How I Feel Like a Carbon-Based Automaton

 Some mornings, I wake up and the first sensation I feel is… nothing. Not apathy. Not peace. Just a blank, gray hum—like the silence before an old machine boots up. It’s not sadness, really. Sadness has texture. It has grit and ache and a whimper. This is colder. Calmer. It's like I've been programmed to go through the motions with perfect efficiency: wake, breathe, defecate, repeat.

I move through my day like a well-oiled construct. I nod at the right moments. Laugh on cue. I say "I'm good, how about you?" like it was hardcoded into my jaw. And God help me, I’m so damn good at it—this performance of humanity. It’s not even acting anymore. It’s muscle memory. A carbon-based automaton flawlessly imitating the ghost of a person who used to feel things.

I think the programming started years ago. Maybe during the military days. Maybe earlier. Who knows when the firmware updated. You don’t realize it’s happening until you’re too deep into the code to remember what your original operating system felt like. Vulnerability was rewritten as a security flaw. Joy became an inefficient use of processing power. And grief? That was a file too large to run—so I compressed it, stuffed it into a ZIP folder buried in a subfolder named "Later."

Sometimes, I look at other people and feel like I’m watching a different species. They seem so free in their expressions, like they haven't been optimized out of their own pain. But then I see the cracks—behind their smiles, the buffering wheel of unsaid things—and I realize they’re just like me. Mechanical. Pretending. Functioning.

What makes it worse is the awareness of it all. I know I’m not supposed to feel this detached. I know that beneath all this routine, beneath the steel exoskeleton of habits and sarcasm and politeness, there's still a heartbeat—weak, maybe, but defiant. It kicks now and then. Like a stubborn spark in a rusted engine. A reminder: I wasn’t always like this.

But that’s the cruel joke, isn’t it? Being self-aware enough to see the automaton you’ve become, but still trapped in the logic loops that keep you running. You want to scream, to break the code, to short-circuit the whole damn system… but the subroutines kick in and remind you: “You have work tomorrow. You have responsibilities. You have people who count on you not to glitch.”

So you power up. You play your part. And maybe—maybe—in some stolen moment of real connection, some flicker of laughter or kindness, you’ll remember what it’s like to be something more than circuitry stuffed into a skeleton.

But until then, I’m Thadd. Unit-47C. Carbon-Based. Emotionally encrypted. Trying like hell to remember how to feel human again.