Summary: Rommie muses.
Codes: None.
Disclaimer: Tribune owns all rights to Andromeda. All I did was borrow it for use in my twisted little tale.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: "Its Hour Come Round at Last" and "The Widening Gyre"
Setting: Season two or three. Non-specific.
Feedback: Please! Praise and constructive criticism welcome. Flames will be used to power a steam engine.
Archive: Ask first, and I'll probably say yes.
Authors Note: For some reason, a lot of the fanfic I've been coming up with lately has been fairly Rommie-centric. I really wouldn't mind, except that a lot of it tends to be morbid. This was one of them, but I decided that I'd rather not be the only one to have this in my head.
Nerve Endings By B.L.A. the Mouse
I can't feel pain.
Not physical pain. Mental and emotional pain I know, I've been programmed with. I know the specter that makes Harper and Tyr twist in their beds, makes them fight its grip on their dreams. It's their physical agony that's beyond me, the way they screamed and cried and vomited at the Magog tearing into their flesh.
I can't feel physical pain.
I can't feel physical pleasure, either.
The satisfaction of a smooth ride through slipstream, the knowledge that my crew is breathing clean, recycled air, these are familiar joys. It is the comfort that Beka feels in a hot cup of tea on a day when my decks are too cold for her thin spacer skin, or why Dylan wears a "worn to perfection" shirt on the quiet stretches between star systems that I fail to understand, the simple sensations that organics place so much value in.
Instead I measure the pressure of Dylan's fingertips against my skin, calculate the appropriate response to my crew's touches, to know whether to strike out or lean in. It is a slender line indeed that separates a pat on the back from an attempt to imbalance, determined by pounds per square inch.
I can fight and kill, make love and walk on walls, give those around me the nutrients they so desperately need or watch them die of starvation on a full stomach. I can rescue a child, break out of a prison, destroy a planet, be shot and stabbed and pierced a thousand different ways with a thousand different weapons, and know nothing beyond what my sensors and my programming tell me.
Warships don't need to know how to feel.
The End