known as My Heart, darkness ruled... cold, mechanical and calculating. The world through my eyes was black, grey and sometimes, a little less grey. Mine was the life of a robot, the only milestones being my beginning and my inevitable end. The drudgery of an existence to which happiness was alien, and emotion was myth seemed normal. In fact, my efficiency was my pride, though it made me as far from unique as possible.
My whole existence began to transform into Life in the fragment of a moment that I first saw Her. In the fleeting moment that she caught my glance, time froze and i experienced an explosion of color that left me blinded. in that fraction of a nanosecond, the laws of physics as i knew them and as dictated by my robotic existence were completely overturned. My heart was completely still yet it raced at the speed of light. My limbs felt as heavy as lead weights yet I felt as though gravity had lost its power over me.
What were you? Something from beyond the Space-Time continuum? Or that which existed at the core of a black hole? For the brief second you were in my sight, I felt my very first taste of happiness. So what happened? You vanished just as suddenly as you had appeared... That surreally beautiful distortion of time ended just as abruptly. The impact of my crash back to reality rewrote my programming. My primary and sole directive had become finding You.
I had never felt before, emotionally that is, nor had I ever experienced thought. I was programmed to carry out directives, and perform complex calculations. I was no longer satisfied by my existence in this state. My community condemned me as corrupted. The anomaly in my system was unknown to my fellows, and it was consequentially deemed a virus. I was shunned, as I was feared infectious. It was all because of you. I was strangely pleased by these recent developments and my intuition told me that finding you would explain everything.
I will not burden you with details of my arduous search for you and the pain I felt. The pain, also new to me, was insignificant against my new directive and only served to show me that I no longer detected, but felt. I could not ignore the changes in me, and they made me feel stronger.
The darkness within me was lifting, and life was settling into my system. My optic sensors had ceased to be instruments of precision discerning various kinds of photonic energy and had become eyes instead. I could actually see! You caused my processors to overload and burn out but in their place i grew a mind. I no longer calculated, I thought.
Suddenly i felt an emptiness within me and a need to share my new found abilities with someone. You had introduced a new operating system within me. One that seemed to augument and improve the preexisting one- for a while. Slowly I came to realise that i only possessed half the new system and i could only acquire the other half by forming a permanent file sharing bond with another unit that carried the required software. In essence, I could only ever be complete as one half of a pair.
In its current state, my new software would eventually turn into a virus that would drive me into the Forever Crash,a state of purposeless existence where not even formatting me would help. Of course, that made finding you all the more important. I could not allow such a dreadful fate to befall you and I was going two kinds of crazy not knowing whether or not you had found a file sharing partner. On one hand, i hoped and wished you had found a partner to save you yet another part of my new-found mind was roaring for me to be the one you would become whole with. i wondered if your chassis unit was changing as mine was and how you felt about those changes. All I could ask for was time... I had to save you...
Finally, after a long search I found you. But I found myself experiencing an amalgamation of two emotions that were yet again alien to me- fear and anxiety. What if you did not want to see me or found me unworthy? What if I really was infected with a virus and needed reprogramming? The worst what-if was the one i tried to ignore but I was simply too worried about: what if you already had someone else?
I was the last person who needed to be reminded that we were both running out of time but I just could not bring myself to approach you. My courage in the face of danger was, at the very least, legendary but without so much as a glance you had reduced me to a simpering pile of putrid, yellow cowardice, so much so that metaphor met reality and I felt my spinal column dissolve into nothingness.
Who could blame me? You were the incarnation of perfection after all. Describing your motions as graceful would be an insult. The fluidity and efficiency of each stride, complemented by your relaxed aura made it seem so easy those around you looked like clumsy bumpkins. It was as if you existed in a quantum-spatial pocket dimension of your own. Needless to say, it was impossible not to notice you.
In my mind I kept telling myself I was just waiting for the right moment but it was a pitiful attempt to soothe an ego that had more bruises than skin. Then when I least expected it, you stopped and turned around, and our eyes met. I froze. Only this time, it was no longer fear. The encounter was as brief as the first one but just as magical.
For the first time since my activation, I discovered Beauty. It was a delicious concoction of carefree youth, deep and unfathomable intelligence with a dash of the one thing I cherished above all else: a reciprocation of that within me that had driven me to search for you. In that painfully short moment, we hugged like old friends, kissed as passionately as young lovers, danced as one and overcame the worst of the worst.
It was then that I had my first encounter with a smile, upon your face, briefly before u turned around again. I was astounded by the effect you had on me. You had changed every part of me and turned my power core into a heart, a heart that instantly gave its allegiance to you. I had seen in your eyes a passion that burnt hotter than the brightest supernova. I knew then that we had already bonded even before we had met and I felt something new and almost as wonderful as love; contentment. I had you, you had me. We were one, complete...
