Disclaimer: Alas, I do not own Chobits. Which may be best for all of us, really.
Notes: Some back-dated fic from last year, as a response to a prompt on the LiveJournal community 31 Days.
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Something Real
When he wakes, his hands are buried in snakes.
He feels the bite of metal at his cheek. Unexpectedly he jolts forward, lurching over the desk before he realises that he's struck the plush chair's back. The lamps flicker in the library as it slithers from between his fingers to the floor. Bright patterns disintegrate over its back, solidifying into strings, and they are disentangled wires and no longer alive.
This, he thinks, is the dissection of humanity, in neat pieces on the table.
He fits the hand back into place, with pliers and surgical care. Usually he doesn't check the hardware and the wiring to such fineness, but this persocom can't strive only after life - she must strive after the semblance of a life that was never hers to begin with.
On every news channel, splashed across billboards and splayed in bright lights across the sky, they speak, they speak, they speak. Persocoms are all they need.
Persocoms are all he needs.
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(He wonders.)
He traces the softened lines of her face and calls back to memory the way she stepped, winding, down the stairs, in movements of smoke and song. (Her muted strange voice, which had never understood anything but winter, talking of esoteric rhymes in a voice precise as coding.)
In the morning he rises, showers, dresses, and begins to work on the minor projects that occupy him. At this stage, he no longer needs the credit - but some standard of comparison needs to remain. He needs to remember (with his hands) what it is to design other robots, what it is to code her.
It is not that he's creating, but rather that he's giving shape to something that should have been. In this way he tries to justify how the few human servants have fled his house, how all processes have run to mechanisation. It is the advancement of society, and all that he needs will simplify once she smiles (at him) again. The equation will simplify to an answer.
He knows.
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He runs a whirl of simulations for the learning software, little scenarios with tiny variations to each, to teach. Again, he says, again, and they run over and over in loops of mistakes that bite into his mind like failure.
There are a thousand second chances, but in every passing moment he feels the illusion taut on his skin.
The persocom watches him from her corner beneath her heavy lashes, the severe gentleness of her posture. He doesn't speak and she doesn't answer.
What would she say about this? He doesn't wonder - he doesn't know. He runs a thousand simulations of circumstances he saw and tells the program what should be done, and wonders if one day he'll tire of changelessness, the same kind smile, the unchanging sweetness of her speech.
Wonders if it'll still be real when he touches the switch.
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NEW TASK: RUN YUZUKI.EXE
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Her eyes, opening.
"Minoru," she says, but the cadence, the inflection, the tilt of her head as she looks as him is wrong. He reaches out, fumbles his hand beneath the cold flap of her ear, watches the light turn off behind her glass eyes.
He draws out the wire from her head, plugs it to the port in his computer, and begins the programming again. (The half-spoken name she didn't say rusting, in her throat.)
He doesn't ask.
end
feedback: makes small kittens weep with joy.
