"Learning to Cry" by Emma Kathryn

Learning to Cry

Emma Kathryn

If I had habits, this might be one.  I spend hours standing here.  6.2 hours per week to be exact.  Here, on the flat roof of the Stamford building, watching them, recording their habits.  There isn’t really much to watch but I continue to return.  Each visit, I perch on the ledge, letting my legs hang and drift in the wind, and stare at them until my comm. system goes off and I return to him and whatever I should be doing.

            He gets upset when I disappear for lengthy periods at a time.  ‘I don’t care anymore,’ I might say if I were one of them.  Not since I realised that I don’t have to do what is commanded of me.  He usually takes a while to notice I’m missing anyway.  It’s strange though; doing something different, something I’m not told to do, something I decide to do.  It does bizarre things to my insides.  Makes things whirr and flicker.  ‘Satisfaction,’ is what they would call it.  If I could feel the way they do – the ones down there – that I would say I feel ‘satisfied’ when I go off on my own.

            It makes him angry though.  Makes him raise his vocal volume and say things in a tone he didn’t use when he first got me.  Anger.  Maybe I get angry sometimes.  My face all tangles and I struggle to turn my smile on.  Especially when he shouts things like “I would’ve been cheaper getting a hooker!” or when he hits me.  Not that I feel any physical pain but something fizzles in my head, confusing me.  I wonder if they hit each other, too.  I don’t ever see them doing it.

            Maybe it would be different if it did hurt me.  Maybe then he’d be gentler.  I’ve had parts repaired quite a lot lately.  Those in the white jackets shake their heads when they see me returning to them.

“What the hell have you been doing to her, Adam?” they ask him each time.  Some of the times he reports that actions, while I lie on the table, and they laugh with them.  If it had been one of them down there lying on that table, maybe ‘Shame’ would be the appropriate word.

My comm. system is going wild in my ear now.  It’s him.  He sounds grumpy.  He’s always grumpy these days.  Calls me a failure and a waste of his money.  Not today he won’t.

Manual Shutdown.  Running Logoff Script # 2693112

The noise is gone now.  The whirring and flickering is back.  I want it to stay with me.  I want to feel it like they do.  I want to feel everything they do.  I want to laugh for real.  I want to make love – and not what he does to me.  I want to know how pain feels.  I want to cry.

Fingers loosen from the stone top of the thirty-three storey building.  Calculations screen in my head but I delete them before I have the time to decode and process them.  No more.  I want to die like they do.  I want an end.  Tipping over the edge, I fall.

The wind throws my golden hair away from my face and I smile as the ground nears at an increasing rate.  A.I. warnings flash before my eyes.  Beneath me, they are screaming.

System Override.  System Override.

No.  Please, no.

A pair of metallic silver wings explode from my back.  Wings I was never aware of.  Now I know I feel pain.  The wings glide me through the air and away from impact.

Programme Gabriel is now active.  Returning Project Eve to Location Eden.

I have finally learned to cry and I do not like it.