loopinvariant | 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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."

My heart keeps beating like a hammer

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