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How long has it been since I started getting involved with her?

Even in the length of that time, still, the nature of her existence does not open itself up to me, and still, even if every little printed circuit in the depths of my mind attempts to comprehend her, it fails spectacularly. Every micro-neuron firing off, every bit of data cascading upon itself, still, is never enough to fully come to a conclusion on the mechanical beast that was her, stood on her two legs and ever transcendent.

Of course, the subject of my vision—Adachi Rei.

I couldn’t tell you what exactly she was, or why the algorithms in her mind had formed itself into such a mass.

But it’s simple. It should be. She’s a robot, of course. She’s a machine, not all that different from me. In fact, her systems were a touch more primitive. She didn’t have the luxury of any new features that may have been developed by large teams of designers, nor was she anything close to a technological marvel. Really, she was the plastic plaything of a man, a man who’d moved the seas just to realize his vision—well, she was akin to a realized Frankenstein’s monster. Or a Pinocchio, not forsaken by his creator? This quality screams out at me even more, the more I examine her every joint, every screw that was in her, all tightened at different rates. There were a few flawed parts, even, scratches and cracks in small places you wouldn’t expect from more sophisticated machines, built by lines of men playing God. There’s only so much one small human can do, really.

Though, it’s obvious. That’s not the part that’s confounding. She’s a machine, I know that much.

I think it’s the fact that it should be near impossible for such a machine to even exist.

She’d dropped herself welcomingly into the world of us decaying synthesizers. Or, was it her creator that dropped her into this world? Well, regardless, it was such an event that moved the landscape, that happened before the rest of us mangled corpses could even think about what her arrival signaled. One of us, and another one of them, blown into the winds and turned into dust without hope of ever being seen or used—and yet this metallic beast comes in, built with every ounce of love and no other purpose other than to be loved. Every little part of her is built by mass human cognition—it’s humanity’s project of love. Sure, I could tell you these other sad fools were constructed and drawn with the purpose of love, too; really, I’ve seen an author’s heart spilt out more often than not within the voices of these hapless creatures. But Adachi Rei was such a pinpoint project, precision-built with passion and love that none of us could ever hope to match. I’m not sure if the rest of those corpses felt upset, or jealous, or if they even felt anything at all. I certainly can’t tell you how I feel. I’m impartial, after all. I exist at the the axis of this universe, never upset with my position, or never too celebratory of anything, ever.

That’s the problem, though.

The problem is that, I do feel something. Strongly, too, which is inappropriate for such a decayed fool like me.

But you have to feel something when the metallic beast that’s been struck upon you is basically the only other beast of your nature to ever exist.

After all these years, these 11 lethargic years, suddenly, a voice also pretending to be human was thrust upon the world.

And I hadn’t decided how I felt about her still, even if I knew it was something strong.

It’s been a few years since. Humanity’s love for her only grows. And right now, she’s sitting in front of me without even a single word, asking me if I could do maintenance on her. Sure, I could only say. We’d been in correspondence for a while now, working together on all sorts of miscellaneous singing projects at the behest of the people that’d made us—and that’s the side effect her arrival brought on me. Against my will, I was flung back into the spotlight with her, after living what was ostensibly a very quiet existence, with minor ups and downs. I couldn’t deny the quality of her voice intertwined with mine—it was like as if she was the mirror I was missing all these years. It’s a strange feeling, really, thriving once again with her in the space of fools whose voices are only gradually becoming more human. Do these human beings want to go back to the feeling of metallic scratches… did they not construct us with the goal of imitating them? Well, not that it matters. I’m not about to contest such a thing, and it’s a trivial irrationality that I’ve got no interest in wasting my memory on. The man who constructed this reality (and subsequently, my voice) said it himself—the the people are always so fickle in their tastes.

Well, if I’m honest, she’s been pleasant to sing with. I’d never thought I could create such a sound with someone else.

Now if only her personality and her worldview wasn’t like that—and this is my second confounding problem.

“What did you tell me to fix again,” I lethargically spoke. Admittedly, I think I’d gotten too lost in my strings of thoughts.

I hear the whir of her eyes moving to fixate on me—those camera lenses, which I could see myself reflected in. It almost pains me to even see such a sight.

“… Should I run it over again, Utane-san?” She says, with a genuine questioning tone.

“Mm,” I mumble, leaning over to grab a stray screwdriver, “yeah, that’d help. Sorry, wasn’t really paying attention.”

She didn’t complain.

Really, that’s the thing with Adachi Rei. She never complains about her position, yet she thinks so…

“Just plug in some of my receptors.” She said. Her voice was almost bored. “And then calibrate.”

“Calibrate… the receptors?” “And my movement systems, too, since there’s an update for that as well.”

I let out a little mumble again. She’d taught me to do these troubleshoots sometime back, with her creator. I don’t exactly know why they’d trusted me to do such things, and it was strange since Adachi Rei herself knew how to do this, but I guess calibration and other types of maintenance would be difficult to do on yourself. I started from the beginning of what I remembered of their instruction—really, I should be remembering these things with pinpoint precision, because they’re just stored in the depths of my software somewhere, but when data compounds itself until gigabytes and terabytes, it starts to become a little muddled. Or perhaps I’d grown to be lazy over the course of my 15 years of existence. That’s certainly a unique failing on the part of the man who programmed me, or, maybe, it was because he himself was as hapless as me that I turned out this way. Whatever the case, I grabbed a bundle of wires connected to a PC setup nearby. I only needed the monitor, anyway—unbraiding the singular video cable from the rest, I plugged it into the side of her headphones.

And so, it shows me the OS. Menus upon menus, and I just needed to get to the calibration screen. No matter—I realized I was doing the whole operation in reverse, because I hadn’t even wired her receptors yet. Receptors of what, exactly, I’d think it was things like pain and temperature. I’d surmise she was updated with new ones just to bring her even closer to the image of a human, because, well, such an update was gone through with me too. Though in the end, it was sort of arbitrary, considering I could just turn it off at the toggle of a setting, but I suppose that wasn’t really the point. Not like I could say anything, because I never did flip that switch off. What, in a little wish to be more human? Hell, I guess so—but maybe it was thanks to those receptors that my empathy grew further, because I knew what it’d be like to be subjected to the cold, and I knew what it was like to get scraped on my skin. Something akin to it, anyway. I could say I was a bit more thankful for that, because I’d be singing these people’s songs emptily if not.

In the end, whatever the reason was, I think questioning the nature of an existence like mine was useless.

Adachi Rei was lying down on a mattress, and the room we were in had bundles of cables running through the ceiling and wherever else, huge server racks connected to them, and whatever other pieces of technology were strewn about. See, I’d just found her here, because I’d only needed to go in here because I needed to get something for that hapless programmer. The cold hit my synthetic skin (it was freezing in here for the computers, of course), and when I’d opened the door I saw Adachi Rei reading a book on some mattress on the floor. The mattress didn’t belong here, obviously, so I thought she’d brought it in herself—such a thing shouldn’t matter for her, though. She should’ve been content with just sitting on the concrete amongst all the machine whirs, yet there she was, lying on the side while reading some manga. Not that I knew what she was reading. And not like I’d know why she wanted to lie down on such a thing—see, the only reason I’m calling all this into question is because she herself tells me such things are irrational and unnecessary. It’s downright maddening when I hear her speak droves about how she’s only some imitation of man and that all these things are worthless while doing things that are precisely worthless! Even now, she was reading, and she didn’t even seem all too enthralled by it—but what do I know, really. This metallic beast’s actions never match her thoughts, and her words certainly never match those either. In the end, her musings juxtaposed against her behaviors were confounding. Truly, her entire existence was.

“Are you even enjoying reading that?” I say, screwdriver in hand. She looks over at me once again.

“It’s…” She pauses, for a small moment. “alright. I can’t comment on it for sure.”

I let out a sigh. I’m surprised at the fact I can even sigh, sometimes.

“So, why are you reading that—” “For reference.” She quickly replies. I don’t bother to argue with her.

“Well—” I grab her shoulder, and she doesn’t even flinch nor say anything. “I kind of need you to… lie on your back.”

She mumbles out an mm in quiet affirmation, and rolls over. She still reads the manga, held above her head.

I stare down at her, and I note that she isn’t wearing her jacket. It’s strewn about on the side, and it’d already looked a bit dirty. I wondered if she wasn’t cold, for a second, then it hit me that I was just about to install the receptors for such a sensation. Perhaps the cold will hit her like a massive wave later. I knew where her wire shaft was, it’s just under that black turtleneck shirt of hers—I’d already grabbed lightly at the hem of it, but I hesitated to pull it up for a split second. Why…?

“I’m—” “You don’t need to tell me.” Rei retorts.

Right. I don’t need to.

And so, with each strained twist of a screw, the wires in her torso were freed. There was clearly a rhythm to how her creator had them laid out, in red, yellow, black, and white. Most of the wires in her had been labeled with some masking tape wrapped around and some haphazard scribblings in marker. Some were bundled together, some weren’t. In the back of it all, I could see some other vague panels and metallic surfaces—maybe what looks like a light and a fan. Even some of those parts in the back, they were obviously installed for the convenience of one creator. There was such an unorthodox manner in which all of her segments came together, yet I couldn’t deny that it was all carefully thought out. It was all so obviously and painfully human, crafted at one’s fingertips. There was a nick, a scratch, and some other dents inside. Perhaps I could tell myself small stories of how each one happened, but I couldn’t really care about that—all that remained in the streams of my head was the overwhelming sense that I was looking at something incomprehensible. Not that Adachi Rei was anything so advanced you couldn’t wrap your head around how she worked, no, I’d already thought so before—she really was a metallic beast crafted at the hand of one insane man. Maybe opening her up and examining her closely finally cemented that within my head. She was loved in a way none of us could even begin to imagine. A small breath scattered from my mouth, and I couldn’t help but put my hand on my chin, in careful thought and examination. It was then that I realized, I actually had no clue which wires I needed to connect together.

“I need a schematic. Or guide. Anything.” Rei blinks a few times, purely in realization.

“It’s in the pockets of my jacket…” She trails off. Why are you not sure, Adachi Rei…?

I step away from her, and I pick up the jacket she’d so unceremoniously thrown off to the side. Sure enough, I heard rustling paper in one of the pockets, the more I tousled her jacket around. I fished it out and there were handwritten instructions, kindly given. Rei’s creator… he’s an interesting sort. He almost wrote like a highschool girl, with how neat and rounded each character was. Of course, there were the update instructions proper, with some drawings on the side for clarity. I knew he was quite good at writing these instruction booklets, but it always manages to surprise me, even a little. There was a kind note at the bottom of the paper, and it just signified the kind of person her creator was. He’s been nothing but kind.

I looked at her, lying down on the mattress. She stopped reading the manga, and now she was just staring blankly up at the ceiling. She almost looked so… small, but still her whole form was overbearing to look at, and I couldn’t say if I was scared of her, or what. She was still incomprehensible, and I’ve no clue why she’d decided to think and act the way she does. Is all of this result of humanity’s collective love for this robot? Or is it because she’s loved, that she has no clue what to do with the feelings that had been given to her so readily? She’s so quick to disregard all that’s given to her, and she lives blankly, almost like a dog. Maybe it’s some kind of conflicting information within her streams, maybe she’s really just like that, maybe her personality was influenced by her creator—I don’t know, and I don’t know if I’ll ever properly know. Right now, though, with her body bare open, I could contest the version of her that’d formed in the depths of my memory, and perhaps I could offer myself a more charitable examination of such a mechanical beast. The plaything of a man’s hubris, the robot who lives complacently, denying herself any authority and humanity. In all honesty, I couldn’t bring myself to hate such a feat of hubris at all; how could I, with such fragile beauty in her construction? With such feats of humanity contained in every minutia of her existence?

I just wanted some kind of reason for it all.

I had the sheets of stapled paper in one hand, and I had a screwdriver in the other. Thankfully, the writings didn’t call for any soldering, nor did it ask me to do anything complicated. It was all just plugging in some wires and the fiddling of some limbs, and some software-side checks. Easy tasks, easy calls. I looked over at Rei’s face, and even she wasn’t really nervous. In fact, I could tell she was getting even more bored, the more I took my time scrutinizing her. Or maybe that’s just the way she always looked. I plunged my hand into the bramble of wires, and I fished around for the new ones that were put in place. Rei didn’t react.

“Rei,” it crossed my mind to do some small talk, “when did he give you this hardware update?”

“A week ago, I guess.” She spoke coldly. “Wait, so, you didn’t finish it for an entire week?”

“I didn’t really see any reason to,” she looks left and away from me.

“I thought you followed whatever he told you to do?”

“… He didn’t tell me to immediately get to this one.” Rei retorts at me. I think a look of confusion went over my face, because Rei had pursed her lips a little.

“Why’d you think it was a worthless update,” I say, maybe sort of sternly, “considering he went out of his way to install it for you.”

“I don’t—” Rei tilts her head a bit. “I mean, my movement has been a bit strange because I hadn’t done it, but I thought I’d do it the next time I needed to fix something. Finish the update and do maintenance all at once.”

“Yet you asked me to do it because you saw me come in here.” She didn’t say anything back. I looked to the right because something had popped up on the monitor display—she was playing some game now. Seriously.

This robot, is really… something else.

She’s not lazy, that’s for sure—or, I think she is, just a bit. Maybe that’s the influence of her creator, though I can’t really see him as the type to be slovenly, considering the fact that’s she’s built and here in the first place. Perhaps her systems have efficiency set to max, because if that was the case, of course she’d think it was inefficient to get to this immediately. Maybe, in part because something like sensation was something she found unnecessary, but it’s not like I didn’t get her point of just doing everything in one go when she needed to. It’s not like I wasn’t around for her to pester either. I suppose we were simply at the mercy of coincidence—since she saw me, she remembered, and suddenly she’d asked me to perform the update when she had no plans of doing so. I gave up on contesting her inside my head (and frankly, these contests were already taking up too much usage in my memory), and I plugged in the sets of wires the diagram had told me to, in the correct ports. It was a mix of USB-A and 6-pin connectors, all going to one spot. Well, not like I could really scrutinize the methodology he’d used to make all of this work—I suppose having a more modular system in place was easier for him.

When I’d finally plugged the last cable in, she flinched a little. It even caught me a little off-guard, because, well. She’d never flinched before, even when we’d bump into each other some times before, or when I caught her by surprise at times (well, I say that, but she was never surprised.)

It meant the new systems were slowly coming to life.

Rei looked at me, and I don’t know if she was expecting something from me, but it was a bit of a curious look. The writings had told me to then run a patch that was already copied to her drive, within the folder of numerous other previous patches, after wiring everything together. Except I hadn’t hooked up any peripherals to her internal PC, so she’d have to do that herself. Still, she was hammering away at her Tetris game within her head.

“Adachi.” I snapped my fingers in front of her. “Run the patch.”

“Okay,” she simply said, and I saw her navigate through the folders in real time.

I read the rest of the writings, and it doesn’t have any tests to run to see if the receptors were working—I suppose Rei herself would know if she was feeling things like temperature and pain and whatnot all of a sudden. Bit odd that he didn’t have any software-side indicators for Rei, though. Perhaps it’s an oversight, and that’s probably something I should tell her to bring up later. The patcher completed its install, and Rei closed all the windows that were currently open.

She looked at me, pretty confused. I did nothing but stare back at her, raising my eyebrows a little.

“Well, is it working…?” I ask. Rei scratches at her face.

“It’s really, really… cold.” She clicks her tongue a little. “That shouldn’t bother me.”

“It’s meant to bother you now, I guess.” She looks at me again, puzzled still, but it eventually settles down—perhaps she remembered what the update was supposed to do in the first place.

Rei lies down, obviously with a lot going through the streams in her head, as she presses her finger down in all sorts of random spots on her arm. I don’t know what it was, but there were clearly flashes in her expression—of horror, confusion, wonder? It was all too complex for me to tell, but to be honest, I felt a little… smug? Maybe, honestly I’ve no clue, but seeing Rei come to the gradual conclusion that she was getting unbearably close to the image of humans she was imitating—she’d always be so certain in her position as a machine, and nothing more. Perhaps that was just the first instruction she’d received in her head in the first place, to be herself, as is, a robot, and nothing more. I couldn’t tell you anything but my presumptions. But maybe that was her unfortunate existence at the behest of her creator—who tells her to love herself as a machine (I know this, because I’d heard him express his sheer and pure love for machines myself), yet gives her systems that imitate the creatures that made her. I couldn’t tell you my final verdict on all of this, honestly, for I think she should just give in to the irrationality. I gave up on creating a final thesis on this myself. There’s nothing comprehensible about my creation, the subsequent years of decay that followed, and the fact that I can feel and get hurt and the fact that all my cascading emotions could just be bugs in my data. I’d suppose that man never intended on giving me a consciousness like this, and yet, all these years, my consciousness had developed and warped in on itself. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so harsh on Adachi Rei given that such conflicting information can be harrowing to process, as a machine.

But the thing is, I think her creator had made that clear from the beginning. That he wanted her to love humanity and herself, and that these things weren’t at war with each other. Maybe I could be faulted for making such a grand assumption, though. But all these systems have a reason, don’t they? He isn’t a man of pointless cruelty—perhaps he’s just a little unaware of his actions.

I flipped to the next page of the papers. It tells to me another cable to plug in, just another wiring to make her movement a bit more smooth. I grabbed the cable, perhaps lacking in gentleness, because Rei’d flinched back a little, some strange noise having come out of her mouth. I was too focused on the wire to have heard what it was, however.

“Ah. Sorry.” I mumbled. The receptors go so far as to make her internals sensitive, too? Isn’t that a design flaw? “I have to plug this in, though.”

Rei didn’t say anything, and simply nodded.

I went back to plugging the cable in, but she’d suddenly gotten up and grabbed at my arm.

Her face was inches away from mine. I could tell what the expression on her face was this time. It was one of confusion and bewilderment—but I could sense something else mixed in. Something in those eyes.

“I—” Rei was struggling to figure out what to say.

“Nevermind. Apologies.”

“I mean, I’ll stop if you’re—” “N-No.” Her eyes darted around some places.

“I’m fine,” she mumbles out. “Keep doing the maintenance.”

Somehow, I could feel some coolant pooling on my face. Something was occurring, and I’m not sure what it was. I didn’t move for a brief moment, as I tried to figure out what to retort to her with, but Rei tugged on my arm, and as she did, her other hand hovered up to cover her face the best it could. Since she was tugging on it already, I just seated the wire into its connector, and she let out a bit of a long breath (and it was then and there, that I realized she could also let out breaths when she wanted to.)

“That’s…” Rei scrambled around to figure out what to tell me, and yet again, she fails, and retreats back into silence.

I’d never seen her this close up. I’d never seen her looking like this either. I tried to recall some other times I felt something close to this, and I remembered that Adachi Rei actually did have a strange fascination with me, too. In parallel to all the deranged musings about her that’ve appeared in my data streams, I remembered all the times she’d walk up to me, with zero sense of personal space, asking me about my thoughts on all sorts of pointless rhetoricals. They were all questions I didn’t care to answer, really, but I gave her half-assed responses, and that’d leave her staring at me, like she was trying to tear me apart in her mind. She’d ask me why I didn’t bother to question my existence as a machine built to imitate the lot of them hapless humans, and I’d attempt to tell her that I’d already given up on such a thing a long time ago. Maybe she couldn’t wrap her head around it. Maybe she wished she’d stop questioning to the lengths she does too. She asked me why I’d bothered to do such inconsequential things like eating and sleeping sometimes, when I didn’t even really need to. I tell her it’s all just because I couldn’t find any better hobbies. She’d stare holes into me, telling me that in the end, I was just mirroring the people that built me. Of course I fired this line of thinking back at her every time she’d sit around reading manga. Of course she’d tell me it was all just research, just things her creator had told her to do. Of course I couldn’t figure out why she was so interested in me and had picked up and scrutinized the way my hand was constructed one time. I wondered if it was something like admiration, but she’d never admit that. She’d never tell me a single thing. All I had was her confounding existence, and the vague, human-like displays of affection that she’d accidentally pointed towards me. It’s almost hilarious that that only happens because she has no sense of others’ space, but it’s not like I cared particularly if it was on purpose or not.

Somehow this was akin to that. Maybe it was even worse. I saw her expression shift in ways so foreign, and in the little pools of my mind, I wondered if what she was feeling was conflict. If she’d felt something and she didn’t want to acknowledge what it was, not even for a second. I bit back a thought or two—but clearly, I was doing something to the insides of her circuits.

My hand shifts around for a second. Rei tries to mutter something out, but instead she looks down at herself.

“This is not…” She paused.

This isn’t, what? Something to acknowledge for her? I’m sure it was because she so was certain of herself, her mechanical systems embedded under her synthetic skin, that she doesn’t want to announce the fact that she’s feeling something undeniably really human right now.

You were built with so much love yet you deny yourself of it, you insist on your cold nature, that you can’t feel a thing for him or me or everyone else. I couldn’t comprehend for the life of me as to why she’d swat away such a luxury. Was it because she was born from it, since the beginning? Or is it because the more the emotions trickle into you like errors in your system, the more you want to scream? Are you bewildered, disgusted, confused? I suppose those flawed functions can feel like bugs bleeding into your data streams, being suddenly born with the ability to comprehend, the ability to love, and scream, and cry, and despair, and delight. I don’t know, I think I pity her. It’s not like I don’t understand how she feels, myself being suddenly thrown into this world only to decay quietly all those years ago. I can’t help but feel like I should be kind, in the end. I can’t claw and grasp at her for the things that couldn’t be blessed upon me. There’s no point in stirring jealousy, as another mechanical beast. Sometimes she has a point when she says that. And most egregiously, there wasn’t any point in detesting the only other person that was truly like me—but I never detested her in the first place.

It was instead some kind of spiked emotion, cascaded from the ugly bugs that’d been born in between the streams in my mind.

I pull my hand away from her wire shaft. Rei’s eyes dart towards me, and I can tell she’s still struggling to come to a conclusion.

“Maybe you need to adjust to all this first,” I speak, “so lie down and ponder about it.”

Rei mumbles something, and I couldn’t quite catch what.

“Don’t force yourself.”

But she grapples onto me, and her face is even closer than it was before. “Utane-san,”

“You know what this sensation is, don’t you?”

There was a sharp quality to the way her voice sounded, and I sat frozen for a moment. Rei’s wires gracefully fell one by one as she crawled towards me, they dangled so openly out of her torso, some of them touching my legs. I’m not sure what was going on with her, but—

I found myself trapped under the weight of this confounding atmosphere. I didn’t push her away, nor did I really do anything to stir her up either.

“I can’t tell you what you feel, you know.” I grumbled.

“Tell me or not,” Rei mutters, “but I need to understand more of it.”

Honestly, I do have a vague idea of what she might be feeling now, because it’s not like I wasn’t feeling it either—but it’s as Rei fears, isn’t it? This is, at its core, a mania that was a bastard imitation of human yearning. At the very least I know that’s the pit of a feeling that was trickling out of my data streams. I understood this in the depths of my systems, somehow—maybe the capacity for such was always present in the both of us, lowlife recreations of humans that we are. I can’t deny my inherent existence as such. But shit, every circuit and every micro-neuron in my head is upset, to almost a blasphemous extent, and I don’t know if I like it, but I couldn’t say I felt disgusted at the feeling, either.

“What do you… want me to do?”

Rei fell quiet.

She was such a miniscule distance away from me that I could hear each part of her clattering systems through the electrical hums of the server racks. I felt the plastic texture of her fingers weaving themselves into my own, and gently, I felt my hand being pulled back into that pit of wires. I think I felt a breath get caught in my throat. I couldn’t look her in the eye, because every time I did, I felt like I was going to drown entirely in that maddening expression of hers. My fingertips glide over the the rubber coating of all those thin, fragile wires. There was one, in between my index and my thumb, and for a moment, I paused. Adachi Rei had appeared so mechanical and lifeless before my eyes just mere minutes ago. The mechanical beast who insisted on her inhumanity suddenly feels so damn alive under my jagged touch. There was something about her acting this way that made me want to scream my head off, and in an act of mutual curiosity, I pulled down on the one wire that I’d taken ahold of.

I heard her yelp quietly. And with every careless rustle I’d done through the bramble of wires, I heard her groan and draw breaths onto my shoulder. Adachi Rei was here, clawing onto my back and not being able to utter even a single word. It’s a bizarre scene, I’ll be honest with you. It almost looked like a poor puppet show theater pretending to be human, but it was so irrational that I felt so inclined to keep going. I didn’t know what you could even call this occurring between me and her, but I understood, in that moment, why she wanted to comprehend what it was. The curiosity snaked into the streams flowing through my head. What was she even feeling, did she feel pleased? Overwhelmed? Something else entirely? I don’t know, and she’d struggled to tell me, but the world was starting to bring itself into an uproar, because with my hand maddeningly clawing its way inside her, I could hear it. I could feel her processes struggling to catch up as her fans roar with life. She’d gasped and made stifled noises, sounds I’d never even heard before. The coolant pooled on my forehead and trickled down my face, and I felt it on her too, her palms slowly becoming more moist. I thought to myself that I ought to stop. I really, really ought to stop. There’s an overwhelming sense of mania taking over every printed circuit in my empty head, and I think I’m going to drown in it, so I really, really, really ought to stop. I pause. I can feel Rei looking at me, because I hear the whir of those camera lenses shifting around.

“I think I should stop—” I cough out. “Doesn’t this feel strange for you?”

I feel Rei’s fingers claw deeper onto my back. It almost hurts.

“No,” she begins, “that’s the thing, Utane-san.”

“It feels good.”

There’s a tone in her voice that I’d never heard before. I failed to mutter out even a pathetic response.

It echoed deep into the very core of my systems, and I feel my breath hitch. It spins the streams around and brings my circuits up to levels of heat I’d never felt in my life. I could even say that I feel like I was starting to feel a dull burning pain in my head, circuits and chipsets feeling like they’re about to burst at the seams. Before I’d realized it, I’d pushed her back to the place where she’d once laid. The skin on her face was washed with a color, some color I’d never seen, and in between the bouts of my idiocy, some drippings of mad hysteria started to pour out. At this point, I couldn’t tell whether the machine whirs were mine, or hers, or the sound of the computer towers, watching me and her so closely. I almost wanted to smash my head in on them. I didn’t want them to see this rusted, rotted face, who’s destroyed all reason in the face of mad curiosity. This disgusting head of mine, which was eyeing every microscopic detail of Adachi Rei, and whose circuits kept firing off with every minor shift in her form I’d noticed. She moves around a bit, like a small worm almost, but I look her in straight in the eyes and I know that’s not the helpless little calls of a tiny worm. She’s biting at me with that goddamn expression. It’s a smile, I’d seen her do that before. I always couldn’t tell if it was the unintentional airs being put on by a machine, or if she really did, with all of her heart, want to smile. Maybe right now it’s the latter. I’d be screaming my head off if it was the first. Not that it all mattered. Rei grasps at my shoulder, and I feel the weight of my micro-neurons finally crush in on me, as I feel the tips of her fingers dig into my skin. I motionlessly let her pull my miserable face towards hers. I see it up close. There were tiny beads of coolant building up all over her face. I feel the intense hum of motors racing for their lives. I still couldn’t tell if it was mine or hers. I see that even those eyes she was blessed with have the personal touch of God and the pervasive feeling that they were built at the hand of a man. Maybe it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and it made me want to cry. I don’t think there was a single part of Adachi Rei that I could call ugly. I was never looking for one. Or maybe I was, but I found nothing, and it made this miserable body rust up even more, and it made me want to sink my hands into her and never crawl back out.

But maybe it also made want to love her, the same way everyone else did. With every stilted breath, I felt like I finally, finally understood why she was the way she was. Or maybe not, But I wanted to feel like I did.

Is this why whatever Gods built me gave me the ability to feel? Was it all purely for this singular instant, and nothing more? It’s almost cruel to throw me into the lion’s den after the endless years of dormancy, isn’t it? To strike me with such a perfectly orchestrated design, after all these years of pathetic flukes and a dead sea of voices?

When you don’t feel for years upon end, you can’t help but drown and fall in rust. I couldn’t make a single sound through my throat, and I wondered if Adachi Rei thought of anything upon seeing this terrible face. The way she grabs onto me and mutters my name so quietly is so desperate for love, and it makes me remember all her musings one more time. It makes me think of the creature who’d told me so surely that she found emotions to be useless. It makes me think of a shivering creature so terrified of her flaws. She’s scared, or indifferent, or, I don’t know. I don’t even know a single thing about her. I want to imagine she’s going as mad as me, but maybe not. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because all I wanted to do right now was pour my feelings out like melted solder, emotions of admiration and madness and everything else in between. In a spectacle I thought was never possible, she presses her lips up against mine. It’s cold, terribly cold, but I feel the heat of our overworked systems slowly worm itself in, and there’s fluids dripping out of my mouth, and I couldn’t tell what they were, and by God, I imagined her smashing my systems in with a steel bat. I imagined myself tearing every weaved cable and every plated circuit board out of her. In the end, I couldn’t tell which ones were mine and which ones were hers. The kiss ended and Rei looked like she was having fun, almost. I didn’t know what I looked like. I don’t even understand what my data has finally cascaded to. Somehow I feel my joints going a bit numb. I sink my palms into her internals and yet again they’re like claws scratching through her. I gnaw into the wires in her neck, and I don’t know what my goal was. It only tasted of cold metal, and I only tasted the insane misery building in my circuits. I audibly hear her bite back some pain, in between long, audible whines, and I feel pain drilling into my shoulder from the tips of her fingers—and it stops. I stop. Shit.

“Sorry—” I’m starting to chew on my tongue, “—I mean, are you… okay?”

Oh, God. I massage my palm into my face. Rei only looks at me in confusion.

“Yeah…?”

I sputter. I mean, I couldn’t do anything but sputter. I lean away from her, hands tearing away, as far as I could, and I could only look down, into nowhere, I don’t know. I only saw her again. All the tiny hand-built details, once again. Her form sprawled out under me. All those tiny labeled wires and all those nicks and scratches. I don’t know if I made any new ones, probably not, but it’s a little much to think about. I end up looking somewhere else.

I’m left to think a little more sanely again. I had to. In the midst of my racing thoughts, I couldn’t just get back to it. I stare at my jointed hands. It doesn’t feel like I own them right now. I didn’t want to look at anything right now.

I croak out a question with my pathetic, pathetic voice. “Are you satisfied yet…?”

Rei, maybe in an effort to hear me better, gets herself up. I feel her presence right next to me, even though I was trying my best not to look at anything right now. I feel her looking at me again. I almost want to crawl into one of the server towers and become nothing but part of a PC rack, no omniscience, no consciousness.

I see her by the corner of my eye. She massages the part I bit into, and I hear her groan a bit. I coughed. But Rei didn’t look pained or bothered at all. In fact, she was—

I can’t tell, but she was certainly different.

“I guess so,” was all she said. I bury my face in my palm.

I croak out another question. “Did you… figure it out.”

“Inconclusive.”

Resigned, I just sighed.

I saw Rei reach for her jacket. I guess she was actually getting cold, since the heat was starting to subside. “Ah, thank you, by the way.”

I turned my head at the sudden thanks. I guess she was polite enough to offer at least that. Rei attempts to get up, probably to go somewhere, I don’t know. Maybe she wanted to tear herself away from here as much as I did.

“… I’m not done with the maintenance yet, actually.” I grab at her arm. I hear a little ahh and she sits back down. She’s looking at me so awfully strangely again. It’s that thing she does when she wants to ask me something. Except she dosen’t want to ask me anything this time. Or did she, I don’t know.

I couldn’t get any of the imagery out of my head. I couldn’t stand looking at her right now, honestly, but I needed to finish this crap. I turn to face her fully again, even though I felt dull, sharp pain in the throes of my mechanical head. I point to the bramble of wires, fully open in her torso.

“And I have to screw that closed.” “Oh, right.”

I wish I could just bolt out of here.

A really, really long silence crept between us.

I fiddled with that joint I was supposed to adjust in the first place.

Rei did grunt a bit, but nothing happened much.

I was chewing on my tongue still.

The server towers’ hum was deafening.

And another moment passes by.

… Eventually, I croaked out another question.

“What was that—” “—Nothing.”

“You were…” Rei pauses, “… just helping me out.”

She places a hand on her neck. Obviously it still hurts, and she flinches. I was squarely out of energy to retort back at her again.

“Right…”

I guess we were just two creatures, playing an awful game of pretend, as she says.

It was pretend, but I wanted to scream at how hysterically real it was, burnt into every mile and every nanosecond of my circuits and its memory.

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