Falling Apart - Witcher II

[Conspiir]

912 words. Estimated reading time: 4-5 minutes.

Have a happy holidays everyone.

--

It’s snowing again. Just a light dusting for the holidays. The planet does that, on occasion. Imani is out shopping with friends. She always insists she’s fine.

“I’m pregnant, love, not dying.”

Whatever she wants to believe. I smile just thinking about it.

It’s raining, and there’s a knock at the door. A real knock. When we moved into a real house, it was startling to hear a knock over a buzz. So many years in apartments will do that.

I wipe my greasy hands off on a towel. The brine just needs to cool. Maybe some scouts are selling desserts. Imani has been craving coconut.

I wasn’t expecting who was on the other side.

--

“You look like hell.”

“Affirmative. Thank you, Malcolm. I am aware of how I appear. My inner state is similar.”

Their red hair is frayed and stringy. Their glasses are visibly spotty. The skin on their face and hands is thinning for lack of maintenance and--are those scratch marks? Perhaps most daunting, their clothes are incorrectly buttoned and stained with what is hopefully just oil.

“What happened? Shouldn’t you be in stasis?”

“I… staged a jailbreak, as it were.”

“You what now?”

“I left. Without permission.”

“How did you get here then?”

“Fairly easily, if you must know. I am not here to discuss the mechanics of my disappearance and subsequent reappearance.”

I take a deep breath.

“What, then, are you here for on Christmas Eve, Witcher?”

“Something is very wrong with me and I do not know what. I am falling apart. I am being taken apart.”

I sit up.

“I’m listening.”

They tell me about when they first noticed things going awry. Little, sudden updates that seemed innocuous and exactly the same as anyone might expect. They got steadily less innocuous. They told me about their coworkers, the “reactions these updates garnered.” Body language updates that had them all but dancing in the middle of a conversation, idiom updates that had them speaking nonsense, accent updates that had them speaking true cockney.

“I used the term ‘Bruv,’ Malcolm. Repeatedly.”

They told me how they overcame these minor updates. How they learned they were not correct and steadily overwrote them. It took longer and longer each time, as though something vital were being corroded.

“And yet I cannot understand why you would do this to me,” they concluded. It didn’t feel like a conclusion. I was even more confused.

“I didn’t do this.”

“You are the only one with access to my original source code, capable of altering it in a direct fashion.”

“That’s true. But I didn’t cause you any malfunction. First off, that’d be cruel. Secondly, no one knows I still have that information and doing that would bring NT right to my door. And thirdly, it would count as vandalism since you’re NanoTrasen property and I don’t want to go to jail. It’s kind of like how you being here without anyone’s permission could be considered theft.”

This seemed to irritate them, though they didn’t say anything for a while. The silence got to me.

“I don’t know why this has happened, but I can figure something out to help prevent it. Some kind of alert and disregard system. It’ll take me a little while. Can you manage for a while longer?”

“I will be fine. Presuming nothing of import occurs during an episode and the alterations made do not become more serious.”

I nod slowly, considering.

“Have you told anyone else?”

“No one.”

“I see.”

“All of my safeguards are still in place. I am not going to go on a murdering spree or take over the world because of a minor manipulation to my code.”

I know they know what I’m thinking about. And they know I know they know. It’s a heartbreaking moment. It must be an awful thing to always be compared to who came before instead on the merits of yourself. But we’re only human, and we know what we see.

“We’ll fix it, Witcher. Regardless of who’s doing the alterations. It'll be stopped.”

--

I take my leave of Malcolm. He is a kind man. I did not truly believe he was the one causing me my suffering. What I did not know was whether the information had been stolen from him somehow. He was unconcerned.

I am concerned.

I scratch at my thinly coated hands, peeling away at them and looking down the sidewalk at the snow all around this house. Not too much. Simply enough. It is a Christian holiday. Ramadan was several months ago. I allow snow to seep into my wounds. They remind me I am myself: a being of metal and carefully crafted sinews and not whomever it is I see far behind my eyes in the mirror. For the first time, I welcome the sight of my insides.

I will return to my stasis pod until I am activated for use on the Phoenix or Aurora. It is more likely the Phoenix. A triage center has more use of an emergency specialist than a mining station where plenty of other doctors can manage a fallen miner. I often feel useless there, yet it is my first and best home. The dichotomy burns my heart.

I bend down and remove my shoes. They still gleam from their last shining. I leave them and their matching socks in the snowbank and walk back to the spaceport.

I do not know why.