Immortal

11. Mental tolls

I sat back staring at the screen of information on the monitor in front of me. I inserted a drive and stored all the data that had been relevant moments before onto it, and wrapped it in a red tape and threw it into a box that continued hundreds just like it. After that I took a deep breath and deleted everything.
Every time I closed my eyes I could see her eyes staring at me frightened, knowing her death was looming just as she'd begin to live.
She fought valiantly. She unfortunately had no savior.  She was dead. I couldn't dwell on the thought of her death. Even if I had to retire her.

It was one of the more challenging rules about my line of work. You clean up your own messes. Which meant my errors were someone else's mess to clean up, if I ever got out of hand. It was the way it worked.

Those of us who worked here valued life so much, in theory, but we took it just as quickly. I rubbed my temples feeling as if I'd aged another thousand years spontaneously. I felt like pointed daggers had been stabbed into my eye sockets. The sensation of being numb to the tidal wave of emotion that threatened to drown me moments before enveloped me completely. I felt grief for the loss of life that had taken so long to create. I wondered what she had thought of us for the few short moments she was alive. I remembered how easily she trusted me. What did she think of this world. How did she perceive it? I couldn't dwell on these thoughts much and none of them were really that important. The itch to that kind of curiosity was still prevalent though.

I wanted to study something living until I knew how it functioned down to its biological components every tick, quirk, micro expression. I could hyper focus on it for hours obsessively. At times were I became so engrossed in what I was doing, I would forget the minimal basics to care for myself. That was one of the many flaws about myself, I had to learn to work around. I had an innate twitch for a twisted version of perfectionism, that drove me to the peak of insanity. It was something I struggled to mask properly when I worked. Izen only noticed it slightly, but never mentioned it. My loyalty to seeing something all the way through to the finishing point. That was the force within me I couldn't of been able to stop even I wanted too.

I could say her death was a finishing line. Watching the light fade from her colored eyes, feeling the last breath slip out of her mouth. The sensation of the body going limp. Although I hated every second of it, the fact that I had killed her myself satisfied that uneasy itch. The job was finished when she was dead. I knew starting over would only begin that hyper focused obsession and mild stirs of excitement in the base of my stomach all over again. Even if I was still numb about her death. I needed to move forward.

I had thought of solutions, before killing her. I'll admit that, it may have meant isolation. Monitoring her behaviors in an environment where she's alone. Giving her a system where she could play scenario games with different choices. Ways for her to self teach on cues and emotion. Later reintroducing her to another art form. Trying to reason with her that what she did was ultimately a bad thing, but I knew it was a wasted effort. She didn't seem to have remorse when she sat on that bed humming a tune while reading a book she had pried from the hands of a carcas. It would have eventually resulted the same way. I just shorted that process and spared everyone the grief of wasted efforts in a split second.

How I knew this is because I'd seen it. I had also seen others like me that became so obsessed with their art form that they were blinded by the imperfections. In those moments, they were removed and sent to an extractor to forcibly forget the process of ever making that art form, and a different team took it upon themselves to kill the art form and dispose of it. We were not allowed to become attached to our work. Those incidents is the reasons why were given lab partners to begin with.
An accountability partner, if one got to obsessive it would need to be reported. The way I knew I could get obsessive was forbidden. Yet, I knew myself well enough to know how to handle my own ticks and desires without problems.

The emotion in Izen's eyes spoke to me that he had seen enough for one afternoon. We had to incinerate the bodies the same way we burned all waste products. Between the two of us he and I had to grab the art form by the arms and legs and I find a way to shove her through the latch in the wall. We repeated the process with the second one that she'd killed. He was dealing with the grief of this loss in his own way.
I was completely numb to it now, but Izen was still fairly new. He had replaced my previous partner that had been reassigned elsewhere and never seen again.

In this field of work some of us did vanish occasionally and sometimes we came back.
The art form we just disposed of was marked my thirteenth creation since the start of working here. She was possibly Izen's third. I understood that being detached was something he was still new at. I could tell he was masking his emotion a bit poorly. I somehow knew it wasn't over the art form, it was over all the work he'd done that didn't last as long as he'd hoped.

I knew my numbing would wear off eventually, I knew that would be when I would be in most danger. My mind would fixate on all the what if's on wether my choice had been correct. I would second guess my own calculations. Her hummed lullaby would echo in my head for days. It would eat me from the inside out for a good three weeks and then spit me out when I had nothing left. My mind would turn into a torture game of doubt and mistrust. Then it would fade, my irritation with the world would clear out. My mind would have something new to obsess about.

Because of it, I had to work as much as I could before this numb feeling wore off. It was the blanket that kept the demons at bay. I knew Izen would protest to beginning over but I gave him no other choice. Someone had to the work. That was our job.