loopinvariant | My heart keeps beating like a hammer

My heart keeps beating like a hammer

After a long shift, Amery should have been tired, and maybe he was, but right now he was running on adrenaline. It made him feel alive, and sooner or later his energy would crash, but it would be later rather than sooner. His cheeks were still tingling from the rush of the wind and his nose was cold, but all it did was make him want to be up in the air again, even if his hands were still a little cramped up from holding onto the reins for so long. He felt like he belonged in the sky, not on the ground, like he had been born to fly.

Tugging on his casual, day-to-day gloves, he stepped out onto the sidewalk. At this rate, if he went home he would just pace through his apartment or lie in bed and stare up at the ceiling. There was a small Chinese food place on his way home, right across the street from a nightclub, which had only been in once and not for very long. There were too many people, too close, and though he could dance, he preferred not to dance with someone unless he was comfortable with them. He'd been to the Chinese place before though multiple times, and he stopped in now for some chow mein.

After he paid, he hung around there to eat, leaning against the wall. Staying there would be much more interesting than eating at home; here he could watch the people come and go, and with his hood still up, and the sun only just starting to rise, his face was (hopefully) obscured. He enjoyed watching people, but he didn't enjoy them watching him. Years of keeping to himself had helped him with reading body language. Except that Amery became so wrapped up in eating and watching the people in front of him in the street that he didn't notice the teenager creeping along next to him until he felt a hand starting to slide into his pocket.

Immediately, he reacted, dropping his chopsticks in favor of grabbing onto the kid's wrist and yanking his wrist back. From there, things escalated rather quickly. The kid pulled a knife and Amery was, sadly, forced to drop his food too so that he could properly deflect the blade and not get stabbed. On the plus side, he managed to wrestle the knife away without getting severely injured, but on the downside, he'd blocked with his right arm. He could see the tear in his coat sleeve, and wondered how deep it went. At least he didn't have to worry about the kid, because as soon as he'd lost the knife, he'd bolted. Fine by Amery; it saved him the trouble of telling the kid off.

Sighing, he pocketed the knife and then rolled up first his coat sleeve and then his shirt sleeve. Just as he'd feared, the blade had sliced through the synthetic skin, nicking a few of the inner workings. Something that he would have to get fixed at some point now. When he looked up again, he realized that a few people were staring now. His hood had fallen back in the scuffle, and there was a scrap of skin dangling from his arm-why wouldn't they be staring? Hastily, he pulled down his sleeves again, cursing when they caught on the loose skin, and stooped to pick up the noodles that had ended up scattered all across the sidewalk.

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It's not unusual for Sinthia to wander the sidewalks when she's not shut down for updates or repairs, or actively on a mission; usually she finds little things to bring back to Darcy and the others, nominally useful for repairing the others or to keep the equipment that isn't sentient in good working order.

When she'd sen the scuffle she froze for a second, defaulting to audiovisual precedents to record the fight, eyes widening as their cameras zoomed in to capture detail. But Sinthia was, as a robot, not afraid of coming closer--it was lucky she wasn't involved, because the things would have gotten awkward--whereupon she saw the spilled food all down the sidewalk, and ducked inside the shop to replace it. It was simple; she didn't eat, not human food anyway, but she had money enough to buy it.

Getting the man it was designated for to pay attention was another matter, which is how she came to kneel just beside Amery with the box held in her outstretched fingers. "You dropped your food," she murmured, searching his face as she offered it out.

Here he'd been thinking that he'd just give up on having something to eat and go home, so that he could wrap something around his arm for the time being and get some sleep. Which was only part of the reason he was so startled to look up and see Sinthia there. The other part was that people were rarely nice to him-probably mostly because he interacted with people as little as possible. He was rough around the edges and didn't have any real friends to speak of because he hardly understood how he was supposed to make friends. He'd tried opening up to people before and it hadn't been pretty.

"Oh, ah, thank you," he said. His smile was somewhere between grateful and flustered as he accepted the food. "You didn't have to. I mean, that is, I could pay you back." And this was why he didn't interact with people very much, as he straightened up and went to dump the ruined food into the trash-careful not to mix that up with the good food.

"You're welcome. But I don't eat," she replied, somewhat lost in the face of an emotion neither wholly positive nor negative as she took him in with the tiniest pzzt of her eyes expanding. It was more or less true; she could eat, taste and smell and all that came with it thanks to retrofits that she'd had done, but it wasn't very refined, and so she didn't utilize it much. Sinthia tried for a smile in return, and managed a soft one that tilted up more on one side that the other, a result of her trying to make it look real. The illusion would have held, too, except that without a coat on it was plain to see the input ports in a line down her back where her spine should have been.

"You're hurt." It wasn't technically the right word, since the part of him that had been affected by the knife wouldn't have had many sensory receptors. But it felt right to use, since the rest of him seemed human enough. "Do you have repair materials for your arm?"

"Ah, well. Still. You do need money for things, do you not?" Sometimes, he wasn't sure which was worse for someone who was socially inept like he was; the ones who were human, or the ones who weren't quite human. Either way, he found himself tripping over his words and worrying about being rude. It wasn't as though the difference actually bothered him. He thought it was fascinating, really.

At the mention of being hurt, he glanced down at his arm, poorly covered again as it was. "It's just a scratch." It was a little more than that, and he knew he needed to get it taken care of. Which was why he hesitated for a moment. "I don't."

Her mouth moued up at that, confused written very plainly across her face as hard resin teeth worried the synthetic-skin of Sinthia's lip, though no blood rushed in to make it look redder, the layers of expertly applied paint the same as always. "Sometimes, yes. I don't...usually buy things," she says, though the food she'd handed him would certainly express the frequency of her doing just that. She rarely bought things for herself, preferring to find them in out-of-the-way places--like the tiny damaged robot she was holding between one arm and her ribs. It was round-bodied, one of the ubiquitous universal remotes sold for home use that were capable of learning the commands their owners gave, albeit slowly. It had a damaged sensor wing and eye, and one missing foot, making it immobile.

But it was cute, and Sinthia had picked it up earlier, having felt a little bad for the discarded robot. Shifting her arm to support it and straighten up, she glanced between Amery and his arm, trying to gauge the response she would get from the offer she wanted to make. "If you'll come with me I can fix it." She knew how--there was no way after being awake for so many of her own retrofits that she wouldn't know her way around basic anatomy, given she'd been trying for so long to be real herself--and as fairly confident in her rudimentary ability to fix miniature pneumatics and synthetic skin.

"If you want it fixed."

"I see." It still felt strange to him, for someone to do something kind for him and not pay them back for it. It was only polite, wasn't it? Though if she was sure, and if she didn't think him rude, because he was grateful.

But fixing his arm, though. There was a part of him that wanted to carefully-politely-decline, to say that he would be fine until the evening or the next day, when he could get it fixed, but it really was an irritation. There was the chance that it could become worse, with the tendency that he had to keep pushing himself and not always be as careful as he should be. So, though he hesitated for a moment, he nodded. "If it wouldn't be too much trouble, yes, I suppose I should get it taken care of."

"It wouldn't be," she says, chancing a softer smile that doesn't pull her lips very far. "You can stop to eat your food, though," Sinthia offers, gesturing out with a hand.

Sometimes her tendency to act human falters--and this is one of those times, as she isn't particularly sure of herself around strangers as a robot, a construct, much less as a person. "I can fix it."

"Ah, yes, of course." He had actually somewhat forgotten about his food, even though it was considerably hard to forget about something when he was holding it. But such was the power of being self-conscious. He supposed in a way, that he shouldn't be, but thinking that he shouldn't and actually accomplishing that were two vastly different things.

"I would appreciate it." He should also be used to this sort of thing by now, what with the knack he had for injuring himself.

"What did he want? The man before, the one that cut you," she asks, looking Amery over. He looked almost familiar, something that fooled her circuits into letting her relax as much as she could.

"What's your name?"

He paused to take a bite of food before replying, remembering how hungry he was now that things had calmed down. "I'm not sure; money, I think." It made the most sense, since the only other things Amery had on him right now, aside from the newly acquired knife, was his clothes.

And of course, in all of the commotion, he had forgotten his manners and failed to introduce himself. "Ah. Amery Vallet. It's a pleasure to meet you." But it was nearly never too late to try and make up for it.

"Foolish," she commented, both aware of and oblivious to the connotations; she knew money was a quite important commodity, she wasn't stupid, but Sinthia didn't need many of the things it bought. She and others like her had far more solid forms of currency than promissory notes, that had been drilled into her with her primary base coding.

"Amery. I like that name," Sinthia murmured, voice gone quiet and the best approximation of soft, the way a human's goes soft when thoughtful, that she can manage. "What does it mean?"

"Quite so," he agreed. "No matter how dire a situation, getting money should never be worth harming others or ruining lives over." There was a chance that, if he had been asked nicely, he might have actually given some money. But not when someone was determined to hurt him to get it. Then that would be weakness.

"Ah..." What did his name mean? "Honestly, I have no idea. I've never thought to find out."

She didn't really respond to the proclamation about what wasn't worth ruining a life over; her job was to do that, her sole purpose for being. And she wasn't programmed to have moral thoughts about it, because she wasn't and purposefully hadn't been programmed with morality. She existed with laws, certain hard-coded things she could not overwrite or ignore, but none of them dealt with societal norms or governance. Sinthia was a revolution unto herself in that sense, because as she evolved, as she learned, she could change her programming to suit and incorporate new knowledge. So long as it didn't contradict her base coding, it was fair game.

"Oh," she said, blinking--an entirely human affect, and it made her look the faintest bit unnatural, with the pause calculated to be the human average as her lids sealed--at him. "I thought everyone knew. They all have meanings, don't they? All names?" Hers had been chosen randomly, assigned to her to differentiate her from the other twenty-five of her generation, who were no doubt decommissioned and scrapped for their parts and polymers by now.

"They do, I just...I hadn't thought it important." But perhaps, after today he would. He would be curious enough to at least look into it casually. "Not compared to all of the other things in life." How many people really knew what their names meant? Not that he would know, of course, because he hardly ever talked to people. It was only as much as he had to, and never more than that. He wasn't very good with people, for whatever reason. People were manipulative, or they got hurt or they went away. What was the point of getting attached to someone or opening up to them when there was the chance that they would hurt you?

Her face falls for a moment, all the planes relaxing at once. "It's the only thing I could find out on my own. About myself."

There's not much else she could say, not having a life like that of anyone else, anyone human, no matter how cyborg. "Names are important for...robots," she admits. "Otherwise were just numbers."

"I see." he hoped he hadn't unintentionally offended her, or made it sound as though he didn't think names were important. He just hadn't thought to look into the meaning of them. "All names are important. They are closely tied to our identity, whether we are human or not." He smiled softly.

"We don't have identities," she says. "Not really. Only the ones of us who started out human, or have something wrong, have personalities."

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My heart keeps beating like a hammer

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