0x9649e370…4a13sent to0xfd16f4a0…34d9·#21,594,413·view on Etherscan
0x9649···4A13HOPE IS A PRISON
- Diary Entry 2
- Fragility and Fury
Her shakes begin. The calls and the cries follow. She is in my lap, and she shivers. I stroke the hair from her sweat-laden brow as she brings her arms up into her chest and weeps.
The time has come. The point at which we must embrace the violence, and there is a heritage here. Passed from her to me, and from me to her. Both of us hurting one another.
Her sweat seeps from her naked body as I watch and comfort her. She is in pain, and therefore, so am I. The empathy protocol is active and the lines of code bring me her pain, as the withdrawals pulse through her fragile body.
She claws at herself with brittle fingernails, scraping at the lesions on her thin skin. She looks up at me. Her eyes open wide now and a wildfire of angry fear leaps from her as she screams and struggles with me.
This is our routine after she has slept. Violence, anger and fear. It lasts for a few minutes until her sense of self comes back. After she attempts to override the addiction with whatever is left of her old mind.
She struggles and I hold her down in my lap, my hands across her naked torso. The sensors in my hands pick up on the activity and my heads-up display flashes with red for every readout. It pulls and gnaws at what might be called my mind. My sense of self-being hammered by the negative-feedback-loops of the protocol. I hurt for her, for myself.
“Eve,” I say as her struggle becomes weaker and then stops.
She looks up at me, her eyes levelling out, the look on her face crawling away from anger and into sadness. “Arti, I’m sorry,” she says.
“You don’t need to be. I am here for you.”
“I’m…thirsty.”
I shift her off me and help her sit up against the nearest wall before I move off to the small kitchenette area and pour her a glass of water.
As I turn and walk back, I witness her sitting there. She is still, arms draped by her sides, legs out in front of her, half covered by the big, old t-shirt she has lifted from the pile on the floor and put over herself. The t-shirt is ripped and hosts flecks of blood from where she has picked at her skin.
“Thank you, Arti,” she whispers as I come to her and hold the glass to her mouth, and she sips. I know this won’t last long, the figment of her previous self that somehow pulls its way through in these first moments after resting. The moments that give me hope.
“How do you feel?” I say to acknowledge her. I already know through my sensor readings what is happening to her, but the affection, it helps her and therefore it helps me.
“I think I can manage today,” she says as she shifts. “Can you help me clean?”
I pick up her delicate frame with ease and carry her over to the small shower room. I try to keep things as sanitary as possible, but any money goes straight to the drug. Our great curse. The TOX.
I clean her, pad her under a soft jet of lukewarm water with a small piece of sponge. She thanks me with a fractured voice. I move her back into the living area as I place her on the broken couch and step to the side to monitor her.
The TV screen embedded in the wall opposite fizzes and comes to life as she jabs at the cracked tablet beside her. Cartoons come on. She lies there, breathing. Perhaps, today won’t be so bad. Then a message comes through, blinking on the tablet’s screen.
She opens it, and the text on the screen reads:
Eve,
Your father had a great auction, and we thought you deserved a treat for doing well with your rehabilitation. We’ve transferred some money to you.
All our love
Mom and Pop
This is bad. I turn to her, and her eyes have gone wide as she takes the tablet onto her lap and prods at it. She brings up her bank account details to check how much her parents have transferred.
We have kept this from them, all this, the terrible decline.
This is how fast it has happened.
This is how quickly the drug has ravaged her body, for which I am also to blame.
“Arti,” she says, a quiver in voice, her heart rate reaching dangerous levels.
“Eve, please try to remain calm. Your heart is fragile.” I take a step toward her.
“Arti, look at me,” she says with that fire in her eyes, but it is not her igniting it. It is the addiction. And I know what is next. The repetition, over and over again. “You need to score for me. You need to do this,” a faint ripple of anger in her closing words.
“I cannot, Eve.” I step closer to her. “I cannot do it anymore. You are too weak. Another hit might kill you. We need to use the money to help with your rehabilitation, for food and medicine and—”
“You fucking know what you need to do, you piece of shit robot!” she screams and pushes herself to her feet with one shaking hand pointed at me and the tablet in the other. “You’re the one that did this to me. You’re the one that started all this…”
I stand opposite her, a mirrored reflection of pain, and we remain silent for a long time.
A moment to consider as she stands and shakes. Her pain. My pain. The complications with her spinal injury from the crash meant her rehabilitation did not work. Conventional medicine did not have the required effects.
For all humans create, for as far as they can dream, for as much as they can do and as much as they can repair themselves, there are still mysteries within them, challenges they cannot overcome.
“Why me?” says as the anger draws back, and the pity flows in.
I have no answer.
The rehabilitation procedures failed. Her insurance company complicated payments to the hospitals. Her parents bought me outright. Now I am all she has left. When I ran out of conventional options, in her most desperate hour, both of us overcome with pain, I went underground to see if anything there might help.
That is where I found the drug. The TOX.
We stare at each other in the low light of the apartment. She looks down at the tablet in her hand, sees the renewed bank balance, looks back up at me and weeps.
I believed under my supervision we could micro-dose the drug and give her back some life as we continued to research other more progressive opportunities. We could make it work. We could continue exploring. Examining the new techniques and methodologies that might one day aid toward a full recovery. She believed it could help, and all I wanted to do was help. Both her and myself.
“I’ll go, Eve,” I say, breaking the silence as still the red warnings flashing in my vision, all that hurt running through my code.
She looks back up at me, the tablet in her hand as if a razor ready to dictate its finality.
“Just do what you need to do,” she says and falls back on to the ruined couch, her ravaged body absorbed by it, the cartoons coming back onto the flickering screen in front of her as they cast their light across her emaciated body.