5.9) Monsters

## Ships log: HvCFT Singularity: Personal Entry

# # Date: October 28, 2006

# # Log by: Mainframe and Systems Manager / Chef WiredNight

The staccato beeping fills my head like the high pitched rhythm of a highly annoying bat. The shallow rasping though that lays behind it in grasping alto sounds like the dragging feet or the zombies.

The form that lies before me is weak, shrivelled. The dead have more dignity then the form that lies before me. And yet, the form used to have such strength, such character that it could move mountains in my mind.

"Frankie? Is that you Frankie" The struggling whisper seems to sigh from the wasted form in front of me.

Only my Mother called me Frankie. Not even my Father did.

"Hello Mamma"

For a moment I looked at her not as a son, but as what I had become. I saw the code ruining her system. The chart would say cancer, but in reality her body in the Real had just about given her last BTU, and this was the Matrix's representation of that degeneration in the Real.

For a moment anger and hatred coursed through me. How dare they. How dare the Machines not let my Mother go, instead forcing her to cling on day and night. Monsters!

Mankind though is either driven by their emotions, or they learn to control them. Sometimes too well. Logic prevails, and the Machines are always driven by logic. Why should they starve for the dignity of one simple human? Who knows when that last BTU that last volt may be the difference between starvation and survival? Logic dictates. Logic drives as much as emotion sometimes.

It doesn't make them any less of the energy draining vampires that they are, but that is what we are here for. To stop the leeching, and help both survive.

A sudden hiss of pain, like from a wounded snake, awakens me from my brief revelry. The barest pressure upon my hand gives testament to the frail fingers grasping my own, a hand I didn't know until now that I had grasped.

"Frankie... please..."

It is a simple thing. She feels nothing as the code slips into her system, first pacifying her, and then slowing ebbing her final moments away. I stay until the end, then simply stand and leave as another page from Agent Gray arrives.

I have become the Monster. I have become Death.

##End of log