Anima
She is not wounded when it ends. She could never be, and yet she wonders – why should it be any different?
It is true, in a way. Her chassis is dead. She has no skin to be scorched by fire, no blood to melt in the acid. Hers is a life of profound calculations, danced on receptors that convey clean data.
Even so, she has had her chances to try what it is like.
When it aches, a body is crude and unforgiving. Before this wreck of a woman, barely alive from the void of space, she has watched countless other corpses go out like lamplight – and each of their faces was horribly tense, rewritten by suffering in the slightest details.
They were ever so weak, she used to think. Gone with the first broken limb. But today has taught her better – it really must be terrible, if all of their words about pain sound so true.
She has heard paragons of blades that cut through flesh, of daggers to the heart – and they described it as the end of the world, with the thing they call soul split in half like nothing.
It cannot be that different from what she feels now.
They were definitely wrong about her. The way they put it, she should never have shared their fate. She should have been obedient and mechanical, enclosed in a perfection of her own.
Yet, she remembers that kind of hurt in them. She thinks of their eyes in the test chambers, stripped to the bone of any will to live, and finds it truly hard not to relate.
But this could not be predicted in their plans. The horror that shook her three times was never considered, not even in their wildest dreams.
They looked at her as no more than a chunk of metal and wires. Her chassis knew no mistake, no possibility to fail. They had built her with their sight, and the ache of the body was the only one they could see.
It is easy to underestimate something when one ignores it. She was never programmed to feel this much pain – and now, of course, she does.
How exactly is it different?
Dedicated to whoever knows the ache of the soul, and just how devastating it is.