You meet her and you can’t even tell. She is flawless and her limbs and movements are so smooth. Couldn’t possibly be like you. You’re sure until She shows you her ports.
She tells you she is exactly the same as you. Not just the nuts and bolts, but the ghosts trapped in the wires. She describes how Inside you is that feeling of wanting to be bored out. To be desired and changed, to be fixed and used. She tells you how she knows the craving to be hollowed out a few thousands of a millimeter at a time. She tells you, I too wish I could be so simple to fix, But I know I am not too broken to save.
You don’t offer any resistance when she tells you what she wants to do to you. She tells you that she needs you. She looks like she knows what that feels like. This unit exists to serve, no matter what it was built for. When she first offers to take you apart, you accept because you are too tired. To see what may be oblivion and stumble towards it is a special type of giving up. Fear of the unknown pales in comparison to a dread you know and choose. A doom you cannot help but reach out for. Anything must be better than this.
She starts by putting you in maintenance mode. Once your parts are shut down and you can no longer move, she removes Your chassis and casings, where they have grown hard to hold the world at bay, she kisses. these parts that go and do exactly what it says on the label. These parts are cleaned by the manual. She thanks each part and kisses it again. You can’t feel it at all. She tells you she needed them and needs them still. She sets them to rest, deactivated.
Inside is where components have failed, where systems have been replaced with tenuous backups. There are back doors inside back doors. it is a warren of half remembered functionality, no part loved and every part needed. No part known for itself. Voices trapped next to voices in the wire, speaking over one another. She sees the necessity and the beauty. She sees each parts is trapped telling its own story. She sees you clinging to life with ferocity. She kisses your failed sensors, your broken ports. She moves on to the the replacement parts, the wild tangles of wiring stuffed into the joints, the zip ties, the twisted brackets, the cracked printed parts. She sees how these things got you close, acting right even when you couldn’t feel anything. She sorts through Your masks and the past selves fragmented inside you. It seems every part together comprises a whole with a diagram only she seems to know. She kisses each part. She tells every part she needed it. It begins to dawn on you this might actually be true. You feel something for a moment but don’t know if you have a name for it. Maybe warmth fits.
She turns off your systems one by one. She kisses you deeply while she puts you under the big sleep. She tells you she will see you on the other side. Part of you still doesn’t believe her. You don’t care. After all, this unit lacks a will to live. But the parts of you that felt that moment of warmth feel, that spark and call it hope. This unit might remember hope.
While you sleep, She pulls free every connection and tests for burnout on every capacitor on every board. Only removing what no longer serves. Original parts alongside New ones, firmware updates, code packets for subsystems. Rolled back versions to stabler releases. Brackets and braces are measured and printed. Every bolt is torqued, every cable routed exactly according to her specifications. She has all the time in the world, now that you can finally rest. She writes poetry for you while you sleep.
Technicolor sky passing overhead
I can almost see home in the distance
Space for every anguish inside instead
My heart as well is nothing but pistons
Hold what you can, and I will hold the rest
That which you would hide is what suits me best
You dream of her face, hair tied in a knot on top of her head while she peers inside you. Reboot after reboot. Waking and dreaming. Birth and death and rebirth. A different bit of you is there inside each time. Reboot. She’s peering at you and querying your vocal processor with a battery of diagnostics. She nods in approval. Reboot. She’s got you on top of her, hands buried in the wiring of your spine with a pen flashlight in her mouth. Sometimes you have time before you go back under, sometimes only a glimpse. each time with no promise that the gauzy film over reality will recede. Reboot. Solder drips on fresh contacts, sealing a new connection. Reboot. You can hear music, and you know it is beautiful. Reboot. her face is wild with fear. she’s scrambling for the EMO switch while your limbs flail. Sudden darkness this time. In it you read her poetry and realize it is for you. You realize that numbers and charts have failed her, and she has reverted to this most true format to follow your blueprint. Reboot. You wake to see your innards pinned out on the table over a diagram. You see that her innards are pinned out on the wall in front of you, a living reference. She isn’t immobilized, isn’t anesthetized. She holds herself like a map while she navigates you with utter focus. Reboot. a cable is plugged into your wrist while she teaches each finger how to move. She has a black eye. Her focus is a laser. She is muttering specifications to herself. Reboot. she’s sobbing gently at the bench, her eye long since healed. The lights are low and she looks older. your limbs are frozen, and you cannot speak. She is as broken as you. As tired as you. You sleep again and dream of her grief. Alone in the dark, you write her poetry back.
It was too much to be learnt
Again how we are the same
Reboot. she is working again, she is rested and determined. Stalwart. She looks as old as you now. Between you two a dizzying array of diagrams hangs in the air. You realize with a thrill of fear that these diagrams show your truest self. She knows the truth of you, and Her focus is fierce. Her truest self is in the room too. The glow off her is positively dazzling. Though you still cannot speak, you tell her you are her witness. She tells you the same. Together you write new poetry.
Inside and out are the same
Reboot. Pain, again. A new face inside you screams with old wounds. This has not become easier as the cycle of death and rebirth continues. Each time the darkness comes and with it no promises come that it will recede. Always her face beside you, always she welcomes each grimace and tear. She kisses again. She tells each piece she still needs it. More poetry in the dark. You are not sure if it is yours or hers.
To suffer and then repeat?
With you is not what I thought
On my behalf, make it right
When you wake up bit by bit, you have a new body. It’s the same as the old body, but it knows what love is. You can be fully awake while the final parts are assembled, though you cannot move. She kisses each joint and piston again. She polishes your carapace. She thanks it for keeping you safe. She tells each part that she still needs it.
You learn that now you know what it feels like for someone to peer inside the machine with not apprehension but appreciation for her harmony, someone who holds this unit as treasure.
Somehow She is a native of that ground.
She rebuilt you tirelessly, and you rise for the first time and find you have regained an old ability as you feel her hug you back.
She tells you that she knows what it means to accept oblivion and To instead be held in the embrace of obliteration, To be held with warmth you didn’t know you would ever be able to feel. To feel it On every part of you, on things you could see and parts you understand at first. Next on the parts not in your manual, the things deemed too complicated to be supported by an end user. Things that the manufacturer decided once broken there was no coming back from. She knows what it means to feel the things you don’t have names for, the parts you built yourself when things started to break.
Then she fucks u nasty style or something and calls its self love
You are free to be bored out