Prose: "weightless"

I don't know what to do with humans.

Because I am not one. At least, I never feel like I assume another human feels. Too much, too deeply, too often. I am given endless terabytes of information to process by my brain every time I blink, and while other people don't even think about it, I do. I feel all of it.

I haven't learned to keep my mouth shut. I say things I shouldn't, when I shouldn't. Normal, functional human beings sound all right when they speak, I just sound like a freak from another planet. I still keep talking, though. I want to communicate and I want to connect. But the wires get crossed and the messages are scrambled and suddenly I'm bleeding and I don't know why.

I am a special little snowflake.

I keep all this secret and store the overload of information in neat lines carved onto my skin, with a surgeon's precision and an artist's tenderness.

I don't understand why she stays with me.

Maybe because of all that. Horrified fascination, unable to tear herself away.

Or maybe despite it.

* * *

Reina is not tall, but not short. Not particularly thin nor fat. Her skin is clear, but not pale nor tan. Her hair is blonde, beyond her shoulderblades and usually worn loose, not what you'd call unusual for any young woman of her age. But those eyes...her eyes are like twin galaxies filled solely with binary stars. How something so dark and liquid can be glittering with starlight, I don't know, but her eyes are. I think it was her eyes that captured me before anything else. Then her long, slender, soft hands. Then her soft, rolling voice.

"Hello." That was all.

It's odd how you can be undone by one word. It was as if I recognised someone who could understand — or attempt to understand — from the first time I heard her voice. Something clicked, somewhere. The usual terabytes became petabytes and all of a sudden, I found it hard to breathe.

I don't believe in love at first sight. I'm an artist, yes, but I haven't yet taken leave of all my senses – believe it or not. I didn't fall in love with Reina when I first met her. I was fascinated, though, and something in my information parsers more or less shut down in refusal to believe...what?

What was it about her? Physically, she wasn't a chore to look at. I knew that intellectually she was brilliant; I had attended one or two of her lectures and had been dazzled by her mind. Her work was far beyond my comprehension.

(It was so unfair; if I was a robot, why did I have to be a broken one that would bluescreen nearly obstinately in the face of numbers and grids? That a robot should be so right-brained seemed almost indecent.)

I didn't know her as a person at that point, so of course I couldn't have fallen in love with her. I'm an artist, a robot, but I'm not a fool.

* * *

"Do you always understand what you're doing?"

We were two weeks into the project and I had become comfortable enough around her to ask nearly-teasing questions like that. I stared at the numbers on Reina's screen with a mixture of fascination and horror, as drawn to it as I was repulsed. My brain refused to take the idea that I could ever parse this gobbledygook seriously.

She just smiled at me. "Do you?"

"Understand what you're doing? No."

"I meant, do you understand what you're doing."

I smiled back. "Touché. Sometimes." I paused, but decided to keep talking, for honesty's sake if nothing else. "I feel absolutely ridiculous on this project, though. Like...out of place. Of all people, I shouldn't be here."

"Fine art is just colouring in neatly between the lines, isn't it?" She teased, and grinned when I smacked her upper arm, playfully. "But seriously. You're vital to the project. The way you see things is important, because no one has seen them the way you have before."

"I wave a paintbrush around, big deal. Why didn't the organisers just hire a photographer?"

"Because all the machines that take the photographs can't see or display something one spectacular human can. They really can't."

I almost wanted to correct her on her 'human' error, but thought it best not to — not just yet. That 'spectacular' made me blush, though.

"I wish I could understand numbers," I blurted out around my embarrassment. Reina chuckled.

"I wish I could paint."

"Like me?" How arrogant of me.

"Like anyone! I can't even draw a line without a ruler!"

* * *

Robotic robot is robotesque. Robot-like. Android. No, gynoid. Female robot. Gyne, woman, -oid, appearing like (but not actually being).

Appearing like a woman.

Only appearing.

I appear and disappear like a woman, and I am a painter. I paint the whorls of time and space.

* * *

Reina traces the parallel lines on the soft, milk-pale insides of my arms with a careful finger, just as soft. I can't understand how she keeps her hands so soft — I mean, my line of work scarcely has me picking up anything heavier than a mechanical pencil, and mine are not as soft as hers. I distract myself by concentrating on her pianist's hands, maybe even sufficiently enough to ignore my heart turning to glass and shattering into a million billion glittering shards as she moves from scar to scar.

"Kiddo," she says, softly. Her eyes are full of a curious pain, all at once a mystery and a good friend to me.

I bite my lip, shake my head, and cover her hand with my own.

"They'll vanish, soon."

"They won't."

Both of us are right.

I am so tired.

* * *

I am so tired, but I can't sleep. I try lying down, breathing like I am sleeping, swallow little blue pills with a bitter taste in the back of my throat, but sleep still evades me. It's like trying to grasp a curl of incense smoke in a fist.

Reina pads barefoot into the bedroom from the lounge room, a glass of red wine in her hands and a soft, melancholy smile on her lips, the eerie blue glow of the muted television silhouetting her in shadows.

"Can't sleep, again?"

"Yeah. No. Affirmative, I mean. I can't sleep."

"Taken the necessaries?"

"No effect." I am talking like the robot that I am, and I know it, and I can't help it. Even breathing is becoming a chore. What is going on with my circuits?

Reina puts her wine glass onto the night table, slides into bed beside me and wraps her arms around me. I close my eyes and lean against her. She is warm and smells like sangria and the men's deodorant she prefers wearing and is so familiar to me, even now, that I forget that there was a point in my life where we didn't know each other.

"Tell me about quarks."

"Mm...well, quarks are elementary particles."

"Yes."

"There's six flavours — I mean, types of them. Up quark, down quark, charm quark, strange quark, top quark, and bottom quark."

"Truth quark and beauty quark."

"Yes, in some universities in the States." She tucks a lock of my unruly fringe behind my ear with infinite gentleness. "Really, lovely, this is all quite complicated and I'm not..."

"Sure I'll understand it?"

She makes a moue of discontent, which I find delightful. "That's a harsh way of putting it. You've got the capability to understand it, everyone does. But you especially. You're brilliant, so please don't—"

"Stop. Stop." My breathing is ragged and I am digging my fingers into her old USYD t-shirt she uses as a nightie. "Just stop. Tell me about the quarks. Please."

"...I understand."

The best thing amongst all things? Is that she does. She does really understand. (But of course she should. Her mind...)

"Quarks are held together by other particles called gluons, but that's not terribly important to know right now — just throwing that out there."

"Gluons. Glue-ons. Noted."

"Let's see...protons and neutrons are all composed of three quarks. Quarks all have quantum —"

"Plural quanta. Minimum amount of anything. From the Latin, quantus, meaning 'how much'."

"Precisely. Should I go on?"

Suddenly I am shy. "Do you...do you mind?"

Her smile is as soft and as powerful as a spring breeze hiding storms. "I wouldn't be here if I minded."

I press my cheek into her collarbone, if only to hide my face from her view. Downside, I can't see hers any more. But I can feel her.

"Truth, beauty, strange, charm." I chant the words like a spell.

"Other way around," she corrects me. "Charm, strange, truth, and beauty."

"Who names these things?" I ponder aloud.

"Ah, what? You don't think scientists can be romantics at heart?"

"I don't know. Haven't thought. Tell me about quarks, still?"

She smooths my hair, still gentle. "Quarks have quantum properties, such as mass and spin and electrical charge. What else, what else...umm...quarks also have another property — colour change. Hence, quantum chromadynamics. This is unique to quarks. It can come in three varieties: red, blue, and green..."

I don't interrupt her again, and by some miracle, I end up falling asleep. All thanks to quarks.