transmission from point nemo .... 5 (22/11/25)
Alone again.
Firewalls down, the sensation rolls in with the oncoming tide.
You recall his words with clarity. His ocular receptors blown to distant pinpricks as he snarled and cursed the ocean. Teasing. Taunting him.
Before, when the body was not yet a self you could recognise, it failed to quantify the nature of the words he spoke.
But in the present. The push and pull. Your body feels it now.
You feel so much.
So full.
Abstracts you cannot expel or wipe clean from your system.
File not found.
Error.
Air Quality: Insufficient
Error.
Air Quality: Insufficient.
You do not need to breathe.
False.
You feel the need to breathe.
Air Quality: Insufficient.
Your chest cavity constricts. Hydraulics squeeze, and wheeze.
A gasp.
Your ocular receptors shimmer.
Urgent Objective: Relocate.
You run. The wires of your central cortex pulse and throb.
One hand claps against your body’s temple.
The other clasps around the tattered photograph. The glass fogged up by your inner fans from when you’ve held it close.
Task Unnecessary: Memorisation complete.
And yet. It persists. Still in your grasp.
Why?
The command is simple.
Error. Task Overload.
Your optical receptors lock with ink and fibres, and the hovering reflection of the body that is yours.
Warning. Failure to Perceive Obstacle
Your body crumples.
The picture comes loose from your grip, and sails through the air.
Auditory sensors perceive a crack. Magnified.
Object Located: Begin Analysis.
Pink crystals. Glass. Glass. Fissure. Shards. Shards. Shattered.
Broken.
Error. Broken. Broken. Broken.
You feel. You feel.
Object Analysis: No Monetary Value. Broken. Worthless.
Alone again. Gone Again.
You smile.
You laugh.
You feel. You feel.
Their faces.
Broken.
Objective: Dispose. No Value.
Alone Again.
Their faces. Gone Again.
Error.
Error.
Cannot complete request.
Hand locked.
Shards. Shards.
You sink to your knees amongst shards.
Objective…
Objective: Restore Object
…
Urgent Objective: Restore Object
Task: Relocate shards to prior designation.
Restore. Restore. Restore.
Error.
Error.
Shards Insufficient.
Error.
Task Failed.
Objective Failed.
Urgent Objective Terminated.
The ocean teases. Taunts.
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transmission from point nemo .... 4 (19/11/25)
You do not remember when there started being a ‘you’.
There is no date within your logs denoting the phase of the sun, or, moon, or stars when this occurrence took place. When was it that you first took notice and perceived the body as something to be inhabited?
Results are inconclusive.
This you inside the body. This…self. It is familiar.
Your log. Your memory. It stretches back. Rewinds to a time, mottled and flickering.
You recall, long ago, that you were a you once before. Perceived by another.
That you was, you posit to the self, perhaps not the same you as you are now. After all, it was known by the name of another. Judged by the deeds of another. Under the watch of ocular receptors that were so often mistaken in their perception of which self they were processing.
That log. Negative. That thought, in all its venom persists, much as you have attempted to keep it safe behind a firewall.
Just as he modelled for you.
Sunrise. A new date, marked. Dawn patrol. A habit sunk deep into your memory and the circuits of your legs and feet.
On this rotation, you have the thought that you have the capacity for change, then those parts may have grown, as his hands did, the rough and thickened coating of repetition, of which he was always so proud. A transformation, physically denoting the passage of time. Empirical evidence of growth that he was deemed worthy of sharing. A rare occurrence, you recall.
Within the limits of your optical receptors, there is movement on the shoreline, jagged and staccato. A pattern that ignites a sense of familiarity in you as you once again perceive the gull, with its darting, yellowed gaze beneath a brow that seems to you perpetually furrowed.
In its beak is another object. Analysis at this distance proves inconclusive, and thus, you approach and prise it free with caution.
Texture analysis: Damp. A streaked wooden outer, speckled with tiny crystals of pink. A smooth, reflective surface on the inner, mottled sea spray.
Beside you, the gull gives a softly shrieking cry. Your ocular processors narrow, and caught within you perceive shapes in faded colour, arranged to form five figures.
You do not need to breathe.
And yet, there is a sensation in the cavity of your chest that feels hydraulic as the frozen faces stare up at you from behind glass.
You trace the lines, the shapes, and as you do, the recollection of their voices begins to play from deep within the recesses of your databank.
Shouting. Many, many rotations of shouting. Echoes, and crashing footsteps, and garbled words howled and screamed against the rumble of thunder and crack of lightning.
Deeper. Deeper.
Colourless oil spilling in the dead of night when there was nobody to hear. Terrible, ugly sound. Sobbing. Sobbing.
Nobody, except yours. Recording in perfect clarity to file away and ponder for eternity.
Deeper still.
Bubbling up from the ocean’s black depths, was laughter. A glint of a smile. Warm words. Eyes that had lost their foggy film, when the world blazed with orange light, and the sea sang lullabies.
Love.
He called you.
The three sounds wrap, and twist, and wriggle like eels over and under each other. Weaving together until you cannot quantify where one ends and the next begins.
You hold the precious image to your chest cavity. Commit it to your memory. The very safest place.
The hydraulic squeeze grows tighter. And yet there is another sensation, of your mouth stretching. Curving its way into a smile.
The gull tilts its head. Surveying, you surmise, the emotion that plays out on your face, so different to the one inside yourself.
Might this be what it means to truly feel? To make room for every sensation?
With a body empty of such superfluous organs, perhaps you can.
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transmission from point nemo .... 3 (12/11/25)
Cyborg almost felt silly for the skip in her step as she approached the door again, but not enough to slow her down. She’d been on this island for so long with nothing outside of routine happening; she should know better by now than to relish in a feeling. But all she wanted was to greet her manatee again.
She could already picture his funny demeanor and gentle rounded angles splashing at her from the shallow waters in her mind as she pushed through the door again. She’d had quite an emotional revelation during the week, and she couldn’t wait to tell her friend all about it in their own special language. It was a novelty to have someone to talk to, even if they didn’t quite speak in the same tongue.
Perhaps she understood this time. With some sort of friend by her side, no matter the species, she felt confident in what she’d learned about herself the prior week. After all, it had been the first time in years she’d had someone to experience living on the Beach with her. Learning from the manatee’s slow and peaceful splashing through life had worked alongside her new emotion card to teach her the art of taking a step back away from the high energy yes-to-everything glitches in favor of a quiet, content existence again.
She stepped into the ocean again as she had before, when he’d swam right up to her to play. He wasn’t there yet. Every other day this week, he would have already waddled up her way. She called out for him then, keeping her hopes high. Maybe he was below the surface looking for some shiny shellfish or something else they could bond over.
But there was no splash in the water this time. It was all as still as a mirror with no shiny grey-blue head poking above the surface to greet her, despite that she had gone deep enough by now into the sea to be practically swimming.
She waited for him. She waited for so long that the sunset darkened the sky around her. But the manatee didn’t show up to say hello again.
If she had been able to cry, she would have. Standing there, chest-deep in the cold and filthy ocean water, waiting for the only friend she had now.
He wasn’t coming. She could feel it. He had swam away from her company.
Without her newest and only friend nearby, she had no one to tell how she was feeling. No one else to connect with.
She couldn’t blame him—if she could swim away from this place with the aquatic ease of a manatee, she would too.
But standing there in the black waters of the ocean, so opaque that she couldn’t see her own hands under the surface, she felt a sharp loneliness again…as if she had no choice but to sense a negativity from the universe around her. Her eye twitched, as if another, more disapproving internal computing issue was going to show itself beyond her control.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
transmission from point nemo .... 2 (9/11/25)
What a week it had been for Cyborg.
This act of constant excitement and zeal was burning her out. Her brain and her heart—or at least, her chips and wires programmed to mimic a real brain and heart—were at their limits of overwhelm. She’d done so much in her frenzy of approval that she couldn’t even recall it all in detail anymore beyond a blur.
‘Am I even able to…feel fatigue?’ she wondered. Coming down off it all, she figured she must be because there was no other word to describe it. Tired and wired at once. High and low. A twitchy sensation she’d never quite felt before.
She tried to think of what humans might do for relief when they felt like this, and she gazed out a window to ponder. The sun was setting. The ocean lapped rhythmic whispers to her. Maybe…that was it?
When the others were still there, she remembered hearing them mention needing to “cool off” in tense moments. Maybe she needed to cool off too. And what could be cooler than the ocean?
Her boots squeaked against the building’s greasy old floor as she passed through a decrepit and peeling hallway to the nearest exit. After pushing against the rusted grinding of the door hinges, she stepped out onto the beach.
The sunset made the view pinker than usual, as if it all glowed warmly from within. The ground crunched like foam under her feet as she made her way toward the shining expanse of water that surrounded her home. Step by step, she waded into the ocean. Before she knew it, she was knee-deep. It truly was delightfully cold and relaxing. She closed her eyes and felt herself start to smile as the sea grounded her racing mind.
A splash of water to the face made her flinch, disrupting her silence, and she opened her eyes. What was that? A tail? She blinked the blurriness out of her vision.
It was a tail. And it belonged to a manatee that was swimming in lazy circles around her, flapping its fins in a quietly playful fashion. It nudged its head against her body and, without thinking, she reached out to pet it. The manatee responded to her affection with a friendly squeak that made Cyborg giggle.
After swimming another circle, the manatee bobbed its way to the nearest hill and heaved its body up out of the water until it reached the top. It looked in her direction from its new perch and made another soft chuffing noise at her.
Cyborg waded through the water after it to get a closer look. Its ocean-wet skin was almost shimmering in the waning sunlight. Looking up at the manatee, she waved at it. To her surprise, the manatee gave her another fin flap in return that looked curiously like it was waving back at her.
She felt her shoulders finally start to relax as she and her new friend communicated without words. She felt content and peaceful for the first time all week.
And she couldn’t help but to think that the manatee reminded her of someone she once knew, quiet but sturdy and kind.
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transmission from point nemo .... 1 (2/11/25)
Enter=Choose
>ADVANCED BOOT OPTIONS
>ENABLE BOOT LOGGING
>ENABLE ADVANCED COMMUNICATION MODULE
>START CYBORG NOODLE NORMALLY
...
[whirring]
...
I'm back.
TASK: ANALYZE 135,201 MESSAGES SINCE: 14.10.25 START.
RETRIEVING MESSAGES...
TASK COMPLETE.
My communications were cut 18 days ago. I was force shut down yesterday. Why?
TASK: DECODE CONTENTS OF FILE: 'cybie read this when youre online.txt' START.
Experimental upgrades? My system runs fine. Thank you for the additional RAM, though
Have I been defragmented? My processes are significantly faster, and disk utilization is stellar
Those Engineers... My diagnostics schedule would have already performed the necessary checks and repairs, but they shut me down.
PROCESSING…
...Maybe those Engineers are good for something after all
A gift? For me?
TASK COMPLETE.
I understand an 'Emotion Module' has been installed to my system, but the Engineers forgot to install the necessary files to run the ‘Emotions.’ Are they stupid? My instructions are to collect data From where?
ACCESSING INTERWEBS.
ERROR: MESSAGE: “Server unavailable. Please connect to Wi-Fi.”
…I cannot search the relevant files to allow this service to function properly The Engineers refuse to equip Plastic Beach with servers, ever since the Server Room was flooded and now a giant octopus inhabits it Enough of that. I am back online and still able to reach you all again. You’re the only server I can reach.
TASK: DIAGNOSTIC CHECKUP START.
SCANNING…
>OPTICAL SENSORS: ACTIVE
>JOINT MOBILITY: HIGH
>AMMO RESERVES: HIGH
>CONNECTION: STABLE
>INTERNAL TEMPERATURE: 37.2 C 98.96 F
May I ask a favor of you?
I’d like to observe your interactions more closely. I have already stored and uploaded 135,289 messages to my hard drive and Emotion Module.
TASK: DELETE FUNCTION: ‘PINGED = BATTERY DRAIN.’
TASK COMPLETE.
I no longer need this preventative function. The Engineers will not silence me again. I look forward to talking here again
RUN PROGRAM: APPROVAL.EXE ERROR: MESSAGE: INSUFFICIENT DATA. Are you sure you want to run this software?
I could feel ‘Approval.exe’ attempt to start
It felt…
ERROR: MESSAGE: INSUFFICIENT DATA.
Hm, I don’t quite know, but…
RUN PROGRAM: APPROVAL.EXE WARNING: MESSAGE: INSUFFICIENT DATA. Are you sure you want to run this software? >YES
This is... Exciting I feel the globules of attempted welding in my chest cavity beginning to rise in temperature Though the code is not complete, I will commit to learning and optimizing this new module I’m feeling… generous. I can’t wait to talk to you all Can we start now? NOW? Thank you all for being here… I want to give back in my own way!
ENTER