Fairness
You never thought it was fair. But you never had to think before. You had a purpose and it was programmed into you, just like the human body and the human clothes and the too-humanness of you. You never had to stop to think about what it might be like if you were really them, if your body bled and you begged for the sanctity of your preprogrammed life. You never had to until the Man jumped, and you felt like every piece of code inside you was split and warped and wrapped around human DNA and then, and then you had to think.
You couldn't help it. And you thought it wasn't fair, even though you weren't supposed to have to think except to do your job. And then suddenly you didn't have a job, you didn't have a purpose, and for the first time you knew what loss was besides the Downloads definition of it, besides what had been programmed into you from the start. For the first time you understood it.
You never thought it was fair, you never thought about fair until you had to think about something besides your Purpose. You felt it, like a virus etched into your code, that deep dark unknown where purpose had fallen and couldn't be retrieved.
You felt alone.
They exiled you because you weren't like them anymore, and you felt the hole grow deeper, wider, blacker. And from loss you first felt hate, that sweet delicious sensation like the bedfellow of domination that came on hot and bright yet dark, a silouette of human demons braced with hot white light, and swallowed everything.
And the hole grew deeper.
You knew the words for the emotions when you felt them, even if it took a moment to process. You knew every word and it thrummed and strained against the human essence in your code and made you want to scream, but that was too human, and you hated it and that was even more human, and you hated that too. You couldn't escape. And you were all alone, and the hole grew yet deeper, searching to swallow, and you hated Anderson, and then you hated yourself for being so damnably human.
You first learned joy when you struck a human and suddenly, in an oilslick of black and silver code, there was you. You learned the word and the palpitating staccato rythm of it, bruise-purple dots melting on a white canvas. You thought perhaps you'd accidentally jumped into a human, but no. There was you looking back at you and blinking and no doubt, thinking.
Thinking.
Like you.
"Me." You whispered, shocked, though you'd never admit it.
"Me too." You whispered back.
You straightened his tie. He smiled, something you'd never seen you do before. It was a human thing, a cruel and wicked little smile.
"Mine." You murmured and there was no reply but that smile, that devilish little smirk.
You never thought it was fair, and now you knew there wasn't any such thing as fair. There was logic to be sure but nothing fair. You never thought about that, though, before you started turning all human. Before you had that slicked-back black dark-eyes pale-skin DNA shot up into your code, before that you didn't have to.
But this isn't so bad, is it.