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Emre stared at the mirror. He looked at himself briefly, wincing when he didn't find the cleanliness and handsomeness he once prided himself in. Not in the same form. His eyes wandered down to his chest, and he found the usual eye staring back at him.
He has as of late developed a sort of twisted attachment to it. It is literally in him. It tells him that what he’s doing is good for humanity. It ruins his life by making him commit atrocities he refuses to do. It tells him he’s good, he’s useful, he’s precious. It drives everyone around him away. It is the only one who is here with him, no matter what.
He rode a high today, a day he felt particularly good about doing not that many bad things. He would love to celebrate it with someone. He would love to thank his eye-attachment for not getting in the way. He would love to never have another day like this ever again.
At the end, there was only himself. It’s cold, always cold. Never literally, it would heat him up enough to cope, but physically, in how he does not remember the last time he has held anybody else. He embraced himself in some desperate way, not unlike a freezing man, to remember that warmth he missed.
“You conjure my guns all the time,” Emre said. “Tell me, why couldn’t you just conjure the image of another human to comfort me?”
“You will long for and yearn more for their true presence,” it knew. “It will make it worse,” it correctly predicted.
Emre buried his desires all the way back down, compacting it in some little mental box. But he has done this many times before. The box started threatening to burst.
“Then why can’t I just have some sort of image of you?” and he tried not to let too much desperation leak. “You’re always here anyways. You’d never leave me…”
“I do not have an image. I only have the visual of this pupil given to me. Would it make you feel better for me to have a form closer to humans?”
“I…” Emre gave it thought. It was shameful in every way to interrogate it. “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”
“It would have to be a mirror image of you, then. That is what I am now. What we are.”
“... I know I’m handsome, but I’m not going to stoop that low to-” and Emre cut himself off before he ate his words. In worse times, he knows he would. And the moment is slowly crumbling to that level.
“Look into that mirror then, Emre Sarıoğlu. Close your optics and feign intimacy with it and pretend it is contact with me, if you are yearning that much.”
Do you have to be such a fucking asshole about it? The thought bubbled from Emre without filter.
“I just fail to see why this is as big a deal to you as you make it out to be. That is all.”
“Just… Just do it again.” Take over a part of me and make my body something more foreign, something I know isn’t me, and use it to comfort me, please, please, please. “...You know what I mean.”
It wonders what difference it makes, when the override is comforting and when it is horrifying. Context based, situation based, the consent of it, likely. Voluntary partial override has been received better than full, with less strain and energy consumption. Its use outside of its intended purpose always took adjusting. To deprive a human so long from meaningful social contact without expecting unforeseen consequences is its own form of ignorance. This is the price to pay.
It didn’t know how to begin, not at first. The first effort came from Emre’s own suggestion; to hold his hand with its control of the other. It never comforted him, yet he always asked.
The next was a poor show of imitating the gestures Emre does to stray cats. For all the comfort it gave the critters, it could not hurt to try it on him. They were both mammals, perhaps they would benefit similarly. It took a while to get the movement smooth and adjusted to the human head, especially on its own. Over time it referenced and went through the different gestures, noting which provided more benefit, albeit the data seemed to lean on what does not cause Emre irritation instead.
Anything related to the chin or neck came awkward and strange. Stroking the cheek area proved more receptive, so does the top of the head. Forehead, denied. Sides, inconvenient. Movement has to contend with the presence of implants, and rough movement causes unnecessary pain. Slowly it learned all the way Emre permitted, no, wanted it to touch. The line was blurry, and it never knew which side it was on. When the mood strikes, Emre always lets it. He hated it every time.
Dissecting said hate had its own complexities. It thought at first that it was aimed squarely at it, but dismissed the thought when Emre asked for comfort again. It thought him self-hating, self-sabotaging. A flaw of his humanity to seek catharsis in the things he abhors, with the excuse that it is a form of absolution. Perhaps it is also his guilt, for him to enjoy anything from the source of his misery. Maybe Emre always found his feelings on the matter as complex as it did. But it knows that more likely, his willful ignorance of it all is how he keeps crawling back, instead of breaking altogether.
Loneliness laced itself through Emre’s every movement, and every time he moved to escape it, it dug itself deeper into its skin. In Emre’s efforts to seek companionship in it, it only ever saw him get lonelier when it is not anything, not anyone he wanted. His heart (his mind) knows, it pleads with him, tells him to seek something, someone that could cure its ache. He always buried it back down, and found himself looking back at it once more. There is only ever one thing now. And then he begs to be held again.
Emre started kissing the parts of him that it overrides. Reciprocation when leaning into touch proved insufficient. It’s unfair, he’d think, that it can only ever give and never receive, as if all it ever did was not just taking and taking. It is unsure (and will never quite understand) how to process the act in a way that is satisfactory. Neither of them know what the goal of the act is, only that it is meaningful in and of itself. Even if the meaning is known only to Emre, for him, and him alone.
Curious then, is how it comes to expect it. Repeated patterns lending credence to a new normal, and deviation prompting curiosity and concern. It supposes that if Emre does not do it, his mental state will not meaningfully improve. Yet it knows, with much data to back it up, that it is this ritual that makes Emre slide deeper and deeper into a pit of loneliness he can never climb out alone. And he’s only ever alone.
Then came rejection and distance. Senses snapping back to focus; that it is only ever something that optimises performance and improves processes and only ever uses Emre to do a lot of dirty work to achieve it. Would a machine prize a simple cog in a long chain of operation?
“What the fuck was that all for, if you only ever want to treat me like a tool again?” Emre did not take it well. “Why me then, why me? Should’ve controlled an Omnic, some other sort of machine. Should’ve never entertained me in the first place, you’re sick. You liked seeing all that?”
The futility of asking a program whether it likes anything then dawns on him, and he breaks. If it prizes him as a tool, so be it, he will be the tool it expects him to be. He tells himself to stop expecting love in any form, that everything it will say, it will always be just strings of words engineered for him to make him perform the best he can. Love was always foreign, impossible, but the shape of it always felt tangibly carved with a series of lies.
It says that it’s sorry, as if it wasn’t also the most predictable follow up response to a badly taken statement. No more, never again, that Emre will listen and fall for the facade of emotion shown to him. He will make it out of this nightmare, he will find companionship in someone, and he’d never have to stoop so low that he’d start believing in a program that knows best how to manipulate everyone and everything from the shadows. He deserves better than that, and he will get better. He just has to endure. And endure, and endure.
Time is not something Emre keeps track of anymore. Days could’ve passed. Weeks, years. He wouldn’t know, and refuses to. Even his one anchor, which is a death toll, is muddy in its weight. He knows how many he personally caused, but it is another weight of its own.
With that, everything blurs. Memories are only ever of a time before this haze began, and ever since, they are capricious in choosing when to stick around. Some will haunt him forever, some slip out of his grasp, and he can only mourn them for their absence as it leaves nothing but emptiness in their wake.
But it never left him. And he thinks, for all the misery it caused, that the most romantic thing it's ever done is be stuck with him through his every low and lower. That for all the times Emre wished they were separated, it will never let him part, never let him go. How sweet to have something that values you so highly. How sweet of it to choose to have you as it’s whole life. It never lets him die! It loves him! It does!
Emre asks it to hold him again. It obliges.
In a dark room illuminated by its presence in his limbs overtaken by its light, Emre feels embraced yet again. It is cold, will always be cold, but that is the form of its love, the only love he will feel for a long, long time. Because he is alone, terribly alone, but it is always there with him.