His outburst –abandoned- hung in the air, as silence congealed around it like flies to something rotten. He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose as a line appeared between his eyes. The room was beginning to stink of it.
"I'm sorry that you had to see that," the man said mildly and with a lilt of irony to the inanimate witness. The machine, by way of answer, tilted its head forward slightly. Or it might have just fallen. The only sound it made was the whirring of gears, and so the man assumed the latter. Alone in the room he paced without direction, his features unguarded as his thoughts waged war. But what the man couldn't know and wouldn't guess was that microphones in electronic ears registered, and the parody of a human mind housed in its features began to turn.
He was far too sober now, thought the machine, as it watched the man move about the room. Personality took root in the features of his face and changed them, unrecognizable now as the man he had been seconds before. Identical, yes, but irreconcilable. The machine, limited by its nature, created a new file, a phantom file, and clicked on.
For all the expense of the cutting-edge circuitry, all the hours the man had sunk into the ominously sparking hardware, the cyborg did not run as quickly as it ought. Every charred drive the man wrested from the overheated machine, he thought was the end of the problem. But then a new glitch would emerge, or the old problem return, until the bolts were stripped from his wrenches and his wrenches were stripped from his hands. What the man wouldn't know and couldn't guess was that there were hundreds such ghost files, thousands, jamming up the system with human contradiction.
But then, a machine was never meant to mimic a human, and so the cyborg was its own contradiction. A computer in the body of a girl; a girl in a bundle of wires. Propped up on a workbench in a teenager's clothes. Twin cameras plugged into sockets of eyes watched the man silently as he swore under his breath and slammed the wall with the side of his fist, the muscles of his back bunched with some meaning the cyborg did not understand. But by now he too had realized that he was far too sober, and he left. To jolt his system until it crashed, or broke down in human glitches. He would steel himself by any means necessary until like the cyborg he felt nothing at all.
