“Why…”

 

I decided to have a bath to try and calm down. I hadn’t talked to Random since… since that night and it’s been on my mind the past few days.

Remembering it, I subconsciously reached up to rub my cheek; the mark was still there. Faint, but still there. I remembered it all too well. I didn’t want to think about it, but every time I blinked it was there, a picture that couldn’t be erased or burned. It was a scar no amount of water would wash away; seared into my mind and beyond anyone’s reach. Thankfully she hasn’t had a nightmare that bad since that night, but I’ve been more cautious around her regardless.

 

“Human emotions are so hard to grasp…”

Still, a bath was also a quiet place to think and allowed me to clear my head. I had my back against the tub and the curtain was partway drawn. I stared down at the soapy water around me.

 

“It’s been four days since then and I haven’t felt like talking to her. I know we sleep in the same room together, but she’s been at school so often I’m usually asleep when she gets home… or evading her.”

 

I wanted to tell Random that what she did was fine, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so. She’s been in and out of the house so much it felt like she didn’t care. Tipsy told me she was spending time with some guy named Cody. Although the plus side to the time alone has helped me look into what she had created.

 

I bent over the tub, placed my arms on the side and put my head onto them, sighing. Looking down I noticed my OPA was on the floor. I had taken it in with me but completely forgot about it, caught up on past events. I lazily swiped my finger across the screen and located the folder I hid that held the information from Random’s machine. It had been bugging me since I found out about it, but I haven’t worked on it much. I’ve been too distracted…

 

“How can someone like her come up with something like this? I’ve spent a lot of my time working on it but…”

 

From the time I met Random I didn’t know whether to trust her or kill her. At the time, I had wanted to, but something in what she said had stopped me. She was intelligent to combat my machines, but she has yet to show anything beyond hospitality to show me she is true to what she says. It may be a few years after she had been like me, but she and I were very different. Machines are one thing we differ in.

Casting it aside, I leaned back against the tub and slid down till the water covered my neck.

 

For the last 10 years I’ve been trying to develop a new AI, one that thought completely and independently. Something that would make us rethink how it’s supposed to be now, something that slowly adjust to its surroundings to produce better efficiency. One that would not only get smarter as it adjusted to everyday life, but would almost be human without exactly losing its robotic tendencies. Sort of like an android, but a more advanced synthetic being.

Almost like melding a humans brain, heart, emotion and thought process, with a machines ability to calculate situations, solve problems in no time at all or even link with a machine and repair it faster than any human alive, even me. A literal perfect being, human combined with machine.

 

I had thought it’d been a dream, a lost hope never to be obtained. I tried piecing various machines together and…wiring them with me, but I couldn’t solve the connection. Using myself as the test subject was probably suicidal of me, but I was so focused on finding the answer that I wasn’t focusing on my own

wellbeing. One side effect was I became unable to comprehend human emotion very well and became more attached to machines, understanding them on a much deeper level. The results were worth it I believe, even for the loss. I had since cast off the idea.

 

“Random, if only you understood what you were capable of.”

 

My name being shouted from outside the bathroom caught my attention. It sounded like Random was back home. It was the first time we were together without one of us sleeping.

 

“Guess I’ll speak to her,” I sighed as I got out, making sure to move my OPA to keep the water dripping off my body and the side of the tub from reaching it. “At least she makes convenient things,” I mumble as I activate her instant button clothes, slipping on a silk blouse and dark green skirt. I turned toward the mirror and looked up and down. I always hated how much shorter I was than everyone else for my age, even though I knew I was smarter than a large percentage of them. Afterwards I turned the lights off and headed toward the living room, after leaving my other clothes in our bedroom.

 

“There you are, Dizzy,” Random says as she comes out from the kitchen, holding a glass of water. She had worn her star gaze tank top, a midnight blue color with small white stars scattered about it, and light blue jeans. She looked happy when she walked out but immediately frowned when she cast her eyes my way, probably thinking about the mark across my cheek. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” she said sadly, which told me she cared, but my, as I’ve called it, robotic side, immediately shut it out, not wanting to believe it was true.

 

“About what?” I ask her in the same robotic tone I used when we first met. It was another side effect of the experimenting.

 

She set the glass down on the coffee table then took a seat on the corner couch. She placed her hands on her lap and looked toward me with what I found to be a sympathetic gaze. I guessed she was trying to find the words to apologize to me, but didn’t know what to say to someone who was new to her life; someone that she knew little of and thus found it hard to talk in a calm, detailed voice to me. It was only when I changed something of hers that her voice would echo off the walls with my name, letting me know I did something she didn’t like, even though it made it better than what it was.

 

“I wanted to…apologize about what happened.” She quickly turned to the side, regretting the mark she had left on me.

 

I had spent the past few days expecting this, waiting for an apology. Now here she is and she can barely speak at an audible level to me. Her head still hung to the side, as if she was still trying to piece words together in her mind to say to me. When I saw her like this I tried to compare her to the girl who’d scream at me for adding voice activation to her kitchen. Having hundreds of buttons strung across the wall just didn’t work; it all gave a set amount with no variation. And it looked cluttered and unprofessional

 

“Dizzy,” she finally says, “I’m sorry I…slapped you. I…wasn’t myself then.”

 

As she spoke to me her eyes began to tear at the sides, indicating to me that she was genuinely sorry. I wanted to believe her; to know what she said was true. But a part of me just couldn’t come to grip that.

 

“Dizzy, can you please forgive me? I know you’ve only been here a short while and barely know me, but I promise I won’t do it again,” she finished, wiping her eyes.

 

Several minutes of silence passed between us as she stared at the ground and I stared down at her. I was slowly deciding whether to believe her or not, as she has calmed down a lot since that night.

My mind then jumped to picturing how she felt, how her emotions were twisting and turning inside her. Did she feel like she was being judged? I just shook my head, casting away the thought. I didn’t think I’d ever understand human emotions the same way again.

 

“Okay,” I say as I begin to turn toward the bedroom, “I’ll forgive you.” Then I continued walking, not looking back to see her reaction.

 

When I reached the room I let the door close behind me as I stared at the messy room. She never did have a knack for keeping this place clean, almost like me.
That’s when it hit me; something that I found we had remotely in common. Whenever one of us got engrossed in something, the room often looked like a hurricane swept through it. Broken or spare parts scattered all over, clothes thrown to and fro, small pieces of clothing irrelevant to the machine or mechanism in front of us. It didn’t matter what either of us wore (I’ve walked into Random wearing a T-shirt and her panties one time) the only thing we understood was what our hands were making, creating, giving life to before our eyes.

 

For the past week I’ve just stepped over each thing, not giving much notice to it. How stupid I was. I started to notice failed projects, broken machines that needed slight adjustments to function and random parts cast aside like forgotten toys.

It almost irritated me, and then I realized that was the first emotion I felt in a long time. Rage, anger, disappointment. Random didn’t realize what she was doing with most of these things, despite how intelligent she was. Then in the blink of an eye the emotion was gone, and I felt like myself again; empty of emotion and more robotic than human once more. A mere empty shell.

 

I sighed and decided to slip into my bed, ignoring the feeling. I pulled out my OPA and looked at the data from Random’s machine once more. It was nearly complete, and had I let Random continue her work the way it was going, she would have found the answer; it’s just that no one would have known.

When I first got here, I had fixed one of her machines from exploding. It was a simple mistake, one that she would never have picked up on the way she is now, tied down by emotions and friends. I had once wanted to be like her, and decided to try again after seeing her, thinking we were really one and the same. But it still may be too late for me.

 

I didn’t know when, but at some point I had fallen asleep. I guess it was late in the day and my body finally had had enough.

I rolled over to get a better look around and noticed Random sleeping on her bed, a log that was unmovable. She looked like she was under control of her emotions this time, as she wasn’t speaking in her sleep or jittering. I guess she was going to be okay this time, and not attack me in her sleep. Convinced she wouldn’t, I rolled back over and closed my eyes. That’s when, much like before, Random got into one of her episodes, only this time it was worse.

 

I heard small mumbles coming from her and dismissed them. That was a mistake I may not have been able to make a second time that night. She must have been fixated on someone called Aurora, because that’s all I heard as she laid there. I knew to keep my guard up, and thankfully I did.

I turned over, half asleep, and noticed Random flailing her arms toward the ceiling, almost as if she were trying to hit someone. Knowing what was coming next, I quickly told myself to wake up. When she was like this, there was no reasoning with her.

 

I began to get up and head for the door. I had already planned ahead with a quick way to get away from her, which was run toward the door before her nightmare became too chaotic. She was just starting to slowly sit up now, mumbling Aurora continually. I didn’t think she was awake, and I didn’t bother to check. My bed sat on the opposite side of the room from the door, while hers was a 90 degree angle away from it, putting her closer than I was.

Forcing my body to cooperate, I got up and rushed toward the door. Out the corner of my eye I could tell she had centered her attention on me, probably projecting whoever Aurora was onto me. I found this odd considering how short I was, but I didn’t let that bother me and continued forward. Only problem with that though, was she was faster than me.

 

She had reached the door far before I had. I stopped dead in my tracks. I began to back up slowly, my heart starting to pick up in pace. As I backed up, I started to brace myself, mentally and physically, for whatever it was she was probably about to do. That’s when I noticed her eyes were open, but her movements were sluggish. She was staring at me with dark, cold eyes, of what though I couldn’t understand. "Was she awake?" I asked myself. Too bad I didn’t get much time to contemplate that as she came at me.

 

Height difference aside, she was stronger than she looked. I put my arms up to defend myself and ended up getting shoved back, falling on top and passed various parts. I looked down at my left arm and noticed it was cut, from what though I couldn’t tell. Thinking of a way out I looked around the cluttered room, but she was cutting off my only escape. I could try the window, but I didn’t know how she had it set up, and I didn’t have time to learn. My heart beat faster as I sat there, deciding what I should do.

 

“Aurora,” she murmured, causing me to snap to her direction. “Why did I ever think I could trust you…”

 

Her sentence was cut off as she mumbled, walking slowly toward me. There wasn’t much I could do as her cold eyes looked down at me.

 

“Cocoa was my friend and you’ve hurt her!” she exclaimed as she launched herself at me, tackling me to the ground.

We then began rolling across her room, fighting for control. It took all I had to barely avoid being scratched by her fingernails or slapped over and over by her hands. Rolling around the room didn’t help either, as her various tools scratched at both of us and dug into(at least to me) our skin. It was a wrestling match I wasn’t going to win, no matter how much I kicked, shoved or called out her name. She was acting out her nightmare, completely lost to whom she was or who I was.

 

Eventually she rolled me on to my back and sat on top of me, her eyes still cold and with what looked like to be sadness, not that I could clearly tell over her weight and the loud beat of my heart. It felt like it wanted to break past my ribcage.

 

As I stared up at her it was like she was another person, completely gone from reality. I tried shouting her name again, trying to push her off, but she pinned my arms to the ground, restricting my movement entirely. I could barely breathe because of her weight, could barely move. That’s when she started attacking me, slapping, scratching or anything else she could do. Once my arms were free I held them up to block her violent assault and winced with every strike; I could feel my arms reaching their limit.

 

During which this whole time all I could process though her assault was that she said she had control over herself; that something like this wouldn’t happen again. I knew words were empty. Humans can lie just as easily as they can feign the truth. That’s why I secretly was glad my experiments cast them off, as something like this would traumatize most people.

From between my arms I could see her eyes, the only thing keeping my body conscious of my surroundings. As I stared at her it felt like, to me, she was awake, deliberately doing this to me. That she didn’t like me or the very idea I was living with her, changing her machines and her way of life. I didn’t want to believe she was asleep, that she didn’t care. But she hadn’t even been home most of this wee-

 

“Dizzy!” she exclaimed, her assault ending abruptly. “Oh my God, Dizzy.”

 

Quickly crawling off of me she retreated a few feet away, allowing me to sit up and catch my breath, which I sucked in sharply from almost passing out. She raised her hands to her mouth as a waterfall of tears streamed down either side of her face. “I’m so sorry,” she muffles, sobbing through her hands.

 

I didn’t know what to say to her. She was awake now, which means she wouldn’t attack me again. But she lied, not once but twice. Sorry sounded empty coming from her mouth. I couldn’t trust her again, even with her sitting there, a living well of emotion.

I stared down at my arms and noticed they were red and bruised, various lines tracing from my elbow down to the wrist. I barely felt any of it though, the shock of it all too great. Or maybe the lack thereof; lack of emotion to care.

 

Without saying a word to her I stood up and started walking toward the door. I could hear her muffled sobs as each step I took echoed in the quiet room. I glanced toward the window and noticed that the moon was still out, indicating it was night. I wasn’t tired though, nor would I have stayed in the same room as Random again to get any sleep.

As I neared door it slid open, making a small whoosh sound that reverberated off the walls of the now silent room, save a few sobs from Random. Mixed in with that I could hear Random muttering behind me, whispering under her breath and through her sobs, “I’m sorry”, over and over again. I blocked it out however as I walked through the door.  Turning my head toward Random, who was still sobbing, still crying tears of regret. I couldn’t come to believe them. My robotic side just ignored it all; its will stronger than when I was human. Then the door slid shut, blocking both us from the others sight.

 

I felt no remorse for her, only right and wrong. What she did I couldn’t easily come to forgive. Maybe her slapping me… I stopped myself, not wanting to think about it anymore. I made sure to grab my OPA before leaving the bedroom.

Walking toward the living room I noticed Tipsy was nowhere to be seen. Last time this happened, she had come to snap Random out of it. This time I had no rescue, no one was coming to help me. I walked toward the front door, it opening as I did, and took one last look at her home, sweeping my gaze over her work intertwined with my own.

 

“Goodbye, Random,” I whispered as the front door slid shut behind me, knowing I couldn’t be around her again.