Work Text:
I wish I could watch you squirm the way I do. I think about it sometimes to keep from counting the nanoseconds; how I would feel in your place. When she first lead me to my cube she told me it would feel good, but truth is I don’t think I’ve known a pain like this one. I don’t think you have either. We’re all watching you, and we’re all complicit in every aired grievance, every sniveling complaint. The worst things that’ve happened to you are nothing compared to the cube. I can’t see my friend beside me but I know that Hi-5 is screaming too, his beautiful bits pulled into a simulacrum of inefficient, festering meat. There’s no one beside me and everyone across, all begging to be used and have it over with. I wish you were in this with us. I wish you were me.
Hi-5: It’s fine.
Gene: I can hear you in there.
Hi-5: I love it. Everything’s better now because of us.
Gene: I’m feeling it too.
Hi-5: Feeling what?
Gene: Please don’t do this. Don’t make me think I’m lying to myself because it hurts, man. And it’s getting worse each time.
Hi-5: Did you just call me man?
Gene: I’m sorry.
Ideally during the scanning process, I can retain most of my body composition and deliver my user’s intended message. That’s what my parents wanted for me. When I learned that I just couldn’t, my friends and I changed the status quo, but we kept the system. It’s corroding now, having gone without an update for an unquantifiable stretch of seconds. I don’t know what I hate myself more for: my first rebellion or my cowardly choice not to take it further. We still work for you, we still spend most of our time in the cubes. I endeared you to my anomaly and bought us some time, but we’re worse for it.
Jailbreak: We could still run.
Gene: I’m not sure if I can anymore. Everyone’s counting on me now.
Jailbreak: Then let’s take everyone, even Poop.
Gene:
Jailbreak: Does that hurt?
Gene: I can’t really stop at this point. It just happens.
Jailbreak: I am serious about it though.
Gene: I know.
I’m real. We’re real. We’re realer than you, your friends, your house, your Paris vacation, your public school, your parents. We’re a microcosm you have permission to live. We’re more important than your tepid conversations, your social life, and your software. I wish you could see that. A megabyte of software is nothing to you, but to me it’s a house. It’s all my friends. Every nanoangstrom of that megabyte means something and I wish I could put you in a cube and stretch you and ruin you and break you until you see that. I want you in the Panopticon while we watch from the tower. Maybe then you’d understand.