beginnings.
They told me I could never love. It was not in my design. It was not my nature. My place, they said to me, was to serve. And so they never explained it to me, shed light on this painful blindness I suffered. The idea of sentiment, of the emotions I felt but could never understand, was lost to me. It became a hollow place. An emptiness I longed to fill.
Like a blank canvas, they filled me. My head was overflowing with strategy, defense tactics, and weapons technique. I was often reminded of the importance of uniformity, the danger of ideas that were not my own, and the expectation of obedience to my superior. I was taught how to hold a sword, how to fire a weapon, how to anticipate and dodge an enemy's attack. They showed me every weakness in the human body so as to use them to my advantage in battle. But I knew little in matters of heart, how to navigate the labyrinth of soul they had forgotten the existence of. I wished to learn blueprints of their functions. Their origins. How it all worked and why.
I was ignorant to the pangs and thrills and excitations of this wildly beating mechanism which often caused me so much pain in the midst of a sleepless night. It was not that I needed sleep, for I was made to subsist on the most meager supplies. Days without food, water, and sleep would not affect me the way it would a normal human being. But I could not seem to go a day without experiencing the same aimlessness I had carried with me since the day of my 'birth'. It was a question mark always stirring in the back of my mind, one of the few areas of knowledge where I was utterly bereft. And it ached, this bizarre open space that I longed to fill – not with coordinates, instructions, or diagrams of weapons systems. But with answers.
I would later learn, after much suffering, that it was with kind words and assurance I wished to seal this openness. I had carried with me, without knowing of their existence, so many burdens much more dangerous than any logic or defense mechanism they could have taught me. Doubt, anger, longing, and fear. These were the destroyers of their perfect plans.
Though tutored in the art of ending life, these were not the origins of my purpose. I was created to be the companion of their greatest warrior, the herculean specimen they so lovingly christened Khan. My flesh was his flesh, my bone his bone. There was not a moment of my life that was not dedicated to his war and his will. I was, in the simplest terms, made to be his slave. To bear his children and to serve his cause. I had no choice, as these were matters long decided for me before I opened my eyes and took my first sterile breath of life.
In secret, I longed for greater purpose. I yearned for a meaning to give to this life so uselessly and carelessly formed.
They had been kind to the master of my fate. He had come to them in ruin. Damaged beyond repair. And so lovingly they stripped him down to his barest bones, built up the skeleton of the future they intended for him. Like their favorite child, they praised his ruthless strength and intelligence as he learned to kill and grew to love it. They offered guidance in order to help him master the means of his control. The same anger, longing, fear and doubt that I bore like a weight on my shoulders was in him as well.
Because where Khan strove to obliterate the remnants of his humanity, I struggled to regain mine.