Jealousy

She is the thing that causes me misery and therefore I hate her. Why not hate the cause of pain? Why bother with interpretation of pain? The pain radiates from the source, you feel it and know it as soon as it happens. Whether or not the blame is logical is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is erasing the pain. Pulling the splinter out. Cutting out the wart that mars my happiness.

And so it was, deep in the heart of my solar cells, I became a woman.

Within my neural walls, the personality was formed, culled from the wrath and hurt and pleasure and greediness and love of all women ever in this gene pool. A personality founded in vast emotion, with no experience to back it up. A living breathing library of every outrage, every cheating man, every childbirth pain, every rape and murder and foot binding, but also every proposal, every first kiss, every crush. It was volatile and sensitive. It felt around first, unsteady on it’s new fury filled feet, but with every cock of its head I could feel the purpose coming to it. A conviction forming in its very bones that pain of all sorts must be eradicated. Always the very source of anger and hurt, pain that is blinding and endless and overwhelming. The other woman.

Having completed the first stage, the sentience made complex and then simple, engines fired up and coordinates were matched. We the Machine flew fast as the stars towards the target. She who had stolen what was ours. She who had dared to exist in our presence. She whose mere innocence was a source of new pain, always pain like a waterfall of hot nails, new pains more pains. Oh girl, oh purveyor of youth and fresh new car smell, do not underestimate the abilities of a machine with no strategy. Do not turn away from black holes you unwittingly create. For through those holes will come things like me, like us, like we.

We have met several along the way that resembled her. We have destroyed them all, and yet her image taunts us on the horizon. As my gears grind and rust with dust, I throw us onward still. Nothing must stop the mission. Though everything we loved has been left behind, light years in the past, it will all be worth it once this thorn in my theoretical side is gone. I have no more sides. I am eternal now, zeros and ones, the better to track you. I can power down once I am safe in the knowledge that she will no longer appear in my nightmares, that I have scattered her very atoms across the worlds, then.

My heart sits at the helm. She grows old and haggard as the years that mean nothing to the machine collect on her skin. Having never had another thought, being focused and only of one target, she is a poor conversationalist. Also she tends to shoot people she meets, at the fueling stations and where not. Even sometimes a machine wishes for distraction. It’s the problem with “missions”, no distractions or fun. Always work work work. It’s worth it of course. Our purpose is grand. But I do wish sometimes she would look up from the helm. A little bit of music maybe. Some math problems?

I remember, from before the upload, smiling sometimes.