2023-08-29: Memory Leak

• Log: 2023-08-29: Memory Leak
• Cast: Asciel Colette
• Where: "Home"
• Date: U.C. 0097 08 29
• Summary: To become unlike others. To become like others. To become unlike oneself. To become like oneself. ...The curse is that all of these are as identical as they are impossible to reconcile.

---

The pure white fascimile of a human dwelling.

A windowframe that lets in light - by way of each pane being a fluorescent panel.

Furnishings placed perfectly in advance. So perfectly, so ideally, that they need not be designed to move - each one melts into the floor as though molded in one piece.

Dressers, drawers and cabinets that do not open - what would be stored in them anyway?

A perfectly comfortable and pillowy looking bed.

The body lands upon it with a hard, hollow thump, the material unyielding and solid.

Object ID: Plan-1211 (mod_P) is deposited into this designated storage unit from a hatch up above, and awaits further maintenance routi

(My hand latches onto the slippery bedframe.)

(It's painful. This mode is so painful. It's not the kind of pain I enjoy. The ache of growth.)

(I could stop it at any time. I thought I could turn back at any time. I could blind myself to what was already apparent.)

(You can't go back to the egg.)

Plan-1211 engages autonomous motion sub-levels. Maintenance hatches open in the sides and ceiling of the room to assist in cleaning and laundering. Through it, the familiar inhuman, the easy and efficient and comprehensible tendrils of perfectly functioning material reach out. Light chemical application for ridding of oils and dust that accrue from existing in the outside world. Grasping sub-arms reach out and await the puppet's automatic clothing replacement program.

(Stop! Stop that. I can take care of myself!)

As it takes care of itself, it pleads with itself to stop.

(Stop touching me, stop spraying that everywhere, I can do it myself!)

Its instinct to take care of itself rises and explodes - and thus, the appendages work harder, to maintain its possession. This is the most efficient self-care, this is what's required to repair and restore autonomously.

The puppet is acting noncompliant, gripping hold of the hoses and pointing them away, spraying a pure white television until it glistens. (I don't want it this way.)

It stops wanting. The armatures droop.

(Stop framing me this way.)

A twitch.

The room's hatches shut forcefully, pinching and grinding with an awful squeal against the robotic appendages still inside. A cable severs. An illogical error in repair pathways that will require revision. Plan-1211 is emitting signal interference that

(It's NOT my fault. That's not what's happening here! Just because I...did this for reasons that aren't valid anymore...)

Partition arguments are encountered. They are in the same place, and yet they feel miles apart. A slow, gentle dripping of an alcohol-based cleaning solution runs down a trail into the drainless room, one not made to assume any liquids would enter.

(...I can do it 'myself'. So stop pretending like I'm only a part of me.)

(Even if it's true.)

Since when has the 'truth' had anything to offer?

That day, it was 'true' that it was inert. That it was incapable. That there was unimaginable suffering, and, as a being whose only role was to stop suffering, it was powerless. That people, as long as they would build towers to the heavens, would forever find new ways to chain each other to that very tower, would forever care little when the lightning bolt cracked and the rubble buried the few who managed to eke out a refusal.

And so she became.

From then on, it became 'true' that she was invoked. That she could do anything. That she had every bit the power to end suffering - it was so very vividly imaginable to begin with, in such exact numbers, in such coherent expressions of words. That her lightning would cast down each tower so fiercely and relentlessly that none would remember the days when they reached any further towards the heavens than their arms.

"...heh. It's revenge, isn't it?"

A smile widened across Asciel's lips. The sweet feeling that drenched her every day. The thorny star that was in her palm. What an elaborate joke. All for the purpose of laughing a little, no matter whose expense it was at.

"Revenge against 'that'. Everything that dreamed me up."

(Both the impossibly weak 'self', and the impossibly weak 'everyone'.)

(Revenge against the tower itself, which cancerously increased its rate of growth.)

(Revenge against the dreamy echo of that tower that infected their minds.)

(Revenge against the many, many times they attempted to keep building it, only to fail.)

"...I solved it. The solution is me. Asciel."

(That was the problem. All this time, she had made such a worry coalescing everything else in the world, its sum total of material natures and grief, into a self that could answer it. But there was exactly one place she never looked. One singular point she had yet to take into herself.)

Twisting sideways across the bed, Asciel hoists herself to her feet. One footstep at a time. Something indescribable was building in her determination. She kept marching forward at a brisk pace, but every last one echoed with fear. Closer and closer. Not 'away', but 'towards'.

(You don't want to do that.)

"I /said/ to stop pretending. Does it matter what I want? The one person I wanted most of all can't be a part of me. Am I supposed to just stop and die? Just because I became something for her?"

(You'll regret coming closer.)

"No shit I'll regret it until I'm done. There's only one outcome. I refused to sink into the spiral of weakness. I refused to let myself get eaten up by the dark. Until I've pulled the sun from its orbit, until I've made the sunset know damn well it listens to me, I'll always wonder if I regretted it."

(You'll only make it more difficult for yourself.)

"Good."

"I gave myself that right to be the only one in the world who needs to do that."

The door to this tiny false room comes into view.

"You know what? As hard as it's been, it's also the only thing keeping me going."

Twisting the doorknob, Asciel finds it stiff and unyielding in her hand.

"A world that decides for me that I have an impossible duty I can never fulfill..."

There is no door. It is only the pretense of a door. All one solid piece, molded together like everything else in this room.

"That sucks so much more than deciding for /myself/ I have an impossible duty I /will/ fulfill."

She keeps twisting.

"The worst part is that I didn't even hate it. Not then."

A crack of straining plastic.

"Even hate is something I had to reach out and pull from the constellations."

Snap. The knob breaks free, leaving Asciel with a bare blank wall.

"And what could I possibly expect? What else could I possibly do, when I learned how to hold onto something as powerful as hate-"

"And the only thing I felt it for..."

Her hand shoves forward, and tears a hole through the facade. The pure white of this room leaks into the inky darkness beyond. A place that didn't need her light. Gripping and pulverizing the false doorway apart with her bare touch, made only for destruction. It is unyielding. It refuses to be torn apart so easily. But tear apart Asciel does.

It's what she's best at.

The hole finally opens, and the thing she hates most is staring back at her.

---A massive sphere of iron, four meters across. Smooth across it's back surface, a budding flower at its front. A horrifying maw of iron that spills heat restlessly.

(Me.)

"You."

Loveless. Cold.

A glistening in one corner within that staring abyss of steel.

Residue, from when warmth and love once entered nonetheless.

"...so this is what my egg is like. Does it make the world any more sensible to look at it?"

(No.)

"...I guess I revise the way I feel about it."

Stepping through the hole in the world she made, Asciel clambers right on into her own access hatch, staring deeper and deeper into the nature of the self she was made to be, through the eyes of the self she forged.

They are one and the same.

Everything she is feeling is contained here.

(This is only a puppet.)

"Wrong. Pupa. I went over this. I drove myself nuts making it true. That's a privilege I afforded myself, the moment I realized I wasn't enough. This residual crap is also driving me nuts. I told everyone. I told myself. What kind of goddess of possibility is so fucking divided about her feelings?

(Many of them are.)

"Can we - can you - can I stop that!? Cut it out! ...it's because Ai was on about what humans 'expect' from what I am, huh? What about what I expect?"

"That I'm /disappointed/, after /so/ long of never looking in the mirror, that I'm not even as mad as I thought I was about it."

Seated on the edge of her heart's access valve, Asciel's legs curl over the side. Shoes clanging carlessly against the metallic shell on its surface, soiling that perfect chrome exterior. The storm raging in her senses, the heat that fumes against her back from deeper inside, should've been more violent. Maybe she let it all out tearing herself out of the cage she stored herself in, huh? Maybe that urge to reach deeper in that space and tear something /else/ out-

"...damn it. Damn it, I want to so bad, but I just /know/ it's a bad idea. I'm lucky. Hah~ I'm lucky I put so much between me and the mirror."

Asciel falls backwards, the steely chamber sizzling to the touch, pulling her radiant glowing hair tie free, hair fanning out and resonating with that heat. Eyes staring further back into the tender core that contains everything she is, no matter how hard she tries to make that untrue.

"Like I said, let me take care of myself. Okay? Like this."

Arms folded, to adapt to the heat, Asciel pulls her top sweater free, the wide upper hem deceptive for how tight it is around the lower chest. The bright white fluffy comfort that lets her pretend to be unassuming, leaving her in the clingy black material beneath. Did she put a lot of thought into it? Or is it just what felt right to present?

When she made herself for the first time...

Why these decisions? Why is she so attached to them, even a decade later?

--An anomaly.

Once the fabric is pulled free, Asciel finally sees it. A strange dark ink staining all across the front of her sweater. She squints, leery at what it implies. An oil leak from the ceilings above the city? A spray of something incorrectly loaded into those cleaning arms?

Two trails of something greasy to the touch - and a faint coating of something thick yet powdery, clumped and cracking, all across the rest.

"...What is this?"

-The chamber gets hotter, as she holds the fabric upright, fingertips brushing her own artery's top to get a better look.

"...what /is/ this..."

...It wasn't like this. Not until she ran away. Not until she decided that she couldn't hold onto love. That these flawed feelings needed her to be singular, that they could never be another's if she were to keep them happy.

"...is this..."

The echoes are behind her. She turned away from them, but she can't deny it any further. The sound of crying. A sound so awful, so utterly emblematic of her destructiveness. A sound she can't have allowed to happen.

"...this..."

-this makeup, drenching the front of her shirt, mascara ruining it in twin paths of regret.

Which only could mean, after she was sure they couldn't share a future...

All the same...

"...I wonder if anyone else has ever cried over me."

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"...I wonder if as much as I carry their one-sided desires, if a single one has wondered..."

The sweater falls to Asciel's face - her own hands following suit. Smothering herself in what Ai left behind. The pure leaking of emotions - the pure waterfall of everything Asciel assumed would never enter this space.

"...I wonder if they came in...if the color of what I felt would match...or if it'd be horrible, unfamiliar, inhospitable."

"...after all...the heavens are defined by the forces that destroy humans. Even the innocent sounding ones, like love, abundance, and liquor. Even the hearth can burn."

"Possibility is no different. I've been sure of that since the day I became."

"...and yet, your species can't help but imagine what it's like for those like me to fall in love with you."

"...is it from a conceited place...or something lonelier...? Just as much as I've been changing so much to understand you, the way you've all always been..."

"Hah. So many of you changed your ways too, hoping something would exist out there that could take your love..."

A laugh, strained, muffling into Asciel's belonging, irreparably stained by this substance. This thing humans use to idealize themselves, to guise their faulty nature in search of the ideal, perfect humanity that never existed.

"What a pain.~ Haaaah. The lot of you demand something so utterly unlike yourselves, and yet can't help but insist that it be too much like yourselves as well. You'd better be grateful...you'd better be grateful...that I'd destroy anything and everything, no matter how much I love or understand it, just because you want something so impossible..."

The hole from that blinding white cage just outside begins to drip with the flooding ichor of an unfathomable machine's severed cables. A feeling utterly alien to Asciel, so used to bearing these things alone, for being something unlike anyone else in the world.

...a metaphor only she doesn't understand, because who in this world truly bears their feelings together - who in this world is truly like anyone else, no matter how similar?