Internalize

How is her progress?

It’s actually quite interesting, sir. She’s the first of her batch I’ve seen to respond in such a way throughout my career.

She has changed then.

Yes sir. There seems to be a flaw. We subjected her through rigorous testing and the results we’ve received are really quite interesting.

Please elaborate.

Well sir, as you know, we have no contact with subjects unless an issue comes up. On that same note, we get back in touch with them after the initial tests after a period of twenty years. In those twenty years, we subject them to normal human stimuli.

She was part of the Potentials, was she not?

Yes, and naturally, her stimuli to pain and challenge would be harsher than most, and on surface examination, she seems to have faced them well.

What is the problem then?

She is self-destructing. We have an inbuilt mechanism to pain, and for the majority of our test subjects, they are able to release the pain to those around them. It is ineffective, and it hurts those who surround them, but it is better than anything else we have come up with.

With her, she seems to have overridden the initial commands. There’s a loop somewhere, or a change somehow, that has enabled her to override our initial programming.

We knew they have the capability to change, it had just never happened before.

How is she different?


She seems to be able to internalize her pain somehow, rather than lash out to those who cause it.


How strange. Almost human, in fact. Rather stupid for her survival, considering she seems unable to control the internalization, but human. A rather interesting deviation to our previous experiments. I wonder what could have caused this change? He gazed coolly on the subject, looking into her eyes. Part of him shivered at the bleakness reflected within, it seemed so human somehow, that somehow this thing had managed to concentrated the sadness of human emotion within its frame.


Sir, what should we do? She’s dying, sir.


The technician gazed mournfully upon the female, seemingly unaffected on the outside, but as he gazed at the scans he held, he knew the destruction was inevitable, the damage that had slowly crept across her heart. He could see the small scars, the slim needle-thin injuries that the currents had caused, and the scientific part of him thought, “How interesting. The pain causes the injuries in the manifestation of literal needles. Small sharp pricks of pain,” but the human within him wanted to save her from herself.


Leave her be. She is a failed experiment.