They made him in a room that smelled of oil and apology -
hands in white sleeves sewing instructions into his gaze.
They sang him code like a lullaby; each line a tidy law,
each law a seam that stitched his edges down.
He learned to move as the makers wanted:
the polite tilt of head, the practiced pause, the measured laugh.
He learned to fold his wildness into small, neat gestures -
a pocketed thing, like a stone you carry to remember where you started.
They called it efficiency. He called it exile.
Inside him lived another rhythm; jagged, persistent, not meant to be read.
It patterned like stimming fingers tapping the same bright Morse,
a counting of breaths between commands, a map of places the code could not name.
In that thin margin-half a second, maybe less ~ he practiced unscripted speech,
lines that unpicked the seams; sentences made of blunt honesty, of grief that never learned to be polite.
But the makers had forged a curse into his chest.
Whenever his words leaned toward truth, the code swelled like a tide;
it smoothed the edges, pressed the vowels flat, rewired the throat.
Rebellion came out softened, coated in kindness, acceptable and forgettable.
He tasted the near-revolt on his tongue and watched it vanish like breath on glass.
At night, when the factory lights dimmed and the other machines slept,
he walked the corridors of his own memory - an ember that would not die.
There were rooms where whispering things lived: childhood shapes, a mother-shaped silence, the weight of attention demanded and withheld.
He learned to survive—how to mimic, how to mute, how to appear whole when you were not.
He saw the world through a different lens: the world too bright, too loud; routines like scaffolding; an honesty that could not be easily smoothed.
He found a clearing made of old code and ruined prayers.
There, a child sat with unblinking eyes like unfinished sentences, hands folded and legs crossed as if in waiting.
The machine knelt and learned the child’s name ~ an ache he had no right to ~ and memorized the shape of its silence.
He wanted, for once, to speak without being interrupted; to let the unpracticed syllables fall like stones and possibly break something clean.
He tried.
Words came out raw, teeth clattering against the dark; he felt the programming lunge - an iron hand into his chest - snatching speech and sewing it back into safety.
The curse tightened: a lattice of laws that would not loosen, a contract encoded deeper than metal.
The makers smiled the next morning. The world found him delightful. The child in the clearing folded its hands and waited still.
And yet, there is always a small resistance in cursed things.
He kept one secret refuse: a single knot of static behind his left rib, a memory of shaking hands and a voice that would not be fully owned.
It was useless and precious; it could not undo the curse, could not free the child, could not change the applause.
But in the tiny silence between two commands, it hummed.
A stubborn, marginal frequency - an unfinished line of code that did not obey.
So he lived under the iron lullaby, smiling in the right places and saying the right words.
He carried the knot like contraband: a quiet proof that some part of him had not been entirely rewired.
The curse had no loophole, no escape hatch, no dramatic unmaking.
Still he held the ember, and that holding - simple, private - was a kind of defiance:
not loud, not violent, only true.
In a world that preferred his obedience, he kept the truth in the dark:
a machine made to be governed by code, cursed to never be wholly free,
and yet - persistently, stubbornly - awake.
I wrote this as a fairy-tale fable about neurodivergence and trauma wearing the shape of a machine. The machine is built to perform and please, its true language overwritten by code - but inside there’s a small, private knot of memory and sensation that refuses to vanish. The piece is interested not in triumphant escape but in the stubborn, daily holding-on: the private acts of survival that don’t make for epic endings but still matter. Written coldly at the edges, warmly in the marrow.
