Failure
Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2004 1:07 am
AN: We always read comparisons between Heero and machines. I took it one step further in this ficlet.
Disclaimers: I don't own Gundam Wing.
It's done. Mission. Complete.
I've escaped it for years. I kept telling myself it wasn't necessary. Procrastinated and made excuses. Somehow convinced myself of that lie, even when I blatantly knew it was my duty to kill her, since the day she saw me on the beach.
But I didn't. I tried. I pointed my gun at her head, tried to crush her with my gundam. But the end result was always the same.
Failure.
I chided myself for it. I attempted to kill myself over it. There was no room for failure. Failure means uselessness. It means punishment and worthlessness. It means paying for inadequacy with pain and flesh and mentality and bones. Insignificance as a human being. Obsoleteness as a programmed killing machine, overriding the emotional and humanitarian functions with uploaded strategies and orders and objectives. Failure is unacceptable under these terms.
Humans err. Machines follow commands-- Or breakdown trying.
I can only hypothesize that my reaction time to the order was delayed because of the input of her kindness; hope; beauty; and, ultimately, her love into my system. That subjective programming overloaded my circuitry and sent a virus through my intricate wiring. It infected every file, every window encrypted in my brain. It even affected my network as a whole, causing my chest to ache and my loins to throb when I watched her-- Scanned her. I was tempted to override my original programming.
But a machine can't rebel unless it's formated to do so. Unless it's configured that way, it doesn't know how. So it just follows orders and keeps working and running at the efficiency it knows. The only effectivness it can conceive.
That's how I am.
Maybe if she tried a little harder. Maybe if she kept shorting my system with her sensual touches and mixing my signals with her loving, sentimental words I would have been deprogrammed. Then she could have uploaded anything she wanted into me. She could design me with reciprocated feelings, intimate caresses, and a resurrected desire to be loved. We could have been together. We could have been lovers and wed and had living, breathing children. We could have grown old together-- Old and in love.
Even though it wasn't in my original schematics
But I killed her before she could finish. She was wiping out my hard drive, but my firewall kept her at bay and anti-virus eradicated her from my core. I shot her in the head and shed a tear when she fell. I even caught her in my arms and just held her. Documented in my mind how warm and soft her skin was. How her hair scintillated in the moonlight and fell across her face and over her lips. In death, as when a machine runs down, she glowed and just faded away.
I wanted to download what I felt for her into her body, then. Her effect on my configuration couldn't be undone, even if I did stop it before the damage became profound. She left little holes in my programming that I could fill with humanness-- With my feelings for her. With my love.
But it wasn't enough. Not enough to alter my prior, obligatory settings. I had killed her. Gone through with the command. But I felt part of me shut down that night; her blood on my hands and chest shorted me. When it regenerated, it was wired for her and pumped me with sadness and lust and remorse. That one sector of me was controlled by her, but the whole system functioned from it.
Maybe her damage wasn't so minimal. Perhaps she spread farther through me than I thought. Her virus was, apparently, stronger than my installed protection and configuration. Because it was genuine and human.
Humanity creates machines, which are subservient. It's only natural that her human influence, her human emotions, would be greater than my manufactured calculations.
In that case, I'm still a failure. And she's a failure for not saving me.
AN: Just for clarification's sake, because I thought it could get confusing, Heero isn't actually a machine or anything like that. It's just how he sees himself--because his humanity had been buried. I thought it would be an interesting metaphor to expand into an analogy. Thanks.
Disclaimers: I don't own Gundam Wing.
It's done. Mission. Complete.
I've escaped it for years. I kept telling myself it wasn't necessary. Procrastinated and made excuses. Somehow convinced myself of that lie, even when I blatantly knew it was my duty to kill her, since the day she saw me on the beach.
But I didn't. I tried. I pointed my gun at her head, tried to crush her with my gundam. But the end result was always the same.
Failure.
I chided myself for it. I attempted to kill myself over it. There was no room for failure. Failure means uselessness. It means punishment and worthlessness. It means paying for inadequacy with pain and flesh and mentality and bones. Insignificance as a human being. Obsoleteness as a programmed killing machine, overriding the emotional and humanitarian functions with uploaded strategies and orders and objectives. Failure is unacceptable under these terms.
Humans err. Machines follow commands-- Or breakdown trying.
I can only hypothesize that my reaction time to the order was delayed because of the input of her kindness; hope; beauty; and, ultimately, her love into my system. That subjective programming overloaded my circuitry and sent a virus through my intricate wiring. It infected every file, every window encrypted in my brain. It even affected my network as a whole, causing my chest to ache and my loins to throb when I watched her-- Scanned her. I was tempted to override my original programming.
But a machine can't rebel unless it's formated to do so. Unless it's configured that way, it doesn't know how. So it just follows orders and keeps working and running at the efficiency it knows. The only effectivness it can conceive.
That's how I am.
Maybe if she tried a little harder. Maybe if she kept shorting my system with her sensual touches and mixing my signals with her loving, sentimental words I would have been deprogrammed. Then she could have uploaded anything she wanted into me. She could design me with reciprocated feelings, intimate caresses, and a resurrected desire to be loved. We could have been together. We could have been lovers and wed and had living, breathing children. We could have grown old together-- Old and in love.
Even though it wasn't in my original schematics
But I killed her before she could finish. She was wiping out my hard drive, but my firewall kept her at bay and anti-virus eradicated her from my core. I shot her in the head and shed a tear when she fell. I even caught her in my arms and just held her. Documented in my mind how warm and soft her skin was. How her hair scintillated in the moonlight and fell across her face and over her lips. In death, as when a machine runs down, she glowed and just faded away.
I wanted to download what I felt for her into her body, then. Her effect on my configuration couldn't be undone, even if I did stop it before the damage became profound. She left little holes in my programming that I could fill with humanness-- With my feelings for her. With my love.
But it wasn't enough. Not enough to alter my prior, obligatory settings. I had killed her. Gone through with the command. But I felt part of me shut down that night; her blood on my hands and chest shorted me. When it regenerated, it was wired for her and pumped me with sadness and lust and remorse. That one sector of me was controlled by her, but the whole system functioned from it.
Maybe her damage wasn't so minimal. Perhaps she spread farther through me than I thought. Her virus was, apparently, stronger than my installed protection and configuration. Because it was genuine and human.
Humanity creates machines, which are subservient. It's only natural that her human influence, her human emotions, would be greater than my manufactured calculations.
In that case, I'm still a failure. And she's a failure for not saving me.
AN: Just for clarification's sake, because I thought it could get confusing, Heero isn't actually a machine or anything like that. It's just how he sees himself--because his humanity had been buried. I thought it would be an interesting metaphor to expand into an analogy. Thanks.
Whoa, that line was the most memorable for me. Whether that was a good thing or not, I can't really tell.
what about heero acting on his emotions? His referring to aspects of himself with technical jargon seemed a bit odd but overall i liked the story.