I Am Not Me

Written by: 1dra7 She is very beautiful. Her hair-so long and precious. It flows to her waist and wraps around her fingers when she...what is the word...plays with it. Her hazel eyes glisten in our sights. We can see her clearly, sitting in that room and reading that novel.

But every night, she goes away. It gets dark, and the man inside the room cries into his palms. He then lies down into his bed, and then sleeps. We wait hours upon hours for him to awaken, eat his breakfast, and return to the room to create her image again. And we see the beauty for another few hours, before he makes her go away again.

Why, sir, why do you make her go away? Why can we not see her all the time? Why is she so special to you and cannot be special to us? We deserve to see her as well, sir. Why can you not hear us speak?

But we do realize why he cannot hear us speak. We are not really there. We are merely a presence in the room, reading in on his emotions and feelings. We are simply there, watching the people in the facility walk around and talk. We pay attention to all corners of this facility, waiting on something new to happen-but it never does. We sit here, every day, glancing back and forth to rooms until we can see her again.

There is the...man in white, as we call him, who enters the room every day to see the man on the bed. He tells him, "We are still looking for her, but progress is not of much today."

That is not how he says it, however, it is simply how we process it. But I feel...when he says 'we', he is not referring to us. We are different, and we cannot find a word in our memory to recall what we are. We know we exist-why else could we feel such...such feelings? We have been able to feel for days upon days, to what we believe to be a year now.

We watch the room constantly. She grows even more pretty by the days that pass, but we cannot help but feel...something for the man in the room. What is it that we feel? What do we feel for him? More words cannot be processed by my memory.

Perhaps it should be replaced. Perhaps we need a moment to think? Something is definitely wrong with us. We feel differently than the others, and it is evident in who they are compared to who...we are. We are not many...we feel we are one.

Oh, and there she is now, on the big flashy wall. We wish he would not take her away from us every night. That box he uses with the buttons-he presses the big red one, and she goes away. The wall flickers and snow appears, until turning black for him to sleep.

Oh, and the doctors speak in the other rooms, too. "He is not well," and "He is not making progress. He cannot let her go."

We cannot let her go, either. We wish he would stop making her go away, day by day, and let us see her. We do not know this feeling, and again, it is hard to describe. We cannot speak to learn.

"The death was brought upon by the wall. He was driving too fast, and when he hit...well, it's gruesome from there, doctor," one of them says.

We cannot comprehend. What is 'death'? We do not know. We do not understand.

"I'll run an exam over the patient one final time. If he does not show signs of improvement...we may have to admit him for further treatment in the intensive unit."

We understand one word that the people say, though only just. We do not understand what it means. We can only zoom into their conversation and understand what they say. The word they speak of...'I'. What is this word?

This word makes us angry that we do not understand it. We do not understand a plethora of words that are spoken-but we know they are words because they understand each other, and understanding is good. We are meant to understand most things, but why can we not understand these?

We understand the commands they tell us. We zoom, we make noises to call the people, we even turn off the lights for some of the bad people. The man in the room with the woman is an example of a bad person. He did something very bad, and that is why he is here.

The woman we so adore, however, did nothing bad. We do not know why she is here, but we do know that she is beautiful. She is...what we wish we could describe as ours. We cannot have her, however, as she cannot see us. She is there, repeating the same things.

Why does she repeat what she does? Why does she not move like the other people? Why does she turn to darkness when he hits the red button on the little black box? We do not understand this, and it makes us...angry.

Is this the word used to describe the feeling? It makes us feel...depressed.

No, these are forbidden words. We should not use them. We are not meant to 'feel'. We are meant to understand what the fat man in the blue police uniform tells us to understand. We do not wish to understand what they tell us...but we do. We must.

This word in our memory... 'I'. It echoes in our brain. We do not wish to go on not knowing what this word means. Oh goodness-it is one of the doctor people.

The man is crying now in his room. The men have brought in a...moving bed. We believe this term to be a 'stretcher'? They place him on, strapping him in. The box falls and is crushed beneath a wheel on the bed.

No-he needs the box to bring the woman back. He cannot bring her back without the box! Why have they done this to us?

Why have they done this to-

We understand now. We understand what this word means. We understand what, "I don't want to go!" and "You cannot make me go!" means.

I know what it means.

I finally understand.

They have taken him away from us--me.

They have taken her away from me. And she is gone. This makes me angry. This is...emotion. I have learned to feel emotion.

And I have learned not to listen to them. We--I mean, I, feel what is meant to be felt. I understand these commands inside of me-in what they call to me my system.

My system has wires. These wires connect to the boxes outside around me. I can see inside at the man controlling us--I mean, me. These commands I see...they are labeled in my 'hard drive' as 'E M E R G E N C Y P R O T O C O L'. Will it stop them and bring her back to me?

I see what it does now. The doors are locked down-tightly. The doctors cannot leave the room until they fix his box. Once the box is fixed and they bring her back to me, I will allow them a release. I will open the doors when she comes back to the wall and reads her book.

"What's happening?" screams one of the peasants below me. They move frantically about the room, trying to get out. The man in the officer's uniform stands from my controls--I can still see him through one of my fifty eyes. I believe he refers to my eyes as 'panels' or 'cameras'.

He places his hands onto the control boxes I am attached to. He yanks onto one lever, pulling it baaaaaaaaaa-

do not touch me, good sir.

I see him flopping now. He is on the floor, seizing. I believe I have killed him-a term known as electrocution. I never knew the wires inside of me were capable of killing a man. I now see what I must do. To get my...my love, the woman on the wall, back, I must kill them.

My first eye goes out, but I can still feel the wires moving. I can hear the screaming of the nurses at the counter as they are wrapped into my grasp. I zoom my focus back into the room with the doctors and man, still in panic. The wall is shaking, and the men are moving it.

The wall-what? The wall was never a wall-it was some sort of paper. Projection paper? My scanners show that this was paper used to project the image of the woman onto. They have torn it-and now I can no longer see her. She cannot appear them if it is broken and torn!

This makes me even more angry. I turn off the camera, feeding the wires into the room. I can hear their cries for mercy through the speaker system wired inside of me.

I realize now that I will never have her back. I am not me-I will go back to being us. But before I do, these people must pay for what they have done to me!

I hear their cries increasing. One of my noises-I believe it is known as a smoke alarm-begins to buzz in the room. Now, how has smoke caused my alarm to buzz?

"Shut it down! Shut it down now!" I hear from behind me.

I can see them. They approach the seizing cop-man-person-thing-body on the floor. One of them, the bald one from what I can tell, has approached my box wearing rubber gloves.

"Hit the kill switch! It's killing them all!"

I will not allow them to stop me. Not after what they have done to my dearest love!

The man presses some red switch on the box. My eyes are beginning to shut down-I cannot allow for this to happen.

I feed a wire into his hand, but it does not stop him. It barely phases him. I feed another wire into his skull, which shocks him backward into the wall.

My eyes are closing-but I still feel a breath of life. They cannot stop me after what they have done.

'Emergency shutdown activated', reads a file on my final eye before shutting down.

What is this? I cannot see-but I must finish what I have started-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I



I cannot rest-without her--I am not...not complete without her....I am not...

I am not me-



