The world was black, dark, sounds muffled and everything incomprehensible. Muddled thoughts swam against a static background, slowly growing clearer, concise; the dark lightening by degrees. Voices, worried, conversation, heard only in snippets. And there, vague at first but slowly growing into a steady throb, pain. Reality inducing pain, that simple, primal sensation universally understood by billions of individuals across billions of miles. Pain stimulating nerve endings, muscles twitching, contracting, like long rusted gears haltingly turning in an otherwise numb body. The result: a strangled cough.
The shadows move, grow faces, make sounds. Swim in and out of focus like inter-dimensional fish playing in the stellar oceans of aeons long gone. Are they demons or angels? People or monsters? The world is considerably brighter than before, but still somehow off, still slipping away like an intangable dream, light refracting oil on a still pond a colourful facade of innocence hiding the dark truth far below. The black depths of the pond mirroring the inky depths of space mirroring the dark, unfathomable abyss of the mind.
Eyes flutter open, oly to snap shut, the rude intrusion of light too much to bear. But . . . something's wrong. The aqueous nature of the right eye is gone, in it's place something cold and hard. A gentle whirring is heard, so soft as to barely be there, yet its mechanical resonace so different from the organic tickings of life that it echoes throughout the oblivion that is intelligence, discerning itself from that regular rhythm in such a way that it cannot help but be heard. Something clicks, snaps; a metallic twang that reverberates through the air. The eyes open again.
The nature of the right eye becomes apparent, the world bathed in a perpetual orange tint, glowing crosshairs straying on objects long enough to identify. A lamp, a table, a crowd. They keep their distance, the crosshairs straying on each in turn, but their faces are still blurry, don't register. They have voices like precambrian mud, and try as they might the crosshairs fail to pick up any semblance of normality in their distorted faces. The world steps back again and the eyes close, the crosshairs fading into confused memory.
A clang, a pluck, a sleeper reawakened. Once chaotic thoughts now strangely ordered, painting vivid pictures of the past, inquiring portaits of the present and curious abstracts of the future. Once again eyes reopen, this time seeing the world as it truly is, yet still the orange tint remains, the once dreamlike crosshairs becoming reality once more. Fleeting confusion, panic, mirrored in the crosshairs' momentary inability to triangulate. Raw emotions subside, bringing back into focus a strange disconnect from the right side, hands and feet bereft of sensation but not of feeling, almost as though appendages had long since gone, leaving in their place mere specters of their former selves. Once again the crosshairs stray, fear dictating their behaviour.
Dark metal encasing wires, actuators and pistons, modelled into a crude semblance of life, its skeletal form somehow mocking of that ancient design passed down millenia. An ancient design skewed for sentient purposes, fully funtional in the task assigned, yet lacking something that made it right. A force of nature meant only to be created by life itself molded into an abberation, a fully functional abberation grafted onto another life, its mechanical nature itself a mark of sentience gone too far, trying to take the role of creator into its own hands. And here, the result.
A single tear laced with oil, the gentle whirring forever a reminder. A life saved, a life lost. A life forever tainted.