The Mechanics of Us

Chapter 9

I trudge up to my apartment, heart heavy, body aching, eyelids on the verge of closing. When I get to the door, I fumble with my keys and drop them to the ground; a clinging chime resonates through the ghostly hallways.

"Great," I huff and bend down stiffly to grab them. A soft breeze feathers against my skin and sends a shiver throughout my body. As I straighten back up and notice a note on the door that wasn't there before. It's a sunshine yellow with blue words scribbled across it. I tear the sign off and, with wary eyes, skim it over. The lettering is smooth, delicate, and swoopy. It read:

"Thank you again. Please stop by later tonight," then it was signed by the initials C.E.

I shove the note in my jacket pocket and take in a sharp breath. I am not feeling this right now, and I could care less about my responsibilities to the ominous company that I still do not know much information about. I need to get inside, but every fiber of being is screaming in pain. I fling my hand over the door handle, press my entire body weight against the dense wooden door, and with the last bit of strength I have, I shove the door open and feebly lock it behind me. I let my body rest against the door and let myself be there for a few moments. Every muscle in me feels as if it was put through a meat grinder and then put back into place, my head is still throbbing, and my arms feel as if they are carrying bags of bricks. I propel myself off the door and shuffle over to my bed, dragging my feet along the carpet. My body eventually gives it tumbles into the bed; the fuzzy blankets envelop me as I gradually sink into the mattress.

Darkness encroaches my vision, my body releases the tension it has been storing all day, and I yearn for sleep to come. Rest is the one moment in time that we are not plagued by conscious thought. The desire for not thinking is very intense, and I wait for this break from reality to come for me. Yet, unfortunately, after the seconds started turning into minutes and minutes to hours, nothing was happening, and I found myself still left awake with my eyes remaining shut.

The most challenging part of breaking consciousness to transcend into the realm of dreams is that you need first to clear your mind and relax. I am unable to achieve this because millions of thoughts are continuously swirling around my mind at rapid speeds. Every thought, every emotion, everything, had no distinguishable direction, and my mind sizzled with excess energy.

The thoughts that invade my mind have to do with everything that occurred today and the complexity and paradox concepts that have been enlightened. Everything I have been taught as a child, and throughout my life made no sense. The notion that cyborgs were not supposed to express specific emotions to the same efficiency as humans being the main one. The child displayed happiness, comprehension of humor, sadness, fear; these are complex emotions, and how she was able to show them so utterly astonished me.

Faint utterances of the slurs start to intrude on my mind. These words did a number on me, another phenomenon I find myself questioning. Before everything happened, words never affected me. My friends and family always liked the fact I had such thick skin, so why was I now so affected by these words? Were they just words after all? Why do I feel so much? Everything I was witnessing now seems so wrong?

Flash memory is triggered, and I sit up in bed and stare blankly at the wall as the memories come into view. A moment becomes enlightened, and I recall a similar situation happening, but I was a part of the bystanders. I was starting medical school, and a patient came in who was a cyborg. From the outside, the patient appeared to be perfectly healthy, but they lost their eye due to cancer years ago, and a robotic one now replaced it. I think back to what I had said to my colleagues. The words used held the same significance and harshness as the ones used and experienced today. I reflect on how emotionally distant I was. During the time, I felt nothing towards this patient, why would I? They could not experience emotions fully, so it wouldn't matter as to what I would say since it will not affect them anyways.

More flashes of the moment become illuminated, and I realize a critical moment I had missed about that patient. I was so swept up in acting like my colleagues and being emotionally closed off that I didn't notice the cyborg had a single tear leave the corner of their eye. The cyborg, and even with one working eye, shed a hurting tear. They experienced a deeply emotional ache similar to what the young girl did today. But that's impossible? They can not undergo the same emotions as we do. Maybe they can create baseline emotions, or perhaps their codes can replicate straight forward emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, but only those three.

I rest my arms on my lap and continue to stare blankly at the wall in front of me. I contemplate the logistics of what had happened today, the rationale behind it all. I think back to the very beginning and piece by piece put together the puzzle to make sense of what had occurred. I reach over to the side table and grab the notebook and pen and begin to write down what I had experienced. I have to send in my findings at the end of the month and must be deliberate with my observations and recordings.

I begin with writing about me walking down the streets to run errands and come across the child and mother. I leave out the bit about my physical reaction, as I believe this was due to overexertion at the moment. I write about how the daughter laughed and smiled, with a given explanation about the mimicking software the engineers must have used. Then I go into writing about how the hand fell off, how it sparked and caused a ruckus. I describe the moment in blunt details and make sure to explain what the hand looked like. I then start to describe the girl's reaction to the hand falling off and the mother's response. I once again made it clear her emotions were in-fact mimicking software, that they were very believable, and the mechanic did an excellent job. Still, there was no validity or sincerity in the child's emotions. I purposefully leave out my reactions, they do not need to know that nor was it essential to their study anyways.

After I jot down the rest of my notes, I suck in a fresh breath of air and shut my eyes. Writing out what occurred today, processing it, and reading it over in my own words, helps me gain stability and aids in my comprehension. It allows me to center myself, clear my mind, and soon I begin to feel less and less. Perfect. My eyes flutter open, and I finally feel myself again. I feel human. I plant my feet on the ground and stand up steadily. I take the note out of my jacket pocket and open it up again. Out of the corner of my eyes, I see that it is 8:00 PM. I was out of it for almost three hours—time to become present again.