Image of Enevelen resting chest down on a bed in a cavern, a torn carpet across the floor and a tattered flag hanging on her wall. [https://i.vgy.me/aUsh3U.png]
A sour thought floated through Enevelen's sleep-deprived mind, as her metal body hung butt-naked over the edge of her bed. What would her old mentor, Nnolyth-Ma, from an era long since past, think of her in this state?
Drool hung from her silicon teeth and dripped from her face. It cascaded down, like a leaking tap, pooling onto the carpet bellow. She had stolen it years ago from an isolated cavern home of several desert marauders, during a difficult job which had resulted in her trapping them in the cave before ripping their bodies to shreds with her bare hands. She had been incredibly angry that day. A stain of their blood still decorated a portion of the carpet, obscuring a small part of its elegant, swirling pattern. It looked somewhat like an ink stain, she noticed. That would probably be what she'd end up telling anyone who asked about it.
Her arms fell loose past the bed, sitting limp next to the puddle of spittle that was collecting below her. She had been laying like this for several hours, having gone to bed very early, completely exhausted from running personal errands and spending valuable time and energy indulging Chlorophi's endless craving for social interaction. The idea of cutting the plant out of her life was very tempting, being that it would easily free up a lot of time for her to self-isolate and dwell on inescapable personal traumas as a dreary form of personal entertainment. It would actually be very easy, she realized, as she could just lock the door to her small mountain cave, and whenever they would come knocking, she would sit very silent in the darkness, barely even breathing, and eventually, maybe, they would go away. Even better, maybe they would never come back. Maybe they would even get injured, and be unable to see her for days, even weeks. Maybe they would return to their plant colony in the North Forest, and Enny wouldn't have to talk to anyone again for the foreseeable future. The promise of being left alone to die in peace sounded absolutely heavenly to her.
Her cave felt like a coffin, and her body felt like a corpse. Perhaps she resembled a murder victim, draped over the bed in the strange position she had found herself in. It was a funny thing for a cyborg to daydream about, being dead. An augmented individual didn't usually fear death, as an electronic consciousness could live on for years and years in a virtual cloud, even if the body was totally destroyed. Did she want to be dead? The thought was interesting to her. She hadn't questioned such a thing since she was very young, back before she had joined the military. She had always been incredibly stubborn about staying alive, even in times of great strife. Now, half a century after the wars had ended and everyone she had ever loved or cared about had either become deceased or lost their minds, she started to wonder if it maybe did sound appealing.
Enny remembered her old mentor. She would visit their temple often, and sit for months unmoving by a large water fountain in the middle of the building, waiting for someone or something to give her a purpose. After the wars had ended, all she could think to do was wander up to the temple and join whoever was there in meditation. At the time, she did not see herself as anything but a soldier, and her battle had finished. She had become completely worthless.
She would sit there, by the fountain, listening to its rushing water and trying to clear her mind. Sun rays would assault her through holes in the roof, their bright light impeded occasionally by the dancing shadows of nesting birds. The temple was nothing but ruins now, but at the time, it was the only space she could find where she was not bombarded by clouds of guilt and frustration. She could become like a statue there, which at the time was something desirable to her. She did not want to feel alive, and she did not want to think or move. So she would sit, for hours.
Nnolyth-Ma would find her on occasion, a hulking golden cyborg warrior, a massive being with long robes and arms that had once carried a thousand tons of ballistic weaponry to and from the front lines of their battlefields. They had led entire armies to their deaths, and now attempted to repent for this by offering a calming space to those who had struggled to find themselves after the wars.
They would attempt to calm her with their booming androgynous voice, one that seemed to reverberate through the temple like a speaker system. They would tell her what it meant to be post-human, what she was able to be if not a soldier. They'd pose her questions about her being, about what it meant to kill.
Originally, despite their intense, angelic appearance, Enevelen had always considered Nnol a criminal. For the longest time, she had only known them as a high-ranking officer of the rival country's cyber-military forces. Nnol was a heavily augmented juggernaut, designed to be feared and idolized as a god-like figure among the country's populace. People would fall to their knees and pray to Nnol like a religious messiah, who would return the favor by burning their homes to the ground. Nnol had been accused several times by other countries of being much too trigger happy with nuclear weaponry, promoting missiles much smaller than typical ICBMs as more "ethical" in some way. He was deemed a hypocrite, a villain, a war criminal, a cult leader... he obtained many such titles. Unfortunately, for her involvement in the war, so had Enevelen. This had put her in a difficult position when confronted by the figure in his temple. How could she criticize his brutality and cruel behavior when she had done the same as him, and killed almost as many? Though her involvement with the wars had been with only her fists and a rifle, she felt just as disgusted with herself as she did with him.
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Enny had never known how to live as anything other than a trained killer. She had been one of the most frightening soldiers in her fleet, being both an expertly trained sniper and a cold-blooded killer that had become the subject of gritty, only slightly exaggerated stories that enemy soldiers would share amongst one another to scare and tease. Enevelen was rumored to have sold her soul to the devil, the last vestiges of her humanity having been wiped away by her military's experiments with electronic augmentation. She was a freak of science, they'd say, a monster with an advanced positronic brain that worked faster than a quantum computer. She'd have already calculated an exact path of strategy to crush a person's trachea and yank out their far-most teeth before they'd even taken their first step onto the battlefield. Her masters would let her loose on entire military parties unaided, and within thirty minutes everyone would be dead.
They had seen her, they said, while running for their lives back to the helicopters, a skinny mechanical terror standing motionless in the distance, surrounded by the pitted bodies of their friends. She would be covered head to toe in their blood, hunched over them with her arms at her sides. Her hands would be seen flexed into claws, their allies' guts dripping off of her armor like crushed fruit. Her figure would be lit from the rear by the still-roaring flames of the nukes that had failed to stop her.
Enevelen sat up in her bed, the trail of spit disconnecting from her mouth and falling to the ground. She stretched her back, and attempted to cuddle herself under her leather blanket, trying to see if she could naturally induce some form of sleep without relying on flipping some internal artificial switch. She wanted her body to behave normally, like it would have before her augmentations had been added. Really, it should still be somewhat an imitation of a human body, she rationalized. There was likely still something in her "brain" resembling a hypothalamus, which could regulate an imitation of neurons and their movement through her mind, which in turn could feasibly induce a period of unconsciousness that resembled something similar to human sleep. She knew it could be done, and she'd made it happen thousands of times before.
What was she if she wasn't human, exactly? Was she even alive? That must've been the award-winning worst question to ask when the augmentation stuff in the military began ramping up in the mid-century, she supposed. She was there for it, of course, but she was very busy undergoing augmentation for military service, and overthinking these things was discouraged by her fascist leaders. She was a killing machine of course, a glorified cog in their war machine. She was their perfect creation, one among a crowd of thousands. It didn't matter what "alive" even meant. The early black monoliths that she was so frightened of, yet so enamored by their intimidating look... had they been 'alive?' The monoliths had had their brains scooped out and replaced with facsimiles of conscious so uncanny that one speaker at a United Nations conference (their name she could not remember) famously called their very existence, "not only a serious human rights violation, but a complete violation of human history as well."
As a teen, the monoliths had been an early inspiration for her desire to join the military. Their frightening appearance excited her. She had been desperate to embody a form of fear similar to that as a teen.
Nnoylth-Ma was really wonderful, she remembered, not just because they had been so kind to her, but also because they had forgiven her. All the people she had killed up to that point, all the bloodshed, the apathy.... it had all been water under the bridge to them. Nnol comforted her, in their hulking, golden arms, and they would tell her regretful stories of their own battles, their own crimes... They had been ashamed of themselves, just like she had been. It wouldn't always be enough to comfort her, however, and at times Enevelen would insist to the massive cyborg that she wouldn't ever move again. She would sulk for days beside the fountain. Others would try to encourage her, saying helpful, meaningful things like, "The war is over! You are forgiven! We must oversee this new era of peace with a fresh slate, there is no time to dwell on it!" but of course, she would ignore them.
She felt that she could never redeem herself, after all the blood that had been spilled.
"We are all equal now," Nnol would tell her, kneeling beside her. "You can be whoever you want to be, now."
She wanted to be an art installation. She was terrified that if she moved even a finger, someone else would be harmed. Who was she, really, if she wasn't a monster? It was a title she had embraced for such a long time. There was no escape from it, in her mind.
At least, that was how she had felt at first. As time passed, and Nnol had made repeated visits, they had given her room to speak, which she was not used to having. They gave her a chance to ask questions, which she was not used to doing. She did ask questions, usually leading ones... hoping to reaffirm her beliefs in her irredeemability. She was not worth saving, she knew. Nnol disagreed, however, and walked her through a new perspective. Maybe she wasn't really anything specific, and maybe she could control who she was just by how she perceived herself. They would recite quick, thin ideologies like that, but sometimes she'd find herself agreeing with them, and it would cause her to speak up, and ask more questions. It was something she found exciting.
Enny slowly drifted off to sleep, clutching her thick, dirt-covered blanket tightly. She was warmed by the thought that perhaps, though that era had long since past, maybe she still had that flexibility to decide who she wanted to be. She didn't know really, as that self-awareness did not exist in her tight little space at that moment for her to confirm that possibility, but the feeling of hope that resonated from that sleepy idea drifting into her mind was very reassuring. It made her feel like, for once, she was not trapped. She could be anything.