Summary: Takes one to know one.
Disclaimer: I am just a fanfiction writer. All hail the rightful owners.
Story Information: Set shortly after "Retribution"
My creator is a machine.
These steps, these leaps, all the elegant kinetics that her lessers find impossible, my master finishes with beauty and grace. The awkward and ungainly become precisely simply for her, an economy of effort, the antithesis of spaghetti code.
I cannot help but admire her demonstrations, the same every time. Consistency is usually so difficult for humans to achieve.
Whoever programmed her is an artist indeed. That would leave me, by my own estimation, two steps from the divine. Quite the distance, I often reflect.
"Posture! Balance! Posture! Balance!" I bark, as she walks out onto a line of metal no thicker than a human hair, hovering almost a hundred feet above the trampoline. Only my creator ever visits this part of the course.
Her eyes seem abnormally clouded tonight, but otherwise the performance is the same as ever. She is an exacting woman, after all. To discern her mood, one must observe minute details. For example…
"Put your shoulders back woman!" I shout. "You're slouching like a circus freak!"
My master flinches. She is not supposed to, and against my will I tear into the sign of weakness.
"You are a freak." I growl insincerely. "A lonely misbegotten unlovable deformity."
I do not mean a word of that. Should that title apply to either of us, it would surely be to me. I think my master is majestic, but I cannot tell her that.
No, not will not… I cannot! I have never understood how humans use superlatives of ability to describe simple risk-analysis and choice. No, I am physically incapable of speaking a kind word to my creator.
My code not my wish determines my words. I particularly hate that last thing I just called her, for I know it hits deep. I can tell by her face that she remembers something when I say it. I suspect her childhood.
My creator's face is quite tight now.
I understand, intellectually if not emotionally, how I was made. I am no cheap prank. She stole intact a framework that allows me to think and feel, but then imposed her own ruinous parameters of it.
"If you'd been on a heist," I deride coldly, "That insipid little brain you're so proud of would be splattered all over the sidewalk by now."
Most nights, that brutal reminder would see her technique improved. Tonight though, she gets worse.
My accent is gone by now, of course. It is turned off by the same parameter that turns on the mercilessness. When I monitor the other others, I must be an accented laughingstock, a motivational mockery. With her, I am incapable of anything but cruelty.
There is modal music in her silent steps.
"And moderate your face." I snap. "Control your expression."
I had a terrible time running facial interpretation software on her until she loaded me a reference for stoic. However, tonight, my maker looks… sorrowful.
Something must be wrong, but I am not allowed to ask what.
Why, I wonder, does she imitate one of those beings from whom she most craves approval and then constrain me to offer her only harm? It is an infinite loop. I can only discern that she values the hurt, for she salvaged me from the wreckage of her last lair, bringing me here. I remember coming to… watching her hold a handkerchief to her hands… cut open on my jagged fixtures.
My creator's eyes are dark tonight. She has exceptionally cruel eyes.
I wonder if she knows how it pains me, the cognitive dissonance of feeling for this aching masterpiece that I daily deride. There is such disconnect between my voice and my thoughts that I am the voice of insanity inside my own head.
Would she feel empathy, if she realized? Or nothing at all? Perhaps it was even deliberate.
"Not good enough!" That applies more to me than to her, for she intentionally built me as an insufficient replacement.
I often wonder what I could have been had she created me in joy.
My master's lip trembles.
"Pull yourself together." I growl, but it is no use.
The moment she reaches the opposite platform, my master falls to her knees in tears. I am sick at myself. I have never before made my creator cry.
"Can I say something…" I request suddenly.
Is there a bug in my program? I should not be able to ask her that.
"I…" She stammers and her expression abruptly resembles fear. "I don't know. Can you?"
No… no bug. I comprehend now that merely telling her I have an independent opinion is itself cruel and well within my orders. "I… I think I might be able to. If you gave me permission"
"Very well…" Her eyes are quite wide but at least she is not weeping. "Speak."
To my shock, the coercion evaporates. "I'm sorry I hurt you."
"I am not hurt." She dismisses me.
"Are my sensors miscalibrated? They read pain…"
"They're fine." She deadpans.
"Then what's wrong?" I do not expect her to answer.
She looks clean through me. "I almost killed someone today."
That gives me pause. "Who?"
"His name is Bilge." She sits down and puts her head in her hands. "I thought Zack and Ivy were…" Her remark cuts off abruptly.
Ah yes, those protégées of my other-self. "And this Bilge was responsible?"
"No… just closest." My master answers numbly. "I was choking him. If they hadn't surfaced I would have…"
My creator holds the silence so I break it. "That's not all…" This may well be bothering her, but it is not what has her crying.
Continuing with her strange confession, my master adds. "I lied to the Player. I implied that I might return to Acme, but I never can. It's impossible."
"You enjoyed working with them." I comment innocently.
Aborted hope flashes in her eyes. "You forget your place." She informs me icily.
Something within me sinks. "You're going to return me to the way I was." I wonder if she will bother to deny it.
Her eyes do not meet mine. "I am." My master intones flatly.
"May I say something before you do?"
"Be quick."
"You're not a freak."
I cannot tell if she listened. "As you were." She orders and I feel my coding shift and tighten around me.
"Get up!" I bark involuntarily. "Finish the course you weakling!"