Stained Pages

[void31]

The day he first cuts himself is the day reality finally sinks in for Daniel.


He stands in the middle of a pristine bathroom in a place he doesn't know, turned away from and approximately two feet to the left of a mirror he doesn't look into. His palm is turned upward, hovering at chest level. The skin is not his own. There are recognizable creases splayed through it in an illogical, agitating pattern, marred within their ivory matrix by a two-inch laceration that weeps red into his cuff.


This has happened before, of course. Not habitually, because the mistakes that lead to such inconveniences are far less frequent for him than they are for others. (And perhaps he'd never be here if that were untrue.) His only inconveniences are the results of a random occurrence which cannot possibly be taken into account: a window shattered by a straw baseball; a rowdy animal released in a careless error; a loose wire tossed into a damp sink basin. Things so rare and so entirely up to chance that they simply aren't cataloged by the human mind--or, in his case, anything produced by it.


There are some remarkable aspects of his current situation, however, that set this experience apart from his typical trauma. This is a new place, and he is a new person.


No--he is, now, in all technicalities, a person.





That's why he's bleeding.


Daniel will not reflect on this.


He knows what to do--he believes he knows what to do; he's almost certain of it, in fact--but the sight of blood, trickling from his own hand in thin, viscous crimson rivulets is more distracting than he'd ever anticipated.


Eleven months prior, the rare wound was no one's fault. Chance was the only perpetrator. And when chance struck, the consequences could be cleaned up in no less than ten minutes, twelve at the most. Replacing a suit in the event of a larger abrasion was always twice the bother.


He's never felt the need to look at himself when it happens, either. Realistically, it's a waste of time. He knows what is there, beneath the thin, porous layer of faux flesh. Or at least what should be there, and what should be there is a complex labyrinth of silver and gray, smooth cords and cables and the effortless bend of synthetic tissue, free from anything that even remotely resembles what he's looking at now.


There's some type of alert ringing at the back of what he assumes to be his mind. He knows humans don't experience such things, but he isn't sure what else to call it. It's sharp and incessant, intent on drawing his focus away from everything else (not as if he were focused on much else to begin with), riling up a hideous sensation somewhere in his midsection and making his fingertips quiver. All of this emanating from a stupid, insignificant little tear in the flesh of his hand.


He was in the compound courtyard where it had happened. They were chased out for thirty minutes each day, roughly at twelve in the afternoon--for what, Daniel does not know--and they, the victims, sat frozen among one another, with the same wide-eyed, terror-struck complexions throughout. Hybrids did not socialize--this, their superiors were apparently oblivious to--and the fact that they now had free tongues did not inspire anyone to be any more talkative.


He'd found solace between two other empty faces--a young blond male and a scruffy, odd-eyed female who seemed not to have survived the transition quite so well as the rest of them. They arranged themselves on a metal bench like birds on a wire, with he in the middle, only ever exchanging glances that could have meant anything. But there was something terribly secure about having others so close, and Daniel never made a move to abandon their display.


He'd had his hand curled under the seat of the bench when the compound faculty had come to round them back up that afternoon, resting above the head of a nail that he had not, in all his stiff silence, paid much attention to. The duration of the thirty minutes was primarily spent waiting for it to be over. But when one of their daily herders turned out to be a prim, older gentleman whom Daniel was not particularly friendly with, he'd shot right up before he could process why he would do such a thing, tearing the metal through his thin, worthless flesh like a blade through butter.


He finally forces himself from the corner of the bathroom, steps in front of the sink, but doesn't look up. He's not sure why he can't. He switches the faucet on and folds his hands beneath it, shocked at the sudden jerk of his forearms when the temperature proves to be unsatisfactory. He scowls at the curl of pale steam twirling away from the basin. He doesn't like that; he doesn't like not knowing what he'll do next.


He fixes the heat, rubs at the wound and promptly ignores the spike of aggravation still nagging at him from some obscure recess of his consciousness, watching the red dapple the water beneath. He does know how to do this. That brings some degree of comfort. Of course he knows how to do this; he's done this dozens of times.


He doesn't know the man's name--he doesn't know anyone's name, in fact. From what Daniel gathers, he's an orderly, and engaged, though he finds himself wondering on more than one occasion who might be so audacious. He has dark hair and a bright, toothy smile, and his features are (somewhat) conventionally attractive. He’s nice to the rest of the faculty, and they seem to favor him the way most humans do their co-workers. But he'll find every excuse to be alone with Daniel. He looks at him like he might want to kill him, speaks to him in ways he doesn’t understand, and touches him like he intends to hurt him, but never does quite go through with it.


A part of Daniel understands. He’s a designer product, praised for aesthetic appeal almost as highly as intelligence and competence. He doesn’t understand sex, but he knows how the urge acts on humans, and he’s no stranger to their unique attractions to him. If he were home--if he had some kind of directive--he might have let the man do as he pleased.


He takes a rag from the cabinet perpendicular to the mirror, eyes skillfully avoiding the reflection. He’s still bleeding, but the irritation is ebbing somewhat as he wraps his hand once, twice, and ties it with his teeth. He watches a faint red stain blossom slowly behind the knot, aching.


His actions today were justified, he reasons. The orderly has been victimizing him for almost half his stay. His aggression had piqued earlier that month, when he’d backed Daniel into a wall in an empty corridor and squeezed his hip so hard that the bruises lingered for a week. A cluster of empty-eyed reversions hardly have reason to defend him if the aggression continues, the rest of the faculty don’t care, and he certainly can’t lash out in his own defense.


He drags the chair beside the door in front of the sink, and sits with his arms crossed over the counter and his head low, listening to himself breathe. The respiratory process hurt him so badly the first few days that he’d prayed to something nonexistent for death, or anything close to it. Now, it comes naturally--except when he thinks too hard. Humans are funny that way.


He finally braves a look up at himself. The mirror reveals to him a creature with flush skin and dark, sunken eyes, lined with shadows from lack of sleep, which terrifies Daniel. His features are still sharp and handsome, perfectly symmetrical. His jaw and cheekbones jut out a little more in result of his lack of eating, which is as disgusting as sleep is terrifying. His hair is soft, black and wispy, his lips a little dry, but having maintained their graceful shape. He can feel the threat of stubble when he runs his fingertips over his chin. His figure hasn't changed much, but he's thinner, and the muscle he'd been given has lapsed over these last few months. His waist is slimmer and his collarbones jut.


There are good things about this place. It's an idea he's tried very hard to keep at the forefront of his mind. Independent thought is another new concept to him, and it terrifies him no less than the rest. But it's keeping him alive.


There’s Lilian, a sweet, robust woman who works in the kitchen, calls him "sweetie", runs her fingers through his hair and convinces him to drink water. There's a skinny tabby cat who slinks through the chain-link fence sometimes and rubs up against his legs. There's the shower, the rain, the furnace in his room, and the little dandelions that have sprung up recently around his window, all of which Daniel loves. There's even his outside companions, which, he supposes, are better than nothing.


But it isn’t where he needs to be.


He misses her, the girl, and her father, too, though he struggles some days to recall what they were like. The thought comes to him again and again that he’s only seventeen years old--still a baby, Lilian would have called him--and most of his memory had been warped in the reversion process. It's taken him a while to grasp the concept of what “home” is, and when he does, he’s still not sure whether he had one to begin with.


But he does remember them. He remembers them in the little things--the aromas on the expensive suits which he somehow manages to snatch back from the faculty’s vaults; in the laughter of their children when they come to see the robots; in the faces of the others like him, terrified but yearning. They all need someone. It’s what they’re for.





Daniel peers up at himself through half-lidded eyes. There are good things about this place, but he's miserable. Lilian will fuss over him, but the orderly won't let him alone. The tabby will come to visit, but he'll still be gazing into the soulless eyes of his companions. The furnace and the dandelions will still be there, but he'll still bleed.


There's a terrible wrenching in his chest, and it's not the first time. He feels so little, so pointless. So terribly, awfully alone. A feeling returns to him, one he hasn't had since the very beginning of his stay.


If this is humanity, he'd rather be dead.

 

[eheu]

“Mandelbaum,” she says, “Cailey.”


The man behind the desk looks at her for an extra second. Cailey smiles and keeps her head down.


“Of course.” He says as he carries on flipping through the pile of folders on his desk.


She had memorised how to react, but never did she truly get used to it - the few seconds people pause and wonder when they first hear her last name. She used to stare back, but it didn’t take her long to learn how it only complicates things unnecessarily. They nearly never actually resort to asking, anyway - most of them don’t really care that much, and those who are inclined to gossip, surprisingly, usually have the decency not to do it in her face. Those people would have much time to speculate after she was out of hearing range, and there would be no shortage of sources from which it could be confirmed that she is in fact daughter to that man they believe so surely to be as amazing a father as he was a scientist.


There also used to be this burning compulsion to protest against it’s inaccuracy every time her mind stumbles upon that notion. She learnt to suppress that compulsion even earlier than she learnt not to hold people’s gazes when they stared. She’s been finding that a lot easier to do lately.


The receptionist seems to be having some difficulty locating the right file, and Cailey ponders for a moment whether to try to help. “Daniel” - how hard could it be to get to where that label is filed, she wonders for one moment before it occurs to her that his name is very likely not what they labelled his documents and that the pile of folders might not be ordered at all.


She’s here to pick Daniel up. That’s the version she’s settled on after a number of troublesome nights - every time she made the mistake of reflecting further her thoughts brought her down the endless winding paths of arguments about sentience, about time, about whether it’s the same bicycle after you’ve progressively replaced every one of its parts. Maybe it was her father and his fancy pseudo-philosophy having rubbed off on her, maybe it was herself, but she eventually decided that either way those were not thoughts that were beneficial to entertain.


The place seems rather new, and has been kept tidy. As expected for a place intended for visitors, she reasons. She wonders what the place the reversions stay is like. There is a bookshelf and a pair of sofas to her right, but she doubts whether the books ever serve a purpose other than a decorative one.


The receptionist succeeds in locating the file, pushes it over the table, and points to places where her signature is supposed to go. Cailey picks up the pen.


She’s here to reunite with an old friend, and that is all.


________


Several minutes ago.


A white automobile slides into a parking space outside the facility. The vehicle is a mundane model, dated somewhat, but clean and kept in good condition.


“ - No, he isn’t dangerous - ”


Her cellphone is connected to the vehicle, but she has earphones on, thus the voice of the other participant of the conversation is not broadcasted through the car’s speakers.


“ - Tessa, we’ve gone through this already. ”


There is no-one else in the car, but Cailey resists the urge to sink her face into her palms as she says this. People say smiling when one was on the phone results in a happier voice on the other end, and obviously cheerfulness it isn’t the only sort of emotion for which this effect exists. She isn’t intending to lose her temper over this, not now.


“ - Not an option. He doesn’t want anything to do with his old work anymore. I’ll figure something out. Repurpose the old study or - at worst it’s me spending a few nights on the couch - ”


“ - Yes, he’s staying at my place. At least for now. No -”


Tessa Beckwith often says the only reason people remain friends isn’t because mutual appreciation, it’s because they manage to tolerate each other. Cailey usually plays along with the facetiousness, but sometimes she gets the feeling that the piece of mock-wisdom from one of the oldest of her few friends is more accurate than she would like it to be.


Cailey has been regretting telling Tessa about this soon after she found out how violent her opposition to this matter was. It appeared in the beginning to just be a friend being worried for her over an important decision, but it very soon began carrying hints of how hybrids, and anything that has to do with them, were apparently safety hazards that should of course be kept as far away from normal, healthy humans beings as possible. There is something Cailey finds very uncomfortable in dealing with this supposedly good intent.


She sighs upon hearing the next question. The argument has gone full circle now.


“No. He is not dangerous.”


The question as to why exactly she made the decision was bound to come up sooner and later.


“- Because it seems like the right thing to do.” She replies.


“Yes, I just said that, and I am fully aware that it sounds like something straight out of a cheesy romance novel -”


The following is, after all of of her previous replies have been cut short by the next question, the first time in the conversation Cailey interrupts Tessa’s criticisms of her choices and accusations of her having a guilt complex. She also doesn’t realise she bordering on yelling into the phone by this point.


“ - And yes, maybe I do think I owe him, maybe for - i don’t know - looking after me from when I can’t even walk until I was seventeen? Look, the fact that I’m at the facility right now - ”


Cailey stops, sighs, and sinks her face into her palms.


“I am going to hang up the phone and get of my car now. Alright?” She says calmly.


A brief moment of silence.


Cailey turns off her cellphone, lets out a grunt, and bangs her forehead against the steering wheel.


________


The receptionist takes the folder and tells Cailey to follow him.


Why is she here?


It isn’t the simple, innocent attachment that she had in her childhood. She’s grown out of that, and one cannot un-outgrow something, in the same way she couldn’t un-perceive the difference between man and machine once it’s been explained to her why her caretaker is never seen asleep.


Neither is it that convoluted, conflicting mixture of annoyance and affection known by her adolescent self, when by day she would keep him from following around too closely so that her few friends outside would stop teasing her for not attending their parties because she was presumably too busy flirting with a hybrid servant. Yet, when at night they are at home alone, never did she find an appropriate time and way to explain to him how she hadn’t really been angry with him, all the while still somehow hoping he’d understand.


And there was no way to know for sure whether he ever did, because hybrids were under a directive, so he was bound to smile and oblige when the next day she would ask him to return the heavier books to the shelves.


Funny how she can almost relate to what that feels like, she thinks, as she forgets how this train of thought started in the first place.


________


“Daniel.”


Cailey was certain that this has been thought through, in detail, and more than once. What to do, what to say, imaginary scenarios from which she would select one that would work best re-enacted in reality.


But in the present, she sees a familiar face, onto which seem to have been drafted uncharacteristic features - lips dry, hair tousled, and the friend of hers only somewhat recognizable blue irides behind the black circles that line the sunken eyes. And she freezes with an overwhelming difficulty to say anything else as what she needs to convey was more than can possibly be articulated with a single sentence.


Cailey lets go of the corner of her lip she didn’t realise she was biting on, and takes a deep breath but tries to do so in the most inconspicuous fashion possible.


“Daniel,” she says, “You look terrible.”

 

[void31]

He isn't expecting it. That's one of the more frustrating things about this particular afternoon, and his circumstances in general--he isn't expecting anything.


Daniel has never been surprised. Every possible, reasonable outcome of any one scenario is cataloged, allowing him to prepare for every path with remarkable diligence. Prophetic, some call it. But man's prophet is based on the concepts of magic and mystery and the trickery that laces it together, which often pales in comparison to the mathematics and reasoning of a modern age.


What frightens him here is the fact that he now feels closer to the former than the latter. It would have been easier now to call himself a prophet than a piece of high-grade technology farmed from brilliant minds.


But Daniel will call himself neither. Not only because he is neither, but because he's never considered the idea of his previous charge coming to this awful place for any reason whatsoever. And yet she is here. And he is, undoubtedly, as surprised as he's ever been.


Shock is a terrible thing, he soon learns. He freezes stupidly beneath her presence, paralyzed by a flash of ice that races up his spine and slowly fizzles out in a cloud of needles at the back of his neck. He knows of at least half a dozen reasons he could be "seeing" her right now--nearly all of them sprouting from the idea of delusion brought on by intense mental issues that he isn't even remotely sound enough to address in himself--but there's a terrible, wrenching ache in his chest that wants more than anything to smother every last shred of doubt, logical or not. The head and the heart. It's an expression he's come across many times. Without anything to convince him previously, he's only now realizing the intensity of the contrast.


But he does suspect--with all due reason, and "emotion" regardless--that she's real, and she's here, because everything and anything that he's preserved from an existence before breath and blood suggests that those things are equally plausible.


Memories are strange things. He can no longer draw up images and information from some data bank or other to connect her physical form to a certain behavior; he no longer has such finely-honed abilities. There is a natural substitute, however, that comes in the form of non-existent lines and colors that organize themselves in a way he cannot see within the picture of his reality, but within his own mental being. They are patchy and twisted and he often doubts their details, but they are there. Indelible.


So she is real, and it is a reasonable possibility that she's here now. The shadows playing off the contours of her form and the oddest sense of presence he now experiences in the vicinity of others plays in his favor, prodding him just close enough to the idea of her reality that he finally thinks to act.


It's the first time he finds himself ignorant to the necessity of his own actions. If she isn't real, so be it.


Daniel gathers himself slowly off the chair, watching her figure in the threshold while making an imperative effort not to break eye contact. Something twitches at the back of his mind in response to the fact that he's not quite as presentable for the occasion as he'd like himself to be. Not as if he expected a call in advance, but he would have preferred a slightly cleaner look whilst reuniting with one of the few he could actually remember.


Or maybe he's simply reluctant to let her see how thin and hollow he's become. He knows he looks terrible; his appearance is impossible to avoid. In the sanctity of his own home he'd always made every effort to be presentable, even on the most uneventful of days. There hadn't been much to do then, given (though he spends most of his time in the shower now anyway, tending to his new body is a tedious process), but his few "hygiene" habits have become such an ingrained process that Daniel feels an irrevocable urge to put out the most professional vibe he can, even in such a hellhole as this.


But there's nothing that can disguise the looseness of his clothes, the marks on his skin or the weary fractures in his expression. This is what humans look like when they've reached their lowest point. Her dismay at his physique is similar to his own, but his is so fossilized now that no flame of reunion can destroy it. There's no hiding his weakness from her.


The same flicker of agitation resonating from his hand reaps throughout his entire body, fighting hard to bring him back to earth when he stands. It sends a crackling blaze across his shoulders, down his back, making his breath catch painfully in his chest before disappearing there, only to be replaced by an ache that he's become all too used to bearing. It happens often and, reasonably speaking, it isn't as much cause for alarm as some part of him believes it is--but he panics a little anyway, every time, convinced he'll break right there on the spot.


There'd been a time when he hoped for nothing more than just that. Now he isn't so sure.


He's certain that, for a moment at least, his expression mirrored Cailey's almost to a fault. Daniel doesn't allow it to linger. Once he's turned toward her with his spine straight and his arms tucked behind his back (it's the most natural position he's ever assumed, and all the better to hide his little injury), he tunes his features to that of a carefully neutral man--surprised, surely, but reserved. He doesn't want her making any false inferences.


"Good afternoon, Miss Mandelbaum." It's the only thing he can think to say; the only thing he should say in this particular scenario. Calm, polite, warm as he'll ever be. He knows it isn't quite the response she's probably looking for, but he doesn't know how to address the fact that he does, in fact, look terrible. The words "I know" have rarely passed his lips.


It's her appearance which unsettles him perhaps the most, his own physique aside. This is not the fragile little life form he tended to in his earlier years; she's grown, changed, like people do, he supposes, although she of all people is, somehow and against all reason, the last he expects to meet as an independent.


Not that she doesn't have the capability. His years upon years of trailing after her, tending to her needs in every way from reorganizing her room to answering the infinite tedium of questions that all children have about the world had left him with a sort of fondness for the girl, and rarely as the years went by had he found himself pondering whether such a bright intellect may one day wink out in the vastness of human society.


And it hasn't, from what he assumes. Daniel knows nothing of the time they've been apart, but her decision to see him is one he suspects she's made and carried out entirely on her own.


Why is another question entirely.


He looks her over for a moment too long, wondering vainly what he could possibly offer to this interaction that he'd never anticipated. There's a sucking rift in the center of his chest that he supposes is a result of her, as he's never felt such a thing throughout his entire stay, and it's not quite as agonizing as most emotions he's apparently experienced over the course of his residency. What was he supposed to call it? Relief? Happiness? It was hardly jovial enough to be either, but he's reluctant to label it negative.


He's already wrestled with the concept of betrayal. It's turned out to be more complex than he thinks, and now that she's here, he doesn't think he's quite skilled enough yet to gloss over the details while tending to her presence.


Instead, he smiles at her. It's the first he's managed in a year, a gentle, handsome thing that improves his exhausted features only somewhat, despite the lack of genuine emotion behind it. The reason for her visit is irrelevant now—whatever she's here for, he needs her to think he's at least twice as alright as he seems. "You're looking well."

 

[eheu]

Cailey regretted that sentence nearly immediately after she said it.


But she can’t tell him she didn’t mean it, because it wouldn’t be true and she is not very good at lying. Neither can she apologise for it, because that would imply that by that sentence she also meant to imply something else that would be the reason for that apology.


Which is also not true.


Of all the things that were equivalently “nice to see you again”, she thinks, trying her best to not have signs of her distress make their way to her face.


Daniel barely moves. Cailey begins to reconsider that apology, despite knowing perfectly how a narrow window of time followed everything said in which an immediate apology was effective, and how that window was very well past by now.


Only minutes ago, a part of her was expecting something that involved tears and hugs that would last too long, and another part of her was quite critical towards how those mental images much resembled the few badly written romance novels she still doesn’t know why she read in the first place. Presently, all parts of her agree that she would much prefer the tears and hugs to whatever kind of mess this is supposed to be.


She sees Daniel smile and realises how she had, long ago come to take that smile as the only expression she expected on his face, and is now, strangely, unsure what such an expression actually meant when it emerges through something unfamiliarly different.


"You're looking well," she hears him say.


She almost winces at that response. Instead, she manages to smile back, despite it being a rather pathetic one.


Neither of them were strangers to expressions that don’t carry the emotions they were supposed to represent. Maybe Daniel would let that one slide.


She words her following words only marginally better.


“Nice to see you again.” she says.


________


Cailey is aware that there are several inconveniences of having nervous quirks while also having people who know her well enough to also know that about her. The little gestures are supposed to alleviate the uneasiness somehow, or at least prevent it from worsening; and the bottom line is that the people around her see a young lady biting her lip or rubbing her fingers or repeatedly straightening her collar, so long as they do not see the same young lady obviously a complete loss as to what to do.


And yet to the people who are capable of observing those gestures and inferring from them the underlying emotions they are ineffective. They are also but another thing to be nervous over. It’s the equivalent of a distress signal written “I don’t need help”; a feedback loop among the lines of what happens in a person’s mind when they are instructed not to imagine a pink elephant.


And so Cailey talks little on their way through the corridors and back out of the facility, after she had nodded and thanked the faculty there. For talking is another thing she does when she’s nervous, anxious, insecure, or otherwise doesn’t know what to do; and she knows that once she starts speaking, suddenly stopping will no longer be an option, and the possibility that she’ll slip and say something wrong means that keeping on talking is a choice just as worse.


The way from where they met back to the reception desk was just that bit too narrow. It would permit two people to walk side-by-side, but only in an unnatural, uncomfortable fashion that involves both of them making great efforts to ensure their shoulders and arms didn’t collide. But neither walking in front of him nor tailing Daniel felt entirely right. Walking behind him cruely implied that the responsibility was his and his alone to face whatever awaited outside the facility. That Cailey had long become accustomed to walking in front while Daniel followed, decreed that she would have to accept the alternative that is the realisation that, much different from what she remembered is the way - and the reason - Daniel is now walking behind her.


The faculty member follows them behind Daniel until the gate. It is growing late in the afternoon, but it hasn’t begun to get dark yet. Cailey waits until Daniel starts making his way to the other side of the car before she opens the door on her side.


She didn’t bring her cellphone with her earlier, and it is now sitting on the side of the driver’s seat in the white automobile parked just in front of the facility. On the several notifications for missed calls, Tessa’s name was rendered Theresa Beckwith because Cailey refused to label anyone anything other than their full name so she could keep her contact information organised. The unnerving amount of possible implications of a ringtone could have on a person’s character, accurate or otherwise, is why Cailey assigned incoming calls a monotone ringing noise.


She taps the screen to silence the phone, and starts holding down the power button early enough such that the screen goes dark just as Daniel enters through the door on the side of the passenger seat. She isn’t so simple as to believe just doing that will prevent him from noticing anything - back then, Daniel could read an entire page of content in her messy handwriting in the time it takes for her to shove the piece of note paper behind another page. She flips her phone over so the the screen faces downwards.


Is that something he was still capable of? That is again something she refuses to reflect upon. She will eventually have to admit that she knows little about what Daniel used to be and knows even less about what he went through and what it means he is now. Yet the thing about eventualities is that, despite inevitable, they can be postponed, and it is Cailey’s intention to push any of these thoughts as far back into the future as possible.


The vehicle slides out of its parking spot.


“So,” she starts, because she hasn’t yet figured out what to say, but she figured there are too many things that she’d rather not talk about that could serve as topics for conversation.


“How have you been?”

 

[void31]

They're well on their way through the corridor before Daniel comes to the final conclusion that she's no projection of his new found conscious; they've attracted the attention of others, if only in the slightest of increments. Desolate eyes bore through the congregated shadows in open thesholds. A navy-clad faculty member shuffles in the opposite direction, past the opposite row of broad metal doors, sparing the both of them a moment's glance that suggests a similar emptiness within. But he looks at Cailey before he looks at Daniel--or maybe, the latter considers for a moment, an empty space in front of Daniel. If he really is loping after a hallucination now, it's nothing new. No faculty member has ever gone out of his or her way to bring them back to reality when such things happen--and maybe that's a kindness of its own.


There is something, however, that marks his look as that of a creature who's recognized another of its own species. The difference is notable in the way humans look at one another in comparison to the way they look at machines--or reversions, in his case. A certain curiosity lights their eyes when they see their kind, a certain strain to behave in an acceptable manner to achieve the common ground they all strive for. When interacting with a hybrid, however, their facade of professionalism--in whatever degree--tends to melt away in an instant. There is still awe, of course, but the need to maintain precious lies and superficial courtesies is less present in everyone as he spends more time with them. Daniel has never cared when someone was "rude" to him, or awkward, or overly personal. He wasn't programmed to be offended or uncomfortable. The moment people recognize this, they're jubilant to have their freedom.


The man that passes them recognizes Cailey. His eyes are blank, but his expression flickers, if only for the slightest second. He acknowledges her. He expresses more professionalism than he ever has, barring when he speaks to his equally human coworkers. His freedom is gone for those few sparse moments--and he seems almost delighted.


Daniel's presumed relief is fleeting. His whole frame seems to grow tighter as Cailey leads him further down the hall--to where, he's too overwhelmed to speculate--and another faculty member steps into place behind them, with no apparent intentions to pass. Six months prior this rising tension would have him rushing the girl out of sight as quickly as possible. Now he isn't sure what he's supposed to do, or if he's supposed to do anything at all. Surely this isn't some covert operation of hers--she'd have no way to get in without passing multitudes of security, and they certainly would have apprehended her by now if she'd managed to work her way through them. Surely she must know what she's doing.


Daniel has never assumed anything so flagrantly unsafe. But at the risk of making things worse at this particular moment, he maintains his pace, following her obediently, as he always has. The warning tension is still present. He swallows, and his undamaged hand comes up to fiddle with his collar, which is, he supposes, a nervous "habit" of his. They keep walking, and the faculty follows.


He doesn't expect to be outside before he is. It's a startling thing; he hasn't actually been outside without a chained wall to obscure his view since before he could feel the chill in the air and the breeze on his face, a sensation that he still isn't entirely used to. A part of him wants nothing more than to stop, just out of pure surprise, to take in the fact that he's here, for some reason, and that this is so very new and strange, something he hasn't experienced in a year or more. But he doesn't need to stop--his wrenching innards aside--and Cailey is still moving. So he follows.


His tension is eased just somewhat when the last faculty member he'll probably ever see falls back at the gate. Crossing the iron threshold invokes a stupid sensation in him, one that encourages him to stop again and recognize his surroundings. They ought to mean something to him, he assumes, but there's nothing logical in that. The unveiled outside is simply a new environment, and that is all.


He studies her carefully before making an independent move. Nothing has changed there. Daniel doesn't recognize the vehicle, but enters anyway, settling himself inside as neatly as possible and still feeling overtly clumsy. He slides his bloodied hand into his pocket before she can see it. He has a lingering speculation that she won't pay it much mind anyway--Daniel can take care of himself exceptionally well, no matter the race--but the last thing he wants to do is bring unnecessary attention to himself. Given her standing, she must be a very busy young woman, and there's no doubt she's already taken enough time out of her day to see him.


The car isn't objectively as comfortable as the sparse furniture in his room, but the manner of its interior is much more pleasing. There are no cold, hard metallic lines, and the person sitting next to him is (though remarkably nervous) far from the mutilated pieces he's spent his last year among. Nothing is a threat here. The chill still clinging to his oversensitive skin has melted away in the close quarters. The technology is familiar. He recognizes the smell.


He lets himself relax after a moment, crossing his legs, gazing absently out the windshield at the looming gray prison that he still can't quite comprehend the exterior of. Cailey and her vehicle may be a warm welcome, but his presence outside the facility is jarring. The building before him is all he's ever known beyond the vast gray timeline between now and then, when he was different, artificial, when the Mandelbaums were all he'd ever known. It's a change, and Daniel has since found that he doesn't adapt to change quite as fluidly as before.


There is, perhaps, a patch of time just before that gray space, when he was here--just the briefest moment to precede an era of suffering--but Cailey speaks before he can reach for the image. Daniel perks up immediately; nothing has changed there, either.


He recognizes the strain in her voice, the insufferable need to make "small talk", like people do. How have you been? He has to assume she knows full well how he's been--his appearance certainly shows it--but what else does she have to say? Humans aren't direct. Not usually, anyway. Perhaps she doesn't have anything else to say.


His response is briefly stalled by the movement of the car. He jolts a little, sets his jaw, and forces his shoulders back again. He hasn't been in a moving vehicle for quite some time, and the prospect of going somewhere else is unnerving in itself.


Daniel readjusts himself and smiles the same faint, timid, trained smile. It takes him a moment longer to formulate an appropriate response than usual. "I've been--" There's another pause here, which he scolds himself for. "--better." It's the first purely human phrase he's ever uttered. He knows he's using it correctly, though it's usually not said with a smile--but his need for her not to worry over him is placed above all else. She won't be convinced if he says anything positive, but at least he can give off the impression that he's lived through it well enough.


Which he has. Somehow.


He watches the scenery shift beyond the windows like it's something he's never seen before--and in a way, it is. The nagging sensation at the back of his mind becomes too much to bear. "If you don't mind my asking," he murmurs--smooth as ever, a little weak, perhaps-- "Where are we going?"

 

[eheu]

“-better.”


The pause between the last part of Daniel’s response and the words that preceded it results in Cailey taking a little longer than she should to begin getting a picture of what that reply might have meant in full.


Happening to be driving at the same time doesn’t help it. All her life she’s been considered bright: clever in problem solving, observant of details, and effortlessly efficient at intellectual tasks of all sorts. The truth, however, is that she has a one-track mind, and only conceals it well through maintaining an illusion of multitasking efficiency, created by still going through things one by one, but being able to go through them remarkably fast.


That is why Cailey hates it when people talk to her when she’s driving. Driving is a marathon of shifting her attention from the dashboard to the traffic lights and road signs to the road ahead and back, iterating through them endlessly and having never to miss a beat lest something happen on the road in front of her when she looks upwards at the lights. Adding processing an evolving dialogue to that cycle makes it infinitely more stressful.


Though, in this specific case, Cailey would rather say instead that she hates the fact that she happened to be driving when they started to speak. Because firstly it was Daniel talking to her, and the idea of herself thinking of Daniel hatefully was one that, somehow, she could never reconcile with everything else; and also that getting upset now was simply counterproductive to what she was trying to achieve here - whatever that was. But mostly because it was in fact her who started the conversation in the first place, under the stress of that irresistible need to at least say something.


That stress had scarcely lessened after she did say something.


She ends up regretting, instead of directing her disdain towards anything else. What exactly it was that she regretted - she was halfway through backtracking all the decisions she had made, yet the headlights of a vehicle approaching in the opposite direction demands her attention.


The fact that the facility was in the suburbs, quite some distance from Cailey’s dwelling in the city, alleviates the complications somewhat, by providing the little comfort that were the simplified roads, featuring considerably less traffic than the ones she’s used to seeing. The car that drives by and heads off towards the other end of the country road, that is a rare instance.


Cailey recollects her thoughts, but refuses to dwell on them any longer. Daniel speaks first.


“If you don't mind my asking, - where are we going?”


Another scenario for which she had prepared an idealised imagination, only for the events in reality to shove ruthlessly out of the window. This time though, it is, in an amusing way, somewhat anticipated. Sometimes she thinks that is the reason she comes up with scripts for events in the future despite knowing perfectly well the scripts are impossible to follow: because knowing how she wants things to turn out distracts her and prevents her from falling into the panic of not knowing how things will turn out. Knowing perfectly how things will not turn out was, on the other hand, also a convenient comfort.


It is only reasonable that the question should be asked at some point. At the facility, during their walk towards the car, when she starts the car, or when they’re pulling over near her place. Somewhere.


And when it did come up - “Home,” she had planned to answer, in a reassuring voice. Another one of those one-liners tear-jerking in print but utterly impractical in real life. Sometimes she wonders where she even picks all that up.


The use of the term “home” here is, in reality, misleadingly ambiguous at best.


The only home Daniel ever knew would’ve been her father’s mansion. He was assembled somewhere else, a ten minute drive away at an expanse of facilities designed for, and inhabited by personnel who specialised in, the engineering of hybrids. That place, however, was most likely quite insignificant in comparison to the decade-odd span of memory amongst the spotless white walls, elegant floors of ceramic or wood, minimalist furniture and lighting that was pure but arguably excessive.


A description of the house in which she grew up, bearing remarkable resemblance the environment in which the hybrid Daniel first awoke.


The decade-odd span of memory of, mostly, just her and her father. Cailey allows herself to indulge in those imaginations a little further. She recalls her memories of the corresponding period of time - which were, mostly, just Daniel and her father. She recalls how all that felt like. Cailey decides that replacing Daniel with herself was unlikely to be an improvement.


She remembers the little tantrum she threw at Tessa earlier that day and how she knew that bringing Daniel out from the facility was the right thing to do. Her confidence wavers for an instant.


Cailey rubs her fingers on the steering wheel. One of the few little gestures she could still afford when her hands didn’t have the luxury of being unoccupied.


Daniel probably knows not of her second-floor apartment. Then again, she herself knows little about the place Daniel had been living for this year or so. Could he have instead made a home out of the grey structure now some distance behind them?


Better. What did that mean?


She glances over her shoulder. The facility is out of sight.


“I’ll be taking you to my place,” Cailey says, returning her sight to the road ahead, “it’s in the city.”


Where you're staying. At least for now. It’s a quaint place, but not that bad. Catch you some rest. Certainly enough space for two people. Then maybe discuss what to do next. I’ll go fetch the extra groceries tomorrow afternoon. I have no idea what to do next.


She succeeds in resisting blurting out anything exceeding that curt description of their destination which she did utter. Objective statements, impossible to go wrong with. At least, impossibly to go objectively wrong with - she had convinced herself that she’d take the guilt for something no-one can prove over the regret for something that she knew she did wrong.


Another car speeds past on the opposite lane. Raise head. Glance out of window. Return attention to wheel and dash. Notice Daniel’s hand stuck inside his pocket.


One of those things that she doesn’t have the leftover mental capability to process - things only slightly out of the ordinary, detectable but not distracting. Can be explained. Can be explained away. Normally things of this sort will go to the very bottom of her stack of tasks - the thing she’d attend to after she’s finished filing those papers, the thing she’ll ask about when she’s been sitting at her desk for too long and there’s nothing else to talk about - if it’s still something of interest by then. The little anomalies tend to flatten themselves out into the background - even if they go unnoticed at first it’s unlikely one would become an issue four hours later.


That stack of tasks, as of this moment, happens to be too large and just a little wobbly. Cailey tosses the idea at it, it collides with that ever-present urge to keep a conversation going so more unpleasant thoughts had no space into which to emerge. The pair of thoughts tumble ungracefully off into a question that slips out in inattentiveness.


“...did anything happen to your hand?”


Explain, explain away. An anecdote she’ll listen to if offered, something she’ll let slide if the answer was to be just “no”.


She realises she was wrong earlier. The roads here do not offer nearly as much of a distraction as to be sufficient. She feels like she needs to talk, but knows she doesn’t want to.

 

[void31]

Daniel is gripped suddenly by the juvenile urge to launch into a series of pointless questions which he's far more accustomed to being on the receiving end of. Where is it? How long are we staying? Are we coming back? Inquiries roused only by an insatiable, troublesome thirst to know the answer right now, as opposed to waiting to observe it for himself, as he would have before. A "free mind", he supposes, will enact these types of changes mercilessly.


And though his incipient thought process inspires an additional bout of festering curiosity, adapting to it is no less unnerving than it's ever been. Asking Cailey where they were going was one of the more uncomfortable experiences of his new existence thus far; he did not, as a law derived from careful programming, ask questions that did not in turn provide answers for others around him. He had no need to. Curiosity was a strictly biological concept. Eleven months ago, he would have relied on his old method of patience, observation, and conclusion--unless, of course, Cailey was the one to ask where it was and how long they were staying and if they were coming back--and that would serve him as well as it should.


It's his purpose to remain taciturn. He has no ideas, no aspirations or desires, no sense of wonder or enlightenment. Such aspects of a being develop with its growth, and Daniel has never grown. Existing as a machine had been simply existing, with the only existentialism entwined with logic; existing as a human, however, came along with every terrifying uncertainty that manifested itself in everything beyond his newfound senses, and Daniel was still taken more aback by everything inside himself than anything outside.


The fact of the matter is that he doesn't know where he's going, how long he's staying, or if he's coming back (though a frozen sensation somewhere in his midriff suggests that he probably wants a negative response to the last question, at least). He could ask Cailey, but it isn't in his nature. He has to continue not knowing until he does know--but this time, it's painful.


Still fairly lost to the concept of time, he spends most of the hours or minutes in the vehicle gazing out the windows, fighting the glaring pain with a ridiculous urge to drink in the scenery that he's been almost completely turned off to for most of the last year. The stark gray and white lines he's become so accustomed to are difficult to decipher here: colors are bold, composed of boundless layers of blue and green, smudged and wild to bore the milieu that Daniel has since found himself harboring an alien ache for. His clean hand twitches impulsively in his pocket. It isn't that he doesn't want to feel what there is to feel, see what there is to see--but the idea is still daunting, and he isn't entirely prepared to come to terms with the fact that he's now able to do such a thing.


He isn’t prepared to come to terms with a lot of things, come to think of it.


He watches Cailey, too. It's a habit more than anything. He hasn't been around to see the girl drive very often, but he theorizes that she must be either very skilled or very unskilled, based on her behavior. Cailey is somewhat taciturn herself--maybe because of him, if not her father; or both of them, likely--but he recognizes her strain. She's been the center of his existence for so long that eleven months apart and a full mind and body alteration into a completely different molecular structure isn't quite enough to deter him—he knows when she's struggling, and he can often guess the cause of it. The meaning of your very existence tends to become quite familiar after seventeen years spent rarely more than a few miles apart.


He harbors a vague urge to say something, but another piece of him suggests just as vaguely that that might be the very thing troubling her. She doesn’t want to make conversation. Daniel isn’t hurt--though he still doesn’t understand the concept, to be fair--but his racing mind won’t settle. She’d come here and plucked him from the masses of empty souls to take somewhere--to take home--but for what? Because she’d missed him? Because he was hers?


He was slow to comprehend this, among the plethora of other things that frustrated him so relentlessly. He was able to think and act of his own volition, but only to an extent—he couldn't leave the facility, and couldn't (necessarily) deny Cailey's decision to remove him from it herself—not as if he really wanted to, but the boundaries were becoming difficult to draw. Giving in to a naturally submissive behavior seemed the best way to go about things in his particular circumstances. Nevertheless, he was unsettled.


So he stays quiet, observing the outside when he can, skillfully avoiding the side view mirrors and his own reflection in the process. She knows he looks dreadful and there’s a pang of guilt that accompanies that realization, like he should have taken better care of himself in the unlikely event that something like this should happen and she might feel guilty about it. Then again, it isn't exactly his fault he’s dealt with several excruciatingly long months of abuse and neglect—logically speaking, of course.


He doesn't blame her for the blood, the exhaustion, or the fear. He doesn't blame any human. He doesn't hold it against them, against her. He doesn't.


Cailey’s inquiry distracts him from this disturbing train of thought. He looks to her before he realizes he’s done so, though the lax, tranquil expression he’s always maintained betrays little surprise. Did something happen to your hand? The words hardly register. She’s grown so much. Perhaps it’s been a few more years than he thought, because this proud young woman certainly isn't the toddling little thing whose hand he once held to cross the street.


He does respond to her question eventually, though his reaction is unconscious before it is verbal. He tucks his damaged hand into his pocket on impulse and heightens his pain in result when the edge of the rag catches on the fabric, making him wince, subtly enough—he hopes—not to be too noticeable.


Daniel does not lie—he can warp the truth, sidestep it if he must—but he cannot lie. Especially not to her.


He isn't particularly eager to tell her about the circumstances that led to his little injury, either. He doesn't want her to know about the lascivious faculty member, the cold hard bench that was his only refuge (or its occupants), or the paralyzing fear that had led him to bear the utterly insignificant wound to begin with. Given, she cannot right these wrongs, but that won't stop her from potentially harboring some difficult emotions. And God forbid she feel bad.


Again he winces at this subconscious betrayal of thought. They’re all new to him, emotions, and though he must be able to decipher them based on their characteristics alone, he isn’t keen any more keen on accepting them. Anger--or what he thinks may be anger, or something akin to it--is a terrifying thing to be seen in something like him. Humans fear anger among one another, but to see it in something inorganic (or previously inorganic, in his case) is downright disturbing.


Daniel notes the amount of time it’s taken for him to formulate a response and finally speaks, eyes casually fixed on his inquirer. What should he tell her? The thought occurs just a heartbeat before the words come out; human or otherwise, obeying verbal commands is an automatic talent.


“It’s--” He hates the acquired pauses in his words. Don’t tell her, do tell her. He won’t lie, he can’t. But the truth is just as unnecessary. “--just a scratch.” Another humanistic term. Though it is, in all technicalities, a scratch. Just a fairly deep one. “I'd caught it on a stray nail, but I’ve taken care of it.” I think.

 

[eheu]

“It’s just a scratch,” he says, and Cailey has the feeling that it’s not something that she expected Daniel to say. Maybe it’s because she didn’t really expect Daniel to be hiding something about his hand (she never remembered him having a reason to hide anything). Or maybe it’s because it’s not something she expected Daniel to say. When did he ever word something like that?


She nods, despite all the latent uncertainty. She will later come to suspect that just nodding isn’t the best response - or even an adequate one at all. She’ll have the option of blaming it on the fact that she was consciously trying to avoid overreaction and the most difficult part about doing that is knowing how not to overdo it.


Then, again, he did say that he’s taken care of it. She doesn’t consciously realize this, but Daniel saying he’s taken care of something has been to her, for the longest time, as reassuring as things get; and at the moment she hasn’t yet become entirely aware of the possibility of that no longer being the case.


She doesn’t notice the wince that existed only for a moment on Daniel’s face.


________


The drive from the facility back to the city isn’t a short one, and her tendency to associate amount of information with actual physical size has led her to habitually underestimate the expanse of the suburbs.


About a third into the journey, Cailey turns on the radio inside the car. She didn’t ask Daniel before she did so - she figured to ask would feel equally strange.


The choice of radio over the repository of CD discs in the car was a deliberate one. When she sampled the old collection at home and shoved the cartridge of twelve discs into the automobile, she did it more or less for the sake of it - she doesn’t listen to music when she drives. A distraction, and she always had enough of those. But her father liked his music, and perhaps for that reason she at one point thought it may be better if she was prepared for the possibility that she’ll have to pretend that she also did. Maybe she thought wrong.


A traffic report for somewhere else was playing. All the better - music could possibly imply too many things. The reporter’s voice was that of a man, but just about everything beyond that is a muddled mess with all the noise in the transmission and the volume, which was appropriately just enough to provide background noise but not loud enough to draw attention to itself. Some time later she will notice that the content of the broadcast was now weather forecasts, but will not remember when exactly the change of topic happened.


Cailey starts feeling a bit more comfortable with herself, even though she knows quite clearly that she really shouldn’t.


________


Many minutes later, Cailey’s apartment on the second floor. As she flips the switch next to the open door. It’s a routine action and she carries it out probably without even realising that she’s doing it. The ceiling lights turn cleanly on without flickering.


“Sorry the place’s a mess,” she says.


The place is spotless.


She still reaches over the sofa to pointlessly move one pillow for a few centimetres to the left because it didn’t make sense to not try to improve on the supposed mess now that she’s mentioned it.


Most visitors - setting aside the fact that there ever were only a handful - receive the impression that Cailey’s apartment is a nice place to live in. Cailey herself will agree if asked, but will never mention it without being prompted.


The place was quite spacious, with nearly all the furniture in white and browns. The light that it bathed in carried tints of yellow. Warm colours: supposedly evocative of that hearty, nostalgic feeling of belonging; but considering the fact that Cailey spent much of her early life in an environment close to the polar opposite of this, even to this day it feels conflicting at best. She figured that, when she moved out and chose to move into a place that she always envisioned a home to be like, she never anticipated the realization that it couldn’t change the fact that her the home she remembered was nothing like it. Her compulsive habit of arranging everything to a degree of precise perfection seen in newly tidied hotel rooms - clashes with the room's attempt to manifest coziness and familiarity, and does not help in the slightest.


Interestingly, she remembers that her father, after retirement, took residence in a place much like this as well. "A change of scenery", she recalls him referring to the choice as such. She sometimes wonders whether he has the same problems with it.


“So, uh, this is where I live now,” she says, having put her bag aside and hanging her coat as she speaks.


The truth is that she slipped and started speaking a few steps up the staircase, and, as expected, it has resulted in her having to continuously scramble for things to say for the entire time up until now. She flips a few more light switches on her way into the deep end of the place.


“The kitchen’s there, so if you need to eat something -” She pauses and gestures in the general direction, but the gesture is mostly there to hide the hesitation in wording. Despite her having always considered Daniel a person, the mental image of him eating anything is still unfamiliar. The tap is safe to drink from - this fact she omits.


“- alright, I’m actually nearly out of food at the moment, I’ll do something about it tomorrow.”


He line of sight glosses over the wooden bookshelf against another wall. Mostly technical books, a few pieces of literature she carried over from the old place - mostly for the memories - and finally a handful of titles that belonged to neither category, grouped awkwardly to one corner. None of them she had removed from the shelves within the past month - never really had the time to.


She runs out of switches to flip, and finally decides to calm down a little. Had this development been delayed for a minute more, her thoughts would likely stumble upon the fact that, despite it being a rather large one, only one bedroom existed. At the moment, though, that thought doesn’t occur.


She takes a couple of breaths, one of them maybe a sigh. In spite of all its paradoxes, this place - home as she calls it - is, in the end, at least a relatively nice place to be.


“...Daniel?”


Now feeling much better adjusted to everything that was happening, Cailey looks around the corner of a decorative wall, having realized that in her franticness she’d scarcely made sure that Daniel was in fact still around the place.

 

[void31]

The terrible knot which has been gradually tightening since the moment of her arrival has yet to ease its grip in the slightest by the time the car brakes outside a building he doesn't recognize. Daniel observes the landscape with the same withdrawn senselessness that he's come to rely on. It's familiar, but he has not seen it this way before. Colors are duller. Movement is dismissible. Angles are meaningless. All of it is wildly unsettling, and the fact that he doesn't have half the capacity to absorb his surroundings as he did eleven months ago is enough to force him into a tentative regressive state that he's almost quite certain he's truly ashamed of.


This isn't him.


The knot demands his attention again when the tension of waiting for the vehicle's ignition to die down passes, and Daniel flinches, just the slightest. It's anxiety, he knows, but he can still conjure enough denial to convince himself that the longer he ignores it, the sooner it will fade.


He looks at Cailey again, searching instinctively for a directive. If he had any common sense left, he'd just get out of the car--that's what she wants, he can be almost certain--but it's common sense that he seems to be having the most trouble reclaiming. The idea alone is enough to bring on another heavy bout of concern. What if she only wants him, he speculates, for what he used to be? Surely she's smart enough to know he's not the thing he once was, even if she doesn't know exactly why--but then, the world has changed drastically in the time they've been apart. Perhaps they're both different things now.


Nevertheless, the concept of disappointing her is no less excruciating than it's ever been. What if he's incapable of living up to what she wants him to be? What if he can't answer her questions the way he used to? And what is it, exactly, that she wants from him? Why is he here?


Daniel doesn't realize he's been gripping the handle of the door until he feels the blood begin to soak the edges of the rag. Cailey is already outside the vehicle, and he is still here, perched on the edge of the seat, lost in his own head.


What a terrifying thing.


He swallows. There's a strained thump in his chest that he recognizes, but doesn't like to acknowledge. He also doesn't want to acknowledge the fact that he was teetering on the edge of a silent panic attack just a few moments prior. He'll allow himself that much.


Cailey seems to be lost in her own head too. Daniel realizes this when he steps out of the car and follows her wordlessly to her new abode, which is nothing less than what he'd expected (he takes comfort in that). She's rambling a bit, and although he listens raptly, taking some genuine pleasure in the familiarity of her voice, it doesn't take the intelligence he no longer has to know she thinks he may not be.


Daniel doesn't try to assure her. Though he pays more attention to her than he does to his new surroundings (always, always), he finds himself marginally more relaxed within the ivory walls than he ever was in any of his previous few environments. Not because of the presumed aura of warmth and welcome, but because the stringent sense of organization that has clearly never faded from Cailey's memory is more comforting to him than soft furniture and light-sparing windows have ever been.


He is only ever truly thankful for the lack of reflective surfaces in the room--or for those that have evaded his line of sight, anyway. He doesn't want to be deterred by his own appearance, especially if its exposed to him on accident. He has to prepare himself before looking in a mirror as of late. The thing that stares back at him is like nothing he's ever seen, and it's made exponentially worse by all the damage he's born over the last several months. He doesn't want to risk Cailey thinking he's just as mentally inept as he is physically; he already has himself feeling worthless enough.


Then that selfishness has him feeling inexplicably uncomfortable again. What does it matter if he feels worthless? It's a completely unnecessary emotion which he's struggled to comprehend even in the mindset of a machine. He's never truly thought of himself or his own existence the way humans must do in order to find such a great fault in themselves. He'd simply been, and Cailey had been, and whether he or she felt he was incompetent or not, he'd still have no reason to do or say or be anything other than what she wanted him to.


But the world has changed drastically in the time they've been apart.


Daniel notes the brief fallacy she introduces the room with, but duly. His lack of artificial intelligence lingers in the same way an amputated limb might--gone, but trying still in vain to accomplish what it is no longer inclined to do. It's a strange feeling, to say the least. He recognizes the error in her words, but has no need to file it away for any reason whatsoever (he's not even sure he can do such a thing anymore, anyway). It's merely a stumble. A single fracture in the lesser half of a moment that neither of them will, out of some courtesy or another, remember or acknowledge. It doesn't resonate with him the way it used to.


"It's lovely," he murmurs in a lulled moment, and it is. Daniel's never had preferences, but he supposes this may well be it, as far as interior decor goes. No matter the fact that he's already registered this place as a refuge of sorts, and even the most hideous hovel would have easily captured his newly-found sense of admiration in comparison to the facility.


His attention strays from her only once, to look at the books tucked almost perfectly on their shelves. Some of them are too familiar. Daniel swallows. He used to know so much.


The idea of food disgusts him (always smothering the protests of a body that he probably should acknowledge more often), but he addresses her offer with a nod and a gracious smile. Though he's certainly felt it, he doesn't yet know what true hunger is, and that's probably for the better. Perhaps not being in a state of perpetual terror will challenge him to eat more.


He doesn't let himself wander from the room, but when Cailey does, he doesn't go after her. He doesn't notice she's left, either. He's distracted by the books, skimming over their titles with his eyes, trying to recall when and where exactly he's seen them before. These memories are almost completely foreign. He remembers organizing them, either for the young lady or her father, though he can't remember whom they belonged to. Probably the latter.


Getting caught up in pointless thoughts is frightening, and even more so when she says his name and he isn't there. He perks up immediately, books and faded memories all forgotten, wide-eyed in that single moment of failure. He looks at her and blinks, drifting forward a bit, hoping to smooth out his expression from panic to assurance. "I'm here." He hadn't kept track of her. There'd never been a day they were together when he hadn't kept track of her.

 

[eheu]

Cailey turns around and hears Daniel’s reply. I’m here, he said - reassuring words. She smiles, appearing relieved by the affirmation that she didn’t leave him too far behind; and with no sign of having noticed how Daniel found himself distracted moments earlier. Neither is she aware of his concern over apparent concern over that distraction, evident through the panic on his face that remained there only for an instant. At some point in the future she will come to question whether her not noticing implied anything: growing independent? Accustomed to having to be independent? Detached? For now, though, it’s just one more of those things that she doesn’t take in.


She does notice Daniel’s eyes lingering on the shelf, though; his eyes remained fixed on the books just long enough for her to have become aware of what he was looking at.


She doesn’t turn away despite having looked in his direction for much longer than it takes to just reassure herself that he’s there. It maybe started out as attempt to indulge in the sense of comfort and familiarity for an extra second or two, but as she holds her gaze, she feels the fond memories receding, being swiftly replaced by the picture presented by reality. She’s reminded again how he’s grown a lot thinner: The face, and how there’s apparently a little more space between his nice clothes and himself. It likely results from equal parts stress and not eating enough - both uncomfortable ideas to associate with someone in which she never remembered seeing distress, and someone who appeared always flawlessly healthy. She speculates on what it feels like to be introduced to the concepts of ingesting bits of organic material for sustenance and the speculation leads her mind to weird places she decided she’d rather not go. There is the same familiarity in his eyes, except perhaps with the calm, calculated restraint partly replaced by a newfound weariness - nevertheless, she sees the same person, or at least manages to persuade herself that she does.


But of course, she realizes the dangers of letting that sentiment influence her decisions. These are choices that should still be made even if it was certain that the person standing in front of her now isn’t the one that she used to know. It’s about reunion with an old friend, she told herself back at the facility that held him, and a reunion she already got out of their meeting. Taking him home and letting him stay there was a step towards something else, and arguably more important. The purpose of reversion is to allow the human parts of the hybrids a chance to live out what they would otherwise have become - as advertised by the facility that carries out the process. She feels uneasy with the implied notion that she sympathizes with the stern faces and concrete walls of the place that she visited earlier. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s something that should be done. It’s about finding each one of them a life of their own - then, does it make a difference if she’s trying to help any one of the reverts, or if she’s helping this one in particular because of the feeling that it’s her responsibility - after he was bound to tend to her life for so long?


Either way, all of that has to start somewhere. In that perspective, this doesn’t seem like a particularly bad beginning from which to work. She doesn’t know where she draws the confidence from when this thought emerges: maybe it’s how she’s now at home instead of at some grey, foreign facility, maybe it’s because - as he just said - he was there with her now. But for one moment she believed that things were just going to slowly get better from that point on.


Then her sight wanders to the hand, and the strip of cloth fastened around it.


The red that soaked the makeshift bandage was a sight to which she finds herself startled. Not necessarily because she’s fidgety with such things as blood and wounds, but only for that it was at all unexpected that the issue that Daniel so simply brushed aside just moments ago was a gash of that size on his palm.


“You said it was just a scratch?”


She utters that sentence out of mostly worry, but immediately notices that it came out a bit more like a reprimanding remark than she would’ve liked.


Instinctively, she takes a step in his direction and extends her hands with the intention of inspecting the wound closer, but her mind decides on an alternative course of action.


“You stay here for a moment,” She says, holding a hand up in his direction despite knowledge of the fact that Daniel probably wouldn’t have reason to go anywhere else at that moment. She shuffles to the other end of the living room, and, after some shuffling through the contents, produces a first-aid kit from the bottom layer of a shelf.


The box is, as would be expected, white; but is not adorned with the equal-armed red cross. Justified in that the contained was appropriated from elsewhere to accommodate her minimal stockpile of emergency medical supplies.


There was a time in her very early days that she aspired to be a medical doctor. She was a bright child. Her father disliked dolls so she went around wrapping bandages of handkerchiefs and tissues around appendages of various other things - very crude ones. He despised doctors too. She never got around to finding out why.


Shortly after there was a time her father would frequently mention that she might make a decent mathematician if she would not follow his footsteps in becoming an engineer. She objected to that notion by making it clear that she had no intention making a living adding numbers together, then not yet having grasped how much mathematics encompassed aside from simple arithmetic.


It’s almost funny when she thinks about that in hindsight, having ended up where she is now. Funny in a way not without irony.


She puts the box on a table, removes the lid, and flips through the contents to find something suitable. She hasn’t needed the box for so long she’s forgotten what she put in in the first place.


“Oh, I visited him,” she said, not understanding why she decided to talk at this moment about this topic. Again the fallacy of avoiding the uneasiness of silence by bringing up something that isn’t an improvement. “the old man’s fine. He says he isn’t ready to see you again, though.”


Maybe it’s the books and Daniel’s gaze at them that prompted her choice of topic. As much as she disagreed with her father on many things, she’s fully aware of the fact that not all people disapprove of him as a person. She blames that on them not knowing him as a person, but also knows she does so mostly just to make herself comfortable.


“Unfortunately.” she adds, and puts extra effort into making it sound sincere.


It’s not a lie, at least technically not. “Unfortunate” is subjective. Her father is fine. That he doesn’t want to meet him now doesn’t imply he would in the future.


She notices that she’s been fiddling with the bottles and scrolls purposelessly for a few seconds. Can’t speak and think simultaneously. Falling silent, she finally manages to process the items and isolate from them the tape and bandages of suitable size. Despite her childhood fascination, though, she never got around to learning how to do this correctly - and fortunately (or unfortunately, if considering the possibility of averting the present struggle through having previous experience) she’s never encountered to need to know. Daniel surely has better knowledge over this subject - but then why would he allow that cut on his hand to remain like that?


She looks at the hand again. She isn’t prepared to even remove the old, makeshift bandage. Because despite what her father claimed about her hybrid caretaker, the person before her now - regardless of how much of him remains the same - could surely feel pain.

 

[void31]

Her initial panic startles him somewhat - or he assumes, at least, that surprise is something akin to his response, despite that whatever it is never shows in his face. It's a tight yet pulsating sense that lingers somewhere in the far back of his mind, replacing what one could speculate had once been the coded response to the committing of a human offense - a general reaction to a wrong which has been done, but with no logical reason why it should be considered such, other than the particularly finicky nature of an organic being had been upset by it. Cailey's response to his perhaps understatement concerning his wound is not the first thing to ignite such a familiar sensation in him since his reversion.


Perhaps what causes it is the contrast between the seemingly thoughtless look she'd given him and the abrupt switch of her attention to an injury which he'd all but deemed completely irrelevant at this point. How curious it was that she'd gradually wound through several layers of individual, complex thought before arriving in a completely different state of mind concerning a completely different situation - all without ever giving him the slightest indication that she'd done so.


It's unsettling, in a way. But he supposes he's done it himself by now, at least once.


He'd met her gaze with a soft smile, all but oblivious to the meaning of her stare. He realizes quickly that he has several theories, but prevents himself from indulging in their details. It would be wrong of him to assume too many things. She could be pitying him, but she could also not be. She could be wondering how they'd done what they'd done to turn him into this thing, but she could also not be. To even speculate on what might be within the confines of another's mind was a concept so utterly foreign and inherently despicable that Daniel feels a shiver of alien discomfort up his spine in response.


It's wrong.


Nevertheless, he maintains the look calmly, unable to process how a stare exceeding more than a few seconds without purpose will be considered uncomfortable in most cases. (He understands the concept as a courtesy, of course, but knows that Cailey could possibly be affected in some negative way if he breaks contact.) There is some sparse comfort in her dark eyes, but it's temporary. The sudden words are just harsh enough to incite his presumed surprise, and Daniel blinks, his mind immediately filing through all the possibilities of why she might be upset. It settles first on the notion that the blood might drip onto the carpet. He clenches that hand a little tighter, bringing it closer to his chest.


Oddly enough, the resignation of having done something wrong fails to appear until she makes a move to reach for him and he very nearly flinches. It strikes him that he hasn't been touched in quite some time, aside from the kitchen worker and the inexplicably aggressive orderly. The latter must account for much of his involuntary response.


Daniel doesn't think he's in any pain - physical or otherwise - but Cailey seems to suspect as much. She doesn't know that, of all the information he's received from the world around him since his reversion, most of it has come from maltreatment, fear, and a threatening and completely unfamiliar atmosphere, none of which have given him any encouragement to develop even the slightest impression of trust with most that surrounded him after the process. She can certainly speculate - and she probably does - but that doesn't necessarily mean she'll understand why he reacts this way in the presence of someone he's always trusted. Daniel hardly understands it himself.





He nods in return to her command, almost instantaneously relieved when she decides to shift her course of action at the last moment. He certainly would have let her touch him if he'd had to - but only if he'd had to.


Daniel swallows. He has no reason to think that he'd "want" anything less than what coincided with her desires. He doesn't "want" anything.


He stands perfectly still in the room where she'd left him, fingers closed carefully over his hand so as to keep it from dripping. He makes a fruitless attempt to clear his mind, trying, in vain, to recall how this situation might have played out a year prior. He didn't think. He'd never thought. Thoughts were new, terrifying things - terror itself was intimidating. Intimidation was a concept he still didn't understand. And then he was confused - and the cycle continued, forever downward into nothingness.


Half of him feels dead. Half of him doesn't.


He doesn't understand that, either.


Most of him wants to sit down, but he suspects he isn't ready to admit to his free will to do so. Cailey turns his attention back on her, anyway - 'the old man's fine. He says he isn't ready to see you again, though.'





He realizes who she's referring to almost immediately - shockingly enough - but that isn't what captures his attention the most. He hadn't heard the first part of her sentence. She'd said something else, but he couldn't recall what. Only on a subconscious level, even, had he registered her telling him to stay, moving to the other end of the room, and fetching the first aid kit.


His stomach plunges miserably. Why would she want him back in this state?


The box strikes a vague memory into him, but Daniel finds himself flinching away from it. She'd taken a liking to whatever was inside, hadn't she? And he'd gone around removing the little makeshift bandages wherever he could find them, because her father had disapproved, in a vague sense - but only after she'd left the room. A curious little thing, blooming with aspirations he could never bring himself to ruin.


His chest hurts, and he doesn't know why.


He tries to bring up an image of "the old man". Her father had been, he supposed, in a sense, like his own, though he suspects their views of him contrast quite a bit. Daniel had respected the man in the way only an artificial creature can. Cailey had loved him, surely, but their relationship had always been somewhat unique in comparison to the standard father-daughter dynamic. Perhaps that's partially his doing.


Certainly Daniel had looked on Cailey as a primary reason for his existence, but never as a child of his own. He'd committed himself to her, of course - and in human terms, he supposes she'd always been dear to him - but she'd only ever have one father.


The fact that that father isn't prepared to see him doesn't offend Daniel. If anything, it's comforting. He feels no anxiety for their possible reuniting, but the idea that the man is even a fraction as uncomfortable as he is in these new circumstances is reassuring, to say the least.


'Unfortunately.'


It isn't unfortunate, he almost says - but the idea of doing so makes him shiver. He stays quiet. The smile is faded, but the easy curve of his lips showcases a contentedness that Daniel isn't entirely sure is genuine.


A programmed expression. Of course it isn't.


He notes her gaze on his hand. Again, his mind shuffles through the possibilities. The rag is ridged with coagulated blood, stained crimson almost through and through. He should have done a better job of patching himself up; if he'd known she was to stop by and take him home at a moment's notice, he surely would have.


Chills creep up along the side of his neck and jaw when he removes the rag, tucking it in on itself carefully, professionally, until the crimson is on the inside, and then sliding it wordlessly into his pocket. He's quieter, he's noticed; others like him were accustomed to speaking strictly when spoken to, but Daniel had known himself to make necessary comments, unprovoked, when the situation calls for it. But he doesn't know what he can say - what he should say.


There's pain again - gnawing, burning. The chills recede slowly. He wonders how unsettled she might be when he smiles casually at the wound. It's stopped bleeding, for the most part. The edges are ragged - the injury itself is deep. But there's not a single speck of red on the clean white carpet, and that's half of what really matters. The other half is making sure she doesn't fuss over him.


"Nothing that can't be fixed," he murmurs. Low, quiet - different. But he really isn't much to be fussed over.