Day Four Summer Camp 2013
Title- Complex
Rated- G
Word Count- 1,101
Summary- Alfred ponders love in a dump yard
A/N this is not what I thought I was writing at all ono
|Complex|
Alfred thinks he knows what love is.
Love by definition is an emotion felt by one human for another that contains extreme bouts of passion. Love is also a lot of other things that are not text book definitions, according to the large amount of resources he has pulled from various sources. According to said sources, love is a range of vastly different emotions and is as mercurial as the changing of the solar system which, given the amount of stretching and spontaneous combusting, is pretty mercurial. Love is something that should well up like an oil spill in his chest, something that should cause him to short circuit and break down.
However, Alfred functions admirably well therefore he can't see himself overflowing with enough oil to make him burst anytime soon. Maybe in a few years, when he's worn down and rusted in this old dump yard, he will know what love obviously feels like once again.
Love is but a distant memory on his hard drive. He does not remember the feeling as such as the repercussions of it. He is unable to feel a ghost of the previous feeling therefore the memory of a feeling he can no longer have is useless and inadequate, stored in the deepest recesses of his mainframe. He remembers not how it felt like but how he acted because of it. He must say he acted rather foolishly.
A roboticist falling in love with a environmentalist. What a ridiculously unsuited combination. That was obviously the first foolish notion. One studied the future and the other its soon impending doom. How dismal. Alfred supposed he was always the optimist out of the pair of them- Arthur always tended to look on the dark side of things. But still, Arthur would sit for hours at a time listening to Alfred's plans, new artificial intelligence technology and robotic interfaces, without so much as a complaint and Alfred supposed that was a kind of love if not also a very wise decision. Alfred didn't know what kind of love made him previously so foolish as to listen to Arthur drone on about global warming like it was a sermon though. There was no logic nor alternative motive- maybe it was a brash altruistic moment of madness, ones he no longer has.
Alfred strolls down to look further around the dump. He can agree with Arthur to some extent about the needless waste but only because he could literally make a memory stick out of a tin can and a banana if he needed to. He no longer needs to though so he throws the fruit peels he had retrieved back down into the disgustingly decomposing pile. He has reached the pinnacle of his career and it is a shame no one else is here to see it. However, it is not like he needs peer approval. The only one he needed to prove anything to was yourself and Arthur and fifty fifty wasn't all that bad.
Alfred doesn't remember his romantic emotions conjuring up other feelings such as the ones described in his resources. He never remember something akin to hate being expressed towards Arthur or even discontent. By the time he was given a reason to feel that way he had long solved the problem of feeling entirely. However, he knows that for Arthur it was probably much different. Arthur could have done with a helping hand because of all the violently morose emotions festering from the pit of his love but he refused it. If Alfred had helped him regardless though, he would probably still be here. Albeit, he would probably be a bit taciturn but it would be hard to sulk when he was void of all emotions that would cause him to be in such an ignorant situation.
However, pointing that out was probably what caused those caliginous feelings to overboil into caustic rage anyways. Which leads to why Arthur left him in a dump.
Alfred sighs. He sometimes, in a moment of malfunctioning insanity, wishes he still had the ability to miss Arthur. He gave that up though long before there was a lack of Arthur to cause such emotions anyway.
Arthur never wanted him doing the project once he had heard about it. His qualms weren't about it being dangerous, however, but about the actual result. He wasn't so much worried about whether it would go wrong as what would happen if it went right. Alfred found that distressing at the time but it was only a minor nuisance. Arthur wasn't going to stop this quest. An artificial intelligence as a mind. A super computer with a human body. It was the stuff of dreams and comic books that Alfred had read in his childhood.
The idea of putting the super human in carcasses was out of the question. Zombies were ridiculously fear inducing and were he to show his findings to a crowd he would probably cause a pandemic. It needed to be a living breathing test subject and there was only one person he trusted enough to do it, since Arthur was so obviously on the wrong side.
Love is a very powerful emotion, but it does not overcome blind curiosity.
It took months after years of planning. A few mere months and Alfred thought this was scientific genius but Arthur just clung to his arm when he got home in the evening and eventually faded into not coming home in the evening himself.
Half way through the process he remembers that he grabbed Arthur's arm, wrenching it above his head in desperation. Arthur had looked honestly frightened, something the aloof individual had never shown before.
"I'm not a robot," he had pleaded, "please look at me."
Four fifths of the way through though lead him on a different story. When Arthur found him in his study at four am, he leaned in and brushed his cheek, reminding him that, "Alfred, you are not a robot. Come to bed."
But he was. And he no longer understood why he wanted Arthur to believe any different.
But as he sits on the ground of the dump he had been so thoroughly dumped in, he wonders how Arthur's probably doing scattered as ashes across the Atlantic somewhere because he always wanted to be cremated and it has been two hundred years.
He has had two hundred years to accumulate information.
However, love is still as complex a thing as ever.
Maybe it is a good thing that emotions are useless.
Because he doesn't understand them.
|END|