250 Words: I may be paranoid but not an android

Set programming is all that this is.
A way my brain is fixed to respond.
I have tried to remove and erase, to reprogram.
I have tried to embrace positivity
But I am hemmed into this myopia like a rat in a cage.

I suck on cigarettes through the day.
Short breaths caused by fear clutching and squeezing,
depressing my lungs.
Knowledge that is always certain,
set in stone,
floods my mind and feeds it,
lets my thought flowers grow,
grow too much like those “damn extended metaphors” and take over control of me.

Set programming.
Nothing I can do these days.

I am not an android, though.
This is not all that I am.

I am not a computer running code and following commands.  I am a human being of flesh and blood: this is nature in one of its human forms and allows me my better days free from that cigarette fug and nicotine-fuelled rushes.  Relaxed days, breathing nicely and thinking clearly, more rationally, allowing me the space and time to discover the possibilities and weigh them up against one another.  No jumping, no overlord those days.

And days of blissful nothingness, silence, without the need for either scenario described above. Days of rest; effective Sundays when my need to explain one way or another hides away and lets me be, to feel normal and free-willed. 

No panic,
no pain,
only peace. 
The human feelings of others.

Because
I may be paranoid
but I am not an android.

---

Note: I wrote this (and the one before) after NME.COM pronounced Radiohead's Paranoid Android as their Best Song of the Last 15 Years.  I'm pretty sure it was this countdown and that in the magazine version of the article they mentioned the line of the song spoken by a Mac computer, "I may be paranoid but not an android."  I had always thought the line was "Repriortise a paranoid android," inspired by this discovery, wrote a story springing from each line.

This one also uses a quote from the Los Campesinos! song My Year in Lists.

250 Words: Reprioritise a paranoid android

He was driving us all completely mad in the lab, though he was never switched on for very long at a time.  We were spending most of our time trying to reprogram, re-wire, update, alter everything in order to locate and remove this negativity that came from him- sorry, it, he is an it (parental feelings are hard to shift) each time we switched it on.  

It was bringing us all down.  I’m talking about years of work to produce something that seemed to be naturally faulty.  An emotionless thought machine that was meant to be useful to all but instead thought we were all out to get it.

None of us could see the point of it, of any of it, if all our efforts were futile thanks to an apparent ghost in the machine causing lines of code to bring themselves into existence and create a personal philosophy based around a distrust of humans.

It was Steve that suggested it.  We just needed to reprioritise this paranoid android.  So simple!  Give it a need, or at least the ability, to protect the nation and maybe we could get Defence to take it off our hands and let us get back to normal computers.

Now it sits in a bunker scared witless of our neighbours while running through every possible attack scenario and working out ways to defend us.  Creating and saving endless defence plans, flagging up problems and giving us solutions.

Well, scratch the us.  It.  Always it.

---

Note: I wrote this (and the next one) after NME.COM pronounced Radiohead's Paranoid Android as their Best Song of the Last 15 Years.  I'm pretty sure it was this countdown and that in the magazine version of the article they mentioned the line of the song spoken by a Mac computer, "I may be paranoid but not an android."  I had always thought the line was "Repriortise a paranoid android," inspired by this discovery, wrote a story springing from each line.