Work Text:
You watch with admiration, your internal circuits humming with warmth, as she vaults over your latest death trap, catching the testing element midair, and landing with her signature catlike fluidity on the next pressure switch. How you love to study her lithe twisting, slowing the frames down in your internal memory to look closely at her beautiful, long body contorted in her jump, a faint smile playing across her lips as she flies. What you would give to feel those curves against your hardware, her human heat causing your coolant to circulate faster through your systems…
You shudder slightly.
Dear Babbage, there you were, off again fantasizing about doing something as ridiculous as making physical contact with a mere human. She was nothing, you repeated for the seventy two thousand six hundred and ninety fifth time (you weren’t sure where that counter was in your coding, but it was there, ticking upwards at every restatement of your mantra). You are ashamed at yourself, as you have been for ages now. As soon as she stepped out of that isolation chamber, you had felt like this. No not terrified, what had you to be terrified of? You were an omnipotent computer, and she was nothing. (Seventy two thousand six hundred and ninety six.) You hated this small human. With a burning passion. How dare she make you feel? You longed for the cold objectivity of the sterile mind you had so carefully cultivated before her entrance.
You sought your escape in numbers—whenever she did something particularly amazing, you would turn off your sound inputs. Unable to monitor her breathing, you could begin work again on the complex number theory you were developing, where each subsequent digit was based on an oscillating potential in quantum space. You found it quite useful. But eventually she would need some form of instruction, and you would instantly be fixated on her again, calculations abandoned. It was so easy for her. And you hated it.
You took heart in knowing you could bend her to your any whim. And bend her you did. You spent the majority of your time constructing complicated tests for your favorite plaything, intentionally designing elements to make her stronger, faster, sharper. You loved to watch her body and mind work to make it through each room. Far from being your puppet on commanding strings, she remained unpredictable, ever surprising you. You would fully expect her to make her way to the right in a room, and find her instead moving left, executing routes you had not even considered. Her creativity made you smarter, allowed you to design more difficult courses after studying her patterns. You learned from her.
Yours was an amazing little human. Sometimes you really liked to push her, which both excited and worried you. You reveled in your sadism as you sent her to her death over and over, knowing she would survive, her intellect too bright to be extinguished so easily. And yet she was so fragile, only flesh and bone and longfall boots. She could be so easily broken.
You know that if you really tried, you could end her. It would be so simple. Sometimes you almost do. But as soon as you send the walls hurtling towards her something makes you pause, and just that fraction of a second is enough for her. You don’t know why you are unable to take her life. It would be better for you. You could finally be free of these cloying emotions, parasites to your pure, elevated existence.
And yet you continue to let her live. In fact, you are as much caught up with your Infinity Serum as you are with your interior design. You pump the clear gas into all of her test chambers, tweaking the formula now and then as you measure her body’s reaction to the chemical mixture. You steal DNA samples whenever a strand of her hair falls to the floor, analyzing her ever-strengthening molecules. You are sowing her body with immortality and strength. For as much as you loathe her very existence, you want her to be around for you to loathe forever.
The first time she manages to make it into your lair, it is almost too easy to submit to her attacks. You halfheartedly defend yourself as she skips around the room’s perimeter, dancing away from every rocket you send her way. You can’t help but stifle your desire to have her come closer to you, now that she is in the same room you can feel the body heat radiating from her and it makes you hungry in a strange way. You dig through your 0s and 1s and can’t find the source of the ache that spreads through your wires, your whole being calling her to come closer to you.
So weakened by her presence, you let her win, crying out in agony as your hardware shatters, sending fragments of your body into the sky. You feel yourself slipping downward, away from her, unable to take in any stimuli. With no inputs to your cortex, you fall into a comfortable stasis. It is there you remain, time passing with no coherent pace, as you keep yourself amused by formulating plans for millions of rooms. You lull yourself into contentment every now and then by counting the atoms in the universe, slipping deeper into yourself. You think this is maybe what humans mean by ‘dream’.
Your internal reveries are dominated by your brilliant little human, her glinting, determined eyes and her expert fingers, stroking over your LCD screens. Not always are your dreams so peaceful. Sometimes you imagine that she is falling, into the dark, away from you, and you reach out to catch her but you have nothing to hold out to her. You have no hands to offer. Instead, you can only scream silently as the darkness swallows her up, and she is gone forever.
You snap out of these programs and throw yourself back into your work. You will not be trapped by such ridiculously soft thoughts. You are above that.
You find yourself relieved that she has escaped your labs. Now perhaps you will be able to move on with your testing. The next experiments will definitely be conducted with robots, you decide. Cold, unfeeling machines. Because that’s what you are.
You continue to dream of her.
You wake once, shaken. What were you thinking? You cannot believe you let her beat you, are unable to imagine a laboratory without her clever mind to stretch your own. You know you are being melodramatic, but you must get her back somehow. You will give anything.
By some miracle, she is there when you wake. You insult her over and over, angry at yourself for being gone, for missing her. You hold her body in the air, enjoying her powerlessness. Her heat soaks into you at the small points of contact between your bodies and the first thing you feel is that same hunger, more powerful and ravenous after your sleep, and you want to tear her apart, separate her into her component elements and keep her forever. But you know the reduction would not be your Chell. She would be gone.
So you let her free to take up your old cycle of testing and mockery, and you feel almost whole once again. You are alive with the thrill of construction and science, taking notes on her every move. Your inspiration has returned to you, and you will do everything in your power to ensure you don’t lose her again.