2024-04-02: Journal of "What Scale Am I Anymore?"
- Log: 2024-04-02: Journal of "What Scale Am I Anymore?"
- Cast: Asciel Colette
- Where: Nouvelle Tokyo
- Date: U.C. 0098 04 02
- Summary: A diary of liminality.
The hardest part of finding lodging - making sure there was sufficient electrical supply.
The voltage on most electrical systems was too weak a charge to refill Asciel's frame after a day of activity - 20 hours to recharge after 18 hours of awakening is unacceptable. She needed the rare types of rooms with plugs for larger appliances, which usually meant an in-room washer or dryer.
...heaving one of those aside to plug herself in shouldn't have felt like anything except utility for her current condition. Yet somehow, it almost felt demeaning now. A direct point of comparison between herself and an appliance.
The cable that plugged into her mid-back dimpled into the bedding that Asciel elected to use. In a reasonably upscale hotel, like this high-up suite overlooking Nouvelle Tokyo, the bedframe would likely be enough to support her weight, and large enough for her imposing height. Even so, Asciel needed to curl up a bit.
"...why did I get used to this?"
Day breaks, and the signal of completed recharging chimes like an alarm in Asciel's senses. Four of the throw pillows are bundled up together, her arms and legs wrapped around them. Was this really how she fell asleep?
The bed creaked as she bolted upright. The sun's dawning on the other side of the building, so Asciel's balcony view is dimmed by its own shadow, with the sun's gleam sparkling like stars off the windows of shorter office buildings. Yanking the cord free from her mid-back - something prickles at Asciel's senses just glancing out at this cityscape. Her footfalls are heavy, thumping on the floor, a little bit ungainly. Even after a year of living like this...her body feels so inelegant.
Throwing aside the sliding glass door, Asciel's met with a gust of cool spring wind, blowing her un-tied hair backwards. The railing of this small triangular balcony is meant to only allow normal people to peek over the edge, but for Asciel's height it's pressed against her stomach.
Nouvelle Tokyo unfolds like a tapestry in front of her. Its highways, rail lines, and seaports are all a visual language she ought to understand, clear as day. After all -
This thing - a 'city' - is what Asciel had been created to be.
For so long, she understood roadways like humans do blood vessels. Streetlights like humans do hair follicles. Construction facilities like humans do hands.
If there is anything Asciel could comfortably imagine she'd 'empathize' with, it would be a city.
. . . But none of them could ever do the same. None of them were active, like Asciel was. None of them felt, like Asciel did. None of them reached, like Asciel did. A 'city' was not a larger-scale sentience-form like Asciel understood it - it was just an idea that lived in the minds of human bureaucracy, augmented by disparate, unfeeling mechanical systems.
Try as Asciel might, communicating endlessly with every municipality in the world, none of them were ever 'like' her. None of them could ever speak back. The closest she had ever found in her lifetime were the Geofront's MAGI - which, of course, attempted to kill her in three different ways, rightfully recognizing her as a dangerous pathogen to their body.
"Maybe I'm the same thing to you right now, 'Nouvelle Tokyo'.
Her arm reaches out to cover a cluster of skyscrapers from sight, as her eyes scan across the rail lines.
None of them were ever 'like' her...
And yet, their shapes, their bodies, felt 'correct'. Their plans and layouts were their faces. Ages aligned with the ways they were built. Some bustled and screamed with constant activity - others moved slowly and serenely. They had distinct 'personalities'.
Asciel's hand tightened. A strange longing overcame her. This is the kind of thing Asciel should 'touch', should 'know'. Every single city was inert, unfeeling, but wasn't it easy enough to imagine them as existing like she did?
Her fingertip trails across a rail line...
__And something shatters.__
A single step backwards, Asciel's vision blurring and flickering.
None of it was connected anymore.
Her eyes re-focus.
No. She does not see 'Nouvelle Tokyo', the diligent and well kept young honor student of the Earth's cities.
She sees the rail tracks. She sees the shipping ports. She sees the harbors full of ships.
And they are all just...
Objects.
Asciel's hand grips the railing again, like a long lost lover suddenly fell over the edge, upper body pressed over the edge. Her lips part open, and she tries to re-assemble the idea of a 'city' as a 'self' again.
But it's dissolved in her hands.
No longer does this look like a coherent entity. What ought to have been identifiable parts of a whole, a body-shape Asciel could intimately grasp - she simply sees matter and shapes written into the earth.
"...What...happened to your face?" Asciel gasps over the gusts, in a vain attempt to put to words this long-wordless feeling. All the sudden, watching over something that could have been a 'companion', it feels so profoundly lonely in a way Asciel never imagined.
It is all...
"It's all just..."
"It's all just humanity's refuse now...!"
A shape 'like her' now is confusing, incomprehensible, distorted. A city is like a 'tree' of logistics - but now, all Asciel can feel in her hands are disparate splinters and branches, blown about by this same wind.
The idea that she could have ever spoken to something like Nouvelle Tokyo seems alien. That she could have ever shared experiences with managing obnoxious humans and their error prone ways, and discussed strategies for mitigating their nature, guiding the flow of information.
Again. Again and again, she tries to push these shattered ideas back together. As though the tree could be re-made. But so much of it is missing. So many of these structural shapes are no longer in Asciel's now-decimated databanks.
A single knock on the hotel room door sends Asciel toppling backwards from the shock of sensory input. With a loud thud that shakes the entertainment center, the dizzying incomprehensibility of the 'self' is no longer in sight - and the far more understandable terms of 'furniture' and 'ceilings' blots out her mind.
Another knock on the door, followed by the sound of footsteps retreating. Cautiously, Asciel drags herself back up to her feet. Nearer and nearer to the door. Back turned to the vista of Nouvelle Tokyo.
Her feet feel numb from the shock of realizing her detachment from what once seemed so comprehensible.
It takes too long to reach the door. Cognition that should have been simple and breezy now clogs up every thread of her processor.
Once she turns the knob, all that awaits her is a gift basket, with a simple note.
- - - "To Lana Nielsen,
- - - "Thank you for your business with Augustus Orbital Services. As a show of appreciation from our successful meeting yesterday, please accept this gift. We hope you find it enjoyable."
Pulling the door closed with the covered basket in her arms, Asciel gingerly unwraps the simple opaque wrapping covering the gift.
A bottle of wine, and three paired cheeses.
Her fist clenches around the wrap, arm swinging out like she'd throw what's in her hand straight through the hotel wall. It being light, papery material, it instead decelerates and bounces lightly off the wall with a faint crinkle.
"Is this supposed to be some sort of joke?! I-" Before her voice wakes up the entire hotel floor, Asciel staggers sideways, hand planted against the wall, staring at the simple, ordinary gift.
Materials she has seen countless times. Just about every week she goes anywhere with Ai. For a whole year, she has lived walking with a human, in step with her schedule and lifestyle and point of view.
But for this simple truth.
This is something she could never taste, and never consume. It is integral to the human experience. Defining their daily lives. Virtually every space made for humans to gather together prominently features the provision of food. Its supply is something Asciel historically understands - its nature as a necessity is something Asciel logistically understands.
...or...
"Or...do I!?" This city-scale understanding of food as a supply line is splintered just like the rest.
It is alien to Asciel as a large-scale organizer, and it is alien to Asciel as an individual. She can only watch - as the most important resource in the world slips through her fingers both viewing from above and from ground level.
...But this was a gift given earnestly. Everything went swimmingly negotiating with Augustus for yet another deal that'd help her maintain the Macross 13. They smiled and shook hands as humans do - Asciel returned the gesture, as she has practiced.
But surely they know.
Surely her luminous eyes, towering stature, refusal to eat or drink - surely it marked her.
Surely they understood that somehow, she was not like them.
And yet, the gift they have given her in parting makes sense only if they viewed her as an equal. An equality she will never be able to share.
Hair hanging over her eyes, head tipped downward at the simple gift of food and drink, a wavering grimace crosses Asciel's lips.
"...Memory Instance-" she begins to say, only for countless warnings to flash over her eyes.
---[ers.library retrieval failure - function 'memory_instance' impaired. error code(__[915_NOTFOUND])]
...And in that moment, Asciel realizes that every recording she'd kept on hand - every replayable instance of surface processing when she encountered a dilemma she did not quite understand-
All of them are gone.
The events of these past twenty minutes are dissolved, flushed like water down the drain. Already, Asciel can feel those emotions turning into dust - those events, seemingly mundane yet profoundly important, losing their color and form.
"...I can't let something like that just ~fall away from me." Asciel murmurs - but the exact fine details are slipping with every word.
And the only resolution she can imagine...
Her hand holds onto the side of the suite's TV. A forced communication from the sensor in her fingertips turns the device on - and in a box used for guests to sign into various subscription services, Asciel instead writes.
- ( Dolls with limbs like mine, faceless like mine ) -
- ( Each day, I spoke silently to you, into you ) -
- ( A world that never saw you as alive, like you never did ) -
- ( The ways I whispered into your ear dissolve into ash ) -
- ( You never could have listened, and my mouth falls to the floor ) -
- ( The catwalks of the stage were empty all along, your eyes merely imagined ) -
... The words linger on the screen just long enough for Asciel to remember them, in the unfamiliar way her memory now works, before the TV's signin program clears them free, for being 'invalid'.
The butterfly at Asciel's chest stings and aches, realizing she can't even empathize with something so simple as that interaction anymore.