Daughter and Mother

Because my mother was such a wretched being, devoid of all joy, embittered through to the end, I cannot say I understand how Doctor Ema was feeling when I laid down Serena's now motionless body on the rickety bed in her little dark room. At least, that's what I would like to say, but that would be a lie. In truth, I believe that you need not experience everything to be able to understand it. I may never have tasted motherly affection but I wasn't completely ambiguous about Doctor's situation right now.

Lubbock had followed close behind me. He stayed silent, and observed everything keenly.

"Not there, could you move her in here?", Doctor said as she opened the little door in her room which, I had assumed, led to a toilet.

I promptly heeded her instruction and moved Serena where she wanted her. To my surprise, beyond that tiny wooden door that was about to come unhinged, rested a lab of some sort. In the center was a long stone table, where I lay Serena. This was her lab, and not a medical one to boot. It had computers, wires, technical equipment all over the place, albeit not in the most pristine situations. Still, even someone as naïve as me could tell that her gear wasn't something standard you could find even in our world. This level of technology was nowhere else but in her lab. She must have built it all herself, I assumed.

"You do not have to stay...", she spoke in a low voice, "...if you don't want to."

"We would like to."

"Then...suit yourself."

She wheeled to her side and began plugging in switches and whatnot into Serena's bare body all over the place. She then started some sort of machine, which, as analog as it appeared with all sorts of weird pipes and wires going about it, was actually a computer. Quite clearly, her tech was meant to be used only by her. She did a lot of complicated stuff, even though she made it look easy. For a while, there was only the sound of her wheeling around the room and the computers guttering sounds which almost made you think the machine was sentient. It might as well have been, for all we knew, she wasn't the kind of Doctor we'd been thinking her to be.

After a long enough while, she was done. Now she just stayed beside Serena's body silently and watched her.

"It may take a while", she whispered under her breath.

"So she's the cyborg of Agartha, huh?", Lubbock finally spoke, in quite a cheery voice too.

She hummed a brief yes.

"Except she isn't really a cyborg, after all, huh? That's disappointing! So a cyborg was just a legend after all!", he seemed bummed.

"Perhaps", she sighed and rested her head back in her chair.

I could finally see her face. She looked defeated.

"I tried my best to save her. Just look", she said that but she herself didn't look at Serena, "Just look at what I made...to keep her alive. To make sure she's perfect. But these villagers simply wouldn't let me be at peace. Every single time I've failed and yet come back...but those arrogant fools have no idea-!"

"Doctor", I cut her short.

She seemed to finally be losing it. Her gentle smile was, as I suspected, just a means to hold herself down. Even so, what I couldn't have given to see that smile again in that moment.

"Why did you make it?", Lubbock asked the question I was meaning to ask.

"Her", she glared at him briefly, "When I first made her, I considered everything of course, I didn't want to leave any loose ends. And she was perfect. She was growing everyday, just as I had imagined she would. But then she learned that she was a machine. That the memories I gave her weren't hers. She began questioning her existence. Eventually, she spiraled into anomie. And then, she stopped functioning."

"Did she kill herself?", I asked, hesitantly.

"More like, she saw death. That isn't something a machine can have, can it? So how, I wonder, could she be dead? Regardless, I rebuilt her. But it kept happening, one way or the other. Over and over I made her again, her conscious, her self, her memories, everything. But she kept failing. One by one, she spiraled into nothingness. I've lost count of how many times I looked for her in the morning and found she had stopped functioning."

Doctor grew deathly pale as she recalled this story to us.

"It became more frequent. The more I rebuilt her, the shorter her span grew before she collapsed again. So I decided to make her as perfect as I could. One last time, I decided to remove every obstacle I had encountered. I decided to give her a perfect place where no one would be able to tell what she was. A world where she would never realize the truth. I couldn't do that in Shamballa. So I let her have free passage to Agartha. The less she was with us, the more time she could have. And yet...just look at her."

"Can't you just...fix her as it is?"

"She's awake Seraph", her words sent shivers down my spine, "She's still listening. She's been awake all this time. She's already realized, since the moment she got shot. She's already known. It won't be long this time either."

"Why are you trying to bring her back? Wouldn't it be easier to let her stop? Haven't you done enough?", Lubbock asked.

"I wish I had", she replied, "But I haven't done anything for my daughter."

I was thinking that the story about Serena's father leaving was a lie. But I couldn't be more wrong.

"This is my daughter. I was trying to bring her back."

"I'm sorry to say but your daughter is already dead and gone, Doctor. Whatever of her was left is now lost in that machine. That there...is just a scrap of metal. Because you failed to make a cyborg, even your daughter's corpse is-"

"You don't get to say that! You outsider!", Doctor snapped.

Her eyes teared up from having to push her voice out, which was about as hoarse as it could get.

"Perhaps not, but why do you think you can save the dead when you couldn't help the living?"

Doctor buried her head in her hands, I wonder if she was sobbing.

"Don't you think I know that?", she murmured and that was the last we heard about that.

Lubbock motioned to me to go outside with him. There wasn't anything we could do after all. It was time to leave.