[Worm]

Blood seeped into the deep crevasses of Sedrex’s face. It continued to spurt out of Sinder’s major artery. He took a deep breath, wiping clean a streak around his eyes. It remained clean just long enough for him to fuse a metal coil into her neck. The coil would attach a new shoulder-piece and allow lubricant to be fed properly to her joints. He peeled back another layer of skin, sealing off the area surrounding the hunk of metal and cauterizing Sin’s flesh with a super hot beam. He liked her best when she was like this, eyes turned to the side, quiet. Nowadays she didn’t need sedative to keep quiet. Her eyes were glazed over, looking at no fixed point, mind completely vacant.

Sin watched walls of coded text stream down her vision. Any way to escape the pain was programmed into her. She tried to understand it, but it was mainly gibberish. She wasn’t as smart as her creator. Sometimes when he talked to her, she couldn’t translate. There were still human idioms she hadn’t caught onto. But she did her best to decode his words.

”This poor girl, Seddie. Why?” His mother’s voice lulled in the back of his skull, he flicked it back with random ticks. ”It’s a machine mother! They don’t have feelings…” He responded if only in his head. He wasn’t sure anymore what he said aloud. Either way, Sin could hear. She knew how tormented her master was. His mother was a religious nut. She believed that even machines had the ability to feel, what a joke. ”The gods are made of metal and electricity. They talk to me, they tell me what you do Sedrex.” Rex honed in on the finishing details, a monocle magnifying glass slid over his right eye. ”She must be perfected.” He saw the wrapping of red and blue wires, tangling around her white overflow cord. ”She must be perfected.”

Sin wondered if Sedrex was talking about her. The walls of text crowded her mind in such a way that would easily stimulate anxiety in a human. But she was a machine. ”Machines are perfect, Seddie. This is no more than flesh and bone. Only the gods may disassemble such things.” His eyebrows pressed together, sweat beading down pulling some of the residual blood from his forehead. As he pulled the flap closed, he saw the ghost of his mother’s machine. Like a shadow haunting him, his mother’s ascension formed a silhouette on a rack behind him. Her gaunt frame hanging limply, intestines removed and forming a spill of tangled webs on the floor. Her eyes… Sin had mother’s eyes.

”All done Sin.” He slapped the warmed metal now forming Sin’s shoulder joint. ”Now back to charge.”

Sin was sure that if she could feel pain, it would be like this. Stinging, electricity shooting up from the afflicted area. She knew that it was merely the new electronics firing up and her improved body coming together. Master Rex was so kind to pick up a piece of junk like her and try to make something worthwhile from it. She was a lucky bot. He walked away, a limp in his gait. Sin followed behind, her arm finally numbing to a point where she wasn’t sure if it was there anymore. She lifted her new arm, looking to the side to see it rise, then looked back at Rex. He was uncoiling a tube for Sin, her charging station. She knew what to do. She stood on the metal plate where she always did. Rex came around her and shoved the tube into her back, a satisfying click let them know that it was properly attached. Metal straps came up from the ground to hold her feet in place as the tube fed her.

After the straps came up, Rex disappeared. He was in the other room preparing the right amount of voltage for her body, looking through a two-way mirror he watched Sin cringe in her spot. Little did she know that he was loading the funnel up with powdered nutrients. He poured the package of post war rations into a funnel and watched as water was added and stirred mechanically, now pumping a thick white ooze straight into Sin’s stomach. That was the mistake he made with mother. He could keep her brain alive for a while, but sadly, the human body needed carbohydrates to run, one way or another. It was the fault in our systems all along. He hoped that if he could replace all of Sin’s parts first, he might be able to keep her brain running on electricity alone.

Sin groaned, the pain of being charged just a figment of her faulty mechanics.