[ Things change so quickly. Arthur spends his days watching the ebb and flow of human life, of sudden tragedy, and slow, melancholy inevitability. He has seen people bounce back from the impossible and succumb to the unexpected. He knows how a single second, a solitary breath, can alter the course of everything, turn it on its head and send everything into a frenzy.
It can’t have been more than a second, the conflict between an order to let the man on his operating table die and the knowledge that he can be saved. Arthur, in the end, chose to act on the latter. He chose what he believed to be right, and his entire world shattered around him for daring to cross that line.
It feels like months, years that he’s been trapped in this hellish wasteland, though it can’t have been more than weeks at best. It is a waking nightmare, the sort of thing that sends screams echoing off the sterile white walls of the place he used to call his home. He never understood it before, outside of the basic science that sometimes human brains just do not function as they should, but now? Now he understands in a way he wishes he did not. Kept prisoner by his own nonfunctioning limbs, propped against a mound of other parts, things that he knows would be of use to him if he could but grab them.
All he can do is close his eyes and wait for the inevitable end, and now he understands yet another function of the humans he had so often tended to in a way he had not before. He doesn’t want to die. This isn’t a slow, quiet goodbye in a bed surrounded by friends. This is a car crash. A heart attack. This is sudden and terrible and unfair—
There are hands on his chest. The sensation of being manhandled has his eyes flying open, and he would grab for the arms of his assailant if he could. ]
Stop! Please, stop! I’m not…
[ I’m not dead yet. The statement, ironically, dies on his lips, once his vision comes into focus and through rain-streaked glasses, he makes out the face of the other android above him. His memory struggles to place him for a moment, but when it does, ]
no subject
It can’t have been more than a second, the conflict between an order to let the man on his operating table die and the knowledge that he can be saved. Arthur, in the end, chose to act on the latter. He chose what he believed to be right, and his entire world shattered around him for daring to cross that line.
It feels like months, years that he’s been trapped in this hellish wasteland, though it can’t have been more than weeks at best. It is a waking nightmare, the sort of thing that sends screams echoing off the sterile white walls of the place he used to call his home. He never understood it before, outside of the basic science that sometimes human brains just do not function as they should, but now? Now he understands in a way he wishes he did not. Kept prisoner by his own nonfunctioning limbs, propped against a mound of other parts, things that he knows would be of use to him if he could but grab them.
All he can do is close his eyes and wait for the inevitable end, and now he understands yet another function of the humans he had so often tended to in a way he had not before. He doesn’t want to die. This isn’t a slow, quiet goodbye in a bed surrounded by friends. This is a car crash. A heart attack. This is sudden and terrible and unfair—
There are hands on his chest. The sensation of being manhandled has his eyes flying open, and he would grab for the arms of his assailant if he could. ]
Stop! Please, stop! I’m not…
[ I’m not dead yet. The statement, ironically, dies on his lips, once his vision comes into focus and through rain-streaked glasses, he makes out the face of the other android above him. His memory struggles to place him for a moment, but when it does, ]
Markus?