Andy (Nature's Inexorable Imperative)
Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful, and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous, and loathed because they impose slavery.
- Bertrand Russell
Her heart could break as well as any another though she was encased in a mass of machinery – wires and rods instead of flesh and sinew. Beneath that cold metal corset-cast she was infused with the ability to feel. She was No. 333, the prototype for human emotion, Andromeda—Andy—they called her, they even burned and etched it with lighted sticks on her wrists and thighs to remind her of it; ANDROMEDA NO. 333 complete with barcode.
Sometimes, looking in a shallow mirror, she would convince herself she really was a child of Man, not the absence of it. She even looked half-human, skin stretched over alloyed parts, and slim, indigo braids drawn up in a messy bun— and her very human, human heart.
They called her the advent of Man, their scion. Look, they said with great glee, look what we have created, Isn’t she beautiful? They would point and stare, and congratulate each other on the success of such a beauty, and when they spoke it was with corrupted tongues—and so human too. Andy was sure she had been cursed though by who or what she did not know. She did not ask to be beautiful? But what did she know, she was just a machine.
It was Wednesday, the day her heart broke; the sun was slicing through the grime on the windows as she slurped down Ramen noodles, the day her world began and ended, the time between creation and destruction a matter of milliseconds.
A man settled in a chair across from her, she had shied away as soon as she noticed him enter. Men reminded her of what she was, a fraud. That although she appeared human on the surface, oil gurgled through her veins. A fraud; an utter perversity.
But she glanced up to check the time, and there he was.
His hands were the beginning of the end. They maneuvered with such grace; she was captivated by his large, wide sun-kissed hands, even the imperfections in the little dips and swells of the fingers and palms. Like earth reaching for the sky, only to lapse and ascent again until she couldn’t tell where his flesh and the light began.
On Wednesday, hands disappeared into the dark. In a flash, like a star imploding in space, they were gone. There was no logical reason for the disappearance and she felt the loss in the space between the cogs in her mechanical brain. Where did the hands go? Where did the light go?
Wednesday, the end of days, men murmured nonsense, and peered at her with lecherous eyes. Skeletal fingers, hooks groped, and fingered her scourging for flesh. That was when the fear grasped her, compressing her till it pained to think.
She hid in a disused maintenance shaft, in her open hands glittering bullets but no gun, an augury of the fickle natures of its creator, her creator.
“Hellfires!’”
She was not alone, the men had followed; silently she crouched closer to the deck. She watched as the form ambled towards her hideout, in the light she saw him. The man had no hands.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
The bullets slipped from her hands that were no more.
Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.
- H. G. Wells
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Am I going to write more on this? I don't know. I quite like the content how it is. Me thinks I've watched a bit too much BSG. CL.
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