He couldn't eat or drink, but Blues thought of himself as a kind of connoisseur. That is, he was a connoisseur of pain. In his first few years he'd already tasted every kind of it.
His understanding of the subject was subtle and sophisticated. There was so much more to his pain than the simplistic one-to-ten scale Dr. Light had devised. There was, for example, sharp, shallow, surface-level pain, very different from the deep dark pain that even his innermost self couldn't hide from. There was swift, surprising pain that ran away as quickly as it had come, and pain that lingered on and on. Pain which he took for granted as part of life, and pain which told him it was going to kill him.
He had endured all of that, but he couldn't endure this. The wounds in his back and shoulder burned with each step he took. The deep, pinkish scrapes in his skin stung him, as did the battered hands which had broken his fall from the door of the sanitation truck. And of course his core was biting him, now more than ever.
He had hobbled only to the end of the underpass and had just found the turn that would lead to Asagaya, when he decided he was done with pain. Groaning, he lifted his shirt, opened his chest panel, and found by feel the set of wires which Dr. Wily had taught him were the receptors he should disable in order to turn off all pain signals from reaching his CPU. Judith had warned that he should keep them disconnected for a short time at most, that other subroutines would start malfunctioning if he left them out too long, but there was no point in worrying about that anymore.
He yanked them out of their inputs.
A half-second of naive anticipation followed, and then another few moments of telling himself that the pain he was still feeling was somehow an illusion. Perhaps he was so used to pain that his mind was now creating it where there was none.
But he wasn't mistaken. Disconnecting those wires had done nothing. He was still in pain.
He stared down, slack-jawed, at the silver wires in his hand. For most of his life, he had accepted their stated purpose as a matter of fact. If he were human, he would probably have suspected a flaw in his memory. But his memory was not wrong. These were the very wires which Dr. Wily had taught him to disconnect in order to ensure that burning himself alive would not hurt.
What did it mean that Dr. Wily had lied about that?
He reinserted the wires and closed his eyes. Big things were coming together in his mind, things which he'd never before considered. He now saw the first year of his life through a sharper lens. And the world, which already seemed so dark, became even darker.
Once he'd seen it, he couldn't un-see it.
"The truth is, I've become rather fond of you, and I'd hate to see you suffer."
Lie.
"Over the years, I lost count of the number of times I had to fix Albert's coding errors—careless amateur mistakes which could have sabotaged the entire project. To think I put up with it all this time for the sake of our friendship…
"He's not the genius he likes to think he is. He's a hack."
Those errors weren't careless mistakes. Dr. Wily put them there on purpose because he didn't want me to exist. My core flaw was his fault. Dr. Light, how could you not know?
"I wish you wouldn't make jokes at his expense."
"Why? He has no idea what I'm talking about."
"He's going to remember. He can remember everything."
He remembered.
If only it would still matter tomorrow.
