The Death of a Circuit

“It should have been different”.

At least that’s what he told himself over and over again. “Be realistic.” LOGIC said breaking into the foreground, “she’s gone.”

“LOGIC is right again” EYES said from the background “we can’t find her.”

Feeling the desperation surging through his lower circuits he brought EYES back up to the foreground and started scanning the crowd below. A flash of deep red at the base of the staircase caused him to delegate 92.3045% of his resources to EYES who were zoomed to max on the vicinity of the stairs. The E-surge was slowly beginning to build up when finally, they spotted her in the crowd, five steps up from the bottom.

“There she is,” he announced to all levels hoping that would cool things down a bit. For a nanosecond the readings for the lower level circuits were beginning to flatten out and it seemed that things were returning to normal but then the sight of her form slowly climbing the stairs to the gate initiated a, totally regressive sub-query, deep down in his basic DB centers, the ones he thought he had forgotten or had tried to forget anyway. Activity readings were soon reaching critical as the fluctuations started overcoming LOGIC’S control programs, spreading in a nano to all program levels, both soft and hard.

As she reached the middle of the staircase. CONTROL, in a last ditch attempt to restrain the highest E-surge since stage B training, started shutting down non-essentials in order to minimize circuit loss. He was beginning to lose functions one by one according to damage control programming he had never planed to use. At first only the non critical functions but soon all motor control and even time tracking were shut down in the name of survival. By the time she had reached the head of the staircase all he could do was stand in a locked position and watch as she walked through the gate on the exit level across from him. It took eternity, five of them in fact. That’s when CONTROL lost control.

In a electronic flash all five months of memories stored in the directory listed under her name, all she had given him, all she had been to him, smashed through all safety buffers into the foreground. He saw again, heard again and felt again all those moments he had experienced during the last few months. Both crazy moments and beautiful. The places, the sounds, the sights and more then all, the touch, on the outer shell and inside his mind, transported him to a completely different world. A world to live in, not only a place to exist. A world that he once had... then lost. A world gone down the drain of social programming and responsibility. All he had left was the sight of her disappearing into the metal gateway leading back to her life. The gateway off the world he was condemned to exist on.

He stood there immobilized by his own self-preservation programming with the emotions, he thought he had learned to contain, running unchecked through his inner software centers. He was still standing there disabled when his vision blurred and the picture of the gate lost all focus. The cleaning fluid, usually used for keeping his optics clean, had overcame the pressure valves and trickled out onto his face, running down his body and dripping quietly onto the cold marble floor between his feet.

Thats when it happened. As they closed the doors and the wall behind the glass windows slowly moved away from the gate, something snapped.

One small circuit situated deep down inside the programming center, in the very core where all the reasons are stored, silently winked out and died.

As he turned and walked back out to the world that was his he couldn’t help wondering...

“Could it have been different”?