Sometimes I wonder what I've done.
She called again this morning. I didn't answer. I didn't know what to say to her. Didn't know what I COULD say.
I'm drunk again. This room stinks like booze and stale cigarette smoke and machine oil. I sit on the edge of the bed, my hands spasming through my hair. Even my hair is fake. What kind of messed up shit is that - fake hair? My fingers twitch involuntarily, and I turn down the reaction setting with a flick of my mind. I stare unblinkingly at the bottle on the table. That was one of the things that freaked her - the fact that I never blinked. I tried to make myself do it at first, but after awhile it didn't seem worth the effort any more. If she really loved me, she'd have lived with it. The bitch should have-
Fuck.
There I go again.
It's happening again. It happens too often these days.
I fumble for the bottle and snatch it up. Dammit, I had to do it. I had to keep the edge. You fall behind the SOTA in this biz, you die. When you look at it that way, a little loss of humanity makes a lot of sense. You want to lose some of it, or all of it? It's not like I can quit. It's not like she didn't know she wasn't going to get the picket fence and the 2.5 kids with me.
Still, I thought we were in it for the long haul. She was my centre - the only one I could go to when things got too bad and this fucking business started to smother me. She was the one who talked me down when my brain wouldn't stop whirling. She argued hard against me taking this next step, didn't understand why I had to. She tried, but I saw her eyes when she looked at me. People think that because I've got all this chrome in me, I don't feel. I'm not some fucking cyberzombie. I'm still human.
More than human. Or maybe less.
Either way, I'd give it all up to go back two days in time. Before that idiot flirted with her in the bar. Before I-
My teeth grit. The red haze hits again. The bottle shatters into shards as my hand - my chrome-and-circuitry, state-of-the-art technological wonder of a hand - clenches around it. Without even thinking I adjust my pain receptors to dull the sting, watching idly as blood pools in my palm and drips onto the broken glass on the floor. Watching like it's somebody else's hand.
Which, up until a couple of weeks ago, it was. How much of me used to belong to somebody else? How much of me is even still the guy she used to care about? At least the blood's still mine - for now.
The comm buzzes again. It's her.
I don't answer.