Impossible Miracles

Chapter 9
A Message

When he had fallen asleep and she finished the song, she made sure he was warm and pulled the covers up further.

Satisfied, she turned to get a glass of water, in case he awakened and was thirsty.

The doctor had said that Len, her Brother, had at most one week remaining, and that was if he didn't stress himself out like he had before. She had been admonished for not alerting him earlier about the vomited blood. She didn't talk, only nodded as she inputted line after line of new data to add to her database.

The first entry can be more or less summarized as, "Wet red streaming from the mouth is not and will never be normal."

She had honestly never surmised otherwise. There was no comparison, and Len said that all the unpleasant parts were expurgated from the novels she sometimes read. She had assumed this was the case and never dwelt on the matter.

It was not in her nature to understand many answers to the question "Why?" but she knew the answer without even a moment's consideration.

He did not want her to know.

The "why" of this… Now that was lost to her. Hiding health problems could only lead to detrimental effects, and from what the doctor said, it was in fact hastening the problem. He had always appeared "normal," but how much of that was truly normal she did not know either.

Lack of context.

(Were those smiles a lie too, then?)

Rehash. He always smiled when the subject came to Rin. Rin, whom she was a shadow of. Rin, the elder twin who died on her way to Len's award ceremony.

She had heard many stories about her. It was all he talked about. In fact, Brother's existence wasn't so much "Len" as it was "Len and Rin." None of his words were just about him. They were either for her instruction or for his reminiscence. Even in his gradual unconsciousness, he had used her name.

She did not know his purpose for telling her everything. She had never known Rin, and she was no longer around. Introductions were useless if meeting her was impossible. And then there was the question of Len. There was no need for him to continuously think about her, as though his thought-process were shorting out and always returning in an infinite loop. Was this also normal?

Len was around. Rin was not. To her, it was as simple as that. She would do what she was programmed to do – to learn – and if what she had to do was learn about Rin…

It was as simple as that.

Why? She did not know and, for this particular instance, she did not wonder.

As she had answered Len's question, he was "Brother" to her. But it was just a substitution for another word, as she had pointed out. And as such, her loyalty – if it could be called that – was to her creator and her Master

Her programming emulated curiosity, self-preservation, and a rudimentary form of empathy. She could discover new sensations and knowledge on her own, but first and foremost, she would learn from her creator. His words were top priority and overwrote everything else. Yet for her to continue learning, he would have to be safe, and she had just learned that some of his words were in fact harmful to himself.

One of the first things she had done after listening to this foreign man talk was to reorder her priorities.

The doctor had said a week. After a week, he would die. Death meant that he would no longer be around.

She could not think about anything after that. It wasn't that she hadn't tried, but that it was beyond her comprehension. A world without her creator.

For now, such a world did not exist, and she limited her future planning to the time Brother was alive.

She was brought from her musings, the glass of water she had been intending to fill still empty, by a loud beep. One of the buttons flashed next to the phone. It was the message transceiver, an old machine that was rarely used, in the lab, but occasionally Len would receive notices through it, so he had wired it to the phone.

It was telling her there was one new message.

She contemplated her options. Perhaps the message was urgent and would be beneficial to Len.

With this thought, she opened the door and left the house, making her way to the lab where she had been born.