dumps only more questions onto a pile that has already grown rather healthy.

His eye begins to burn, reminding him of such a basic need as blinking that he’d seemingly forgotten in his stupor. The boy’s eyelid trembles: will it manage to arise once more, after it’s fallen? The darkness was daunting, but he felt safe within its embrace. It tasted different from the one he’s grown accustomed to - ah, hold on, that’s not quite right.

As more and more of his consciousness tears itself free from its sleepy cocoon, the child begins to make sense of his own thoughts. He understands that it’s not quite that his unconsciousness felt safe in and of itself - rather, it’s what he feels now, after he’s already gotten out of it. Knowledge informs his less rational side, rewriting his immediate past in light of the present. It’s the fact that he knows what comes after the darkness, that leads him to trust it for the first time his short, young life. And for how utterly fruitless his attempts at making heads or tails of his present predicament may be, he has no doubt that he prefers it to the routine that preceded it.

Lingering for a long, drawn-out second more on the thing that may or may not be a face, the boy tells himself that he has nothing to lose anyway. And in the simple act of blinking once, he perceives the rush of an emotion he’s never known he could harbor.

If he’d ever had any conception of it, the child could relish in his first taste of freedom.

“Do yourself a fa-A-A-A-A-A-vor and don’t move, will you?”

More words come out from a mouth that doesn’t move to spell them. The boy speaks his obedience with silent immobility: at the end of the day, old habits are too stubborn to lie down and let themselves die; he receives a nod for his effort, or lack thereof.

“Not that you can move an-N-N-N-N-yway.”

From the corner of his vision, the boy witnesses what seems to be a shoddy impression of a shrug from a pair of stiff shoulders that must have been made for anything but.

“Had to strap you good in case these aneS-S-S-S-S-thetics failed to do their job, and what do you kno-O-O-O-O-w? Never trust chemic-C-C-C-C-als a couple centuries past their expiration date, kid.”

Peeling off the various layers of noise and glitching haunting it, the voice digs out the impression that he’s been talked to by a woman, despite his eyes’ struggle to acquiesce with this conclusion. If what she’s wearing is a protective suit of sorts, it’s nothing like the ones he’s seen.

Panic threatens to seize him. Could they have transferred him to another research facility?

No! No!

He’d just begun to warm to the idea that perhaps, finally, it had all ended, but now that his lucidity has wrestled back control of his ability to process things properly, he wonders how he even came to that conclusion. His path had never, ever strayed from its repetitive course until that fateful day. Why, exactly, should he believe it to be the case now?

Foolish. Stupid stupid stupid! He dared dream for the first time ever, and he knows that all it did was set him up for greater anguish than he’s ever known. Because now, he has tasted hope. It’s far too late to retrieve the resignation that he cast away at a whim. He’s left himself vulnerable, discarded his fragile shell in the spur of a momentary madness. For all he knows, he’s left himself bare against a realm of suffering that could surpass anything he’s experienced. That is… that is…!

He wants to cry. To scream atop his lungs until his throat will have burned away along with what’s left of his sanity.

Burning…

His throat is burning. He feels a lump in it that has nothing to do with the one born from his desire to cry his heart out. The distraction is a tiny one, yet he clings to it as best he can, a minuscule island in an ocean of self-made terror. He notices now that the noise he was picking up while barely conscious is his own breathing. A ragged, drawn out sound like dusty wind sweeping off a gravelly path. The boy’s eye moves down on its own, seeking an explanation. It can only manage to pick up the vague shape of a cylindrical shape, jutting out of the edge where his pupil meets his lower lid. The woman bends aside so that her masked face can meet his gaze again, her head tilted even further to express what her “face” simply can’t.

“Yeah, that w-W-W-W-W-W-W-ould be the reason why you’re tied like a b-B-B-B-B-undle of rations. I can’t have you thrashing all ov-V-V-V-V-er the place with a tube sticking out of your throat… wait, hold on. Does it hurt? Those painkillers I stuffed you w-W-W-W-W-W-ith are three decades older than the anaesthetics.”

There’s a long, drawn out pause filled mostly with one-sided blinking, and little else.

“Oh! Right! Can’t move! Sorry, this one’s on me. hA-hA-hA-hA!”

For a moment, the boy thinks his… caretaker? Captor? Whoever that may be, the way her voice spazzes out at the end and her whole body shakes, it looks and sounds dangerously close to a seizure. It comes to an abrupt conclusion and a return to her very relative normality, which means… what exactly was that supposed to be?

“That’s a face you’re making there… well, half-F-F-F-F-F a face. Did I startle you, maybe? Sorry, faulty voice m-M-M-M-M-odule. Gave up trying to fix it a couple centuries ago, not worth the has-S-S-S-S-S-S-sle. You don’t find many conversational partn-N-N-N-N-N-ers around these parts, you know?”

He doesn’t, but then again it’s not like he can point that out.

“Anyway, anywa-A-A-A-A-A-y, I’ve just told the IV to inject you with another sleepytime cocktail, so sit tight and relax. You’re g-G-G-G-G-G-oing to be doing a lot of that, honestly, at least until I’m done downloading all this medical training software for the surgery.”

A metal-clad arm raises: at the end of it, fingers lightly curl around a wire that begins somewhere outside the boy’s scope, and ends in a rectangular protrusion connected to a similarly shaped hole in the side of the mysterious stranger’s neck. It makes about as much sense as anything else the child has learned about her, and he’s given up trying to put together all the clues he’s been given into a cohesive, discernible whole.

“I mean, a thracheos-S-S-S-S-S-tomy’s a piece of cake by itself. But anything beyond going stabby-stabby on your tr-R-R-R-R-R-R-achea is a tad more complicated than that. I haven’t half a clue what they’ve d-D-D-D-D-D-one to you up there in that big floaty world of theirs, but whatever it was, it made a mess of your throat. There was enough goop stuck in there I had to spend an hour drain-N-N-N-N-N-ing it to make sure you wouldn’t choke on it. I reckon that when my scanning module’s been updated, we’ll disc-C-C-C-C-C-over that the rest of your body’s even worse for the wear.”

Silence falls anew at the end of a series of informations that the boy tries to digest all at once. Half of his features are still perfectly usable, and could lend themselves to expressing what a metal visage cannot. But the child does not visibly react to the news given to him. His lips do not smile. His eye does nothing but look at the one speaking to him with a half-lidded stare, unsure of what to make of any of it, less of all his worry that this may be a prelude to a nightmare.

The boy is tired. He closes his eye, deciding to thrust himself to the darkness, and the infinitesimal chance of salvation hiding in it.

If he has any hope left in him now, it’s the old, familiar brand that cannot wait for his body to do away with itself.

Sensors that were state of the art back when they were made do their best to try and do what they weren’t built for. The staticity on the little human’s face brings up correspondences with old, untouched corners of her databases. Visual data from times long forgotten by those they begot, visions of broken husks of flesh and bone, deader than the corpses of their comrades. Some of those fallen to the very same iron-cast hands that have done their best to keep a lone boy from biting the bullet, based on what can only be defined a whim.

The automaton born of war kneels besides her guest, and wonders. She does so by sending microscopic sparks across a net of data swimming inside her artificial brain, in search of an act that no medicine or surgical procedure could emulate - a way to heal something other than a body.

Something comes up. A tiny possibility buried among billions of others, at the very edge of her range of intended abilities. Fragments of culture acquired for mere curiosity and to stave off whatever form of boredom a machine could even feel to begin with, knowledge thought obsolete until it came up in this very moment, suggesting a pattern that seems convincing enough to be put into tentative, awkward practice.

Thunk. Thunk.

The child raises his eyelid, startled. A gelid, hard sensation is spreading on his head, where his forehead gives way to his disheveled hairline, right next to where the chitinous substance has overtaken the rest of it.

His view is obscured by something. A shadow that robs his sight of light, only to let him seep through again, cyclically going through the motions while the sharp feeling becomes more defined against his skin. It’s only after the fifth time that the shadow finally relents and draws back enough for him to find its source, staring at him through a red, unblinking light.

“How is it? I’m not entirely confident since it’s my f-F-F-F-F-F-irst time, but apparently headpats are supposed to feel g-G-G-G-G-G-ood for young humans like you.”

Her hand approaches again, stopping short of reaching him. It reels back just enough that he can see the black band where her eye resides, and the mouth whose lips cannot flap, nor curl.

“You want me to stop?”

He hadn’t noticed it before, taken as he was with pretty much everything else assaulting his senses, but… there is something about this voice. Beyond the metallic-sounding raspiness, aside from the occasional slip into an ear-piercing torture, there is a tone about this voice that feels unmistakably reassuring.

It’s a rough, alien-feeling sort of softness.

The boy’s eye lingers on the hand hovering above him, shifting to the person staring back with what he decides must be expectation, then back to the hand.

The lid falls like a curtain, letting the centuries old anaesthetics do their job. If he wishes to protest, he doesn’t make the slightest attempt to show it.

As sleep beckons him back to its thoughtless cradle, the child hears it again. Thunk. Thunk. It’s cold, and hard, so much so that at the epicenter of it he can feel a sharp, prickly pain.

Yet somehow, he doesn’t mind.

#wordy seeds #Let's Meet the Robot

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