A young man is desperately fighting to save his damaged cybernetic girlfriend from dying. "Damn it! The circuits down here, t-they are all fried... It's going to take hours to fix this!" He fears the worst as he looks up at her sorrow filled face and she speaks gently to him.
Her voice is merely a soft whisper, "J-Jason, it's okay. You have to let me go now. We had great times together. But sadly, I-I will not recover from this. All my systems will simultaneously shut down in approximately one minute from now."
Jason's eyes swell up with tears. She is on an operating table in his lab. He does whatever he can. But she knows his efforts are in vain. She’s prepared to die.
However, Jason can’t let her go. Not now. He needs her more than ever. His hands shake because he doesn’t want to accept the truth. He’d rather work for hours on end to try and save the girl he loves. Her circuitry is badly damaged and her time is limited. Jason tried to remain composed, despite the overwhelming sense of desperation coursing through him. He tries to stabilize her delicate circuitry. Her body is just too damaged. The flickering lights from the machinery surrounding them cast eerie shadows on her face, accentuating her pale features. She lays there quietly, her synthetic eyes fixed on him.
"I-I'll fix this," he muttered through gritted teeth. "I can repair the damage, I know I can." They locked eyes one final time.
“I love you, Jason." The circuits spark, then fail. Death looks dramatically similar to merely powering off, only she will never again turn back on. Jason continues twisting together wires, rebuilding circuits, in denial that what has occurred truly has occurred. After all, Jason built her. He can't also be the cause of her demise. His self-centered inability to reject his flesh and blood desires can’t be what killed her. Jason refused to let that be true. Hours pass in screws turning, hands tensed, back tensed, Jason would hurt himself before stopping. Hunger eventually did him in, forcing him to leave the lab. Jason despised his body's weakness
Jason had not always been this weak. He ate reluctantly. He was still human, even without his girlfriend. She hadn't been the first, but she had been the first he had made with his own two hands. She had the first creation he had that could love him, as opposed to another human choosing to, which meant she could never choose to stop loving him. She was supposed to outlive him. She was supposed to outlive him, and instead he was eating alone again, the memory of her final "I love you" mixing with his tears.
Jason didn't know what happened now that she was gone. He knew had to let himself grieve, but anger and denial, self-loathing and regret, it all overwhelmed his own system as though he was the robot. He wished he had been the one who died. But his chest still rose and fell, and his lab still contained the diagrams and prototypes he had built before her, the ones who hadn't worked, who had died before developing the capacity for love. Jason couldn't stay in his house at all any longer. He ran, ran out the door, ran to the woods where he had once - where his first love had once kissed him before she had decided he ruined her, he ruined everything, and he had vowed to find a way to love without ruining anyone other than himself. The woods felt like the right place to grieve. Jason was not sure who he was grieving anymore. Maybe everyone, every relationship that had failed, every decision he had made, it had all led him here. Alone.
Jason was alone as birds chirped, as leaves rustled in the wind, as the sun probably burned his all-too-human skin, as his mind kept returning to her circuitry, to the body he had built, had memorized, as though he could still see it, his eyes closed. With his eyes closed, he could pretend he was no longer crying. He could pretend she was by his side, or laid out in front of him. He could pretend he hadn't killed her. He hadn't killed the thing he loved, as that Oscar Wilde poem claimed all men did. Jason didn't want to be an ordinary man. He wanted to be younger, go back in time, but he had built a sentient machine, not time travel machine. 7Please respect copyright.PENANAjQTO7J6LV5