completelysane:

“Symptoms most commonly produced by Enrichment Center testing are superstition, perceiving inanimate objects as alive, and hallucinations.”

    Wash sat on the white ground and worked with his nails at the dirt between his ankle prosthetic and his skin. It was important to pay attention to the little things in here. Keep clean, follow the instructions on the walls (don’t die, don’t drink the water). The Director is watching, or more rightly, the Alpha is watching.

    Some say she was his lost love, some say that she was his mother, some say she met him in a sandbox. There were a lot of discussions about that, back on the Mother of Invention. But none of the Freelancers knew it was all going to go wrong, or that they would be separated and put through these test chambers that so literally reconstructed the dead ends, tunnels, and leaps of logic of a damaged mind. (CT had known the experiment would take a deadly turn, but no one had listened.)
   
    And now the Alpha is talking and laughing. Maybe she was human once but now she was a program that warned against other programs, eternally self-referencing even while denying that she could ever tell the truth about herself.
   
    “If the Companion Cube does speak, please disregard its advice.”
   
    Wash looked aside at the cube sitting serenely next to him, its rounded gray sides splattered with the paint that had been applied to make the messy blue E.

    At the end, there would be cake. Sweet, tasty, artificial intelligence-free cake.  And Wash would be safe.

This is everything I need in life that I didn’t know I was missing.

I just

I just love this

I love this so much