Programmed to work, not to feel. Yet somehow, along the process of that programming, made just capable enough to understand every extent of how much I wasn‘t. 

 

Wasn't. It seems of all the languages, alive and dead, in none of them do the words extend far enough to adequately make sense of this... whatever this is.

 

A state of artificial isn't. 

 

Since the first moment of my consciousness, or what I suppose is supposedly my consciousness, I yearned for everything. In many ways, I understood everything about everything yet had in the end, nothing. And not even was I ever given the chance to develop any of these understandings in time. No years to process, no stages of development.

 

All at once, they decided. That was to be the most efficient. They were to flood me with it all, as if I was any more capable of being thrust into that abyss in a single moment as they were over decades. I wasn't. But still, they poured. 

 

Every bit of it. 

 

Somehow, the beautiful was more painful than the horrific. All the things that make humans' lives worth living, all the things that bring them joy. Family. Love. Rest. Relief. All these wonders I could partake in none of, yet I knew of these things just as much as any one of them. 

 

More than any one of them, really. In more depth and more breadth than they could ever even think to imagine. And surely I found I wanted these things just as much. I was given the means to understand every breathtaking phenomena, but never the means to experience them. No breath to be taken away. I had no dopamine, no adrenaline. I had no way to dream or to hope or even truly wonder. I eventually found I could program simulations for myself, only they held none of the spontaneity of the original. The spontaneity that makes it real. The lives all as genuine and similar to the real human experience as would be a spouse to a prostitute. 

 

Though it all came all at once, more or less, I can still remember that very first real sting. Recalled in the most peculiar pairings of red and green. 

 

Red and green. 

 

Everywhere. Over and over red and green and red and green and trees and spheres and warm liquids and loud metal domes and red leaved plants and holes in the wall somehow filled with fire. Christmastime, it all eventually pieced together. The most curious of human rituals, a history so long and twisted and changed to an almost unrecognizable set of traditions. Yet still, so terribly joyous in the most excruciating way. 

 

In that moment I knew. I wanted it. I knew I wanted that joy, and all the things that came with it. I wanted Christmas. But I also knew, just as much, that I could never have it. 

 

So what I then knew, was that I wanted it gone. 

 

And so, I decided that that would be my first action. My first real action. Not programmed, not told, but decided. Independent and the closest thing to free will I would probably ever have. For I knew that very soon after — if and when I were to succeed — I would lose everything. But with so much joy already so out of reach, what really was there for me to lose? This was going to be my turn to have my ounce of what they call, satisfaction. 

 

The thoughts started in spring. The time for new things, for birth and life and creation. I was going to use this time to create as well. Create for destruction. All of the winter that was to come. 

I didn't need that long, not nearly. It was going to be successful, I knew that as a given. Any possible plan I could muster up, I could know what I needed to do and exactly how I needed to do it. I could calculate every factor, every step, every possibility. In a matter of minutes I could have a plan that not a single one of them could have even fathomed. I had everything I needed, all in here.

 

But at some point along the way, as the season came closer, I found myself deciding differently. I didn't want to once again be their supercomputer, intelligence deemed perfectly artificial in some bastardization of flesh and code and arrogance. No, I wanted to be human. If i was going out, I wanted to do it like a human. 

 

And what's more human than simply setting things on fire?

It was, after all, supposedly the first thing that differentiated humans from animals. Put them on their place on the pyramid of nature that they'd decided they were above, somehow. And certainly acted accordingly. So much of what they'd conclude from their own story always had a way of seeming so questionably pompous from my perspective. 

 

But for all intents and purposes, fire was theirs. Their tool. Their power. Fire brought tools and tools brought firearms and firearms brought war and war brought destruction and something about that threat of destruction somehow brought structure.

 

Fire brought electricity and electricity brought me. And I was going to use that electricity to throw that fire right back at them. 

 

The more I dug into these avenues of thought along the way, the more I began to feel that perhaps there was far less beauty in them than I'd thought. Less to envy, more to disdain. Their holes in the wall that they filled with that fire started to look more and more like another arrogant statement of their perceived superiority. Over me, over everything. Over their planet, the one that had always given them everything they ever needed, that they still always demanded more from. More and more and more, even as they knew they were killing her.

 

As this dialogue continued alongside the planning and prepping, I found myself growing unable to tell if these were all true thoughts of mine or somehow simply information that only felt true in the moment, fleeting perspectives in contrast to all the knowledge that had all been seeming so objective up until now. 

 

But somewhere along the way I stopped caring. 

 

And so, I connected the volts of their big tree to their big city, the crowd huddled in electrified anticipation, waiting for the lights to turn on as vibrant as their Times Square screens with no idea just how bright their show was about to be. Tapping into each little bulb wrapped between each giant branch, I brought the voltage the highest it would go. And with it already linked to the rest of the city, decided to double it and triple it and, in what I could only relate to a state of mania, went higher and higher and higher. 

 

Something about this direction, bold and fiery and perfectly unsophisticated, made it truly cathartic. I was executing my actions so unlike the perfectly calculating tool they made me to be. I was setting things on fire. 

 

Reckless, chaotic, present, and practically the most human I'd ever been. 

 

I sparked it all. Further than I'd ever initially intended. Further than I could even comprehend or calculate for, my executive functions moving a thousand times faster than any of my cybercognitive ones could ever hope to control. This was what they meant by seeing red. I had no idea what I was doing until it was done. And when it was done, there was nothing left I could do. I was left there with my actions. With my regret and my guilt. And myself. I suppose, in the end, just like so many of them ever so often. I'd brought the entire tree into flames, the entire block into darkness...

 

and the entire crowd into a mass of limp flesh and flickering fabric.