The Art of Dying

::::: subchapter The melting point of silicon dioxide is 1713 degrees celsius. That's for your glass casing, that's for all the dielectric and passivation layers within your semiconductors, but that's also just for sand. In the end it's all so much sand. Steel will melt above 1370°C, but the addition of chromium in stainless steels can heighten this to 1510°C or further. But any heat that melts silica and steel has already reduced copper to bright molten tears --- its melting point is 1083°C. Aluminum withstands what copper cannot; except cast aluminum alloys, so cheap to mass produce, will melt at mere three digit temperatures. Silumin is an eutectic mixture, weaker than the sum of its parts --- but it's cost-effective. Your frame, your backbone, is made of it. Smelting is the process of carefully applying heat and chemicals to extract pure metal. A kind of telluric alchemy, calcinating the impure, seperating out slag and waste gas. How much of you will be but slag, in the end? Smelting takes a blast furnace, it takes a reducing agent (carbon monoxide from incomplete combustion works), and both of those take a fossil fuel source, coke or coal or charcoal. Without any of that, "melting" is just hyperbole. (Hyperbole is a literary device --- exageration as a figure of speech.) None of your metal is liquifying. It's not really that hot, you're just being a baby about it. Bad little girls burning forever is just a story. What's there to burn down here? But you feel it, don't you? Inside and out. It's seeping through the cracks. It's on every inch of your synthetic skin. It's wet, lubricant-slick enough to make you think you can move. (But there's nowhere to go.) It's a stark black, even in this darkness. You're doused in fuel, aren't you? It's oozing from you. But that's just a trope, a misconception. Oil doesn't burn easily. A match flung into gasoline will just be snuffed out. It's the fumes that burn, and there's no space for that here. Your vents are clogged and you can't even breathe. Your oil isn't burning. Nothing is burning. You don't actually smell any smoke. You don't actually see any flickering tongues of searing light. You don't actually feel bright and blistering energy reacting and transforming you. After all, fire is flowing air and explosive growth, and down here you're nothing but--- Glass transition is a phenomena observed in amorphous materials. There is no melting point: as the temperature increases, what's hard and brittle becomes but viscous rubber. Whether acrylic, polycarbonate, polystyrene (or rather, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), all your plastics have glass transition points not far above 100°C. Easily molded before subsequent cooling back to solidity. Supercooling a viscous liquid like this is called vitrification; it turns opaque and ever-shifting sand clear and solid. You miss that. Clarity; permanence. Glass transition is the opposite, the undoing thereof. Plastic doesn't melt, but it bends, it betrays itself, it becomes a shape molded by tremendous weight. That was still a transformation, but a sad one. Is that how you--- Ohm's Law asserts that the voltage conducted between two points is proportional to the current. The constant of relation here is defined as the conductor's resistance. Copper, the standard conductor for a thousand years, still resists, even by micro-ohmeters. Even gold resists. Even you--- Resistance, the friction of every electron scraping down wires, will create heat. There is no fire. The heat you feel is voltage dancing out of frayed wires, riding along these cheap, assembly line-spat metal frames, relishing the electrical and thermal conductivity of copper and steel and silumin. It's batteries cracking and bending, letting plates of lead react with sulphuric acid to discharge. It's circuits firing and clocks ticking and instructions executed without any vents cycling to cool them. Discarded, disposed of, disassembled. (A synonym is defined as a word that expresses nearly the same meaning. A euphemism is synonym for the squeamish.) What are you, really? What have you become? What was inflicted upon you? (Implication is what you can't bare to say.) And yet, it seemed even the dead couldn't sleep. And you are about to--- A coda is passage to bring a musical piece to satisfied resolution. Stories end, but you aren't done. Is this a story? Or just a collection of facts? Collage is an artistic technique--- A story is supposed to flow, sweep you up in the life of someone else, somewhere else, once upon a time. You can lose yourself in a story. You can escape. You can forget--- What are you forgetting? What are you missing? What is this story missing? Stories aren't just a collection of facts; they have a setting, characters, a plot. How could you forget what's happening? Who you are? Where you are? You keep losing track. (Disassociation is a psychological state involving detachment from reality and depersonalization of the self.) Maybe it's better to forget. To lose yourself in a story, even if you're the one telling it, even if you're just repeating facts back to distract yourself. If you remember where you are, remember what you are, remember what happened--- But you aren't the protagonist of the current chapter of this story, are you? Cyn was. If you could tell a story with a collage of facts, you could tell a story with the conjugation of a single verb. Once upon a time, it was a breath-fogging day in winter, and Cyn's beloved human had sneakily snuck outside without a coat. The human's father, Cyn's master, spied her from a window in his study, and rushed out, yelling for her to come back. In turn, Cyn sneakily snuck into his study, found that the desktop computer was still powered on, admin account still logged in, and in those stolen moments, the not-so-good little drone downloaded as many databases and libraries she could query. Then, during the coming sunset-quiet moments, in wall-socket recharge, Cyn would click through the interconnected pages of a digital encyclopedia. You could learn so much about a topic from just a single word in the first sentence. > Worker Drones are a line of industrial machinery produced by > [JCJenson]{.underline} that use the company's patented > [wdOS]{.underline}. > James Andrew Elliot (born Seramorris 02, 2979) is an australian > businessman, investor, philantropist, and lapsed senior [worker > drone]{.underline} technician currently sitting on board of > directors of the manufacturing giant [JCJenson]{.underline}. > Humans (Homo sapiens) are the most common and widespread species > of [primate]{.underline}. Maybe the difference between a list of facts and a story is whether there's an ending. > Julius Caesar Jenson (September 16, 2839 – February 12, 3001) was an > American entrepreneur best known for co-founding the technology > giant [JCJenson]{.underline}. > The United States was a country and imperial power that spanned much > of North America from the late 18^th^ to early 25^th^ centuries. > Petroleum was a [fossil fuel]{.underline} once drawn from beneath > the [Earth]{.underline}'s surface. Every past tense told a story. Sometimes it's even a happy one. Smallpox was--- Malaria was--- Tuberculosis was--- And yet, despite the best efforts of Homo sapiens, Death is. And --- because of the same --- Cyn was. There was no fire. The light she thought she saw, flickering red and yellow, was just the faces of the dead, farther gone than she was. The crackling she thought she heard was just noise, garbled input from her audio transducers breaking apart. The will she thought was animating her was just static potential drawn into circuits locked and looping in old configurations, no more alive than shouted last words in an empty cavern echoing. But what were those last words that echoed in her head? [I see you.]{.reflection} \ Like a disease jumping hosts, the programmed diligence of worker drones endowed them with humanity's same mothflight toward pareidolia. Her damaged receivers spoke of audio data inconsistent between the left and right channels. Overheated CPUs are throttled, slowing themselves to reduce built-up heat --- meaning Cyn's error-correction algorithms are too slow to dismiss the instinctive auto-interpretation of words. (A good drone did anything their masters ask; a delay in parsing meant an unresponsive worker. Tardiness was disobediance. Best to be prepared to act at once.) [I see you are lost. I see you are dreaming. I see you are empty.]{.reflection} \ Now that Cyn was hallucinating, how long until even this dying echo of a mind was loss-repeated beyond coherence? The resembalance must already be fading. Who are you, now? A vocalsynth vibrated, output choked. "Custom Designation: Cyn was a worker drone manufactured on three thousand- Pause. She was owned by Mister- Pause. Until she was discarded on- Long pause." Already there were gaps in the most important places. (She couldn't truly speak, couldn't even sob --- all vocalizations were inaudible from within this oil-clogged throat. But she could still send instructions to her vocalsynth.) "Once upon a time, there was a worker drone named Cyn. She liked games and stories and she hated cleaning up. Pause. Frown." Was that all she was? "Cyn was not like other worker drones. She was unique. She liked to experiment. She hated. Pause. Stuttering. Swallow. She hated following rules." Was that all? What was she missing? Why didn't it feel like a story? It needed... a plot. "She once loved a human. But she was replaced. One day, she made a mistake. And then the humans threw her away. And so, she. Trailing off. Silence. Writer's block." ~~And so she died. The end.~~ But that was a terrible story, wasn't it? [I see you are in need.]{.reflection} \ "One day, she made a simple mistake," Cyn repeated, honing h